Frick’s truck rumbled in place in the parking lot, the exhaust pipe blowing fumes into the air. The door was locked and Frick had to reach over and unlock it. I climbed in, and as I did he took my backpack and set it in the small space behind the gray seats.

“Is the baby home?” I asked.

Frick put the truck in drive and pulled out of the parking lot. “No,” he said. “He’s sick.”

And the child remained sick for some days. Each day I sat through detention unable to finish a test, wondering if the child would be home when Frick picked me up. He was brought home eventually to our little yellow house. Years later, when I would visit Mom on Sundays at the elder apartments on the reservation, she would tell me—in this low, gentle voice she found in old age—that the boy suffered terrible seizures from methadone withdrawal, a revelation that explained his horrible screeching wails. At the time, I thought his cries were because Paige refused to hold him—she was depressed, quiet, always on the couch with her arms crossed and a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray. But no—the boy’s pain was from withdrawal from the methadone his mother had taken to fend off the desire to wash down those blue pills with drink, the desire to numb the memory of that terrible touch of a man’s hands on her body on this planet I could not name. It’s funny that at the time I knew all of that—that she was on methadone because of her using, which was because of that man who ran back to the Mohawk rez (Frick chased him)—but I didn’t know, or couldn’t conceptualize, how dependency transitioned from one body to the other, how all those actions had consequences.

When the boy came home, Mom cared for him the most since Paige couldn’t. Mom would wrap him in a small, white, soft blanket that the nuns had given us—along with diapers and spare towels and vouchers for the grocery store, all of which were delivered to us in an ash basket the boy slept in, the only other place besides my mother’s arms where he tended to be quiet. Mom would rock and hum to him as they sat on the couch with the TV turned low and Frick in the kitchen, holding and flicking an unlit smoke. And that is where we were—Mom and the boy on the couch, me on the floor watching TV, Paige sleeping in her room, and Frick pretending to smoke at the kitchen table—when the first of many calls came from the hospital demanding the child’s name.