How could I face her now, when everything I said, everything I saw, might be completely wrong? It chimed again and I picked it up to turn it off, but the text wasn’t from her that time. It was the man who had given me the burns.

I felt a pang of dread reading his message, but ignored it. I thought about the money Des took, about what it would take to start over again. I couldn’t go to my mother, but I also couldn’t stay—I would think of the marsh every single day, of those women, whether they were really there or not. Luis, skulking through the grass. Wondering when Luis would come back and find me, ready to punish me for what I knew. Wondering who he’d take next.

One night, $500. The betrayal foretold in my reading had already come true. The money I had hoarded was gone; Des had been the last person I could count on. Maybe there had to be real, physical pain before I could be free. For the price of one weekend, I could be away from Luis—his staring eyes, and whatever was in him that wanted to hurt. I could be free of Des—her moods and her pills and the bitter way the corners of her mouth turned down. I texted him back and asked where we should meet.

JANE 6

MY MOTHER WAS OBSESSED WITH my hands. Clean fingernails are a sign of godliness, she would say. I was to wash them twice every time I went to the restroom or if I went anywhere public or outside. Even when I walked to the mailbox and back. When I was old enough, I rebutted her—but only in my mind. Clean fingernails are a sign of a life unlived. A sign that you are a statue, an object. Lifeless. Inert.

For my birthday, she always gave me soap, lotion, scrubs rough with sea salt. My brothers got basketballs and baseball gloves. My childhood was from another time—I knew other girls didn’t live this way. Preserved, scrubbed into purity. They didn’t go to church for half a day in a dusty old grain warehouse forty miles east, where there was no heat, no air-conditioning, and a former car salesman who called himself Pastor Roy stood on an overturned milk crate and preached himself hoarse, folding chairs creaking and squeaking as we all shifted our weight, uncomfortable and bored. Afterward, the same group of women, my mother included, fluttered up to the pulpit to give him biscuits, cookies, cakes, flushing like schoolgirls. Desperate for approval only he could give.