As it was, the cops called social services to take over. I watched an older woman in a tired blue pantsuit sift through drawers trying to get the kids’ things together. She wouldn’t let me help, just kept shoving their clothes into pillowcases in a way that made me feel angry and embarrassed. I barely got to say goodbye before she put the kids in a car and took them back to live with their mom, who I already knew could barely take care of herself.

The last I saw of Amy, she had almost all her hair in her mouth, and her face was covered with snot. They’d put her light blue socks on Jason as if it didn’t even matter what he was wearing. The way they both looked at me, I’ll never forget, as if they were silently asking how I’d let this all happen. I was asking the same of myself.

—

Because Red was still in jail and because neither he nor Robin had any family around, no one knew what to do with me. I was taken to a safe house to wait for my first foster-care placement. The housemother was a young woman who didn’t look much older than my mom had been—twenty-seven. She made her own clothes, she told me as she gave me a plate of graham crackers and a wedge of bright orange cheese that came in a huge block, the wax stamped in blue by the welfare department. “You’ve been through a lot,” she said as I ate. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I didn’t. Her skirt was brown with yellow flowers, like she was some sort of frontierswoman, a character in a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. There was no possible way she could understand my life, but pressure had been building inside my head. Words that I had to let out somehow. Not about my mother’s death, which I had barely begun to process, or about how worried I was for my brother and sister, who were still so little and needed someone to pay attention to them and make sure they ate, but about a single moment in time. One flick of the dial of the range while a worry festered in my mind about Phyllis, who’d been harmless after all.

“I’m just so mad at myself,” I said to the woman in the ruffled blouse, and started to cry. Until that moment, I had held the tears in tight.

“What?” she asked. “Why?”

“I was such an idiot,” I said with the same inflection my mom had always used for my dad. “I shouldn’t have cooked. That was so stupid.”