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.
I learned a lot in those books, about science and nature, about how unstable air caused thunderstorms, about how, in some parts of the world, thunderstorms happened every day. About how lightning was actually good for people and plants, not something to fear.
I started wondering if Joseph was wrong, about the fire and brimstone and all that stuff. I started thinking that maybe when the thunderstorms rattled across the land, shaking the living daylights out of our small Omaha home, it wasn’t God coming for me because he was mad.
It was just a thunderstorm after all.
But I didn’t dare tell Joseph.
*
One day Matthew arrived with burns on his arms and hands, the skin raw and red and blistery. I could tell that it hurt, the way he cradled one hand in the other, one of his forearms wrapped up in a gauze bandage. He came into the house quiet-like, like maybe he wasn’t sure I should see. I gasped when I saw him, hurrying into the kitchen to get him a bag of ice.
What he told me was there was a fire at the shelter where he was staying. When I asked him where he was staying, he said a homeless shelter. I thought of Momma collecting our old clothes for the homeless, but otherwise that word didn’t have a whole lot of meaning to me. I thought of Matthew wearing someone’s old clothes, sleeping on someone’s old bedspread, and the thought made me feel sad.