But Matthew said no. “Not when you’re adopted. The Zeegers had to pay for Lily. Like ten thousand dollars or something.”
“Huh?” I asked, disbelieving. Ten thousand dollars was a lot of money. The Zeegers bought my Lily like you’d buy a shirt at the store. I didn’t know how I felt about that, if I was supposed to feel good that they’d fork over that much money to own my Lily, or if I was supposed to feel bad because she was just like any other commodity you might find at the supermarket. Clothing. Peanut butter. Bug spray.
I wondered if one day, if I ever had more than ten thousand dollars, if I could buy my Lily back. Or maybe, one day, the Zeegers would want to return her, like a shirt that didn’t quite fit right. Maybe one day Lily would be for sale again, and I’d figure out a way to buy her myself.
But what really rubbed me the wrong way was that Joseph and Miriam were getting paid for keeping me. They didn’t buy me like the Zeegers bought Lily.
“How do you know?” I asked.
He shrugged, like duh. “I just do.” And then he closed the door and walked away.
“Why didn’t you ever try to run away?” asks Ms. Flores. By now the man in the corner, the guard, has leaned in and I know he’s wondering the very same thing. Why didn’t I try to run? I glance at him, his brown eyes prodding me on from behind a navy uniform that looks like something his dad should be wearing, not him. He is a boy, not a man.
“Well,” they say, those eyes, “why didn’t you?”
“I was scared,” I say. “Scared to stay and scared to go. God would be mad at me if I disobeyed Joseph. That’s what he told me. That’s what he made me believe.”
I knew that there was no way I could go. Not at first anyway. Not that there was anywhere to go, but if I left, Joseph would do something to harm Lily—that he told me nearly a million times—and if by some chance he didn’t, then God would send his thunderstorms and vultures after me, and I wouldn’t stand a chance. He’d turn me into a salt pillar. Drown me with a flood. “I was a kid,” I remind her. Before going to live with Joseph and Miriam, I believed in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny. Until I lost a canine tooth, that is, and stuck it under the pillow on my bed and waited all night for one of the shiny gold coins the Tooth Fairy used to leave me back in Ogallala.
But she didn’t come.
I made believe she couldn’t find me, there in that house in Omaha, that she was flying all over Ogallala looking for me.
And then I started to wonder about things back home, in the prefab house on Canyon Drive. I wondered if another family had moved into that home, into my home, and if some other little girl was sleeping in my bed. The one with the hot-pink quilt—with orange polka dots all over—and lacy indigo curtains Momma had made with fabric she found on clearance, though they didn’t match a thing. I wondered if that little girl was hugging my favorite stuffed purple kitten, all wrapped up in my hot-pink quilt, reading aloud from my favorite picture books with her momma, awakening in the morning to find my shiny gold coin tucked neatly under my fluffy pillow.
I told Matthew about it, one night when he passed by my room. I told him how the Tooth Fairy couldn’t find me. How I was still holding on to that shiny canine tooth. How I didn’t know what to do, how to get it to the Tooth Fairy so she could use it to build her gleaming white castle in Fairyland.
“Fairyland?” he whispered. And I told him how the Tooth Fairy used all those millions of teeth she collected to build a shimmering castle and village for her and all of her fairy friends. And they called it Fairyland.
He just stared at me, dumbly, like he didn’t know what to say.
And then he kinda stuttered, “There ain’t no Tooth Fairy, Claire,” he said. It was quiet for a real long time. And then, “Throw it away.”
And just like the day Momma and Daddy died, a little part of me died, too.
I was too scared to ask about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. But when Christmas came and went again, with no presents, I knew the reason. And it wasn’t that I’d been a naughty girl that year.
Days later Matthew left a new book under my mattress: a book of fairy tales. Goldilocks and the Three Little Pigs, Rumpelstiltskin.