His eyebrows lifted in surprise as he took the glass with an effortless grace Maddy envied. "Really? Are you a professional entertainer?"
"Professional, yes. Entertainer… not exactly." Now her hands were empty again. To fill them, she picked up a little-girl puppet with round pink cheeks and a head full of bobbing, corkscrew curls. In a prominent place above one bright blue eye, there was a large Band-Aid. "This is Didi," Maddy explained as she settled the puppet, using her free hand to poke an errant curl into place. "She's one of the puppets I use most often in my work."
"Why does she have a Band-Aid?" Zack asked, smiling at Maddy as he touched it with a finger.
She gazed steadily at him and didn't return the smile. "That's the first thing the children always ask too," she said softly. "It's amazing what an icebreaker it can be."
"Icebreaker?"
"Yes. I use the puppets in my work with children like Theresa. Even very frightened and confused children will tell a puppet things they would never tell a strange adult."
Zack stared at her for a moment in tense silence. Then he muttered, "God," under his breath and turned away from her to set his glass of milk, untasted, on the coffee table. Keeping his back to her and spacing his words with precision, he said, "What I don't understand is how you can deal with this kind of thing all the time. I guess you must just get… hardened, huh?"
"No," Maddy answered carefully. "Not hardened. You never get hardened. But insulated… maybe."
He turned back around. "You learn not to care, is that it?"
Wincing a little, but realizing that the anger in his voice wasn't really directed at her, Maddy spoke instead to the pain in his eyes. "Of course you care. But not… in a personal way." She fussed for a moment with the puppet, while she tried to think of a way to make him understand. "It's like a doctor," she said finally, touching the Band-Aid on the puppet's fuzzy brow. "Doctors care about their patients, but if they allowed themselves to become emotionally attached to them, they wouldn't be able to help them. They have to maintain a certain amount of distance- professional objectivity-in order to be effective. Do you understand? That's why doctors usually don't treat members of their own families."
Zack didn't answer immediately. Instead he picked up a puppet-a dog with sad eyes and long, floppy ears-and fitted it over his hand and arm. He cocked the puppet's head and opened its mouth in an experimental way. Then, to Maddy's surprise and delight, he reached out and touched Didi's cheek with its shiny black nose. "I'm sorry," he murmured as the dog gazed soulfully at Didi. "I had no right whatsoever to judge you like that."
Zack's dog puppet gave Maddy's Didi puppet a gentle nudge under the chin, but his eyes were looking across the two fuzzy heads and directly into Maddy's eyes. She opened her mouth, then closed it again in confusion. The sensation in her stomach was something like a stampede of butterflies. She couldn't think, let alone talk!
In a kind of panic she tore her gaze from those smoky eyes and gave Didi's curly yellow head a shake.
"Oh, that's okay, I understand," the puppet said in a sappy, little-girl voice. Manipulating the rod that operated Didi's right arm, Maddy made the puppet pat the dog's head. Then, in another one of those unexpected and dangerous impulses, Didi planted a quick puppet-kiss squarely on the dog's nose.
The dog gave a startled "Wuf!" and actually seemed to look taken aback. Maddy jerked her gaze back to Zack's face, once again afraid she'd gone too far. There was a peculiar little half-smile on his lips.
"I understand too," he said enigmatically, and, taking both his puppet and Maddy's, laid them carefully back on the shelf. Before she had any idea what he had in mind, he turned back to her, placed his hands on her shoulders, leaned across the space between them, and kissed her, oh, so gently, on the lips. And then again, softly, on the tip of her nose.
"I like it much better," he said firmly, "without go-betweens."
He released her, but she could still feel the weight of his strong hands on her shoulders, still feel the imprint of his mouth on hers. He moved away to finally, belatedly, take his seat on the couch. As he reached to pick up his milk glass, Corry appeared from nowhere. The cat bumped his head once against Zack's elbow, then arranged himself like a feather boa along and over one lean thigh.
For a moment Maddy and the cat just blinked at each other. "Yes… well, um…" Maddy cleared her throat and attempted an intelligent comment. Corry looked faintly disgusted. Maddy tried again. "I-" She gave up and sat down on the telephone table, a safe distance from the sofa.
Zack drank the milk and offered the glass to Corry, who haughtily sniffed it and declined. "Tell me what happens now," he said, frowning at the glass as he rolled it between his palms.
"To… Theresa?"
"Yes, of course." He lifted his gaze to hers, that funny half-smile back on his lips. "I'm pretty sure I know what's going to happen with us."
Maddy's whole body broke into goose bumps, responding to something in his voice that felt strangely like warm hands on her skin. She looked desperately around for a puppet, but the only one within reach was Boz, and she certainly couldn't be trusted.
"Well," Maddy said, after clearing her throat once more, "first people-a juvenile officer and a public-health nurse, probably-will go pay the family a visit. They will check on the home environment, talk to the parents and tell them a report is being filed, check Theresa to see if she needs medical attention-" She stopped because Zack had made a noise, but he waved her on. She continued with more assurance, finding refuge from the unfamiliar feelings he was arousing in her, in the familiar realities of her professional routines.
"They'll evaluate the situation-recommend what needs to be done, put the parents in touch with the right agencies, support groups-"
"What about the kid?" Zack interrupted. "Won't they get her out of there? She's been hit before, I'd stake my life on it, and she's going to get hit again, unless somebody does something to stop it!"
"Somebody is doing something," Maddy said patiently. "You did the most important part-you reported it. Now let the professionals handle it. Zack… they do know what to do."
"Right… I know. I'm sorry." Controlling himself with a visible effort, he sat back and stretched his arms out along the top of the sofa. Maddy watched the thin knit of his polo shirt pull taut across his chest, and swallowed.
"Tell me something," he said, watching her with a thoughtful appraisal that made her self-consciousness even worse. "How did you get into this? Were you an abused child yourself?"
"Of course not!" She stared at him. "What on earth makes you think-"
He shrugged and said, "Sorry," but didn't soften his unnerving scrutiny. "It seemed to make sense. You have a pathological fear of water, and that kind of phobia usually comes from a real trauma of some kind, doesn't it? And then, you're unusually shy for such a beautiful woman-"
"I'm not!"
"Not shy, or not beautiful?" He was smiling at her now, a rare smile that touched his eyes with a soft sparkle.
Words failed her. Again. She felt gauche and stupid. She felt thirteen, with adolescent males staring, red-faced, at her bosom. What could she say that wouldn't sound either false or egotistical? She was shy, and she was supposedly beautiful. She'd been told often enough that she was. How could she ever hope to explain to anyone that she just didn't think of herself that way? On an unexpected tidal wave of memory came the image of her own nine-year-old face in the bathroom mirror, pale and round-eyed, trying not to wince as her mother's hands pulled and tugged her masses of corn-silk hair into tight, stiff braids. And above her own face was her mother's, thin-lipped with disapproval, her voice cold, her words punctuated by the jerking of her hands. "Pretty is as pretty does, Amanda. The devil himself can put on a pretty face."