One of her fans. I saw you at the movies, hopping along between the tents. When your hair was red and your tits were full of useless milk. Why are you despoiling Matt’s grave?

The Magpie lunged at her, but Sonia backed away. The men said Sonia was a lunatic and leave her alone, and she hitched a ride back to town. After that, though, she couldn’t stay away. She kept coming back, watching them desecrate the grave. Until the night she saw trolls digging it up! She’d tried to stop them, but the sheriff came just as he had thirty years ago, threw her into his truck, bad girl, Sonia, get off the land.

43
Hazmat Site

The carillon had bonged midnight, and then one, before I finished sifting through the papers in the trunk. Bernie was heavily asleep, despite the lamps I had turned on. She’d been in a bright mood when I came in, which made me think she’d hatched a scheme with Cady, but I didn’t have the energy to catechize her on it. I also prudently didn’t ask to see her French essay.

Sonia’s fury and pain with her parents made those parts of her journals almost incoherent, but she wrote about the staff and other residents at St. Rafe’s with a compassion she apparently couldn’t speak aloud. She seemed to have built a relationship with two of the children in St. Rafe’s permanent housing units, although she colluded with their mother in hiding substance use: Mindy let me have Lima and Autumn this afternoon. Hopscotch, swings, ice cream . . . Mindy passed out, I took L & A, walked out in garden, we painted until Mindy woke up.

The suitcase included a number of drawings, most of them quick sketches, although Sonia had taken care with portraits of the little girls. She’d caught them in action, playing hopscotch, and had captured the intensity of children concentrating on a project. She’d drawn Randy Marx as part grasshopper, his wide lips exaggerated, while he counted grass seeds into piles.

I found a colored sketch of an adult Cady Perec looking at herself in a mirror, freckles prominent, copper hair done in ponytails that made her look like a child. Who are you? the mirror was asking her. A savage self-portrait of Sonia showed up in a corner of the mirror, leering down at Cady’s reflection. Another self-portrait: Sonia’s face in the body of a polar bear, swimming in a giant teacup whose liquid was labeled “Lithium.” Underneath it Sonia had printed “The Bi-Polar Bear.” My heart twisted with pain at her self-loathing.