Beneath her breath she mutters an incomprehensible jumble about forgiveness and sins.

Keys. Keys in a lock. Being locked in?

I make a mental note of this.

I’m not one to feel sympathetic, but for a split second I feel the slightest bit sorry for the girl floundering around on the floor, praying to the gods for mercy.

“Honey, please,” Heidi begs as she retrieves a towel from the kitchen drawer and hurries to Willow’s side, “please don’t worry about it.”

I do my part, leaning over to retrieve the glass from the floor.

But I see the terror in the girl’s eyes and know that I cannot undo what has been done.

* * *

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.”

And we stood like that in absolute silence, for a minute or more, and then he closed the door and went into his room.

The next day I found a book slid under the mattress of the bed, sandwiched in between the patchwork quilt and a scalloped dust ruffle: A Children’s Guide to Insects and Spiders. I knew it was from him. When Joseph went to work, and Matthew and Isaac disappeared down the street, joining the other kids at the bus stop, those kids who heckled them and called them names, I sat on that bed of mine and devoured the book.

Momma had sent me to school back in Ogallala, and that school had taught me to read, and Momma used to make me read to her every night before bed, everything from her fashion magazines to the Julia Child cookbooks to the mail. I was a good reader. I wolfed down that book from Matthew on the very first day, and then slipped it back into his room, under his bed before he and Isaac, or Joseph, got home. I learned everything I could about earwigs and mantids, cicadas and damselflies. I learned that horseflies live for thirty to sixty days, that queen bees hibernate in the dirt in winter, that periodical cicadas only appear every thirteen or seventeen years.

A few days later, a new book arrived: Sea Anemones. I read how they looked like flowers, but really were not. Instead, they were predators of the sea. They didn’t age like others plants and animals. They had the ability to live forever, to be immortal, the book said. That book taught me how the sea anemone injected venom into its prey, and how that venom paralyzed the prey so the sea anemone could swoop fish, shrimp and plankton into their carnivorous mouths.

I didn’t like those sea anemones one bit: so pretty and celestial, and yet assassins. Would-be murderers in delicate, angelic bodies. It didn’t seem fair. It was a trick, a trap, an illusion.

A few days later: Rocks and Minerals. And then another book, and another. Nearly every week Matthew was slipping another book from the school’s library under my mattress: Charlotte’s Web and The Diary of a Young Girl and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which I read in the moments that I wasn’t cleaning house or bathing Miriam, or making tuna salad sandwiches for dinner.