I glanced down the hallway, saw their heads as they ascended the steps to the back door, and I hurried to Paige’s room. They started to knock, a rapid three-rap, and I opened Paige’s closet. It was as full as Mom’s, a dense wood of clothes hanging, the floor cluttered with boxes and Bedogi’s car seat; a soft, smiling star dangling from the handle began to play on its own and beeped happy notes too loudly. I grabbed it and buried it deep down in the closet, and as I did something fell on me: the window screen Paige had removed, the one Frick had never put back in place. I looked to the window, heard the doorknob jingle in the kitchen, and had no choice—I was not to open that door.

. . .

The withered grass was cool on my bare feet, my heels pressed hard in the dirt, and I turned back only once—to shut the window. Then I hurried over the grass and onto the stony concrete, cradling Bedogi, his little arm coming untucked from the blanket. My feet scraped and burned all the way down the road, and they stung numb when I made it into the woods and onto the brown-green earth where sunlight scattered through leaves and thick pines onto the ground.

Down in the woods, holding Bedogi to my chest in the green blanket, I watched my steps over sharp rocks, avoided poison ivy, ducked below grabbing branches. I headed back to the house that way, stopping every few feet to look up and see if I could be seen. I hid behind a tree when I saw Marla standing on the steps, Choggy pointing his finger at her, gesturing with a nod that no one was home. And then she argued with him, pushed him aside and entered the house, searching. She came back out and Choggy yelled that she’d imagined it.

Maybe I imagined his saying that, but I don’t think so.

I moved away from that spot behind our house. I walked farther into the woods until the path forked, and I took the rocky one to the river that rushed past the reservation.

The wind blew enough for the crowns of the trees above to part and give me a glimpse of the sun. I stopped walking and looked directly at it until the wind quit and the trees closed up, shadowing the woods again.

“Did you see it?” I said to the boy. I watched the sky, hoping to see the trees and leaves part again for the afternoon sun, to check that it was not swelling, that it was still round and healthy.

“It’ll come again,” I said to him, wanting to make sure the world would live on. And the longer I waited for the wind to rip the trees apart the more I felt Bedogi in my arms.