Each of the cars had a story to explain it, to fix it in place. Marya’s uncle knew them all. Who had owned what and approximately how much he’d paid for it; who had done what to whom, and where, and when; what the consequences were; how many deaths, cripplings, hospitalizations; how much money had changed hands in the final transaction. (Everard Knauer would pay as much as $100 for an old car if he really wanted it; but sometimes the wrecks were so bad he was paid to haul them away.) The black Dodge with the broken radio antenna; the skeletal old Studebaker; the dump truck that had belonged to a local contractor named Dietz; the wrecked Franklin with the wide rusted grill; the Ford sedan; the hulks so battered and corroded they no longer had names or former owners. . . . Old tractors and wagons (the kind once drawn by horses), old motorcycles, an oddly shaped jagged implement the children called a snowplow, on which they loved to climb in tireless, pointless games. . . . It was a child’s paradise, a wonderland, filled with surprises. It covered only an acre off the Canal Road, behind Everard Knauer’s house and garage, but it seemed immense; it might have been an entire world.

Things that happened in the lot—things done to the younger children by the older children—related only to the lot itself and were rarely spoken of elsewhere. There was a logic of secrets that pertained to the lot as it pertained to the schoolyard and to the towpath along the canal, where adults were almost never seen. These were no-man’s-lands, limbos of a sort, places where language did not prevail and the only protection was flight, if you could run fast enough; or submission, if you couldn’t.

“Don’t you tell anybody, you know what’s good for you,” Lee whispered. He buttoned himself up, crawled from the wreck, never looked back. Marya lay without moving, her head against the armrest, her fingers still gripping the torn seat. She could hear flies buzzing, she could hear the whine of a solitary mosquito. She wasn’t really hurt; he didn’t really do anything to her, only rubbed himself fast and hard against her, chafing the soft skin on the inside of her thighs, poking against the crotch of her white cotton underpants. She was eight years old when it began, then she was nine, ten. . . . If he hurt her she couldn’t stop herself from crying but he rarely hurt her badly, the sensation was more likely to be numbness, pins and needles darting through her legs or the small of her back. She was meek, docile, shrewd, not really there. She stared at the cracked and splintered windshield, marveling at its intricate patterns, seeing ice, cobwebs caught in ice, something stony-hard and frozen and unbreakable.