Strangers

yesterday, Jorja moved swiftly to forestall a similar scene. She put one hand on Marcie's shoulder and said, "Honey, you were never-"
        "I was!" The girl's anger and fear burgeoned into rage and terror. She threw her fork, and Pete ducked to avoid being hit by it.
        "Marcie!" Jorja cried.
        The girl slipped off her chair and backed away from the table, white-faced. "I'm going to grow up and be my own doctor, so nobody else'll stick n-needles in me." Words gave way to a pitiful moaning.
        Jorja went after Marcie, reaching for her. "Honey, don't."
        Marcie held her hands out in front of her, as if warding off an attack, although it was not her mother that she feared. She was looking through Jorja, perhaps seeing some imaginary threat, though her terror was real. She was not merely pale but translucent, as if the very substance of her was evaporating in the tremendous heat of her terror.
        "Marcie, what is it?"
        The girl stumbled backward into a corner, shuddering.
        Jorja gripped her daughter's defensively raised hands. "Marcie, talk to me." But even as Jorja spoke, a sudden stench of urine filled the air, and she saw a dark stain spreading from the crotch down both legs of Marcie's jeans. "Marcie!"
        The girl was trying to scream, but could not. "What's happening?" Mary asked. "What's wrong?"
        "I don't know," Jorja said. "God help me, I don't know."
        With her eyes still focused on some figure or object that remained visible only to her, Marcie began a wordless keening.
        
        New York, New York.
        The tape deck still played Christmas music, and Jenny Twist lay immobile and insensate, but Jack no longer engaged in the frustrating one-way communication with which he had filled the first few hours of his visit. Now he sat in silence, and inevitably his thoughts drifted back through the years to his homecoming from Central America…
        Upon returning to the States, he had discovered that the rescue of the prisoners at the Institute of Brotherhood had been misrepresented, in some quarters, as a terrorist act, a mass kidnapping, a provocation meant to spark a war. He and every Ranger involved were painted as criminals in uniform, and those taken prisoner were for some reason the special focus of the opposition's anger.
        In a political panic, Congress had banned all covert activities in Central America, including a pending plan to rescue the four Rangers. Their release was to be arranged strictly through diplomatic channels.
        That was why they had waited in vain for rescue. Their country had abandoned them. At first Jack had trouble believing it. When at last he believed, it was the second worst shock of his life.
        Having won his freedom, home again, Jack was relentlessly pursued by hostile journalists and subpoenaed to appear before a Congressional committee to testify about his involvement in the raid. He expected to have a chance to set the record straight, but he quickly discovered that they weren't interested in his viewpoint, and that the televised hearing was merely an opportunity for politicians to do some grandstanding in the infamous tradition of Joe McCarthy.
        In a few months, most people had forgotten him, and when he regained the pounds he had lost in prison, they ceased to recognize him as the alleged war criminal they had seen on television. But the pain and the sense of betrayal continued to burn fiercely in him.
        If being abandoned by his country was the second worst shock of his life, the worst was what had happened to Jenny while he had been stuck in that Central American prison. A thug had accosted her in the hallway of her own apartment building as she was coming home from work. He put a gun to her head, hustled her into her apartment, sodomized and raped her, clubbed her brutally with his pistol, and left her for dead.
        When Jack came home at last, he found Jenny in a state institution, comatose. The level of care she had been getting was abominable.
        Norman Hazzurt, the rapist who attacked Jenny, had been tracked down through fingerprints and witnesses, but a clever defense attorney had managed to delay the trial. Undertaking an investigation of his own, Jack satisfied himself that Hazzurt, with a history of violent sex offenses, was the guilty man. He also became convinced that Hazzurt would be acquitted on a technicality.
        Throughout