Three women. Me in their arms, passed from one to another.

“My mother and her two sisters,” I said, eyes still shut.

Mr. Schumann rifled through a folder before pausing to read something. I heard his asthmatic breath aimed down at the desk, blowing against his loose papers. He scratched his head with his pen. “Eden, it’s my understanding that your mother died when she had you. I know you live with an aunt and uncle; is there another sister too?”

“Yes, but that’s not who I mean.”

“But you said—”

I balled my hands into tight little fists, squeezing the story out like toothpaste from a tube. “Not my mother now. My mother then. When I was his prettiest one. It was a long time ago. Whole lives ago since he killed them.”

Mr. Schumann held still for a minute. He thumped his wrist down on the desk and used his scritchy little pen to jot notes across his pad of lined paper. “Who is this ‘he’ you mentioned?” he finally asked.

I always saw the women so clearly, it seemed strange that I couldn’t conjure his face. I felt his arms, broad and muscular when they picked me up to sit on his shoulders. I recalled the sweat and musk and tobacco smoke I smelled when I pressed my cheek against the crook of his neck. But these were only photographs.

I needed a scene. I cracked my eyes open enough to peek over at Mr. Schumann’s fidgeting hands. They fumbled, disassembling the pen into pieces and placing them in precise east-west alignment with a granite paperweight and a letter opener shaped like a sword. Such anxious hands. Not like my father’s at all. Not like the long, dark fingers so lean and strong and always sure.

My father’s fingers held glass vials filled with funny liquids and powders, and he poured them one into another, another into a greater one, and another onto a small burner. One more bottle. Three drops of brown, smelly stuff on top of it all. When all was done simmering, he removed it from the heat with a padded glove and poured it into a Mason jar that might have otherwise held peach preserves.

His sleek back stretched a damp undershirt to its breaking point. He was at a rough desk, reading something from a book beside the vials. He leaned his head backwards over the chair and gripped his hair with both hands. Tight black wool.

He was frustrated, angry. Something was missing.

“Papa?”

“What are you doing in here? Get yourself away now.”

“But Papa, I wanted to know where—”

“I said, get yourself away now.”

“Papa?”