And I freeze.
I check twice, half-certain that it’s the poor lighting in the laundry room that makes me think I see blood spatters across the undershirt. Something red, of that I’m certain, but I do my best to convince myself that the flecks are ketchup. Barbecue sauce. The juice of a maraschino cherry. I smell the shirt for whispers of tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, but I come up with nothing but body odor. Body odor and blood. My eyes scan the other articles of clothing for a second time: the frayed jeans, the raveling sweater, Ruby’s jumpsuit. They’re each caked in their own filth, but none other than the undershirt carry the distinct carmine color of dried blood. I fumble for the stain remover and begin squirting the life out of it, but then stop—suddenly—knowing that little can be done about dried blood. I wad the undershirt into a discreet ball and on the way upstairs to our fifth-floor condo I drop it in the garbage shoot.
I envision that undershirt with whatever secrets it may hold, tumbling down five flights and into the Dumpster perched beside the service entrance.
Of this, Chris can never know.
WILLOW
Momma used to say she had a sister, Annabeth, but if such a sister existed, she never came forward to claim Lily and me.
“How is it that you came to live with Joseph and Miriam?” asks Louise Flores, the ASA—assistant state’s attorney, she told me when I asked. The clock on the wall reads 2:37 p.m. I lay my head on the cold steel table of the interrogation room and close my eyes. “Claire,” the stark woman prods, laying a hand on my arm to shake me awake. Roughly. She’ll have nothing to do with this, nothing to do with my “shenanigans,” she says. I yank my arm away and hide them, both of them, under the table where she can’t reach.
“I’m hungry,” I say. I can’t quite remember the last time I ate, but I remember sifting through a garbage Dumpster sometime before the cops caught me, finding a half-eaten hot dog, cold and covered in pickles and relish and mustard, the mustard thick and gluey, lipstick marks on the bun. But of course, that’s not where the police found me. They found me smack-dab on Michigan Avenue, staring through the window of the Gucci store.
“We’ll eat when we’re through,” she says. She’s got old-lady hands, wrinkled and veiny. A tight gold wedding band that cuts into the skin. Surplus skin that hangs from the bottom of her arms, her chin.
I pull my head from the table and look at her, into those gray eyes behind the rectangular glasses and say again, “I’m hungry.” And then I put my head back on the table and close my eyes.
There’s a hesitation. Then she tells the man in the corner to get me something to eat. She drops some coins on the steel table. I wait until he’s gone and then I say, “I’m thirsty, too.”
I won’t lift my head until the food arrives, I decide. But already she’s asking questions, questions which I readily ignore. “How did you end up with Joseph and Miriam?” and “Tell me about Joseph. He is a professor, is he not?”
Joseph is a professor. Was a professor. It’s the reason that when he and Miriam showed up, claiming to be the second cousin twice removed (or something to that effect) on my daddy’s side, my caseworker thought it was a lucky break. Joseph and Miriam lived with their two boys, Matthew and Isaac, in a home in Elkhorn, Nebraska, which sat right outside of Omaha, the largest city in all of Nebraska, so that the two were practically holding hands. Their home was nice, much nicer than our prefab home back in Ogallala, with two floors and three bedrooms and big old windows that stared out at the hills that surrounded that home. We lived in a neighborhood with a park and a baseball field, though I didn’t ever see any of those things, but I heard about them, heard about them from the neighborhood kids I watched out those big old windows, riding their bikes up and down the street and calling for someone or other to grab their bat ’cause they were going to play ball.
But Joseph said I wasn’t allowed to play with those kids. I wasn’t allowed to play at all.
I spent my days doing chores, taking care of Miriam, missing Momma and Daddy. The rest of the time I stared out that window, at the kids, coming up with as many “I love you likes” as I possibly could.
I love you like cinnamon loves sugar.
I love you like kids love toys.