Beneath my feet, the steps creak. Upstairs in the hall, I find the sheets stripped from the beds, just where I left them. I’ll replace them later, put them back on the beds just as dirty as they were when I took them off.

The darkness of the outside world seeps into the home, making it hard to believe it’s not the middle of the night. I flip a light in the hallway on, but then just as quickly turn it off, on the off chance that someone is standing in the street, staring through the windows at Will, Tate and me.

MOUSE

Not long after they brought Bert the guinea pig home, he started getting fat. So fat that he could barely move. He spent his days laid out, flat on his big belly like a parachute. Her father and Fake Mom told Mouse she was feeding him too many carrots. That was why he was getting fat. But Mouse couldn’t help herself. Bert loved those carrots. He made a squealing sound every time Mouse brought him some. Even though she knew she shouldn’t, she kept on feeding him the carrots.

But then one day, Bert gave birth to babies. That was how Mouse knew that Bert wasn’t a boy after all, but that he was a girl, because she knew enough to know that boys don’t have babies. Those babies must have already been inside Bert when they got her from the pet store. Mouse wasn’t sure how to take care of guinea pig babies, but it didn’t matter because none of those babies survived. Not a single one.

Mouse cried. She didn’t like to see anything get hurt. She didn’t like to see anything die.

Mouse told her real mom what happened to Bert’s babies. She told her what those babies looked like when they were born and how hard it was for Bert to get those babies out of her insides. She asked her mother how those babies got inside of Bert, but Mouse’s real mom didn’t say. She asked her father, too. He told her he’d tell her another day, when she was older. But Mouse didn’t want to know another day. She wanted to know that day.

Fake Mom told her that it was probably Bert’s fault those babies died, because Bert didn’t take care of them like a good mom should. But Mouse’s father said to her in private that it wasn’t really Bert’s fault, because Bert probably just didn’t know any better because she had never been a mom before. And sometimes these things happen for no reason at all.

They scooped up what was left of the babies and buried them in one big hole in the backyard. Mouse laid a carrot on top, just in case they would have liked carrots as much as Bert liked carrots.

But Mouse saw the look on Fake Mom’s face. She was happy those babies were dead. Mouse thought that maybe Fake Mom had something to do with Bert’s babies dying. Because she didn’t like having one rodent in the house, let alone five or six. She said that to Mouse all the time.

Mouse couldn’t help but think that it was Fake Mom who made Bert’s babies die, rather than Bert. But she didn’t dare say this because she guessed there’d be hell to pay for that, too.

* * *

Mouse learned a lot about animals from watching them through her bedroom window. She’d sit on the window seat and stare out into the trees that surrounded her house. There were lots of trees in the yard, which meant lots of animals. Because, as Mouse knew from the books she read, the trees had things that animals needed, like shelter and food. The trees made the animals come. Mouse was thankful for the trees.

Mouse learned how the animals got along with one another. She learned what they ate. She learned that they all had a way of protecting themselves from the mean animals who wanted to hurt them. The rabbits, for example, ran real fast. They also had a way of snaking around the yard, never going in a straight line, which made it hard for the neighbor’s cat to catch up with them. Mouse played that out in her bedroom sometimes. She ran in a zigzag, leaping from desk to bed, pretending that someone or something was coming at her from behind and she was trying to get away.

Other animals, Mouse saw, used camouflage. They blended right into their surroundings. Brown squirrels on brown trees, white rabbits in white snow. Mouse tried that, too. She dressed in her red-and-pink-striped shirt, lay on her rag rug, which was also red and striped. There she made believe she was invisible on account of her camouflage, that if someone came into the room they’d step right on her because they couldn’t see her lying here.

Other animals played dead or fought back. Still others came out only at night so they wouldn’t be seen. Mouse never saw those animals. She was asleep when they came out. But in the morning, Mouse would see their tracks across the snow or dirt. That’s how she’d know they’d been there.

Mouse tried that, too. She tried to be nocturnal.

She left her bedroom, and tiptoed around her house when she thought her father and Fake Mom were asleep. Her father and Fake Mom slept in her father’s room on the first floor. Mouse didn’t like how Fake Mom slept in her father’s bed. Because that was her father’s bed, not Fake Mom’s. Fake Mom should get her own bed, in her own bedroom, in her own house. That’s what Mouse thought.

But the night Mouse was nocturnal, Fake Mom was not asleep in her father’s bed. That’s how she knew that Fake Mom didn’t always sleep, that sometimes she was nocturnal, too. Because sometimes she stood at the kitchen counter with not one light on, talking to herself, though never anything sensible, but just a bunch of poppycock. Mouse said nothing at all when she found Fake Mom awake like that, but quietly turned and tiptoed back the way she came from and went to sleep.

Of all the animals, Mouse liked the birds the best, because there were so many different kinds of birds. Mouse liked that they mainly all got along, all except for the hawk who tried to eat the rest of them, which she didn’t think was nice.

But Mouse also thought that was kind of how people are, how they mainly get along except for a few who try to hurt everyone else.

Mouse decided that she didn’t like the hawk, because the hawk was ruthless and sneaky and mean. It didn’t care what it ate, even if it was baby birds. Especially, sometimes, if it was baby birds because they didn’t have it in them to fight back. They were an easy target. The hawk had good eyesight, too. Even when you didn’t think it was watching, it was, like it had eyes on the back of its head.