Maybe the worst thing is that I have no one to speak to, no one who could open the window on this stale air of speculation. I know that, eventually, I will need to find someone to trust. At the office they ask me how I am every day, about a dozen times. It took me a while to understand why they were so baffled by my attempts to answer, to understand that my answer isn’t the point. That asking is. So now I say that I’m fine. I even attempt a smile. But I sense that either way my foreignness somehow absolves me from their judgment. To them, it must explain my strangeness completely.

*  *  *

When I was still a child, Mother and Granny would lock themselves in my mother’s room every evening. I never knew what they were doing in there, and they never allowed me in. Whenever I asked, they’d say that I wasn’t old enough to know.

“And you mustn’t tell anyone we do this,” Mother would say, crouching down to my level and placing her large, hard hands on my shoulders. “You understand? No one. If you do, something bad might happen to us.” Her face was tense, the deep worry lines above her brows making her look spent.

“Are you doing something bad?” I asked, scared.

“No, my darling.” Her voice mellowed. “But even when you don’t do bad things, bad things can happen to you.”

“Why?”

She tried to look soft, but the lines on her forehead didn’t disappear altogether. “This is how it is.”

They wouldn’t say anything more, no matter how much I begged. I would put my ear to the door, but all I could hear was a very low sort of crackling, indistinguishable voices. I couldn’t see anything—the keyhole was filled with the key. Much later they’d emerge from the room talking in urgent, hushed voices, sometimes sad, sometimes almost joyful. And though I was used to their nightly ritual, it still frustrated me to be excluded from its secret.

The day I learned that Beniek and his family had gone, my mother came home and found me in my room, wrapped into myself, crying. She must have known this was serious because I didn’t cry often, and when she asked me what the matter was, tears choked my words. She sat on the bed, and I put my head on her lap, the material of her skirt cool against my cheek, her arms around me. I continued to cry, encouraged by her comfort, letting the tears out until there were none left. She stroked my hair, and when I had calmed down, I told her I had gone to see Beniek, how that strange woman had opened the door, and what the lady from church had said.

“Why did they leave?” I asked. “Will they come back?”