What she remembered vividly were the conditions she’d found them in: the piles of trash, the smell of sick and shit so overpowering Winnie had taken two giant steps back, into the fresh air, and promptly thrown up. When she’d composed herself, washing her mouth with the bottled water she’d put into her bag, she stepped back into Josalyn’s tent. In her attempt to keep the baby warm, Josalyn had made a nest for him out of blankets, wedging him between her own body and that of her dog, who stared at Winnie balefully, unmoving.

Josalyn’s face was pale, almost greenish along her eyes and jaw. She lay very still next to the bundle, a threadbare towel draped over her body. The smell of death was so present that Winnie’s eyes had immediately gone to the baby and stayed there.

The child was her priority; the child had not asked to be put in this dire situation. She had to get him to safety first. She could reach him if she crawled around Josalyn; and so without thinking, Winnie dropped to her knees and crawled over the human and animal waste, the heel of her hand landing in dried vomit. The dog whined from where he lay, one drooping eye watching Winnie.

She closed her eyes, focusing on everything she was feeling on the inside: her desperate need to reach the child, the urgency, the adrenaline that was pounding past her hesitancy. What she was seeing and touching and smelling wasn’t important; the baby was important. When her hand reached to touch the pale cheek of the baby, he stirred, and Winnie felt a mass of joy, thick and sustaining. Alive!

He was tiny, his weight no more than five pounds. Gently unwrapping him from the blankets Josalyn had used, Winnie lifted him from the cocoon and saw that he was wearing an Elmo onesie that was a size too large—relatively clean aside from his bulging diaper. Winnie eased him feetfirst into her jacket until he was pressed against her chest, splayed out like a little turtle. It would have to do until she could get him somewhere warm. Winnie zipped it up around him, leaving enough room for air to get inside. For the first time in her life, she was grateful that she didn’t have huge breasts, which would have been suffocating to this small creature. Still on her hands and knees, she bent her head to peer inside her jacket where the baby lay, curled as if in a hammock; he was breathing, but not deeply. She crawled back out into the twilight, away from the smell and the filth, gulping in the sharp winter air.

It was bitterly cold; she had to get him to her car, and quickly, but it was parked up the steep embankment and nearly a mile away. Her only option was to scale the frost-slicked grass on her hands and knees. Winnie crawled; she was terrified of slipping. Keeping one hand firmly on the bundle against her chest, she picked her way to the top, never once looking down at Josalyn’s tent, which hung in the mist below her, never once thinking about her. When she reached the top, she straddled the metal railing and swung her legs over the side, landing squarely on the asphalt. And then Winnie took off, racing for her crisp white BMW, which still smelled of new car. She was parked along a skiff of grass between a cluster of houses. She could see them up ahead as her breath chuffed out in bursts of white. She wasn’t thinking about anything but the baby when she climbed into the front seat and jerkily pulled the SUV out of the grass.

If she’d just called an ambulance right away.

She’d meant to—as soon as she got the baby safely to the car. But that’s where everything had gone wrong, so wrong...

      23

   JUNO

Juno broke the cable box. That was her big plan. She unplugged the whole thing and then, lifting it above her head, threw it at the carpeted floor in Nigel’s den. Once lightly...twice...she heard something rattle loose the third time. Then she put everything back the way she found it and waited. Nigel holed up in his den, watching an endless stream of CNN and ESPN for his mindless entertainment. To fuck with his cable box was to fuck with his precarious mental stability. But that’s what Juno wanted—everyone unstable, so she could get some answers.

Nigel spent two days arguing with the cable company over the phone. Juno, who risked a night in Hem’s Corner to hear everything, for once appreciated his loud anger. No, he would not be paying for a replacement...no, it was their faulty box, not his inability to handle it... Yes, he needed someone to come out, hadn’t he been saying that all along? The soonest was when! No, that wasn’t acceptable, there was a game he wanted to watch this weekend and he would not be put out by their incompetence...if that’s all they had...Thursday. “And can you give me a window, so I know when to be home?”

“That’s an eight-hour window!” She could almost hear the defeat in his voice. “Fine. Yes... I’ll leave the alarm off for the day and the back door unlocked. If your guy can give me notice when he gets here and leaves so I can come and lock up. Is it in the notes? Put it in the notes.”

On Thursday morning, Juno was waiting in the closet by what she guessed was 5:00 a.m. She’d had a carton of chocolate milk to drink and a few oyster crackers before she came up, and the sugar was making her feel squirmy. Squirmy was better than limp, she thought. She was wearing a gray Seahawks hoodie with the hood pulled up and a pair of Nigel’s giveaway jeans, belted with twine Juno had found in Winnie’s craft drawer. Nigel always left earlier than Winnie, usually heading out the door by six, and she wanted to be ready. On her feet were the same sneakers she’d worn the day she moved in—since they’d brought her here in the first place, she wore them for luck.

Nigel’s steady, methodical footsteps echoed above Juno’s head. She crouched beneath the coats and costumes, breathing through her nose and smelling the faint aroma of urine. A cough stirred at the back of her throat, and she tried to swallow it down before it became a thing. That was one of her biggest fears—discovery by coughing. Her thighs burned, muscles she hadn’t used in weeks being forced to hold her weight, however slight she was. His boots were on the stairs now; soon he’d put off the alarm and open the closet to grab his bag. Juno heard him clear his throat, then the faint beeping of buttons as he tapped in the code, disarming the alarm. The code was Sam’s original due date: 0602. She’d once overheard Winnie reminding Dakota of it. The door opened and closed, and Nigel was gone. He hadn’t taken his gym bag today, and she stared at it hard before crawling over. She checked the zippers first, then the inside. There was a five stuck in the inside pocket; she smoothed it out on her knee and kept looking. She pushed past a change of clothes and a small bottle of cologne. At the bottom of the bag was an Altoids tin that didn’t rattle with mints when she nudged past it. Juno brought it out and flipped open the lid. She didn’t have time for this; Sam would be waking up any moment.

Her mouth went dry as she stared down at a credit card, a wad of twenties that looked like it amounted to about five hundred dollars, and a single, foil-wrapped condom. She unwrapped a twenty from the wad and shoved it into her pocket with the five. What she did next didn’t surprise her as much as it amused her. Juno crawled back to the hot dog costume, the one she liked to hold against her face. She’d had a big surprise one day when the tip of a safety pin had jabbed her in the cheek. She’d reattached it to the hot dog, the sharp pin tucked away. Now she retrieved the pin with only minutes to spare; Sam was in the bathroom. With the aspirin coating her pain, Juno was actually pretty fast. She liked the way it felt to stick the sharp end of the safety pin past the foil and into the rubbery onionskin beneath it. She pushed the pin all the way through. Then she put everything back the way she found it; that was the trick. Juno was out the front door before Sam had even flushed the toilet. She had an eight-hour window.