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'That's what I'm here for.'

'I'm sorry,' Diane said. Then she was angry with herself. Why should I feel guilty ? 'I've kept her out of-'

'I know,' Dr Parker said. 'I called the school after you called me.'

"You did?' Diane asked.

'Of course I did. Sarah's my patient. This incident is my responsibility.' The blunt admission surprised Diane but she sensed the doctor wasn't apologizing; she was simply observing. 'I misjudged her strength. She puts on a good facade of resilience. I thought she'd be better able to deal with the stress. I was wrong. I don't want her back in school this term. We have to stabilize her emotionally.'

The doctor's suit today was dark green and high-necked. Diane had noticed it favorably when she walked into the office and was even thinking of complimenting her. She changed her mind.

Dr Parker opened a thick file. Inside were a half dozen booklets, on some of which Sarah's stubby handwriting was evident. "Now I've finished my diagnosis and I'd like to talk to you about it. First, I was right to take her off Ritalin.'

I'm sure you're always right.

'She doesn't display any general hyperkinetic activity and she's very even-tempered when not confronted with stress. What I observed about her restlessness and her inattentiveness was that they're symptomatic of her primary disability.'

"You said that might be the case,' Diane said.

'Yes, I did.'

But of course.

'I've given her the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, the Gray Oral Reading Test, Bender Gestalt, Wide Range Achievement Test and the Informal Test of Written Language Expression. The results show your daughter suffers from severe reading retardation-'

'I don't care what you say,' Diane blurted, 'Sarah is not retarded.'

That doesn't mean that she's retarded, Mrs Corde. Primary reading retardation. It's also called developmental dyslexia.'

'Dyslexia? That's where you turn letters round.'

That's part of it. Dyslexics have trouble with word attack - that's how we approach a word we've never seen before - and with putting together words or sentences. They have trouble with handwriting and show an intolerance for drill. Sarah also suffers from dysorthographia, or spelling deficit.'

Come on, Diplomas, cut out the big words and do what I'm paying you to do.

'She has some of dyslexia's mathematical counterpart - developmental dyscalculia. But her problem is primarily reading and spelling. Her combined verbal and performance IQ is in the superior range. In fact she's functioning in the top five percent of the population. Her score, by the way, is higher than that of the average medical student.'

'Sarah?' Diane whispered.

'It's also six points higher than your son's. I checked with the school.'

Diane frowned. This could not be. The doctor's credentials were suddenly suspect again.

'She's reading about three years behind her chronological age and it usually happens that the gap will widen. Without special education, by the time she's fifteen, Sarah's writing age would be maybe eleven and her spelling age nine or ten.'

'What can we do?'

'Tutoring and special education. Immediately. Dyslexia is troubling with any student but it's an extremely serious problem for someone with Sarah's intelligence and creativity-'

'Creativity?' Diane could not suppress the laugh. Why, the doctor had mixed up her daughter's file with another patient's. 'She's not the least creative. She's never painted anything. She can't carry a tune. She can't even strum a guitar. Obviously she can't write...'

'Mrs Corde, Sarah is one of the most creative patients I've ever had. She can probably do all of those things you just mentioned. She's been too inhibited to try because the mechanics overwhelm her. She's been conditioned to fail. Her self-esteem is very low.'

'But we always encourage her.'

'Mrs Corde, parents often encourage their disabled children to do what other students can do easily. Sarah is not like other children. Encouragement like that is just another way of helping her fail.'

Well,' Diane said stiffly. "You sure don't hesitate to call it the way you see it, Doctor.'

Dr Parker smiled a smile that meant nothing at all to Diane, who was for once relieved that the psychiatrist had set a frigid atmosphere for these sessions. She had no problem saying bluntly, 'That's very well and good, Doctor, but how. the hell are you going to help my little girl?'

'I want you to find a tutor. They're expensive but you need one and you need a good one. I recommend that you check with the Auden lab school.'

'Why can't we help her? Bill and me?'

'Sarah needs a specialist.'

'But-'

'It's important that she see someone who knows what they're doing.'

Diane thought it was remarkable that you could both admire and detest someone at the same time.

'Second, I'd like to work with her myself. Until we build up her confidence in herself she's never going to improve. Her self-esteem has been very badly damaged.'

"What can you do that we haven't? All right, maybe the way we tried to teach her was wrong. But you keep forgetting that we've always supported her. We always tell her how good she is. How talented.'

'But she doesn't believe you. And how can she? You push her to work harder and it does no good. You tell her she's doing well but she isn't, she's failing her classes. You tell her she's smart but by all the outward manifestations she isn't. Mrs Corde, you've acted for the best motives but your efforts have been counterproductive. We need to encourage Sarah to do the things she's genuinely good at.'

'But haven't you heard what I've told you? She isn't good at anything. She doesn't even like to help me cook or sew. All she does is play games by herself, go to movies and watch TV.'

'Ah. Precisely.' Dr Parker smiled like a chess player calling checkmate.

Diane blinked. What'd I say?

'I'd like to see Sarah as soon as possible. If you could make the appointment with Ruth.' The cryptic eyes, so talented at dismissals, glanced at another file.

'Okay, sure.' Diane stood.

Then she hesitated.

She sat down again. 'Say, Doctor . ..'

'Yes?'

Diane blurted, 'Where does it come from? Dyslexia?'

'I'm sorry, I should have discussed that with you.' She closed the second file and turned full attention to Diane. 'We don't know exactly. It used to be that a lot of doctors attributed it to physical problems - like memory confusion between the two hemispheres of the brain. That's been discredited now though vision and hearing problems can be major factors. My belief is that like many developmental problems dyslexia has both a nature and nurture component. It's largely genetic and the prenatal period is very critical. But how parents and teachers respond to the child is important too.'

'Prenatal?' Diane asked, then casually added, 'So could it be that someone who had maybe smoked or drank or took drugs during pregnancy might cause dyslexia in their children?'

To some extent though usually there's a correspondent decrease in IQ . . .' Dr Parker squinted and flipped through her notes. 'Anyway I thought you said you largely abstained while you were pregnant.'

'Oh, that's right,' Diane said. 'I was just curious . . . You know, when someone you love has a problem you want to know all about it.' Diane stood up. She sensed Dr Parker studying her. 'Well, I'll make that appointment.'

'Wait a minute, please.' Dr Parker capped her pen. 'You know, Mrs Corde, one of the underlying themes of my approach to therapy is that we really are our parents.' She was smiling, Diane believed, in a heartfelt way for the first time since they had begun working together. 'I call parents the quote primary providers and not just in a positive sense. What they give us and what they do for us - and to us - include some unfortunate things. But it can include a lot of good things too.'

Diane looked back at her and tried to keep her face an unemotional mask. She managed pretty well, even when the doctor said, 'I've seen a lot of parents in here and I've seen a lot of people in here because of their parents. Whatever's troubling you, Mrs Corde, don't be too hard on yourself. My opinion is that Sarah is a very lucky girl.'

Technically this was trespassing. But boundaries in the country aren't what they are in the city. You could walk, hunt, fish on almost anybody's land for miles around. As long as you left it in good shape, as long as the feeling was reciprocal, nobody made an issue.

Corde ducked under the wire fence, and slipped into the scruffy forest behind his property. He continued for a ways then broke out into a clearing in the center of which was a huge rock some glacier had left behind, twenty feet high and smooth as a trout's skin. Corde clambered onto the rock and sat in one of the indentations on the west side.

She wears a turquoise sweater high at the neck, half obscuring her fleshy throat.

To the south he could just see a charcoal gray roof, which seemed attached to a stand of adolescent pines though in fact it covered his own house. He noticed the discolored patch near the chimney where he had replaced the shingles last summer.

"You used to live in St Louis, didn't you?' Jennie Gebben asks.

Oh, she is pretty! Hair straight and long. Abundant breasts under the soft cloth. Sheer white stockings under the black jeans. She wears no shoes and he sees through the thin nylon red-nailed toes exceptionally long.

'Well, I did,' he answers. 'As a matter of fact.' He clears his throat. He feels the closeness of the dormitory room. He smells incense. He smells spicy perfume.

'Eight, nine years ago? I was little then but weren't you in the news or something?'

'All cops get on the air at one time or another. Press conferences or something. Drug bust.'

Saturday night, January a year ago, branches click outside the dormitory window. Bill Corde sits on a chair and Jennie Gebben tucks her white-stockinged feet under her legs and lies back on the bed.

'It seems it was something more than that,' she says. 'More than a press conference. Wait. I remember. It was . . .'

She stops speaking.

Bill Corde, sitting now on the flesh-smooth rock in the quiet town of New Lebanon, watched the sun grow longer to the horizon through a high tangle of brush and hemlock and young oaks soon to die from light starvation.

Shots fired! Shots fired! Ten-thirty-three. Unit to respond. . .

Each inch the sun fell, each thousand miles the earth turned away from it, he sensed the forest waking. Smells grew: loam, moss, leaves from last fall decomposing, bitter bark, musk, animal droppings.

. . . this session of the St Louis Police Department Shooting Review Board. Incident number 84-403. Detective Sergeant William Corde, assigned to St Louis County Grand Larceny, currently suspended from duty pending the outcome of this hearing.. .

Corde thought he'd be happy just being a hunter. He would have liked to live in the 1800s. Oh, there was a lot that amused and appealed to him about the Midwest at the end of the twentieth century. Like pickup trucks and televised Cardinals and Cubs games and pizza and computers and noncorrosive gunpowder. But if you asked him to be honest he'd say that he'd forgo it all to wake up one morning and walk downstairs to find Diane in front of a huge fireplace making johnnycakes in the beehive oven, then he and Jamie would go out to trap or hunt all day long among the miles and miles of forests just like this one.

A. Well, sir, the perpetrators . . .

Q. You knew them to be armed with assault rifles?

A. Not with assault rifles, no, though we knew they were armed... The perpetrators had taken the cash and jewelry and were still inside the store. I ordered my men into the alley behind the store. It was my intention to enter through a side door and take them by surprise.

Corde listened to the snapping of some invisible animal making its way through the woods. He thought how odd it was that a creature was moving past him, probably no more than ten feet away, yet he sensed no danger. He felt if anything the indifference of the surroundings, as if he had been discounted by nature as something insignificant and not worth harming.

Q. Sergeant Corde, could you tell us then what happened?

A. Yes, sir. There were a number of exit doors leading from the stores into the alley. I had inadvertently told the men to enter through door 143.

Q. Inadvertently?

A. That was a mistake. The door that opened onto the jewelry store was number 134.1-

Q. You mixed up the numbers?

A. Yes, sir. In speaking with the fire inspector, he had told me the correct number of the door. I had written it down. But when I radioed to the men which door to enter, I read it backwards.

Q. So the men entered the mall through the wrong door.

A. No, they tried to. But that door was locked. As they were trying to get it open, thinking it was the correct door, the perpetrators ran into the alley and fired on the policemen. Their backs-

Q. Whose backs?

A. The policemen's backs were to the perpetrators. Two police officers were killed and two were wounded.

Q. Have the perpetrators been apprehended?

A. To date, one has. The rest have not'.

He'd been suspended with half pay for six months but he quit the force a week before reinstatement. He sat around in his suburban home, thinking about the men who'd died, thinking of the kind of jobs he ought to get, replaying the incident a hundred times then a thousand times. He stopped going to church and didn't even have the inclination to turn a bar or the bottle into his personal chapel. He spent his time with the TV, doing some security jobs, some construction work. Finally the mortgage payments on the trim suburban split-level outran their savings and with Sarah on the way they'd no choice but to come back to New Lebanon.