A door clicked shut. I sat up. The room was dark. Ellen was below me, sleeping. She’d slept almost all day, and I could see Marie’s shape across the room in her bed, the soft rise and fall of her breath. Another sound came from the hallway, a creak of floorboards. I leaned forward, tense, listening. There was a low whimper. Beatrice. I heard the sound of my mother: “Shhh.” She was taking Beatrice, something she did sometimes, leaving in the middle of the night. She’d freewheel the car down to the road in the dark before turning on the engine. It was bad enough with Marie sneaking out the window and climbing down the wall, but my mother creeping out of the house with Beatrice half asleep in her arms left me with a pitching feeling, as if the house were staggering sideways into the ground, everything sliding and falling, and I couldn’t grasp anything I could hold on to. I lay back down, eyes open. When they reached the road, the lights of her car switched on and hit the trees, splaying shadows backward across the ceiling of our room and down the wall toward me. They were going to meet Bill.

I tried to fall back asleep, willing myself to let go, but I woke with a jerk midway through falling. I never seemed capable of just floating or drifting down. I fell violently, from a bike, a branch, a building, the sudden drop jolting me awake before impact, leaving me with the sensation that the shock was still below, waiting to come. I tried counting sheep and imagining myself in a relaxing place, a forest looking skyward through the canopy. Now it was the Barbie Man whose blank face and sleek hair materialized above me. I gasped and sat up. I was sweating. We should have told my mother. She would never have left us in the middle of the night if she knew what had happened to Ellen. Not even for Bill.

None of us had even met Bill. Only Beatrice. “That’s why Beatrice has the box room instead of me,” Marie had said. “So Mom can get her in and out of the house easier without waking the rest of us.”

“But Beatrice doesn’t even like going. She’s told me a hundred times.”

“So?” Marie had asked. “Mom uses her. Beatrice is her Bill pawn.”

I’d imagined Beatrice as a chess piece on a board, being pushed around by adult fingers: her tangle of wavy hair, the freckles across her nose, her wide rosy cheeks and missing teeth, how she was always trying to please everyone, maneuvered around in a game she did not understand.

Marie sometimes expressed things crudely. She could see things from a detached distance, she said, because she had stopped liking our mother.