He dug in his pocket and pulled out a small deer-hide pouch that was sewed shut. It was no bigger than a quarter, and an open safety pin stabbed through the middle.

“Come here,” he told me. I stepped forward, and he knelt on one knee. Clenching the pouch, he stuffed his hand up my shirt, and in front of my heart, he stabbed the pin through the cotton and clamped the pin shut.

“Can I have one?” Mom said, and Frick pulled another from his pocket. Mom took it and pinned it on.

“It’s a medicine pouch,” Frick said. “I made it.”

“How does it work?” I asked.

“It just does,” he said.

The pouch was itchy, and I didn’t care for it. I planned to take it off and stuff it under my bed the moment I was back in my room. At least what he hung and pinned above the door wasn’t physically bothersome. Distracting, certainly—it looked like a toy, the way it was wrapped in that red, and every time I walked down the hallway or when I left the house I thought of my lost plastic guy who was getting sucked deeper and deeper into that thawing mud.

. . .

It seemed that Frick had moved in just as fast as Mom had unpacked the whole house. He’d be there all day, sitting with her on the couch or at the kitchen table, and he’d be there when I went to bed, both of them drinking wine from a box. In the morning, he drank black coffee and smoked cigarettes with Mom. Soon his hairbrush was in the bathroom, strands of hair floating unflushed in toilet water, and his toothbrush was in a cup next to mine.

I had heard Frick say the jar was an old curse, and most likely not done right, that some skeejins were messing with Mom and me, but it had been best to be safe and pray and smudge and bless the home.

I felt fine, even before the smudge when I had held that jar, so I agreed with Frick that it probably wasn’t done right, but Mom wasn’t so sure. “I don’t know,” she kept saying, not really to me, but to Frick, who would shake his head. “Only time will tell,” she said.

At the end of March, I started up at school, and after school I spent the afternoons until dinner at the community center—rusted roof, yellow walls—playing basketball on the concrete floor with some of the kids in my class, and it took no time falling into that place, feeling that I had been there my whole life and that I’d not been plucked out of my bed in the middle of the night with a fever and driven way, way north to where Mom had grown up.

If Dad was mad about our disappearance he never said anything to me, but I heard Mom fighting with him on the phone late at night, and one time I heard Frick get on the phone and yell at him. “You gamblin’ man,” Frick had said. He slurred his words. “You lost a big hand.” On the nights I heard them on the phone, I often fell asleep dreaming of my lost alien figure behind the steps.