She sat on the floor, away from the charcoal couch. When Kyle shed his army jacket, Phoebe noticed through his T-shirt how muscular he was. He took a joint from a Lucite cigarette holder on the coffee table and fired it up, then lowered himself to the floor.

At twenty-three, Phoebe’s brother was a millionaire. The seed of his wealth had been their father’s five thousand dollars, engorged by careful investments while Barry was at Berkeley. After graduation he’d used the money to start a software company, and when Phoebe last asked, his employees had numbered fifty-seven. He owned a four-bedroom house in the hills outside Los Gatos, and showered Phoebe each holiday with gifts that left her weak with gratitude, a Prince tennis racket, a digital watch, a string of real pearls that radiated a faint pink glow in certain lights. Barry often dropped the names of important people he’d met at parties, always stressing how they’d sought him out, how some moment of unique communication had transpired. According to Barry, his employees were off the genius charts, his products so phenomenally great that customers were nearly fainting away at their computer terminals. Against her better judgment, Phoebe found herself believing him sometimes, adopting Barry’s view that the center of the world was not New York or Paris or Washington, D.C., but a software company near Palo Alto.

Faith kept glancing at their father, fidgeting with the straps of her bathing suit. Finally she rose to her feet. With dread in her face she walked slowly to the highest diving board and climbed its steps. She looked tiny up there, eleven years old, slim and deeply tanned, slightly knock-kneed. “Dad,” Barry said. Their father opened his eyes and rubbed them, followed Phoebe’s and Barry’s stares and sat upright, muscles tense in his neck. Faith stood a long time at the end of the diving board. A few teenagers waited impatiently below, craning their necks to see what was taking so long. Please do it, Phoebe thought. Please, please do it. Faith gave a tentative bounce. Then a clarity came to her movements, a stillness; she leapt high in the air, spread wide her arms and arced into a swan dive, head straight down like an arrow’s head, pulling the wand of her body toward the turquoise water. Her splash was minute—in years to come Faith would never again match that first, perfect dive, a fact that galled her—and their father leapt to his feet. “That’s it!” he cried. “Jesus, you see what she did?” He was grinning, his despair gone, and Phoebe knew the day was saved.

“I mean she does it for you. That wildness? Come on, Gene. You know perfectly well that’s for you.”

Her father’s voice was hushed, furious. “You think I told her to knock that kid in the river?” he said. “I don’t tell her to be wild, Christ Almighty. She just does it.”

“You don’t have to tell her,” her mother said. “Any fool can see it makes you happy.”

Their father slapped her across the face, his palm making a loud, wet noise against her cheek. Faith looked stunned, then tears filled her eyes. “That didn’t hurt,” she said.

He hit her again, harder this time. Phoebe, standing to one side, began to whimper.

Faith was shaking, her thin limbs covered with gooseflesh. With each breath her ribs stood out like a pair of hands holding her at the waist. “Didn’t hurt,” she whispered.

He hit her again, so hard this time that Faith bent over. For a moment she didn’t move. Phoebe began to howl.

Then he lifted Faith into his arms. She clung to him, sobbing. Their father was crying, too, which frightened Phoebe—she’d never seen him cry before. “How could you scare me like that?” he sobbed. “You know you’ve got my heart—you know it.” He sounded as if he wanted it back.

“It was hard,” Barry told her with relish. “I had to order the parts from this store in New Jersey, Edmund Scientific. Then I just figured it out, you know? Studied Dad’s sketches.”

He was flushed, dark eyes fastened to the small machine. He turned a knob and the buzzing sound became a loud ringing. “Think about it,” Barry hollered over the racket. “You know? I mean, think about it, Pheeb.”

Phoebe was overwhelmed—by the whispery trace of their father, which seemed caught against its will in this shrill contraption; by her own fragile closeness to Barry, which seemed in constant jeopardy.

“I’m going to make them all,” he said rather grimly. “Every single one.”

Phoebe nodded, smiling at her brother. Her head ached. Much as she longed to share in Barry’s awe, she wished he would turn the thing off. She tried to imagine their father here—his reaction to the leftover drawings, even Barry’s machine. And she knew that he wouldn’t give a damn.

She was not a presence at high school. If someone thought to include her, Phoebe was included, but if she stood up and left mid-party, as often she had, phoning a taxi home among the bright potholders and fruit-shaped magnets of someone’s kitchen, few people noticed. Handed a hit of acid once, she’d slipped it into her pocket (kept it to this day), but nobody caught the move. “Hey, were you okay with that?” they’d asked days later, for apparently it was powerful, someone had flipped out. Phoebe pictured herself in the eyes of her peers as half ghostly, a transparent outline whose precise movements were impossible to follow. During free periods she had no place to go. Often she simply wandered the halls, feigning distraction and hurry, afraid even to pause for fear that her essential solitude would be exposed. A glass case full of old trophies stood near the school’s front doors, shallow silver dishes from state swim meets, faded ribbons; they were dusty, inconsequential, no one looked at them. As an excuse to stop walking, Phoebe sometimes would pause before that case, pretending a trophy had caught her attention—I’m nothing, she would think, I could disappear and no one would notice—her face reddening in shame as she stared at the meaningless trophies and waited for the bell to class.

“Because IBM made him sick,” Phoebe said, angry at the quaver in her voice.

Her mother snorted, turning on her heel. “That’s ludicrous,” she said, heading for her bedroom.

Phoebe charged after her. She felt crazed. How could it be ludicrous? That was the story of her father. With every move, every gesture—for years—her mother had confirmed it. “Mom,” she pleaded, “I can’t believe what you’re saying.”

“I can’t believe what you’re saying,” her mother replied. “You’re telling me your father got leukemia, a blood disease, from working as a manager at IBM? What, from chemicals or something? What are you saying?”

“No! You know!” Phoebe was shouting. “Everyone knew, because he—” Explaining felt useless. “Not chemicals, but—”

“What? Radiation?”

“No, no! Because he hated working there.”

“Oh please,” her mother said. “Spare me.”

Phoebe felt as if she’d been struck. Her mother sat on the bed and pulled off her pumps. She set them side by side on the polished floor.

“Do you ever miss those times?” Phoebe asked.

“What times?”

“You know. The sixties.” The term sounded foolish.

Karl sucked at the pipe, eyes narrowed. “It was good,” he said, breathing smoke. “Like falling in love. Sure, you want the beginning. But you know already the end.”

Phoebe took the pipe. The smoke was soft as felt in her lungs. “What’s the end?” she asked.

Karl shrugged. “Same like everything,” he said. “Goes too far, becomes the opposite.”

Phoebe changed into her sleeping shirt, turned off the light and lay on the bed, arms folded. The ceiling was made of white squares that sparkled faintly. Her heart pounded in her ears. Something was wrong. She’d failed, Phoebe thought, but at what? Imagining herself in Europe, she’d always pictured someone else, physically even, a tall blonde with an answer for everything—as if, in the course of this journey, she would not only shed her former life but cease to exist as herself. Yes, she thought, to leave Phoebe O’Connor behind and be reborn as someone beautiful, mysterious. But the opposite had happened; her own narrow boundaries had hemmed her in, keeping everything real at a distance.