And then that bus veered off the road toward Highway 61, signs leading the way to Lake McConaughy where I built many a sandcastle as a kid, Momma waking up with the urge to go on the brightest of summer days and loading Lily and me into the Bluebird for the short drive to the lake. She never remembered the sunscreen, and we always burned to a crisp, all of us, comparing freckles and pink noses later in the day, pressing on the tips of our noses until they turned white. I stared out the window while that bus pulled right on into the Conoco parking lot, right there beside the Super 8 and the Comfort Inn, just across from the Wendy’s where Momma and I ate so long ago it was like another life. The Pamida was there and the truck stop; just like I remembered. I remembered it all. The bus was passing through Ogallala on the way to Fort Collins. This was Ogallala.

I was home.

When the bus came to a stop and passengers unloaded and headed into the Conoco to use the restroom and grab a snack, I had the strongest urge to snatch that suitcase and run. My heart was thumping loud and heavy in my chest, arms and hands quivering. I went so far as to push past the handful of new riders who were boarding the bus for the next leg of the trip. “Excuse me,” and “Pardon me,” I muttered as I pushed the suitcase ahead of me, lumbering down the narrow aisle in a clumsy manner. I got more than one dirty look. A girl with longish hair the color of pralines parroted, “Excuse you,” as I passed by too close, stepping on her fancy shoe. But I didn’t care.

I convinced myself that I had the tiniest inkling how to get home, to the prefab house, though chances were good I didn’t know how to do it when I was eight years old. But it didn’t matter. I could’ve laid down in a roadside ditch somewhere in Ogallala and it still would’ve felt like home. I could feel it in my blood and in my pores. Ogallala. Home. And wrapped up in all that: Momma and Daddy. There was this silly thought filling my mind: maybe Momma was still here. Maybe it was just a whole big misunderstanding. I’d walk back to the prefab home, and there Momma would be with Daddy and baby Lily, who was not Rose, who did not have a sister who was not me. And all of a sudden, walking through the rasping screen door, I’d be eight years old again and it would be as if time hadn’t happened. Time had stood still. Momma was alive, her energy and enthusiasm filling the flavorless rooms of that tiny home as it used to do. The house would be exactly the same as we’d left it. There would be no other family living there, no little girl sleeping in my bed. And I’d never have heard of a man named Joseph. Just a mistake, I told myself as I climbed down those enormous bus steps and onto the Conoco parking lot. The cold air startled me—begged me to change my mind—but I ignored it. I started off, across the parking lot, toward the street, a look of defiance streaked across my face. A refusal to believe what I knew inside me to be true. Just a whole big misunderstanding.

Momma is alive. Daddy is alive. My feet pounded on the pavement, fast and determined. The suitcase was awkward, smacking my right leg with each and every step I took.

What I found out was that I did remember how to get to that prefab house. Maybe my mind didn’t know, but my feet certainly did ’cause they carried me right on out of that parking lot, down Prospector Drive. The suitcase didn’t bother me, nor did the blustery air. I was on autopilot, or cruise control as Daddy used to say about driving the truck when I asked how come he didn’t get tired with all that driving. My mind was stuck on Momma and this expectation that she was still alive as I trudged past the old brick buildings I remembered from when I was a kid, under leafless trees that spotted First, Second, Third and Fourth Streets, beside the carbon copy white homes and low-lying telephone wires. In time the trees and the homes began to multiply, the small, nearly deserted town drifting away. And then onto Spruce Street with its mobile homes and open land and billboards, nearly a mile’s walk with cars soaring by at speeds that made the hair whirl around my head.

My legs burned by the time I arrived at Canyon Drive. My fingers were numb, my nose oozing snot from its nares. My arm was nearly asleep from the weight of the suitcase, my leg likely lacerated from where it rubbed back and forth, back and forth, all along the way.

The house was smaller than I remembered, the white siding more like oatmeal than snow. What once felt like an entire stairwell to the front door were instead only four small crooked steps, the aluminum handrail missing half its winding, taupe spindles. There was a basketball net, which there never used to be, a Honda hatchback in the drive. Red. Not the Bluebird I was used to seeing.

I stood, on the opposite side of Canyon Drive, staring at that house that used to be mine. Gathering the courage to turn the knob on the front door, hoping and praying I’d find Momma on the other side, though of course, deep down, somewhere far inside, I knew she was dead, but I tried hard to ignore that notion, to imagine the what-if instead. There was a split-second thought: if I didn’t try, I’d never know, and that was a good thing, ’cause not knowing was better than proof that Momma and Daddy were dead. I’d been eight years old, a stupid kid after all. Maybe all those things they told me had been a lie, just one of all the other lies Joseph told me. I made believe Momma had been searching for me all this time, that my face had been like one of those other missing kids they plaster on the back of milk cartons, the black-and-white images with an age progressed photo beside it, what some smarty-pants thought I might look like when I was sixteen. If you think you have seen Claire, please call 1-800-I-am-lost. I imagined the wording: Claire was last seen at her home on Canyon Drive, in Ogallala, Nebraska. Her hair is the color of snot, her eyes a bizarre blue. She has a small scar under her chin, a space between her two front teeth. She was last seen wearing...

What was I wearing, that night Amber Adler came to tell me my parents were dead? That periwinkle T-shirt I used to own, the one with the bright red tube of lipstick and the frisky inscription: SWAK, kiss marks flecking its edges. Or maybe a party dress or a polka dot tank top or maybe...

This is what I’m thinking about when the door to that prefab home jolts open, the sound of kids arguing annihilating the silence. The sound of a mother’s voice—not my mother, but a mother: stern and tired—telling them to Shut. Their. Mouths. Please.

There they were, three of them—no four, I saw then, the mother carrying an infant in a seat in her arms—pouncing down those four crooked steps like a litter of playful kittens. The two freestanding children elbowed one another all the way down the stairs, calling each other names: fart-face and booger-brain. It was two boys, each in jeans and tennis shoes, thick winter coats and fur bomber hats. The mother had a blanket—pink—draped over that baby. A girl. Maybe the girl she always wanted, I thought, as the mother propelled the boys forward with a gentle shove and told them to hurry. Get in the car. They were going to be late. One of the boys spun then suddenly crying huge crocodile tears. “You hit me,” he screamed at his mother.

“Daniel,” she said, her tone flat. “Get in the car.” But he continued his outburst right there, at the bottom of the steps, as the older boy climbed into the hatchback as he was told, and the mother secured the baby carrier into the car. The boy, Daniel, maybe five or six years old, crossed his arms across himself and pouted, that bottom lip of his almost covering the top one. I stared in awe, thinking how I never, ever would’ve talked to Momma that way, never would’ve called Lily a fart-face or booger-brain. I decided then and there that I didn’t like this little boy, not one bit at all. I didn’t like the way his wayward brown hair crept from the edges of his bomber hat, or the way his too-big coat hung farther down on the left side than the right, the sleeve on the left completely covering a gloved hand. I didn’t like his navy blue boots or the nasty frown on his long face.