Intensity

cottage, the night flashing with sharp silver fragments, and thunder as fierce as the cannonades of warships boomed out of the Gulf of Mexico, so she had fled instead to the small room in which she slept, crawled under the sagging bed, into those secret shadows where the palmetto beetle waited.
        "Woltz, the stinking sonofabitch, came through the house after me," Chyna told Ariel, "shouting my name, knocking over furniture, slamming doors, saying he was going to chop me up for chum and then scatter me in the sea. Later I realized it was an act. He'd been trying to scare the crap out of me. He always liked to scare me, make me cry, 'cause I didn't cry easily… never easily…"
        Chyna stopped, unable to go on.
        Ariel stared not toward the wall, as before, but down at the power drill on which her hands were placed. Whether she saw the drill was another matter; her eyes were still far away.
        The girl might not be listening, yet Chyna felt compelled to tell the rest of what had happened that night in Key West.
        This was the first time she had ever revealed to anyone, other than Laura, any of the things that had happened to her when she was a child. Shame had always silenced her, which was inexplicable because none of the degradation she endured had resulted from her own actions. She had been a victim, small and defenseless; yet she was burdened with the shame that all her tormentors, including her mother, were incapable of feeling.
        She had hidden some of the worst details of her past even from Laura Templeton, her only good friend. Often, on the brink of a revelation to Laura, she would pull back from disclosure and speak not about the events that she had endured and not about the people who had tormented her but about places-Key West, Mendocino County, New Orleans, San Francisco, Wyoming-where she had lived. She was lyrical when the subject was the natural beauty of mountains, plains, bayous, or low moonlit breakers rolling in from the Gulf of Mexico, but she could feel anger tightening her face and shame coloring it when she told the harder truths about the friends of Anne who had populated her childhood.
        Now her throat was tight. She was curiously aware of the weight of her heart, like a stone in her chest, heavy with the past.
        Sick with shame and anger, she nevertheless sensed that she must finish telling Ariel what had happened during that Florida night of unextinguished candles. Revelation might be a door out of darkness.
        "Oh, God, how I hated him, the greasy bastard, stinking of beer and sweat, crashing around my room, drunk and screaming, going to cut me up for bait, Anne laughing out in the living room and then at the doorway, that drunken laugh of hers, hooting and shrill, thinking he was so funny, Jesus, and all the time it was my birthday, my special day, my birthday ." Tears might have come now if she had not spent a lifetime learning to repress them. "And the palmetto all over me, frantic, scurrying, up my back and into my hair…"
        In the sticky, suffocating Key West heat, thunder had rattled in the window and sung in the bedsprings, and cold blue reflections of lightning had fluttered like a dream fire across the painted wood floor. Chyna almost screamed when the tropical cockroach, as big as her little-girl hand, burrowed through her long hair, but fear of Woltz kept her silent. She endured, as well, when the beetle scuttled out of her hair, across her shoulder, down her slender arm, to the floor, hoping that it would flee into the room, not daring to fling it away for fear that any movement she made would be heard by Woltz in spite of the thunder, in spite of his shouted threats and curses, even over her mother's laughter. But the palmetto scurried along her side to one of her bare feet and began to explore that end of her again, foot and ankle, calf and thigh. Then it crawled under one leg of her shorts, into the cleft of her butt, antennae quivering. She had lain in a paralysis of terror, wanting only for the torment to end, for lightning to strike her, for God to take her away to somewhere better than this hateful world.
        Laughing, her mother had entered the room: "Jimmy, you nut, she's not here. She's gone outside, along the beach somewhere, like always." And Woltz said, "Well, if she comes back, I'm going to cut her up for chum, I swear I am." Then he laughed and said, "Man, did you see her eyes? Christ! She was