* * *

When I awake in the morning, there is sun. After days and days of clouds and rain, there’s something perplexing about the sun. It’s bright. Too bright.

My entire body is stiff. Like an old man’s. I can barely feel my hip. I roll over, onto my back, my right hand smacking the metal edge of the bed frame. All sorts of expletives run through my mind as I try to remember why I’m on the floor to begin with, why my now-aching hand is even close enough to accost the bed frame. I find myself on the not-so-soft boucle rug that lines Heidi’s and my bedroom floor, wrapped up in Zoe’s magenta sleeping bag.

And then I remember: sleeping on the floor at my own insistence that Zoe not be left alone in her bedroom for the night. Not when we had an outsider in the home. Heidi told me I was being ridiculous and offered to swap places with Zoe. But I said no. I wanted my flock where I could see them. All of them. Even the cats were allowed to stay, sealed in a locked bedroom across the hall from that girl, an extra chair buttressed beneath the door’s handle in case she tried to force her way in.

I roll over, onto my side, and get an angle of the bed I’ve never seen before: the underside. There are all the expected things one finds underneath a bed: a dusty sock divorced from its partner some time ago, a stuffed bunny of Zoe’s that went AWOL when she was eleven, the back of a woman’s earring.

“What’s wrong?” Heidi asks as I slip out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. The house is filled with the aroma of pancakes and eggs, freshly brewed coffee. Heidi’s hovering before the stove, baby placed on one hip, flipping pancakes with the opposing hand. It looks shockingly natural, Heidi and that baby. As though we’ve stepped in a time machine or something, and there she is, holding baby Zoe in her arms. The baby’s got her gold chain, the one Heidi won’t leave home without, wrapped up in the palm of its fat hand, tugging hard. I see Heidi’s father’s wedding band dangling from the end, the one and only thing in the world Heidi wanted when he died. She made a bargain with her mother: her mother could have everything else of sentimental value, but the ring went to Heidi. She searched high and low for a chain of the very same yellow gold as the ring, a twenty-four-karat gold chain that cost nearly a thousand dollars. And now, I watch as the baby yanks on it, the loop of the chain dangling from her grip like a uvula at the back of someone’s throat.

“Nothing,” I lie as I yank a mug from the cabinet and fill it with coffee. “Morning, Willow,” I say to the girl who sits alone at the table, dragging pancakes and eggs into her mouth with a trail of syrup that runs its course across the mahogany table and up Zoe’s striped shirt.

I make a quick trip out to purchase the Trib from the stand on the corner, and then I take my pancakes and eat outside, on the insignificant wooden balcony that sits at a tilt. I can’t stand to stay in the same room with Heidi and that girl, the discomfort filling the room like pea-soup fog. Outside it can’t be more than fifty degrees. I stare at my bare feet resting on the balcony’s rails and think that I’ve been duped by the sun. Flipping through the paper I find the high for the day: 56 degrees. I can’t help but scan for images of missing girls, as well—teenage runaways, articles on kids wanted for questioning in the killing of their parents. I scour for the words: homicide, butchery, torture, and find myself wondering what, exactly, Lizzie Borden’s folks did to piss her off.

The night before, Heidi sent me out for supplies. After dinner I walked to the drugstore, where I found myself staring stupidly at a variety of baby diapers in the empty aisle. I’m too old, I thought as I groped for a box and stuck it under an arm, to be buying diapers.

At home I watched as Heidi laid that baby out on the hardwood floor and removed the blue towel—covered now in stinky shit—from her body and set it aside. The baby kicked her feet, thrilled to be naked, while Heidi wiped her bottom with one of those powder-scented wipes, setting the dirty ones in the towel that would later be hurled down the garbage shoot.

When she lifted her up, I choked at the sight of the rash, a foul red rash that covered her rear end. As Heidi lathered one cream, and then a second, onto that baby’s behind, that girl stared on, as if no one ever told her about changing a baby’s diaper before, about how sitting in all that shit and urine couldn’t possibly be good for her skin. Her eyes looked sad as Heidi slipped a white jumpsuit and footed pants from their plastic packaging and onto the baby, covering up a birthmark the size of a sand dollar on the baby’s leg.

When she was done, Heidi passed the baby back to Willow, who held her awkwardly, without Heidi’s obvious expertise, without the natural maternal instinct girls were supposed to be blessed with. I watched her shuffle that baby like a sack of potatoes, wondering whether or not that baby was really her child.

But I didn’t dare suggest this to Heidi because I knew what she would say. She would remind me that I’m a cynic, a skeptic. Of course it’s her child, Heidi would say as if she had some sixth sense about it, as if she knew.

We’d sat around the TV for what felt like an eternity, an awkward, hellish eternity, where for an hour or more, no one spoke. And then, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I shut the TV off and said it was time for bed. The clock on the wall read 8:46 p.m.

There were no complaints.

Before we went to bed, I pulled Heidi aside and said, “One night. That’s all,” and watched as Heidi shrugged, and said to me, “We’ll see.”

I gathered Zoe’s magenta sleeping bag from her bedroom closet, and propped that extra chair before the door, listening to Zoe go on and on about how my insistence on a sleepover sucked. About how impossible I was being. About how she hoped her friends would never find out about this, our little ménage à trois, she called it.

Since when does my twelve-year-old know about ménages à trois?

WILLOW

Joseph was a professor of religion at the community college. He taught about the Bible, but mostly the Old Testament. He taught about a God who wiped out the world with a flood, who rained down fire and brimstone on entire villages, killing everyone there. Women and children, good and bad. Everyone. I didn’t know what brimstone was, but he showed me drawings in those college textbooks of his, pictures of fire pouring down and devouring the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt.

“This,” he told me in that somber voice of his, with the solemn, spongy face that never smiled, the reddish-orange beard, thick and disgusting, “is God’s wrath. You know what wrath is, don’t you, Claire?” and when I said I didn’t, we looked it up in some big, heavy dictionary, together. Extreme anger, it said.

“This,” Joseph said, showing me again, the pictures of fire and brimstone, “is what God does when he’s mad.”

Joseph convinced me that thunder was my doing, something or other I had done to upset God. I lived in fear of thunder, lightning and rain. When the sky turned black—as it often did in Omaha in the middle of summer—on one of those hot, humid July days when the threatening black clouds raced in to swallow the calm blue sky, I knew that God was coming for me. When the wind started whirling, the trees stretched down to touch their toes and sometimes snapped clear in two, garbage from the Dumpster on the corner jetting through the air, I would drop to my knees, as Joseph had showed me to do, and pray, over and over and over again, for God’s forgiveness.

What I did wrong, I never quite knew. The explosive lightning and ear piercing thunder immobilized me, and once or twice, and probably even more, I peed my pants as I knelt there, in that bedroom of mine, praying to God. I’d keep watch out the window for the fire and brimstone, falling from the sky. I’d stare for as long as it took, for the storm to settle, to move on to Iowa, and then, Illinois, to punish some other sinner like me.