And once again my thoughts go to the blood on the undershirt.

She says, “You took the baby. You took Ruby from my room.”

And I say calmly, “Yes. I did,” and then I think fast for some excuse. “She was crying,” I lie. It’s instantaneous, spontaneous, far too easy a thing to do. “I didn’t want her to wake you,” I say. “I was up anyway. Just about to start a pot of coffee. When I heard her crying.”

“She’s hungry,” Willow says to me, her voice soft, watching as I watch the baby paw at my chest.

“Yes,” I say, “I was just about to make her a bottle,” but Willow says with a sureness I’m certain I’ve never heard from her before, “I’ll do it,” and her eyes stray to the coffeemaker, yesterday’s remains now syrupy and cold.

“You haven’t had your coffee,” she says, and I tell myself she is simply being helpful, doing her share. I tell myself there isn’t an edge to her voice as she gropes the baby awkwardly and removes her from my lap. Suddenly, I feel as if something has been taken from me, something that was mine.

Perhaps Willow isn’t as wide-eyed and green as she’s led me to believe.

She’s taken the baby and stands now in my kitchen, baby thrust to a hip, holding her awkwardly as she tries to prepare a bottle, as the baby wiggles ferociously in her arms, her eyes glistening with tears. The baby stares at me, her arms reaching past Willow for me—I’m just sure of it—as I remain on the rocking chair, unable to rise and make my coffee because I can think of nothing but wanting that baby returned to me. My blood pressure is rising, sweat pooling under my arms, sticking to the flannel. I feel suddenly unable to breathe, unable to find enough oxygen to fill up my lungs.

The baby is staring at me, her eyes still, though everything else is flailing about. Her feet kick at Willow, her hands pull madly on Willow’s sepia-toned hair. The baby’s skin has turned a beet red, and at Willow’s sluggishness, she begins to scream. Willow takes the abuse as if she barely notices, and yet it makes her clumsy, makes her knock the formula-filled bottle to the floor, the white powder creeping its way into the cracks of the floorboards. And I could help. I could, but I find I’m frozen still, like a statue, my body glued to the rocking chair, my eyes locked on the baby’s.

A door parts from down the hall, followed by the sound of Zoe’s voice, half-asleep and annoyed, the child who once clung to my breast needing me and only me. Now she didn’t want a thing to do with me.

“Doesn’t anybody sleep around here?” she asks, piqued, not making eye contact with Willow or me as she emerges into sight.

I manage a, “Good morning,” my voice breathless, as Zoe slides drunkenly down the hall, the strands of her auburn hair in a complete state of lawlessness and anarchy.

Zoe says nothing. She drops to the sofa and flips on the TV, MTV, the preteen equivalent to caffeine.

“And good morning to you, too,” I mutter to myself, sarcastically, my eyes staring at the baby with longing, craving another chance to do this right.

WILLOW

Ms. Flores asks to know more about Matthew. Just talking about Matthew somehow brings a smile to my face. I don’t say anything, but Ms. Flores sees that smile and says to me, “You like Matthew, don’t you?” and suddenly that smile goes away. Just like that.

“Matthew is my friend,” I say.

I tell her about Matthew passing by my room at night, about how he left the books under my mattress so I didn’t turn into a dimwit like Miriam.

But that was before.

Matthew was six years older than me. He was fifteen when I came to live in that home in Omaha. I was nine. It wasn’t too long before he was done with school, and by the time I was twelve or thirteen, maybe fourteen, he’d moved out of the house. Just one day, when Joseph was at work, he packed up his things and decided to leave. But he didn’t go far.

Instead of going to college like his friends were doing—Matthew couldn’t afford college—he worked at the gas station down the road, and for a while, instead of bringing books for me, like he did when he was in school, he brought candy bars and bags of chips when he came to visit, the kinds of foods Joseph swore were the devil’s creation.

I didn’t know where Matthew slept at night. He didn’t talk about it much. Sometimes he’d talk about living in a big, tall brick building with an air conditioner and a big-screen TV but even I knew he was lying. Other days it might be that he was traveling down the Missouri River in a barge. He just didn’t want me to feel bad for him, is all. But of course, anything would be better than living there, in that home with Joseph and Miriam, with Isaac, whose own eyes had started to have that same thirst I saw in Joseph’s the nights he came into my room.

But still, sometimes, Matthew would come to the home in Omaha on the days when Isaac was at school and Joseph was at work, and Miriam, of course, was in her own room, oblivious to the world around her. He’d tell me how he might just join the army, how he was making more than I might think in that gas station down the street.

But even I could tell how his eyes looked tired, how sometimes he smelled as though he hadn’t bathed for days, how his clothes always smelled, how sometimes he’d nap on that bed of mine while I washed a shirt or a pair of his jeans, or scavenged the cabinets for something for him to eat. Every now and then he’d search around that house for some money, a dollar bill here, some forgotten coins there, and he’d stuff them in a pocket, and I came to believe that Matthew was getting by on that money alone, on whatever money he could steal from Joseph. Once he found a twenty-dollar bill in the pocket of an old coat Joseph didn’t wear anymore, and I could see in Matthew’s eyes: it was as if he’d struck gold.

Matthew wanted to get me out of the house. I knew he did. He just didn’t know how, is all. One day, he swore, when he had more money. Like Momma, Matthew was starting to talk a lot about one day. One day he’d have enough money. One day he’d get me far, far away from there.

I thought about Joseph and Miriam getting paid to foster me, and I wished that maybe Matthew could foster me instead.

But that was the child in me talking, the real me knew nothing like that would ever happen.

I could tell that something was changing in Matthew. He talked about bigger things than cockroaches and Venus now. He talked about getting me out of that house, away from Joseph. Homeless people living on the city’s streets.

Matthew continued to bring books for me that he picked up at the public library. I fantasized about that library, about the fact that without any money, you could read all the hundreds of thousands of books for free. Matthew told me about it time and again, about the four floors of nothing but books, and I wondered how long it would take me to read them all. Matthew would bring a book or two when he came by to visit, and let me keep them until the next time, and when I finished the cleaning and the laundry, and I had taken out the trash, I would lie down on my bed and read from the pages of whatever it was that Matthew had brought.

Matthew and I would perch together on the edge of my bed, sometimes, him looking too big for my room, like a full size man trying to squeeze into a doll’s house, and together we would read. I could tell that Matthew was changing from the boy who used to stop by my room and tell me about Venus and dumb stuff about bugs. He was filling out, no longer a broomstick, but now a man. His voice was lower, his eyes much more complicated than I remembered in the days when he and Isaac would walk home from school, staring down at the concrete, trying hard to ignore the punches they received.

I felt like something was changing in me, too. I felt different around Matthew, somehow. Nervous like I’d only ever been that first time he came into my room, when I wasn’t sure what he was there to do. Matthew looked at me like no one in the world ever had. He talked to me like no one had since Momma and Daddy. We’d read together from this book or that—my favorite being Anne of Green Gables, one I must’ve asked Matthew a hundred times to get from that four-story library—and when we got to a hard word I didn’t know how to say, Matthew would help me with it, and never did he give me that look like I was dumb.