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