I tell her how riding the buses with Matthew became more or less a regular thing. We didn’t go to the zoo more than the one time because the zoo cost money and money was one thing Matthew didn’t have. We went places we could go without money. We went to parks, and Matthew showed me how to pump the swings, something I’d forgotten since my days back in Ogallala. Sometimes we just walked up and down the streets of Omaha, past the big buildings and all of those people.
And then one day Matthew took me to the library. I remembered how I loved going to the library with Momma. I loved the smell, and the sight of all those books. Thousands of books. Millions of books! Matthew asked me what I wanted to learn about—anything in the whole wide world—and I thought about it long and hard, and then I told Matthew that I wanted to know more about the planets. He nodded his head and said, “Okay. Astronomy it is,” and I followed Matthew as he waltzed through the library like he owned the place, and took me to a bunch of books on astronomy, as he called it, the sun, the moon, the stars. The library was quiet, and in that aisle with the astronomy books, Matthew and I were all alone, tucked between the tall bookcases like we were the only people in the whole entire world. We sat on the floor and leaned against the big bookshelves, and one by one I started pulling the books from the shelf and admiring their covers: the black nighttime sky all cluttered up with stars.
Growing up without a mother there were things I wanted to know but had no one to ask. Like why, every now and again, my body started bleeding, and I was made to stuff my underwear with wads of toilet tissue to keep it from ruining my pants. Like why I was growing hair where no hair used to be, and why parts of my body were getting bigger for no apparent reason at all. There wasn’t one lady in my life I could ask. The caseworker was the only one, but of course, I couldn’t talk to her about those things because she’d want to know why I wasn’t just talking to Miriam, ’cause every time Ms. Amber Adler came around, Miriam was taking the little white pills and acting almost normal. Almost. But Miriam was far from normal.
All those questions were about the outside, but I had questions about the inside, too. Especially about Matthew, and this whole strange slew of emotions I felt whenever he was around. I felt an urge to be close to him, and lonely when he wasn’t there. I waited each and every day of my life for him to appear at the door once Joseph and Isaac had gone, feeling sad on the days he didn’t come.
I was seeing things I’d never seen before when Matthew came and got me out of that house: beautiful women with rippling hair, the color of straw or cinnamon or macaroni and cheese, their faces fancy, dressed in wonderfully complicated clothes: tall leather boots with heels, skintight jeans, pants made of leather, teal pumps, dozens of bangle bracelets flanking an arm, shirts with scoop necks, sweaters with holes where bras showed through the burgundy or jade or navy fabric. Women and men holding hands, and kissing. Smoking cigarettes, talking on phones.
I owned one bra, slipped to me by Joseph with the last parcel of clothing: one that contained brown jumpers and cardigans that bored me to tears, when what I wanted were heels and bangle bracelets. I wanted to slip some see-through shirt over my one bra and let Matthew see.
When Matthew and I lay down, side by side on my bed to read from the pages of whatever book he’d brought me, we lay close, our bodies fused together, our heads sharing the same lumpy pillow. Matthew would slant himself into the bed’s headboard, his legs and torso curving their way around my own, his head angled toward mine so we could both see the same microscopic words in the books. One of my favorites was Anne of Green Gables, a book I must’ve asked Matthew a million times to check out, and though I knew he must be getting sick of it, he didn’t ever complain. He even said he liked it, too.
But no matter how much I liked that book, still, I’d find it hard to do anything but think about Matthew’s hand grazing mine while turning the pages, his jeans brushing against my bare leg beneath the blanket, an elbow accidentally swiping my breast as he redistributed himself on the bed. While Matthew was reading aloud about Anne Shirley and the Cuthberts, I lost myself on the tone of his voice, the smell of him—a hodgepodge of moss and cigarette smoke—the shape of his fingernails, what it would feel like if he slipped those toasty hands up under my sweatshirt and touched my breast.
It would be different from Joseph, that I knew for sure, different from Joseph whose teeth marks were singed into my sallow skin like the branding of cattle.
Matthew and I would lie that way for a real long time, together on the bed, and then sometimes Matthew would sit up quickly, rearrange himself on the other end of the bed.