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  "You know, I never had an in-between," Alex said. "My ownmaman and papa didn't give a damn about me, and I went straight from that life to people who pick through my trash, trying to figure out what I eat for breakfast." He pulled me onto his lap, burying his face in my hair. "You know what I'd like?" he murmured. "I'd like to go meet the guy who tailors my suits, instead of having him come here. And I'd like to buy you daisies from a street vendor who hasn't seen my last three films. I'd like to go out to dinner and have your goddamn friend tip off the press and have them say, 'Alexwho ?'"

  He lifted his hand to cover my breast, and it rested in his palm like a simple, solid truth. "I used to lie in my bed at night as a kid and wish that someone cared if I woke up the next morning, and not just so there'd be someone to kick around." He kissed the crown of my head and tucked me closer to his chest, as if he could protect me from his own past. "Be careful what you wish for, Cassie," he said softly. "It might come true."

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  "I brought this for you."

  Alex's voice came from behind me, and without meaning to, my fingers gripped the armrests of the white wicker chair. I did not turn around, staring instead over the balcony of the upper veranda, counting the steps it took for Alex to walk from the door of the bedroom to me.

  He set the tea down beside me, centered on a simple saucer with the milk already poured in, which told me that Alex had gone to the trouble of preparing it himself, rather than asking the cook to do it. In the distance, I could hear the sounds of late-afternoon traffic and crying gulls, as if this day had been just like any other.

  Alex knelt in front of me and rested his folded arms on my knees. I stared at him as if I was in shock, which I suppose I was. My mind registered the flawless symmetry of his features as if seeing them for the very first time. "Cassie," he whispered, "I'm sorry."

  I nodded at him. I believed him; Ihad to.

  "It's not going to ever happen again," he said. He laid his head in my lap and of their own volition my hands began to stroke his hair, his ear, the line of his jaw that I knew so well.

  "I know," I said. But even as the words came I saw behind my closed eyes the image of those midwestern storms that rip up the world as you know it, and leave, like a sacrifice, a rainbow to make you forget what has come before.

  "WHAT'S IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER ABOUT THE NATURE OF BONE, " I told the sea of faces in the lecture hall, "is that it's not the way we always imagine it to be." I stepped from behind the podium, coming to stand at a little demonstration table I'd set up before my field anthropology class. We were nearly two months into the course, and I was working hard to give the students the background they'd need for the site excavation we'd do later in the semester. "When we dig up a bone, we assume it is something solid and static, when in fact it used to be every bit as alive as the other tissues of the body."

  I listened to the scratch of pens on lined notebooks as I counted off the properties of bone in a living organism. "It can grow, it can be stricken by disease, it can heal itself. And it adapts to the needs of the individual." I lifted up two femurs from the display table. "For example, bones become stronger when necessary. This femur came from a thirteen-year-old girl. Compare its width to that of the other bone, which belonged to an Olympic weightlifter."

  I liked giving this lecture. Part of it was the sensationalism of the displays, part of it was breaking down most of the preconceptions the students had about bone in general. "Bone isn't made of inorganic matter, either, like chalk. It's an organic network of fibers and cells that happen to contain inorganic matter, like calcium phosphate. It's the combination of the two that gives bone its resilience and also its hardness."

  From the corner of my eye, I noticed Archibald Custer leaning against the doorframe. Last year, he had said to me that I treated science like aNational Enquirerstory. And I had argued, no pun intended, that a dissertation on the nature of bone was too dry to keep kids awake for an hour, much less get them interested in anthropology. Since Alex's grant, Custer hadn't had the guts to criticize my teaching methods, or to move me to a different course. I could probably have lectured naked without there being any backlash.

  My eyes roved the back of the classroom, just below Custer's tightly crossed arms. A kid wearing headphones, two girls whispering to each other, and Alex.

  Sometimes he came to watch me teach; he said it amazed him how much I knew. He always slipped in after the class started, to keep from drawing attention away from my words; he usually wore sunglasses, as if they were something to hide behind. Most of the students knew I was married to him--I think some of them took the class just to find out what I was like, or in hopes of seeing Alex.

  I grinned right at him, and he took off his sunglasses and gave me a wink. When Alex came, I was at my very best. I suppose, in a way, I was acting for him. "Now, you can see just how much of a bone is organic if you soak it for a while in an acid. This will remove the salts, leaving the organic matter behind in the shape it was before it was placed in the acid. But," I said, drawing the fibula from a glass tray where it had been soaking, "once you remove the salts, it's completely pliable." I picked up each end of the long bone, letting it sag a bit in the middle before I tied it into a loose knot.

  "Holy shit," whispered a freshman in the front row.

  I smiled at him. "My thoughts exactly," I said.

  Glancing at my watch, I stepped back behind the podium and began to shuffle together my notes. "Don't forget the quiz next Thursday."

  Custer had left, and the students began to stream down the aisles of the hall. Usually after this lecture, a group would cluster around the display table, touching the jellied bone, untying it, running their fingers over the edges. In the past I had answered their questions and let them stay as long as they liked. After all, anthropology was a hands-on discipline.

  But this year, in spite of the rapt attention the class had given me and the fact that my lesson hadn't changed a bit, nobody seemed interested. Quietly, I began to straighten up the table, packing away the exhibit bones in layers of soft cotton wool. I wondered if I was losing my touch.

  I looked up, remembering that Alex was probably waiting, and saw a knot of students milling around him in the aisle, offering up their anthropology notebooks for autographs.

  The blood drained from my face.Wait,I wanted to say, they belong to me.But the words were stuck in my throat, and even as I let the first wave of anger flood past I realized that I had nothing to be jealous of at all. Alex hadn't deliberately gathered them near, and even if he hadn't been in the classroom, there was no guarantee that any of the students would have come forward to look at my display.

  He pushed past the students and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking over the table and the bones lying neatly in transport crates. "Don't some of the salts seep out into the soil when a bone gets fossilized?" Alex said loudly.

  I laughed; in spite of his apparent undivided interest, I knew exactly what he was doing. "Sure," I said.

  "So how come you never dig up anything as limp as that?" He pointed to the bone, still knotted, swimming in its acid solution. Two students wandered back down the aisle of the lecture hall, coming to stand on either side of Alex and touching the display femurs in the spots where his fingers had brushed them seconds before. Several other kids joined the group.

  "First of all, it's going to take centuries to happen. But even when the calcium content is reduced, it's not quite as drastic, so the bones usually retain their shape. Of course, every once in a while the climate and the soil are right"--I rummaged through a half-packed carton--"and you get something like this." I held up an Iron Age jawbone that had been excavated from an Irish peat bog, which was twisted neatly in the shape of a cruller. "The way other bones were lying on this one was what caused it to take this shape."

  For a while, then, the soft pads of a dozen hands ran over the bone samples I'd brought, and above the heads of the students I caught Alex's eye. He really did know how to