Lucas spit in his face. “I didn’t do anything!” But he had. Sarah told. The coins were in the sewer. He’d dropped them, one by one, down the grate in the street.

Dr. Snow wrote down a new diagnosis in the chart: 313.81—Oppositional Defiant Disorder. She changed his prescription from Ritalin to Mellaril. It will pass, she told them. She’d seen it many times before. He was a good kid. She looked at her notes. They didn’t have to worry.

But they worried. When Marianne turned off the television during Saturday-morning cartoons, Lucas took a glass of soda from a nearby table and threw it at her head. It glanced off a bookshelf before shattering at her feet, the cola fizzing against the floor like acid. Marianne spent the next forty-five minutes in the car outside, turning the ignition on and off, on and off.

She liked to sit in the car. Marianne sometimes sat there in the driveway not going anywhere for hours. She enjoyed the quiet, the way it felt to be sealed inside of something, the suction of the air as the door slammed shut. Before she got married, she had driven across the country and spent nights curled in a sleeping bag across the backseat. She had lied to her parents that she was traveling with friends. She had felt no danger.

One night she got caught in a dust storm. Tumbleweeds sprang from the darkness and soared past her headlights while the wind threatened to shimmy the car off the road. She pulled behind a deserted gas station at a crossroads and fell sound asleep, the sand spraying the windows like hail. She woke up to silence in the middle of a Navajo Indian reservation and drove through Glen Canyon at sunrise. She wondered now at her faith in flimsy door locks, in stars turning into morning.

Every day there seemed to be another test. Coming home after work, Marianne heard a shuffling and found Sarah in the crawl space underneath the porch, covered in cobwebs and dead leaves. Lucas had locked her inside for telling about the coins. Marianne unhooked the latch.

Sarah crept out and wiped her face off with her sleeve. She smiled. “Is he going to get in trouble?”

Somewhere over the past year Marianne had lost the ability to communicate with her son. She went through boxes of baby clothes in the attic—tiny sailor suits and booties—she searched his dirty laundry, poking through pocket lint, eyeing his shirts and underwear; she scrutinized his report card, his toothbrush, his bike, the remains of his breakfast, and his issues of Ranger Rick. She felt guilty for wishing she were somewhere else, for wanting not to be his mother.