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O
N MY SIXTH BIRTHDAY
our dad came to visit us at the Clapps’. He had presents for me, a huge stuffed psychedelic turtle I named Charlotte, after
E. B. White’s book, and a copy of
Peter Pan.
He read it to us right then, Lost Boys and pixie dust, alligators with attitude. He didn’t take us anywhere but stayed for
a few hours. We showed him the pony and the pool behind its metal fence, the big tree that dropped walnuts we could stomp
open and eat like real food. It was a good day. As he left, he told us he’d gotten married again, to Donna, our old baby-sitter.
He asked if we remembered her. We did. She lived next door to us in one of the green apartment buildings. She must have been
fifteen then, with a shaggy shag and corduroy jeans that swallowed her shoes. One night, she offered me a puff of her cigarette.
Now she was married to our dad and about to have a baby.

“Once we get really settled,” he said, “we’re gonna come and get you. I mean it.”

October passed without other incident, and then, in November, the Clapps threw a party with a luau theme, tikki lamps and
pineapples and meat on sticks. For this, the pool was opened and cleaned, though no one would swim. It wasn’t that kind of
party. My sisters and I watched the festivities from the window of Teresa’s room at the back of the house. Becky Bodette’s
bed was still there, the spread so neat and tight it looked like a present we’d get our hands slapped for touching. We perched
on Teresa’s bed instead and sighed. It was all so lovely, the colored lights and the colored dresses. Women we didn’t know
threw their heads back and laughed, showing big white teeth. The men stood in herds of three and four, holding their martini
glasses close to their bodies, even when empty.

“I’m going to run away,” Teresa said. “I can’t stand it here.”

I can’t stand it
was one of Mrs. Clapp’s phrases, but it sounded right in Teresa’s mouth. She was eight, and we believed her almost all of
the time — so we took out lined paper and the chunky pencils they give you in first grade and started on the note. My handwriting
was better, so Teresa dictated while I wrote. The letter began well. We skipped the
dears
and plowed right into
Good-bye. I am never coming back.
Then we were stuck. We argued about how to spell
terrible
and whether or not she should use the word
hell.
Penny and I would still be there, after all, and could get in trouble for her swearing. Stumped, we gave in and played Pick-Up
Sticks instead, though we agreed the running away had been a good idea.

The next day was Saturday, sunny and hot. By 10
A.M.
the outdoor thermometer read 88 degrees, and Mrs. Clapp started filling the plastic pool. It was a baby pool with a pattern
of fat, happy goldfish, but we didn’t care. We fetched the buckets and shovels and beach balls from the garage and snapped
on our suits with the pink flowers, though they were much too small for us now. The poodles were out, clicking and sniffing,
but we ignored them and looked, instead, to the few bright reminders of the night before, mango-colored lanterns and paper
umbrellas. We squinted into the pinwheel sun, easily forgetting the runaway note and Mrs. Clapp clucking her way through our
dirty laundry behind the locked door.

When Teresa climbed out of the pool and started chasing Penny with a bucket full of pool water, even the dogs got into it,
yip-yipping and hopping up on their narrow hind legs. They ran around and around one of the brick planters, the dogs chasing
Teresa chasing Penny. It was like a cartoon until Teresa slipped on the water-slick cement, smashing face first into the planter.
She started screaming like it wasn’t okay, and when she stood up there was blood streaking her chin and bathing suit. Her
front tooth had broken in half; the missing piece lay on the cement by her foot like a piece of seashell.

On Monday Mrs. Clapp took Teresa to the dentist, but he said there was nothing to be done. He could cap it, but her teeth
were still growing. She’d push right out of it, and that would get expensive. The dentist said to bring her back when she
was sixteen or seventeen. Two things were clear, however, and the first we could see on Mrs. Clapp’s face: we’d be long gone
by then. The second was that Teresa’s tooth would stay broken for eight or nine more years.

At first, I couldn’t stop seeing that jagged, snaggly tooth, but soon it
was
Teresa, as much a part of her face as her thick eyebrows, the Kirk Douglas dimple in her chin. We also had solidarity after
the fall, Teresa with her tooth, me with the cotton patch I wore under my glasses after the eye doctor told Mrs. Clapp my
left eye was “lazy.” (Wouldn’t you know it, even my eye was lazy.) When we played Peter Pan, we had props. My pirate eye made
me a natural for Hook, Teresa was the crocodile and Penny was Tinker Bell because she was the littlest, and because she whined
if she didn’t get her way.

We clapped to show we believed in Peter Pan but forgot to believe our dad was coming back for us. And then, one day, there
he was, parking his sporty new Ford in the shade of one of the looming oaks. He got out and stood leaning against it, feet
crossed, hands in his pockets, posing. In his black-twill dress pants and stiff-collared shirt, he looked younger than his
twenty-eight years, younger, even, than the last time we’d seen him. He looked like a movie star, like a photograph of a movie
star playing a father. He was waiting for us.

T
HINKING
BACK TO THAT
day, I often wish I had stood at the Clapps’ picture window awhile longer just watching him, drawing the moment out. If my
sisters and I had walked to him instead of run, whispered instead of yelped with joy, perhaps time would have shifted just
enough to let us keep each other.

We had three months with Dad and Donna. Three months and then we drove home from dinner out one night to find a police cruiser
parked in our front yard. We’d been spared the sirens, but the lights were on, red and blue staining the lawn as well as the
neighbors who had stepped out to see what all the fuss was over. Once inside, we saw two cops standing in our living room,
crisp and blue with badges and guns and walkie-talkies, big belts with lots of snapping compartments — the whole shebang.
They were looking around at the TV sets. Some were still in their boxes; others sat with dead screens and coiled black electrical
cords. They were everywhere — under the kitchen table, stacked against the back door, hugging the sofa like end tables. One
cop elbowed another in the ribs and said, “I guess they watch a lot of television.”

I thought the sets, like the stereo equipment that rotated in and out of our apartment, meant we were rich. We had a lot.
That’s why our dad just stood in the center of the room, shrugging a little as the cops asked their questions. He wasn’t making
a break out the window,
Dragnet-style.
Any second he was going to explain the whole thing, and the cops would leave, shooing the neighbors back into their houses.
But it was my sisters and me who got shooed, herded by Donna down the hall toward the bedrooms. The new baby, April, was asleep
over her shoulder, and Donna made a big production of asking for our help to put her down. There were the tiny nylon socks
to pull off, and her diaper needed changing. Teresa found the sack sleeper in a drawer, and the three of us stood around the
bassinet to watch Donna pull April’s little arms up and the cotton sleeper down.

In the living room, Dad was being asked to put his hands behind his back, but he already knew how it was done — thumbs together,
palms flat. We didn’t see or hear any of this, because we weren’t supposed to. Instead, we watched Donna’s fingertips graze
April’s delicate head with such fascination you’d think scenes from Martian home-life were being piped in by satellite. “Good
night,” we said to her powdery smell, her quick, soft breath. “Good night, little baby.”

W
HEN
OUR CASEWORKER CAME
to pick us up, we cried and whined to please stay, but Mrs. O’Rourke couldn’t help this or anything. Neither could Donna,
who was crying so hard she had to go back into the house before we were even out of the drive. As much as we wanted it, Donna
wasn’t our mother — wasn’t even our baby-sitter anymore. Besides, she already had her hands full with April and Frank Jr.,
who was two and into everything. If he wasn’t safely in his playpen, he had a mouth full of cat litter or was trying to pull
the toaster down on his head by the dangling cord.

Our dad was Frank Jr.’s father too, which could only mean he and Donna were having sex when he was still married to our mom.
We never got mad at either of them for this, mostly because Donna was so nice. Whenever we’d help set the table with Chinet
plates and blue paper napkins, or try to sort the mountain of socks in the laundry basket, Donna would say, “You girls are
such a big help.” And sometimes, for no reason at all, she’d say that we were good and sweet, that she was glad we were around.
Hearing that, we’d perk up, our souls wagging.

W
HY THE
C
LAPPS AGREED
to take us back was a mystery. Surely, we’d proven we were too much trouble. We tracked dirt, left fingerprints, couldn’t
seem to stop wetting the bed. I was the worst, and it didn’t matter that Mrs. Clapp still enforced the No Water After Five
rule. I had accidents anyway, even when I was so parched that I had the dream where my very own water fountain bubbled as
soft as a voice next to my bed. I might not have a drop to drink after my glass of milk at lunch, but I peed anyway — because
of the other dream, the one where I was outside, running to get to the toilet and finding the door to the house locked. Just
when I thought I was going to explode, I would find a bathroom outside, a room I had never seen before attached to the garage.
I’d sit down, feeling nothing if not blessed by the miraculous toilet, and let the pee go. In the morning, I’d wake up in
the cold puddle of my nightgown, and Mrs. Clapp would throw me right into the tub, whether it was a Sunday or not, shucking
the soiled sheets in to-the-elbow rubber gloves.

“That’s it,” she’d mutter, and I’d think,
She’s going to call Mrs. O’Rourke to take us away.
But it didn’t happen.

It kept not happening.

Everything was just as it was before we went to Dad and Donna’s: shopping and McDonald’s, the weekly hour with Lawrence Welk
that ended with him singing,
Good night, sleep tight, until we meet again.
He’d dance with all the beautiful women, one at a time, their pastel gowns flipping up to stir the bubbles that fell around
them like a snow made of champagne.

The only real change was that I had been promoted to second grade. My pirate eye patch had come off, and I had a best friend,
Olivia Alvarez. When I said her name, I said the whole beautiful thing, all those vowels making my mouth feel bigger than
before, open enough to hold the name of a best friend. She was in the other second-grade class with Mrs. Norris, but we had
recess and lunch together, running to meet each other at the Cyclone fence. In one place, there was a hollow carved out from
kids sliding under. It was just deep and wide enough for me and Olivia to lie side by side in it, the metal hovering so near
our chests that if we breathed deeply, the sharp edges poked down like the tines of a giant fork.