“And now I do. I should’ve hired some old crone for her. Someone with a low IQ, with swollen feet, and moles on her chin. I did exactly what my mother despised: I hired someone who reminded her of her youth, her beauty, all this power she had lost.” She stands up then, steadying herself on the kitchen table, walks over to the sink, stepping around Annie, and dumps the rest of the coffee down the drain.

“It’s not your fault I feel this way. Really, it’s not.” And Annie nods, her eyes narrowing as Mrs. Keller bends down to pick up Suzy and falters, her arms too weak even for a toddler’s body. She sniffs, collapses back in the chair and looks past Annie’s left shoulder. “The snow stopped. You should take Suzy out. It’ll be her first snow in the country. She’ll love it.”

Annie obeys.

21

Camp Suzy, as cheesy as it sounds, is fun. Anneliese feeds them breakfast, a vitamin-filled smoothie, and then gets to work applying for jobs. I take them on a new field trip every day: the Bronx Zoo, where I have to shield their eyes from masturbating baboons. Coney Island. The Natural History Museum. The Botanical Gardens. The Studio Museum in Harlem. The library’s Schomburg Center, where Lola stares, transfixed, at artifacts, illustrations, sculptures created by Black and African artists, and I imagine I’m helping her connect with her heritage in some small way. The Noguchi Museum. Around Manhattan on the Circle Line boat.

And I get to know them, their likes and dislikes. The way Lola runs her tongue around her ice cream sandwich, until the ice cream part is concave, before taking a bite. How Jordan insists on reading aloud to me every description of every animal at the zoo, every label near every work of art in every museum, no matter how dense or confusing the language is.

I watch as Lola gnaws at her knuckles when she’s thinking deeply about something. How Jordan softly pats his sister on the back, right by the spine in a very particular rhythm, when she’s scared or lonely or unhappy. I watch them at night, after a long day, watch him braid her hair, tell her stories in low whispers when she’s taking her bath, admonishing her when she inadvertently splashes him, but never really meaning it.

One day, I take them to a magic show, in a little theater on the Upper West Side. A man who calls himself Incredible Isaac, with blond highlights and a pink but kind face, who I recognize from a cable TV show, stands on a little stage with red curtains and enraptures a room of children. He invites them on stage, lets their stuffed animals join them. He makes coins come out of kids’ noses, makes his wand go limp. Sparks of fire come out of a blue kerchief.