Mr. Murder

when something as simple as the surf would remind her of the deep well of sadness and isolation in which she'd dwelt throughout her childhood.
        She always strived to ensure that her daughters never for an instant doubted they were loved. Now she was equally determined that the intrusion of this madness and violence into their lives would not steal any fraction of Charlotte's or Emily's childhood as her own had been stolen in its entirety. Because her own parents' estrangement from each other had been exceeded by their estrangement from their only child, Paige had been forced to grow up fast for her own emotional survival, even as a grammar-school girl, she was aware of the cold indifference of the world, and understood that strong self reliance was imperative if she was to cope with the cruelties life sometimes could inflict. But, damn it, her own daughters were not going to be required to learn such hard lessons overnight. Not at the tender ages of seven and nine. No way. She wanted desperately to shelter them for a few more years from the harsher realities of human existence, and allow them the chance to grow up gradually, happily, without bitterness.
        Marty was the first to break the comfortable silence between them.
        "When Vera Conner had the stroke and we spent so much time that week in the lounge outside the intensive care unit, there were a lot of other people, came and went, waiting to learn whether their friends and relatives would live or die."
        "Hard to believe it's almost two years Vera's been gone."
        Vera Conner had been a professor of psychology at UCLA, a mentor to Paige when she had been a student, and then an exemplary friend in the years that followed. She still missed Vera. She always would.
        Marty said, "Some of the people waiting in that lounge just sat and stared. Some paced, looked out windows, fidgeted. Listened to a Walkman with headphones. Played a Game Boy. They passed the time all kinds of ways. But-did you notice.-those who seemed to deal best with their fear or grief, the people most at peace, were the ones reading novels."
        Except for Marty, and in spite of a forty-year age difference, Vera had been Paige's dearest friend and the first person who ever cared about her. The week Vera was hospitalized-first disoriented and suffering, then comatose had been the worst week of Paige's life, nearly two years later, her vision still blurred when she recalled the last day, the final hour, as she'd stood beside Vers bed, holding her friend's warm but unresponsive hand. Sensing the end was near, Paige had said things she hoped God allowed the dying woman to hear, I love you, I'll miss you forever, you're the mother to me that my own mother never could be.
        The long hours of that week were engraved indelibly in Paige's memory, in more excruciating detail than she would have liked, for tragedy was the sharpest engraving instrument of all. She not only remembered the layout and furnishings of the I.C.U visitors' lounge in dreary specificity, but could still recall the faces of many of the strangers who, for a time, shared that room with her and Marty.
        He said, "You and I were passing the time with novels, so were some other people, not just to escape but because… because, at its best, fiction is medicine."
        "Medicine?"
        "Life is so damned disorderly, things just happen, and there doesn't seem any point to so much of what we go through. Some times it seems the world's a madhouse. Storytelling condenses life, gives it order.
        Stories have beginnings, middles, ends. And when a story's over, it meant something, by God, maybe not something complex, maybe what it had to say was simple, even naive, but there was meaning. And that gives us hope, it's a medicine."
        "The medicine of hope," she said thoughtfully.
        "Or maybe I'm just full of shit."
        "No, you're not."
        "Well, I am, yes, probably at least half full of shit-but maybe not about this."
        She smiled and gently squeezed his hand.
        "I don't know," he said, "but I think if some university did a long-term study, they'd discover that people who read fiction don't suffer from depression as much, don't commit suicide as often, are just happier with their lives. Not all fiction, for sure. Not the human beings-are-garbage-life-stinks-there-is-no-God novels filled with fashionable despair."
        "Dr. Marty