Heads Did I tell you she was raped? And not by the man she stabbed? If you could do . somethingI couldn't remember whatthen you'd be able to do something else. I couldn't remember that, either. I knew it was the poem they quote at commencements and at civic-awards ceremonies in small upstate communities like mine. I remembered the rhythm of its lines, but I couldn't remember the words. My head was a hive of half-remembered words, tatters of statement, halves of stories, the litter of alibis, confessions, supplications, and demands, the aftereffects, perhaps, of the time I spent standing beside my grown, or half-grown, ungrown, ingrown child in a courtroom. She trembled, and I tried to situate myself, standing as we were before the clerks' desk, which was before and below the bench of the judge, so that she could lean her thin, shivering body on mine, at least a shoulder or forearm, at least the comfort I could offer with the heft of my hand against the hard, cold, bony fingers of hers. But she would not accept the heat of my flesh or the weight I wished she might prop herself on.

The trial for the crime had never taken place, because our lawyer convinced usAlec, my daughter, and methat she should plead nolo contendere: guilty, in a word. She had, as they say, copped a plea. She'd bargained down. She and the victim and the Manhattan district attorney's office had agreed to change the shape of events. We would say that Alec did not incise three small cuts in the skin of Victor Petrekis's face with a stainless-steel pocket knife brought to her from England by her father when she was small. She and our lawyer, Petrekis and the assistant district attorney, had constructed a language to make her crime the attempt of the deed she had in fact done. And we were before the judge to hear the sentence he would pass. Petrekis and the assistant district attorney stood at our left, the judge's right.

The two clerks periodically bent to write on forms. The marshals behind us, their belts creaking with the weight of their guns, their lapel radios hissing static, waited to learn if they would take her to jail. I had been warned that they put your child in handcuffs right there, as she stands beside you, and they take her off. The heavier clerk, her face a kind of mild mask, was the one who swore us in, ending her questionwhether we would tell the truth before this courtwith the warning that we must remember how on that great day, when all would be judged, our falsehoods would be weighed against us. It seemed to me she expected us all to lie and was trying, with her impassivity, not to show her disappointment in our dishonesty. But we all said, and in unison, "I do," as if the ceremony were about marriage and not the dissolution of whatever you might namerest, comfort, household, and, surely, freedom. Alec wore a suit she had bought for law school. It was too large, like everything she owned, and its eggplant color, once so interesting with her red-gold hair, now seemed to overpower her complexion.

It made her look gray. Her hair was thin and muddy-looking, cropped so short I could see, from beside her, the bone of her skull behind her ear. Her head looked vulnerable to the temperature of the air, and of course to the world of cruel surfaces before which her head was naked now. Even the sleeves of the suit seemed too long, as if her body had diminished in length as well as breadth. The judge had a wattle of chin and a thick, long nose. The flesh of his face was pitted and loose, his scalp very broad and shiny. But his eyes were of a rich, dark blue, and he spoke with an urgency, a sense of concern, in which I believed. He read from sentencing guidelines and asked the assistant district attorney and our lawyer,.