I love you like bananas love mayonnaise, she’d say, and I’d just shake my head and laugh, watching her prance around our home in her black shift dresses and beehive hairdos.

That bus took us past buildings that looked like the apartment buildings I remembered from Ogallala, short buildings splayed over the tawny lawn, made of pressed clay bricks, brick red. There were parking lots as wide as the buildings themselves. Electrical wires running alongside the street, making the air through the open bus window buzz. We drove through slummy neighborhoods, past run-down, boarded-up houses, past ratty cars and rough-looking people who loitered along the cracked sidewalks. Just loitered. We passed American flags, flying in the stubborn wind, patches of dirt showing through the deadening grass on the side of the street, past bushes with puny leaves, brown and tumbling to the ground, and trees, naked trees, hundreds of thousands of them.

There was an enormous parking lot that we passed, with pieces of cars. When I asked about those cars, Matthew told me it was called a junkyard, and I asked him what’s a person possibly to do with cars without wheels or doors.

“They use ’em for parts,” he said, leaving me to wonder what good wheels or doors do without a car. But I found myself searching for Momma and Daddy’s Bluebird nonetheless, for the upside-down car, the smashed-in hood, the broken headlights, the mirrors that hung from the door by a string, bumpers and fenders squished down to half their size. This is the image I’d carried in my mind for all those years, a snapshot on the front page of the paper: I-80 Crash Leaves Two Dead. Momma and Daddy’s names were never mentioned. They were called casualties, a word I didn’t even know at the time.

“Where are we going?” I asked for a third and final time.

A smile flickered on Matthew lips as he said, “You’ll see.”

“Where did Matthew take you that day?” Louise Flores asks. I think of Matthew living in that house with me all those years, all those years that Joseph kept me locked inside. I wondered what Matthew thought about that, or maybe he didn’t think about it at all because he had been a kid and Joseph was his father, and he didn’t find it the least bit strange. Living in that home with Joseph and Miriam had become commonplace to me after all that time. I had to look real far inside my heart to realize that being cooped up like that, it was wrong. I thought maybe it was the same way with Matthew. That was the way it had always been since he was a kid. He never saw Miriam come and go. He never saw me leave.

And besides, Joseph said that no one would believe me. Not a soul. It was his word against mine. And I was a child. A child that no one—no one—besides him and Miriam wanted.

“Where did he take you?” Ms. Flores asks again, and I say, “To the zoo.”

“The zoo?” she asks, like there’s a million places in the world she’d rather go.

And I say, “Yes, ma’am,” with a smile on my face as big as the sun because there wasn’t any place in the world I would’ve rather been except for maybe with Momma and Daddy.

The zoo. I had been to a tiny zoo before, in Lincoln, but we’d never been to Omaha before. We saw antelopes and cheetahs that day, gorillas and rhinos. We went for a train ride, and into a giant dome that looked just like the desert inside, a real live desert. Matthew spent just about every penny he owned on me there at that zoo, buying me popcorn, too!

I loved every minute of it, though the truth of the matter was that I was a little scared of the people. Lots of people. I didn’t know a whole lot about people back then. What I did know was summed up into the scattering of people in my life, and all of them packed into three categories: good, bad and otherwise. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t been outside of that Omaha home for years. It was that I hadn’t seen a whole lot of folks, other than Joseph and Miriam, Isaac, Matthew and, from time to time, every six months or so, Ms. Amber Adler. I stared at all the people we passed and wondered, over and over again, if they were good or bad.

Or if maybe, they were otherwise.

But Matthew held my hand tight the entire time; he didn’t ever let go. I felt safe when I was with Matthew, like he was going to protect me, though I knew that sooner or later I’d have to go home, back to Joseph and Miriam’s home. As it was, it was sooner rather than later because Matthew said we couldn’t risk Joseph getting home before us. We couldn’t take a chance of him knowing I’d been gone.

Because then, Matthew said, Joseph would be mad. Real mad.

And then I wondered what he might do.

That night I dreamed of antelope. Antelope in a herd, running throughout the African savannah. Free and uninhibited as I only wished I could be.

HEIDI

We’re getting ready for bed when Willow steps into my bedroom and says good-night, her voice apprehensive in that way that it almost always is. Zoe is on my bed staring blindly at some sitcom on the TV, and I grimace internally every time someone on screen says the word damn or hell or a couple shares a romantic kiss, not quite certain when we graduated from the Disney Channel to this. Is my twelve-year-old daughter old enough to watch this, to grasp the sexual innuendos and adult humor that suffuse the TV screen?

But she stares blindly, not laughing along with the audience as some man slips on an icy patch in a parking lot, falling onto his rear end, a carton of eggs soaring from his hands and into midair.

Her gaze turns to Willow as she enters, a coldhearted stare in her warm brown eyes.

She scrabbles for the remote control and turns the volume louder, trying to drown out the sound of Willow’s spineless good-night.

Zoe is upset at me, upset that I forgot to pick her up from soccer practice, that I got sidetracked at the clinic with Willow and the baby. That she had to wait an extra hour, maybe more, with Coach Sam while he called—and then called again—my cell phone to remind me of my daughter waiting at Eckhart Park as the Chicago sun sank lower and lower below the horizon. By the time we arrived, her teammates were long gone and Coach Sam had grown cold and antsy, though he faked a smile and told me it was all right when I apologized for the umpteenth time for my delay.

Zoe didn’t speak to me when we arrived home; she didn’t speak to Willow. She showered and climbed inside the bed, saying that she wanted to be alone. This, of course, didn’t surprise me in the least, and I could see in her vacant eyes, in the sulky expression that expropriated her face, that she hated me, as she hated most everything. I’d made it to that never-ending list that included math homework and beans and that nagging substitute teacher. That list of things she hated. Me.

But the baby. The baby on the other hand was full of smiles. Toothless smiles and mellifluous baby sounds that filled the room like bubbly lullabies. I clung to her greedily, not wanting to share. I prepared a bottle when she began to forage around in the pleats of my shirt for my breast, sneaking off into the kitchen without asking or telling Willow where it was that I was going, or asking whether or not it was okay to feed the baby because if I did, she might suggest she do it herself, and then I would have to relinquish the baby, relinquish the baby to her care, and that was something I found I simply could not do. And so I stood in the shadows of the kitchen, feeding Ruby, and tickling her sweet little toes, pressing a terry-cloth dish towel to her mouth to catch the drops of formula that escaped, sliding this way and that down her chin like a pair of pinking shears.

And then: “It’s time for her medicine, ma’am,” Willow declared, appearing suddenly in the kitchen, a bolt of lightning on an otherwise quiet night. I’d been caught, red-handed, with my hand in the cookie jar, or so they say.