Momma and Daddy hadn’t been religious at all. The only times they talked about God were what I later came to know as in vain. We didn’t go to church. There was only a drawing of Jesus in the old prefab house, which Momma said used to belong to her own mom and dad, and we kept it in the kitchen, and more than anything else, it covered up a hole in the wall where I accidentally threw a ball when Daddy and I were playing catch in the house. The man in the picture might as well have been the president of the United States for all I knew. He might have been my grandpa. We never spoke of the picture. It was just there.

“You’re telling me your foster father sexually abused you,” Ms. Flores says, though her eyes say I’m full of it. Full of crap. “You ever tell your caseworker about this?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Why not? She checked up on you, did she not? Brought letters from Paul and Lily Zeeger.”

I shrug. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Then why didn’t you tell her?” I look out the one barred window placed too high on the wall for me to see what is outside. There’s just a hint of blue sky, some white fleecy clouds. I fantasize about what’s on the other side: a parking lot, cars, trees.

The caseworker was okay. I didn’t hate her. She drove a beat-up junker car and carried about half a million case files in a mangled Nike bag that, at the age of thirty or maybe forty, made her back sag like those old ladies with osteoporosis. She worked out of her car, with all her files stored in the backseat. She moved from group home to foster home, back to group home, meeting with all the kids on her ever growing caseload. Apparently she had an office—somewhere—but I don’t think she was ever there. She was nice enough, but she was up to her ears in her caseload (if she told me that once, she told me a thousand times) and half the time when she showed up, she thought my name was Clarissa and once or twice, Clarice. She talked fast and moved faster. She wanted things done.

The day I went to live with Joseph and Miriam was just one more checkmark on her to-do list.

“You see, Claire, I’ve seen your files. I know that your caseworker made visits to the home, to Joseph and Miriam’s home, and I know that this so-called sexual abuse was never discussed. What was discussed at these visits—” she reaches down into a briefcase at her feet and pulls out a chunky green file, flipping to a page she’s marked with yellow sticky notes “—were your mood swings, your quick temper, your refusal to follow rules, complete chores, obey orders, your defying authority, your poor grades in school.” She sits, still as a mouse, her eyes bearing down on me across the table, and then adds, “Your flights of fancy.”

I’d been in that house just outside Omaha for all of a month before Joseph came into my bed that first time. At first he just wanted to see parts of me I didn’t think he had any business seeing, and then he wanted to touch me in places I didn’t want to be touched. When I said I didn’t want to do these things, he said to me with a kindliness that waned with every split second it took to undress, “Come on now, Claire. I’m your daddy now. It’s okay to let your daddy see,” and then he’d stare as I pulled a shirt up over my head.

I was scared like I hadn’t been in a long time, not since Ivy Doone, in the first grade, dared me to summons Bloody Mary from my bathroom mirror. In that first month I’d rarely seen Miriam leave her room. Miriam wore her nightclothes all day and all night, the same fusty, crusty ones, without bathing, until her stench filled the home. She rarely said more than two words to the boys or me, only to Joseph, when she was begging his forgiveness for something or other she’d done. She’d drop to her knees before him, sobbing, and kiss his feet, begging Please, Joseph, forgive me and he’d kick her away and move on, saying she was pathetic, worthless, a tramp. He said once, in a fit of rage, that Miriam should be tossed out the window, her corpse left to feed vagrant dogs.

“Have you got anything to say to that?” Louise Flores asks. Any comment about my delinquency.

Joseph said no one would believe me. It was his word against mine. No one would believe me if I told them what he did.

And besides, he was only doing what a good daddy was supposed to do.

“No,” I mutter.

The woman rolls her eyes, closes the file before her and says to me, “This alleged sexual abuse. Tell me about that.”

I learned later, when copying from the Bible, word for word until my hand cramped and the muscles burned and I could barely hold the pencil without shaking, which was Joseph’s punishment for me when I misbehaved, of the Phoenician princess Jezebel, who was thrown through a window for killing the Lord’s prophet, her blood splattered on the walls. She was trampled and left to be eaten by dogs, so that when the people returned, all that was left was her skull, and feet, and the palms of her hands.

Matthew and Isaac were sent to school while Miriam and I were left at home alone. If anyone ever came to the door, we weren’t to answer it. We were to stay real quiet so no one knew we were inside. Joseph told me if ever I did dare answer that door it might be bad people on the other side, bad people who wanted to hurt me. So I didn’t dare open that door. The house was dark, the curtains always closed. Except in my bedroom, where I’d peek out my window as Matthew and Isaac walked through the neighborhood where we lived, past the kids on the bikes with their baseballs and footballs, past little girls with pigtails who drew murals on the sidewalks with chalk. They’d wait, at the end of the block, for the big yellow school bus to come and sweep them up and drive them to school. I watched as some of the kids called Matthew and Isaac mean names because, in that neighborhood, Matthew and Isaac were deemed weird ’cause they didn’t ride their bikes and they couldn’t catch a ball if their life depended on it. They didn’t have friends, and if ever some of the neighborhood boys came to the door to see if they could play, Matthew and Isaac, like me, had to be real quiet, pretend no one was home, and in time, none of those kids came to call anymore. Instead they called them names at the bus stop, they pushed and shoved them, they threw snowballs smack dab at Matthew and Isaac’s heads.

I believed Joseph when he said, coming into my bedroom night after night, hearing me sob for Momma and Daddy, and feeling so lonely and alone and scared, that he would take care of me like a good daddy should. He told me that this, what he was doing when he lay his sweaty body beside me under the patchwork quilt, was what a real daddy was supposed to do.

He told me that my living with him and Miriam was my momma and daddy’s last request. That this was what they wanted.

And he told me that if I didn’t do what he said, he’d take it out on my Lily. Oh, yes, he’d say if ever I hesitated to undress. You don’t want anything to happen to Lily now, do you?

I thought about Lily all the time. I thought about Lily, out there, somewhere. I wondered if that was Momma and Daddy’s wish, too: that Lily live with the Zeegers when they died.

But I didn’t think that was true.

By then, Lily was three years old. She only knew Paul and Big Lily as Mommy and Daddy; she didn’t have any memory of those folks buried at the cemetery back in Ogallala off Fifth Street, under a maple tree that was half as dead as they were, their corpses rotting in matching pine boxes in the ground. I dreamed of Momma and Daddy there, in those boxes, the ones I watched with Ms. Amber Adler being lowered into the ground, before she drove Lily and me in her junker car to the group home.

I dreamed of Momma and Daddy’s skeleton arms trying hard to reach through the pine boxes and touch hands.