Over breakfast, oatmeal with raisins and apples but, by my mother’s ruling, no sugar, my father told us that Aunt Vera and the baby were going to be okay. They would have to stay in the hospital a little while longer, until the baby was born, to make extra sure that she was safe, and Ruth would stay with us until then.

“How long?” Ruth asked.

“As long,” my mother said, putting the sugar bowl down in front of Ruth gently, conspiratorially, “as it takes.”

Ruth and I were in different grades, the fourth and fifth, respectively, so I only saw her during recesses. Our schoolyard was large, composed mostly of a field, with a border of trees blocking us off from the residential streets on two sides, and, at the back, a swath of undeveloped land where some thick, raggedy oaks grew on the slope of a brown hill. I was sure that hill was haunted. The tree nearest our fence had the remains of some structure nailed up in it, a few mossy boards and a fraying bit of cloth, an abandoned tree house or something more sinister. In the third grade, I had heard a story about a girl who ran away from home, and was mauled and eaten by a mountain lion. I had decided that it had to be in this place that it had happened; there was the tree house the girl had built herself, there was the ground where she was eaten.

Most breaks Ruth and I spent walking along the chain-link fence that bordered that hill, looking for manifestations of this haunting. We disturbed the piles of leaves and mud that accumulated at the base of the fence, speculated about what the holes dug under it could mean, traps made for us to fall into or corpses burrowing up from under the earth.

“Are we gonna see your mom after school?” I asked her.

Ruth shrugged. “Your dad said probably. He said if she’s feeling up to it.”

I had been to a hospital once before in my life, when Ruth broke her arm, and then I’d only been allowed to sit in the pale waiting room for a couple of hours, to investigate one of the sparse vending machines, before my mother came to take me home while my father waited with Aunt Vera. I was interested by the idea of going back. “Did she call you or anything?”

“No.” Ruth looked soft, with her curls resting fuzzily against her ears. I wanted to pet her. I turned over a clump of leaves with my shoe. There was something mounded up under there, something moving darkly, and I realized after an indrawn breath that I had disturbed an anthill. They swarmed up my leg in a slurry of black chitin. “Look,” I said to Ruth, but she’d already gasped and jumped back, out of range.

“They don’t bite,” I said, though they did, a little. I could feel the small attempts of their pincers at the places between my jeans and the high end of my sock.