* * *

My father went to get Ruth, while my mother and I stretched my spare linens across the air bed. I kept getting in the way, bouncing on my knees on the rubbery mattress until the sheet corners tugged free. I wondered what Ruth might be feeling about the endangerment of her sibling in potentia, and what the appropriate way to act around her was, and I was thinking about a kind of wasp that laid its eggs in caterpillars. Parasitoid wasps, which instead of stingers have a needle-sharp ovipositor and deposit their larvae beneath the host’s skin. I’d learned about them in the spring, when my mother brought a monarch cocoon inside for me and it sat, inert, in a little plastic terrarium on my dresser, slowly darkening with black splotches as the wasp ate away inside it. After learning what the splotches meant, my mother shook the cocoon out onto the cement of our driveway and crushed it with her foot. I had wanted to keep it; just long enough to see the wasp come wriggling out.

Ruth brought her mother’s carpetbag with her, instead of just her bluebird backpack. The bag smelled like Aunt Vera’s fortune-teller perfume, singed and musky. My father hefted it onto the floor, and then stood in the doorway, and it made me feel very grown up to catch the look that passed between him and my mother, as if we, all three of us, were assessing the direness of the situation.

My mother stepped around the air mattress to hug Ruth. “Are you hungry, honey?”

“No.”

Ruth did not look very worried to me, but she paused in my doorway like she was not sure whether she could enter, like we had not played war with my dolls last night on the blue tie rug, and shaved one of her stuffed animals the weekend before. “You can come in,” I said.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to make you a sandwich?” my father asked her.

“I’m sure.” When Ruth sat down on my bed, she crossed her legs primly at the knee, holding them out from her body like she wanted to touch as little of the room as possible.

“I have to get to work.” My mother leaned against the doorframe. I reached under Ruth to get my toy box from beneath the bed. “Will you three be okay?”

My father nodded her off amicably. “Sure. How about some water, Ruth? Ice cream?”

I had pulled a toy out of the box, and now I held it up in front of Ruth’s face. “This,” I said, when she looked at me, “is what I think fairies look like.”

“What?”

It was a small rubber model of an orchid mantis, from a set of plastic bugs my mother had gotten me at the science museum. The orchid mantis was my favorite, extraordinarily delicate, with a waxy pink body fading to white at its pointed limbs, and eyes like opal beads set against its skull. “This is what fairies look like.”