We sleep, Heidi, Zoe, the cats and me locked in the bedroom. In the early morning before I leave—the sun just rubbing at its eyes and preparing to start the day—I wake and remind Heidi that this is as it should be every night that I am gone, her and Zoe in the room together, door locked.
I am out the door by five, lugging my suitcase and briefcase down the hall for a cab ride out to O’Hare.
The girl and her baby are asleep when I go, their own door pulled to and presumably locked, as well, my office chair possibly slid under the door’s handle for an extra safeguard in case we try to force our way in while she sleeps.
The sun is beginning to rise, painting the sky gold. As the cabbie, with his talk radio and the overwhelming smell of a pine-scented air freshener filling the cab, careens down I-90, I lay my briefcase on the seat beside me. I reach inside for a notebook and pen, to get some work done on the ride. It’s a solid thirty minutes out to O’Hare on a good day, and judging by the buildup of cars already on the interstate, I’m guessing it won’t be a good day.
I toss open the briefcase, and there I see it, a note, scribbled on a purple sticky note, the answer to last night’s unanswered question.
A note that sucks the oxygen right out of the cab.
Handwriting I’ve never seen.
The simple inscription: Yes.
WILLOW
Louise Flores wants to know more about Matthew and Isaac, my foster brothers if that’s what you call them. The term brother implies some kind of familial tendency, of which there was none. Not with Joseph. Not with Miriam or Isaac.
But Matthew. Matthew was different.
Sitting there in the meager room, across the table from Louise F-l-o-r-e-s, I picture Matthew, tall, like his father, but with hair the color of chocolate brownies, Momma’s chocolate brownies, and dark brown eyes. I imagined that this was what Miriam must have looked like once, long ago, before she became a mousy gray. Isaac, on the other hand, was Joseph through and through: a carrot top with orange hair on his arms, his legs, his chin.
“What about them?” I ask, and the lady says: “Did you get along with them? Did they participate in this alleged sexual abuse as Joseph did? Or were they victims, as well? What was their relationship with their catatonic mother?”
“Catatonic?” I ask.
“Yes. In a daze. Unresponsive.” She says that she assumes Miriam suffered from a condition called catatonic schizophrenia, based on my description. If, she says, what you say is true, as always implying that it is not.
A troll, I think. An imp. I envision Miriam parked in the corner of her room on the wicker armchair, staring into space, while in the room next to hers, her husband did as he pleased.
My bedroom shared a wall with Matthew and Isaac’s bedroom, and for the first year or so, that alone was the only association we had. We ate no meals together. Looked away or downward when we passed each other in the halls of the home. Matthew and Isaac were made to share a room when Joseph and Miriam brought me in, and I didn’t know if they liked it or not because no one talked much in that house. Matthew and Isaac spent much of their day in school, and when they were home, they were in their room, doing homework and reading from the Bible. Joseph didn’t allow any exchange with me, and he would readily remind Matthew and Isaac that: “Bad company ruins good morals,” when their eyes so much as wandered in my direction.
To this end, Isaac never changed. If anything, he became more like Joseph as time went on, a lemming ready to plunge off a cliff at his father’s request. But Matthew was different.
I remember the night, the first time we really spoke. I was ten. I’d been living in that house for almost a year, and in that time, Joseph had visited me two dozen or more times. I laid in bed, well after midnight, unable to sleep as was almost always the case. I was thinking of Momma and Daddy and rattling off as many “I love you likes” as I possibly could. And then there were footsteps, outside in the hall, moving along the wooden floorboards to my bedroom door. I held my breath, waiting for Joseph to come in, to slide his clammy body into bed beside mine. I began to shudder as I always did when Joseph’s footsteps clamored down the hall and that, in itself, set in motion a whole slew of things: my heart beating as though it might jump from my chest, the sweaty hands, sweaty everything, the inability to see straight, the ringing in my ears.
And then the door slid open and standing there, in the darkness, was a much different profile than that which I was used to seeing. And the voice was different, softer somehow, tender, equally as scared as I was. “Did you know that cockroaches can live for a week without their heads?” he asked. And then I knew, by the sound of his hushed voice: Matthew.
“They can?” I whispered, sitting upright in bed, propped on my elbows in the nearly black room, the only light from a nearby streetlight that flickered off and on, off and on. All. Night. Long.
“Yup,” he said. “Sometimes a month. They die from lack of water.”
“Oh.”