They live in a brick house you can’t blow down — boards instead of windows, nails in the doors. They tell me, Come alone.

They have dusted joints and I have seven dollars. They have pocketsful of pills and I have pennies I found in the snow. I know how easy it is to go down the steps to the basement, to stand shivering against the wall. Nothing hurts me. Earl says, Pain is just a feeling like any other feeling. He should know. Knife, slap, kiss, flame. He says, Forget their names and they pass through you. Earl has wooden arms and metal hands. His left ear’s a hole, his nose a bulb of flesh from somewhere else. He sits in the corner and smokes. He holds the joint in his silver claw. His long feet are always bare. When he whispers in his half-voice, everything stops.

No money the night before I found you. One of the Halloween men said, Come with me. He had pink hearts and poppers. He knew I’d need them. He said, It’s dangerous to sleep. I looked at Earl. I thought his lips moved. I thought he said, Nothing lasts too long.

This speedboy with poppers was the whitest man I ever saw. When I closed my eyes he was a white dog bounding through streets of snow. I tried not to think of his skin, all of it, how bright it was, how his body exposed would blind me, how his white palms blazed against my hips. I thought of Earl instead, smooth arms, cool hands, Earl who only burned himself, hair flaming around soft ears, holy angel, face melting into bone.

Clare said, Nobody will find you.

The whiteman was in me, close enough to hear; he said, Not even God.

God doesn’t like to watch little girls pressed against basement walls. God doesn’t like little girls who swallow pills and drink rum. God’s too old to get down on his hands and knees and peer through the slats of boards. Glass broken long ago but shards still on the ground. He might cut his palms. If he ever thinks of me, maybe he’ll send his son.

I never slept with the whiteman.

I mean, I never lay down and closed my eyes.

Clare said, There’s no reason to go home. She made me remember the trailer in December, a ring of Christmas lights blinking its outline, red and green and gold, the wet snow the first winter she was gone. She made me remember the white ruffled curtains on the windows and the three plastic swans in the yard. She said she hitched two hundred miles once to stand outside, to watch us inside, the fog of our breath on the glass. She said our mother had a new husband and two sons. She said we were nobody’s daughters. She said, They all want you to go.

Singing Christians, pink nurse, rain — I waited, saw your blue truck at last. I had a dream once of your body, damp hair of your chest, my fingers in it. As soon as you stopped, I remembered the hunting cap on the seat between us, the rabbit fur inside your gloves.

I surprised you. I’m the living proof: unknown father’s daughter. Tall bony Nadine. Dark-eyed Nadine. Girl from the lake of stumps. Water swirling in a mother’s dream. His face rising toward her. Shadow of a hand making the sign of the cross.

I pulled the blanket from my head and you saw the holes in my ear — you counted the tarnished hoops, nine, cartilage to lobe.

Later I’ll show you: the holes in my ear never hurt like the hole in my tongue.

You were amazed by the space I filled — long legs, muddy boots; you had no reason to let the wet-wool, black-hair smell of me into your warm truck. Moments before, I looked small and helpless, a child on the road, no bigger than your own daughter, ten years old, her impossibly thin arms, all her fragile breakable bones.

I closed my eyes so you wouldn’t be afraid. I was just a girl again, alone, but the smell — it filled the cab; you breathed me; I was in your lungs. I was your boyself, the bad child, the one who ran away from you, the one you never found.

Later there was fog and dark, the rain, heavy. You didn’t know where we were going. You didn’t know where to stop. The lights of cars coming toward us exploded in mist, blinding you. I said, Pull over. I said, We can wait it out.

And it was there, in the fog, in the rain, in the terrifying light of cars still coming, that I kissed you the first time. It was there parked on the soft gravel shoulder that I stuck my pierced tongue in your mouth and you put your hands under my shirt to feel my ribs, the first time. It was there that you said, Careful, baby, and you meant my tongue, the stud — it hurt you — and I thought of the handcuffs in my bag, stolen from the Halloween man, the last one, the white one — he was cursing me even now. I could have cuffed you to your wheel, left you to explain. I imagined myself in your coat, carrying your gun.

But I loved you.

I mean, I didn’t want to go.

The rain slowed. The fog blew across the road. You drove. I wore your gloves, felt the fur of the animal around every finger. I stared at the lights till my eyes were holes.

You were tired. You were sorry. It was too late to throw me out. You said we’d stop at a motel. You said we’d sleep. You said, What happened back there — don’t worry. You meant it wasn’t going to go any further. You meant you thought it was your fault.

I disgusted you now. I saw that. Your tongue hurt. My sour breath was in your mouth. Never, you thought, not with her. Dirty Nadine. Nothing like my pretty sister. Pale half-sister. Daughter of the father before my father. Not like Clare, lovely despite her filth, delicate Clare, thin as your daughter — you could hold her down. You could take her to any room. You could wash her. You could break her with one blow. You would never guess how dangerous she is. You can’t see the shadows on her lungs, her hard veins, her brittle bones. You can’t see the bloom of blood. Later I’ll tell you about the handprints on all the doors of the disappeared. Later I’ll explain the lines of her open palm.

Is she alive? Try to find her. Ask her yourself.

Never is the car door slamming. Never is the key in the lock, the Traveler’s Rest Motel, the smell of disinfectant, the light we don’t turn on. Never is the mattress so old you feel the coils against your back when you fall. My tongue’s in your mouth. Your cock’s hard against my thigh. Never.

Clare has a game. We strobe. She grabs my hand, sticks the wire in the socket. She dares me to hang on.

I’m a thief. It’s true.

I turn you into a thief. It’s necessary. You’ll think of that forever, the sheet you had to steal to get out of the motel. You’ll remember your bare legs in the truck, the cold vinyl through thin cloth, the white half-moon hanging in the morning sky, face down.

Days now and hundreds of miles since I left you. You wear your orange vest, carry your oiled gun. You follow tracks in snow. I follow Clare to the road. She wants me to find her, to feel what she feels, to do everything she’s done.

When you see the doe at last, you think of me. You’re alone with me — there’s no one you can tell about the girl on the road, her sore tongue in your mouth. Never, you said, no and no, but you twitched under her, blinded by the flickering in your skull. No one will understand. You thought her hands would turn you inside out, but you held on. There’s no one you can tell about the wallet she opened, the cash and pictures, the pants she stole.

Careful, baby.

I’ve got your life now — your little girl smiling in my hand, dressed in her white fairy costume, waving her sparkling fairy wand; I hold your sad wife in her striped bathing suit. If I could feel, her chubby knees would break my heart. I’ve got you in my pocket — your driver’s license, my proof. I’m in your pants. I belt them tight. I keep your coins in my boots for good luck. I wear your hat, earflaps down. I bought a silver knife with your forty-three dollars. I carved your name in a cross on my thigh.