The driver took great offense to that and he kept talking—“I’m trying to help, does she need help? Jace, call someone, she needs help—” but Mom ignored him and grabbed Paige’s face in her hand and Mom said, “What did you do?”

“Frick did it!” I yelled, and Mom twisted loose from Paige and hurried down the driveway and she didn’t look at me as she walked up the steps and into that yellow house, and she shrieked and wailed walking backward back out of the house and down the crooked steps and she collapsed onto the hard, hard driveway.

Paige was crying to the van driver. “He came after me,” she said. “He came after me.”

“Someone’s coming,” the driver said. “Someone will be here soon. He won’t get you.”

Mom threw up.

One man was filming, and I told him to turn off his fucking camera.

Mom wiped her mouth and said “Jesus Christ” over and over again. “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.” I rubbed her back, tried to pick her up and move her from her vomit, but she said that wasn’t how it was supposed to be, and she crawled toward Paige, kept saying and flapping her hands to the white driver, “Give me my baby, come here, come here,” and Paige went crying to Mom and Mom held my big sister on her lap in the driveway, and she rocked Paige and said, “Where’s my other one, where’s my other one?” and I went to her just in time, crawled beside her in the dusty gravel right before the world and its purple sky and red setting sun faded to black.

The Name Means Thunder

THE NAME MEANS THUNDER

I am no longer blind, but there was a time many years ago when I lost my vision. Next week I’ll see the eye doctor for my cataracts, and he’ll ask if my eyes were ever damaged. I don’t know how these things work, but should I go in for surgery—should it come to that—I feel that withholding any medical information, any important details, might lead the doctor’s sharp tool in the wrong direction.

I want to get the story right for my sake, so I think it should begin here: I was ten, and I sat in a hard chair, pushed in close to a desk too high for me. Every so often Jane, the principal’s secretary at the rez school, got up from her big brown desk and walked over, looked at how little I had completed of the map test on the solar system, and said, “You know that planet, right?” She smelled like cinnamon, the flavor of the Nicorette gum she chewed. “It rhymes with birth.”