Joseph’s blood.

I was sure of it. I tried hard to piece the bits and pieces together: the broken glass, the knife, the guttural scream that awoke me from sleep. Matthew appearing in the door, his words: Go now. Before... Before what? I sat there and wondered. Before the police arrived. Before Isaac appeared. It had yet to really hit me: the fact that I was on my own. That I no longer belonged to Joseph. That he would no longer be coming into my room.

I sat there for I don’t know how long. Taking slow sips of my soda, listening to the TV. It was warm in the bus station, and bright. I stared for some time at a fluorescent light flickering on the ceiling and watched as a man came into the station in jeans and a tattered T-shirt, a Huskers cap on his head. I thought that he should’ve been cold with just the T-shirt on, but he didn’t look cold. He looked at me, out of the corner of his eye, trying to make it seem as if he wasn’t staring. But I could tell he was. He carried an overstuffed duffel bag in one hand, too much stuff inside to zip it clear shut.

He nodded, kind of a half nod, as if saying I see you, and then walked, smack dab to a chart on the wall, and when he got there he just stood and stared. I saw the words on the wall above that chart.

Departures.

Arrivals.

The bus schedule.

I waited until he purchased a ticket to Chicago from the grumpy man behind the booth and then sulked into a hard chair on the other side of the station, and pulled that cap over his eyes and appeared to sleep. I slid from my chair—wiping my eyes with the back of a sleeve—and wandered to that chart on the wall, staring at so many words and numbers it made me dizzy. Kearney. Columbus. Chicago. Cincinnati.

And then I saw it, two words so unexpected, I knew they were meant to be: Fort Collins.

Fort Collins. The same words that I’d seen time and again on the return address labels of those letters Big Lily sent me from her home in Colorado. My Lily, little Lily, lived in Fort Collins, Colorado.

It was time to go to her. To see my sister again.

HEIDI

Graham stands three feet away in the darkened room, watching with gluttonous eyes as I lower my undergarments to the ground, the pale pink bra falling upon the kitten heels and pink panties, beside sheer nylons now wadded into a ball and cast aside.

His eyes look me up and down deliberately, unhurriedly, coming to a standstill on the diagonal scar, red and ever-present, running from my belly button down, its tail end lost amid pubic hairs. A constant reminder.

I dismiss that scar, telling myself it simply isn’t true, reminding myself of the baby, sound asleep on the pink fleece blanket next door.

Graham says nothing as his warm hands come to rest on my waistline and he leads me to the bed, setting me down on a gray duvet that slips halfway to the bedroom floor, beside pillows that have yet to be replaced since morning. I stare past him, at a ceiling fan—brushed nickel with cherry blades—blowing papers one by one from a dresser and onto the floor, Graham’s latest work in progress, though he’s so caught up in the moment he fails to notice, fails to notice how the breeze of the ceiling fan spawns gooseflesh upon my bare arms, my legs, my chest.

He stands at the end of the bed, slipping an undershirt up over his head and as he does so, as I lean in to run my hands down the oblique and abdominal muscles that line his torso, the faint, fair hair, the alcove of a belly button, the antique brass button that affixes his jeans, I hear it.

I hear the baby cry.

Louder than the blare of a car horn, an unexpected peal of thunder, the roar of a steam engine.

I stand up quickly, gathering my clothing from the bedroom, the living room floor; Graham, deaf to the baby’s cry, begs me not to leave. “Heidi,” he says, his voice placating in a way that I bet makes it impossible for women to say no. “What’s wrong?” His eyes stare at me, at my eyes, as I step into the dress, clinging to the nylons, the panties in my hand. I secure the buttons up my back—mismatched and irregular.

“It’s just—” I say, feeling flushed, unable to let go of the sensation of Graham’s hands, his eyes, on my body, staring at me in a way Chris no longer stares. “I forgot there was something. Something I needed to do.”

I hear the crying when I am still in Graham’s doorway, loud, wretched crying, and I begin to run, the frantic clamor of kitten heels pounding on a wooden floor, as Graham calls to me by name.

“Heidi.”

But he doesn’t follow.

When I come into my home, there she is, the baby, sprawled across a pink blanket, on the floor.

Sound asleep.

It is not what I imagined.

What I expected to find was the blanket folded over her like the edges of an omelet, a handful of fleece stuffed in her angry hand. Her skin cardinal red, her cry thorny, like goose grass, rasping, scratchy, as if she’s been crying for days, weeks, more.

Instead, she is silent, save for the delicate inhalation and exhalation of air. She lies inert on the pink blanket, her features calm and composed while I stand there in the doorway, gasping for breath.

She is asleep, I tell myself, finding it utterly impossible, for I was certain—as certain as I live and breathe—that I heard a baby cry.

I run to the child and sweep her tiny figure from the floor, up into my arms, waking her from her daze.

“There now,” I croon quietly into her ear. “Mommy is here. Mommy won’t ever leave you again.”

WILLOW

Matthew had given me near everything I could possibly need inside that suitcase: money, and lots of it, some food: candy bars and granola bars and cookies. I didn’t know for sure how he happened upon the money. I settled into the bus, clutching it close to me, the only possession in the world that was mine. As the bus crisscrossed rural Nebraska, the sun making its ascent into the late-winter sky, I laid it upon my rickety lap and opened the clasp to reveal a book like all those he’d slipped into my bedroom when I was a kid: The Fifty States. I skimmed through it, seeing that he’d left messages for me in messy black ink, smudged between the slippery pages of the thick book. Beside Alaska: Too cold. Nebraska: No way. Illinois: Maybe. A guidebook to my future: that was Matthew’s intent.

Montana: A good place to hide.

I wondered if that was what I needed to do: find a place to hide. Would someone be looking for me? Joseph, maybe, or maybe the police. No, I reminded myself. Not Joseph. Joseph was dead.

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but sleep didn’t come easily. All I could see were Matthew’s deranged eyes as he tore into my room, the watery blood—colorless in the darkness of the room—on the knife. I heard Joseph’s scream over and over again, a ringing in my ears, and tried hard not to imagine what had happened when I left, to wonder where Matthew was right then and there, and whether or not he was okay.

I had this suspicion that everyone was looking at me, that everyone knew. I sunk low into the seat and tried to hide, refusing to make eye contact with anyone, refusing to force out a stale hello, even to the man who sat on the other side of the aisle, in his own teal chair, in a black suit and clerical collar, leafing through a worn copy of the Bible.

Especially not the man on the other side of the aisle.

I closed my eyes and tried hard to pretend that he wasn’t there, that he couldn’t detect my sins, sniff them out like a bloodhound on a scent trail.

Sometime after noon I started to recognize the scenery out that tinted window: gigantic green signs with town names I knew, their names written in bold white letters: North Platte and Sutherland and Roscoe. A plaque lining the road: Entering Keith County. Familiar whitewashed barns and cattle fencing, an abandoned wooden farmhouse sloping so far in one direction I was certain, even eight years ago, the last time I laid eyes on it, it would slide right over onto the yellowing grass and collapse. I found myself sitting upright, my nose pressed to the frigid glass, hearing Momma’s voice against the drone of the bus’s engine: I love you like pigs love slop.