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guiding her into the front bedroom, to the twin bed that was
     Adam’s and that Myra has now designated to be Omar’s. She pulls the south-facing blinds
     and covers Eva with the blanket folded at the bottom of the bed. The girl turns onto
     her side and puts her thumb back into her mouth.
    The kitchen is still dark. Myra makes a pot of coffee and brings a mug downstairs
     to her office. Her desk faces the French doors leading to the garden, invisible at
     this hour. She tries to settle down to work but cannot focus on her writing. When
     they first moved into the house, Adam, then nine, had also rebelled against the sleeping
     arrangements, refusing to stay in his room one floor below hers despite Caro’s offer
     to keep her door open so he could sit up in bed and see her. After two nights of having
     him in her bed, Myra relented and moved his things to the room down the hall from
     hers, a room she had intended to be a television–guest room.
    Then, there was no need to look for an explanation. Adam’s insistence on sleeping
     nearer to her was part of his package of phobias and fears, foreshadowed by the clutching,
     easily startled temperament he’d shown as a baby and toddler, his poor appetite, the
     ectomorphic form he’d inherited from her, and then cemented when his father had left
     the house. With Eva, though … She stops herself. The girl has been here less than
     a day.
    Eva is eating at the kitchen table by the time Myra comes back upstairs. She is humming
     between spoonfuls of cereal, a tune that is vaguely familiar. She smiles at Myra,
     a shy smile, but without any trace of embarrassment.
    “You moved upstairs.”
    Eva giggles. “I am sorry.”
    “Were you uncomfortable in your room?”
    “It is so lonely all the way down there. At home, we have one floor. My sister and
     I share a room. In Lima, I sleep in the room with my friend.”
    “That’s going to be Omar’s room when he gets here, but you can sleep there for the
     next two weeks. Maybe by then everything will seem more familiar.”
    Eva nods. As she stands to clear her bowl, she resumes her humming. Now Myra recognizes
     the tune. It is “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music.
    “Small and white / Clean and bright / You look happy to meet me.”
    The Sound of Mucous , Larry had called it. He’d chase the children around the house bellowing, “Big and
     green / Dirty and mean / You look happy to eat me.”
    The humming stops. “Thank you,” Eva says.
    15
    Usually a sound sleeper, Caro is woken in the middle of the night by a dream of howler
     monkeys. She is in a basket suspended from a tree. One of the monkeys has climbed
     in and is clinging to her, its claws digging so hard into her skin she can see beads
     of blood. Unable to shake the creepy feeling of the dream, she wanders into her kitchen,
     where she stands at the counter eating grapes, imagining her mother on the fourth
     floor of the dark brownstone with Eva three stories below. When the grapes are gone,
     she takes a bagel from the freezer and defrosts it in the microwave. She eats it slathered
     with peanut butter and then opens a carton of frozen yogurt, which she eats to the
     bottom.
    In the morning, she feels sick from the nighttime eating. No amount of toothpaste
     will remove the revolting taste from her mouth. She puts on her running shoes and
     jogs slowly across Eighty-sixth Street and then into Central Park. She circles the
     reservoir twice, once on the path by the water, once on the bridle path, hating herself
     for the useless calories. She can identify the impetus for stuffing herself—the anxiety
     about Eva, the memories she’d unleashed—but the understanding never stops the compulsive
     hand to mouth that leaves her with a self-loathing in comparison to which the original
     discomfort would have been a pleasure.
    With her head finally clear after the second lap, she calls her mother. The answering
     machine picks up. “Hi,” Caro says. “It’s