“She was getting mad, but she held on to herself. ‘I’ll try to explain it to you, dear,’ she said. ‘You and Janie here and even the twins are all normal, healthy children and you’ll grow up to be fine men and women. But poor Baby’s—different. He’s not going to grow very much more, and hell never walk and play like other children.’

“ ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Jane said. ‘You had no call to send him away.’

“And I said, ‘Yeah. You better bring him back, but quick.’

“Then she started to jump salty. ‘Among the many things I have taught you is, I am sure, not to dictate to your elders. Now, then, you run along and get dressed for breakfast, and we’ll say no more about this.’

“I told her, nice as I could, ‘Miss Kew, you’re going to wish you brought him back right now. But you’re going to bring him back soon. Or else.’

“So then she got up out of her bed and ran us out of the room.”

I was quiet a while, and Stern asked, “What happened?”

“Oh,” I said, “she brought him back.” I laughed suddenly. “I guess it’s funny now, when you come to think of it. Nearly three months of us getting bossed around, and her ruling the roost, and then all of a sudden we lay down the law. We’d tried our best to be good according to her ideas, but, by God, that time she went too far. She got the treatment from the second she slammed her door on us. She had a big china pot under her bed, and it rose up in the air and smashed through her dresser mirror. Then one of the drawers in the dresser slid open and a glove come out of it and smacked her face.

“She went to jump back on the bed and a whole section of plaster fell off the ceiling onto the bed. The water turned on in her little bathroom and the plug went in, and just about the time it began to overflow, all her clothes fell off their hooks. She went to run out of the room, but the door was stuck, and when she yanked on the handle it opened real quick and she spread out on the floor. The door slammed shut again and more plaster come down on her. Then we went back in and stood looking at her. She was crying. I hadn’t known till then that she could.

“You going to get Baby back here?” I asked her.

“She just lay there and cried. After a while she looked up at us. It was real pathetic. We helped her up and got her to a chair. She just looked at us for a while, and at the mirror, and at the busted ceiling, and then she whispered, ‘What happened? What happened?’

“ ‘You took Baby away,’ I said. ‘That’s what.’

“So she jumped up and said real low, real scared, but real strong: ‘Something struck the house. An airplane. Perhaps there was an earthquake. Well talk about Baby after breakfast.’

“I said, ‘Give her more, Janie.’

“A big gob of water hit her on the face and chest and made her nightgown stick to her, which was the kind of thing that upset her most. Her braids stood straight up in the air, more and more, till they dragged her standing straight up. She opened her mouth to yell and the powder puff off the dresser rammed into it. She clawed it out.

“ ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ she says, crying again.

“Janie just looked at her, and put her hands behind her, real smug. ‘We haven’t done anything,’ she said.

“And I said, ‘Not yet we haven’t. You going to get Baby back?’

“And she screamed at us, ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop talking about that mongoloid idiot! It’s no good to anyone, not even itself! How could I ever make believe it’s mine?’

“I said,‘Get rats, Janie.’

“There was a scuttling sound along the baseboard. Miss Kew covered her face with her hands and sank down on the chair. ‘Not rats,’ she said. ‘There are no rats here.’ Then something squeaked and she went all to pieces. Did you ever see anyone really go to pieces?”

“Yes,” Stern said.

“I was about as mad as I could get,” I said, “but that was almost too much for me. Still, she shouldn’t have sent Baby away. It took a couple of hours for her to get straightened out enough so she could use the phone, but we had Baby back before lunch time.” I laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“She never seemed able to rightly remember what had happened to her. About three weeks later I heard her talking to Miriam about it. She said it was the house settling suddenly. She said it was a good thing she’d sent Baby out for that medical checkup—the poor little thing might have been hurt. She really believed it, I think.”

“She probably did. That’s fairly common. We don’t believe anything we don’t want to believe.”

“How much of this do you believe?” I asked him suddenly.

“I told you before—it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to believe or disbelieve it.”

“You haven’t asked me how much of it I believe.”

“I don’t have to. You’ll make up your own mind about that.”

“Are you a good psychotherapist?”

“I think so,” he said. “Whom did you kill?”

The question caught me absolutely off guard. “Ms Kew,” I said. Then I started to cuss and swear. “I didn’t mean to tell you that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “What did you do it for?”

“That’s what I came here to find out.”

“You must have really hated her.”

I started to cry. Fifteen years old and crying like that!

He gave me time to get it all out. The first part of it came out in noises, grunts and squeaks that hurt my throat. Much more than you’d think came out when my nose started to run. And finally—words.

“Do you know where I came from? The earliest thing I can remember is a punch in the mouth. I can still see it coming, a fist as big as my head. Because I was crying. I been afraid to cry ever since. I was crying because I was hungry. Cold, maybe. Both. After that big dormitories, and whoever could steal the most got the most. Get the hell kicked out of you if you’re bad, get a big reward if you’re good. Big reward: they let you alone. Try to live like that. Try to live so the biggest most wonderful thing in the whole damn world is just to have ’em let you alone!

“So a spell with Lone and the kids. Something wonderful: you belong. It never happened before. Two yellow bulbs and a fireplace and they light up the world. It’s all there is and all there ever has to be. Then the big change: clean dothes, cooked food, five hours a day school; Columbus and King Arthur and a 1925 book on Civics that explains about septic tanks. Over it all a great big square-cut lump of ice, and you watch it melting and the corners curve, and you know it’s because of you, Miss Kew…hell, she had too much control over herself ever to slobber over us, but it was there, that feeling. Lone took care of us because it was part of the way he lived. Miss Kew took care of us, and none of it was the way she lived. It was something she wanted to do.

“She had a weird idea of ‘right’ and a wrong idea of ‘wrong,’ but she stuck to them, tried to make her ideas do us good. When she couldn’t understand, she figured it was her own failure…and there was an almighty lot she didn’t understand and never could. What went right was our success. What went wrong was her mistake. That last year, that was…oh, good.”

“So?”

“So I killed her. Listen,” I said. I felt I had to talk fast. I wasn’t short of time, but I had to get rid of it. “I’ll tell you all I know about it. The one day before I killed her. I woke up in the morning and the sheets crackly clean under me, the sunlight coming in through white curtains and bright red-and-blue drapes. There’s a closet full of my clothes—mine, you see; I never had anything that was really mine before—and downstairs Miriam clinking around with breakfast and the twins laughing. Laughing with her, mind you, not just with each other like they always did before.

“In the next room, Janie moving around, singing, and when I see her, I know her face will shine inside and out. I get up. There’s hot water and the toothpaste bites my tongue. The clothes fit me and I go downstairs and they’re all there and I’m glad to see them and they’re glad to see me, and we no sooner get around the table when Miss Kew comes down and everyone calls out to her at once.

“And the morning goes by like that, school with a recess, there in the big long living room. The twins with the ends of their tongues stuck out, drawing the alphabet instead of writing it, and then Janie, when it’s time, painting a picture, a real picture of a cow with trees and a yellow fence that goes off into the distance. Here I am lost between the two parts of a quadratic equation, and Miss Kew bending close to help me, and I smell the sachet she has on her clothes. I hold up my head to smell it better, and far away I hear the shuffle and klunk of filled pots going on the stove back in the kitchen.

“And the afternoon goes by like that, more school and some study and boiling out into the yard, laughing. The twins chasing each other, running on their two feet to get where they want to go; Jane dappling the leaves in her picture, trying to get it just the way Miss Kew says it ought to be. And Baby, he’s got a trig play-pen. He don’t move around much any more, he just watches and dribbles some, and gets packed full of food and kept as clean as a new sheet of tinfoil.

“And supper, and the evening, and Miss Kew reading to us, changing her voice every time someone else talks in the story, reading fast and whispery when it embarrasses her, but reading every word all the same.

“And I had to go and kill her. And that’s all.”

“You haven’t said why,” Stern said.

“What are you—stupid?” I yelled.