I remember hesitating as she got out of the car and walked down the driveway again. I’d had time to get back to Bedogi in the room, but I didn’t go when I should have. I ended up stuck in the living room, and each time she knocked I pressed my back harder and harder into the wall as if it would take me in, absorb me, let me move around and through the insulation like the Goog’ooks—evil spirits—that moved among our house and spoke a language only we could hear, the Goog’ooks that Frick could never smudge away. (He always blamed me for their arrival, said they came because I once whistled at night.) If only the house could absorb me, I’d dive down under where the pipes rattled in the cold, and I’d go to Bedogi, slither back up the insulation, and reach my arm through drywall and take him with me, tell him that Marla was here for our condition.

Again, she eventually stopped and the screen door slammed shut again. I crawled back to the living room window, peeked between curtain and sill. Marla was there, behind her car, talking to the tribal police.

There were two of them, and they had come in one cruiser. One was white, a man named Mitch who had pulled Mom over once for going the speed limit—or at least that’s what she said. The other cop was Native, a man named Charlie. Everyone called him Choggy, though. He’d once come to Frick for medicine when his wife couldn’t get pregnant, but Frick told him he didn’t have any medicine for that.

Marla and the cops were still talking when I decided to move. I crawled to the hallway, stood, and hurried to Mom’s room.

I knew Marla meant to come in, to enter the house. She’d seen me, no matter how much I pretended she hadn’t. I wonder now and then why Marla didn’t barge through the door and save us. I wonder if things would have turned out differently.

Back in Mom’s room I opened her closet, but it was full of clothes and blankets and broken metal hangers. I looked under her bed and saw I couldn’t fit between the floor and the bed frame.

Bedogi, startled, twitched when I took him from between the pillows, but he didn’t cry, just looked at me as I looked back at him, and I smelled the stinky, milky sweet of the formula roll off his breath.