AFTER MATTHEW DIED, JOSIE’S PARENTS TRIED TO ADOPT A BABY. Josie found out even before her parents announced it, when Alba informed her that she was going to be a big sister. Looking back now, Josie wondered how anyone could tell a child the things Alba had. Everything she gleaned from Josie’s parents, she relayed, as if the two of them were siblings or Josie another employee. Her father liked to tell the story of how one Friday when he was writing a check for Alba, Josie stood expectantly waiting for hers, and when he explained that Alba was paid to take care of her, Josie simply asked why she wasn’t paid to be the daughter. Her father would tell the story and people would laugh, and Josie would smile and make a crack about how she was only perfecting her business skills, but that wasn’t it at all. She had felt she was doing a job, pretending to be her parents’ daughter, holding Matthew’s place until he one day returned. So when she was told the news that her parents were going to adopt a baby, she wasn’t surprised.

Nevertheless, the baby never arrived. The adoption fell through, and Alba told Josie that it was a good thing because to have trouble come into your house was one thing, but to ask it in was something entirely different. The baby clothes were put away and the crib given to charity. No one ever spoke of a baby again, and it was almost as if Matthew had never been born. But Josie could feel the way he held tight to her mother’s hand. It was most noticeable when Josie’s temper flared. Her mother would turn unbearably calm, and then Josie would feel Matthew there in the room, the child who should have lived staring into the eyes of the one that had.

It was when she exploded like this that her fantasies were most violent. Her mother would send her to her room, and Josie would crawl under the blankets to the bottom of her bed, wedge herself tightly between the sheets, and imagine violent, terrifying things. The fantasies started small, just an image of being spanked, nothing but a hand, but they had grown, and Josie soon imagined paddles and belts, and then she was tied and sometimes gagged.