I let myself out the side door and wandered into W’s backyard, where I stepped on the cracks in the fractured pavement. I knew the rhyme “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” I pulled my fingers along the chain-link fence, stopped and pushed my sneakered toes into the holes, climbed halfway up and back down. The neighbors’ rosebush, budless this early in the season, had trespassed through the fence. When I pressed the thorns against my thumbs, they budded with blood.

Being outside felt strange after being inside for two months. Like eating peanut butter after not having eaten it for months and forgetting how sticky it was, and at the same time how much I liked it.

I ran inside for a bandage and back out again to sit on the cold stone of the front stoop. A woman passed by pushing a red carriage, her two babies sitting face-to-face inside it. She waved and smiled, and it scared me. Maybe this lady was a spy, a monster in disguise.

The babies stared at me. One of them giggled. The other drooled, its expression serious, unreadable. I liked babies, always wanted to touch their soft faces and fuzzy hair, but maybe these were baby spies.

I stood up, brushed the dust from my butt, faced the door, and scurried inside. The basement light was off, and I felt my way down the dark stairs. You lay on the couch. When I straddled your bony legs, your eyes fluttered open.

“What is it, Sammy?”

“Hanadi,” I said, sensing you didn’t have the strength to argue. In the space of time it took me to say my real name, you fell back asleep. I watched you for a few minutes. Your hair was matted in places and tousled in others. Your breath whistled in your nose.

“Mama,” I said. I got off you, and the outdoors drew me like a magnet for a third time. I walked down the driveway and turned right. The street was lined with aluminum-sided houses. I’d forgotten my jacket. The sun warmed me at first, and then it skittered behind a cloud and the air chilled. At the end of the block, I turned around and looked up the street to W’s house. It seemed very far. I wasn’t ready to go back.

“I’m running away,” I said out loud.

W’s street dead-ended at an elementary school. I looked both ways and crossed the street. The kids were out for recess, and I heard their shouts and squeals, like bird calls. I walked across a field to the edge of the blacktop. Two little girls with pageboys and bell-bottom jeans were peering at me sidewise, as though we were on either side of a fence, or a cage.