Yes, she understands. If you leave a child long enough, the soft bones of the skull will flatten.

He says, No wonder we hate you.

Elena whispers, But that didn’t happen. Elena says, Iris has a perfect head, a lovely curve — I didn’t hurt her.

The boy laughs. The boy says, You think I don’t know that?

The boy says, You think I haven’t touched her?

He says, She lived in the jungle eight days last summer. I remember her voice. She’s sweet, your Iris. But mostly it’s her throat I remember. So white I wanted to snap it. I wanted to lie down beside her with my eyes closed. I wanted to rub naked against her until her skin was sore and red and mine was healed.

Why should I be me? Why should she be Iris?

One night she must have heard me. My thoughts. She must have dreamed the words inside me. The next day she disappeared. Came home. To you. To this house. Not because she loves you. Only because I scare her. She’ll get over that. Don’t think that you can keep her.

The boy says, She told us where you live, how easy it would be to rob you. He says, When I saw you on the Ave. that day, I knew we were meant to be together.

Elena wants to tell the boy, Everybody suffers. Wants to say that children who live in cars and children who live in castles sit awake all night watching stars, wondering why meteors don’t set the earth on fire. Children everywhere wonder why their mothers refuse to answer. Children lie in the grass, waiting for fathers who never come to save them.

The boy is very practical. The boy says, You sleep in the car. I’ll sleep in the castle. He says, You eat from the dumpster. I’ll eat your salmon and raspberries. He says, I’ll lie under the down comforter. You can stuff your pants with newspaper.

He says, Maybe you’re right. He says, Maybe I’ll still suffer. He says, I’m willing to try it.

He hasn’t been this warm in years. He says, I think I’d like to die here. He says, We die every night in the jungle. Last week it was a migrant. One of those fools who forgot to go south for the winter. He ended up with us instead, under the freeway, in a house made of sticks and cardboard. He was hacking yellow phlegm and bleeding from his asshole. Maybe you’re right. When it comes to this, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the car or in the castle. On the white bed or the cold vinyl. But if I had my choice, I’d stay in your house forever.

We didn’t let him die in the dirt. We made a bed of leaves, wrapped our hands in rags to lift him. Someone covered him with a silver blanket. Our astronaut.

He asked us to find the sin-eater. Who knows how many of us there are? Ten thousand in this city? But we found her, the one he wanted, shriveled-up old spook of a woman. She came and sat beside him. Ate everything we brought her — boiled cat, raw fish, roasted squirrel. She swelled and swelled. Choked down his evil. Drank gallons of water. Belched and farted. She chewed till her eyes rolled and she toppled over. We thought his sins had killed her. All that meat, his poison. She slept two days. Foul. We had to tie shirts over our noses. The man burned. Riding that horse. No one could stop him. But his body wanted to stay with us. It breathed and bled. It snorted. Once its eyes opened.

On the third day, the sin-eater woke. Small again. Her withered self. Wind blew through the stick house. Rain washed us. We smelled like the ocean, salt and seaweed. We were clean, in a way, as clean as we can be. Our astronaut was wet and cool. His blanket shimmered like liquid silver. We wrapped it around him. A girl with little hands sewed it shut with tiny stitches.

That night we carried him to the highway and left him on the shoulder. We were too tired to dig a hole. And there are too many of us to bury. We could dig all day every day, turn this jungle to a graveyard.

If you leave a dead man on the road, someone always takes him.

He disappeared at daybreak.

We have this kind of magic.

When it was dark again, the silver blanket burst above me. A billion stars exploded. I was afraid. I thought it was his body breaking. If blood splattered in my eyes and mouth, I’d be the next one dying. But there were only stars and the black sky between them.

The boy is very tired. Too tired to keep talking. He whispers his last words to Elena. He says, Every night ends if you live through it.

This night does end. The rain is soft now. Elena climbs out of the trunk. She’s not scared. She knows the boy has vanished.

Room by room, she’ll find everything he’s left her.

In her bed, she’ll find his imprint. Everywhere he’s been, he’s carved a hole, a space for her to enter. Yes, it’s true, when she touches the spot where his head lay on her pillow, she knows how flat his skull is. Between the sheets, she feels his short legs and curved clavicle, the three places where his arm was broken.

In the bathroom, she finds specks of blood in the sink, knows he tried to brush his teeth. His teeth are stained, his gums infected. He defines himself by absence, by what he’s taken: three bars of soap, toothpaste and toothbrush, a box of Band-Aids. He’s left a ring of scum in the tub, two wet towels, a damp bathmat. She finds blood here too. The boy scraped his flesh this hard and still felt filthy.

On the kitchen counter, she finds four eggshells, spilled milk, the empty carton. He’s taken a tin of cashews and a box of powdered chocolate.

In the dining room, she finds shattered glasses, her favorite ones, hand-blown in Murano. She sees the broken window. No birds have flown inside her house, but in the shards she hears trapped cries and torn wings quivering.

The boy’s pulled ivory creatures from the closet: an otter swallowing a lynx, a wolf mounting a caribou. Strange couplings. He has no use for these, and so he leaves them.

She follows him downstairs, his trail of sticky handprints. This is where he’s strongest, where he was in the beginning and where he was in the end. Before he came upstairs, he must have lain on Iris’s bed with his shoes on. He changed his clothes here. He’s left his dirty pants, his hooded sweatshirt. Elena imagines what he’s wearing now. Iris’s ripped jeans, Geoffrey’s leather jacket. He has her black alpaca sweater. She remembers an open drawer upstairs, thinks he took a pair of stockings. Practical boy. Will he wear them under the jeans, stay warm this winter? No, he’d never do that. He’ll pull one leg of her pantyhose over his face to smash his nose and lips flat. No one will recognize him. Except Elena. Yes, she thinks, I know the curved bones of your shoulders. The silt under your nails. I know the texture of your hair between my fingers. I know you as I know my own child, as I know myself, as I know my sister.

She takes his little pile of clothes to the trash can. The rain is cold, a fine drizzle. She smells split wood, fresh sap, grass shredded. Out here there’s no scent of boy to follow.

She tugs the sheets and comforter from Iris’s bed. When the electricity comes back on, she’ll wash them. She wipes fingerprints from the wall, throws out eggshells. Scours sink and bathtub. Smoothes pillowcases. She erases him. She has to. No one would understand. No one would believe her. Just a drunk woman throwing her own glasses. A scared, silly woman hiding in the attic. She presses her face to the pillow, wondering how many days she’ll breathe him.

This morning her husband will come home and find her weeping. She won’t explain this.

Tonight her daughter will appear, as if by magic. Thin, wet Iris. Slender stalk of her body in dark clothes, white bloom of her face. Iris in the doorway. Lighting a cigarette. Iris saying, Mind if I smoke here?