I was told plenty of stories about how Mom and Jenny spent weeks cleaning that house as I toddled around the overgrown garden in my diapers. Once they’d thrown out the junk that Mom’s grandfather had hoarded, she and Jenny scraped the dirt off the floors with trowels and grease remover.

When the house was clean, they painted the walls and window frames in a fresh shade of white. They sanded down and wood-washed the timber kitchen cupboards and reworked the grime-filled tiling in the bathroom and kitchen using oddments of bright yellow and blue tiles that Mom bought at a hardware store closing-down sale.

Our furniture was secondhand. Mom would buy furniture at garage sales or flea markets. She used to say that all it took was a few coats of paint and a whole lot of imagination.

She hid our threadbare sofas under painters’ throw sheets that she’d dyed crimson in a metal washing basin. She decorated the windowsills with painted glass jam jars that she filled with wild yellow daisies we’d pick from the fields around the house.

When she got sick, I always made sure to put a vase of yellow daisies in her room so that there was something for her to look at on the days when she couldn’t get out of bed. She was in bed an awful lot that summer.

As for Jenny, she became skinnier than ever after she was taken by those boys. She was always thin, so that was saying something. Her face became pale and her glossy hair turned brittle and lifeless. Her nails were a disaster. She bit them down almost to the flesh.

Mom was so ill that she had no idea that Jenny was hurting. Maybe I should have told her. God help me, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I kept the house going as best I could. Mopping the floor and hanging out laundry while standing on my tiptoes to reach the clothesline. It was fortunate that nobody had an appetite. There was no need to cook. I lived off jelly-and-peanut-butter sandwiches and glasses of milk. I spent the days drawing pictures on the porch and riding my bicycle.

One afternoon, I heard tapping on the screen door while I was slumped on the sofa, watching television. Visitors rarely stopped by. Through the window, I saw a woman. She was snooping around while she waited for me to answer the door.

“Is your mom home?” The lady wore a patterned dress with lip stick too orange for her complexion, her blow-dried hair sagging from the humidity.

“She’s not seeing visitors,” I said.

“She’s expecting me,” the woman insisted. “We arranged this meeting weeks ago. Tell her that Mrs. Mason has come to see her.”

I went back into the house, leaving the woman waiting outside in the clammy heat. Mom was lying in bed in a loose caftan that she’d made herself on her grandmother’s vintage sewing machine.

“There’s a lady here,” I told her. “She’s got ugly lipstick and she’s wearing a church dress. She said she’s supposed to meet with you. Said her name is Mason, or something.”

Mom nodded, like she already knew. She climbed out of bed and shuffled to the living room. Only when she was properly settled in the armchair did I let that woman inside the house.

The woman made an awful din coming up the stairs in her heels. She looked disappointed to see the air conditioner was not turned on and kept waving her hand in front of her face like it was a fan.

Mom didn’t stand up or reach out to shake the woman’s hand. It wasn’t because she was being rude. It took every last drop of her energy for her to sit up straight in the armchair and pretend that everything was fine.

“Hannah, it’s time to play outside,” Mom ordered when I brought them a pitcher of water.

I deliberately left the door open while I played with a tea set on the back patio. I tried my hardest to listen to what they were saying. It was difficult. Their voices were hushed.

I stayed there until the woman rose from the sofa. I thought she was leaving. Instead, she walked through the house with a clipboard and pen, pausing occasionally to write something down. Mom sat in the armchair, watching the woman helplessly as she opened our refrigerator door and examined the contents.

“Not much food in your fridge,” the woman said.

“That’s because we’re going shopping later,” I snapped, shocked at her rudeness. It was a lie. We’d run out of money for groceries and couldn’t get more until Mom’s welfare check arrived later that week.

That awful Mrs. Mason walked through the rest of the house with her lips pursed. When she opened Mom’s bedroom door, I was relieved it was aired out, with clean sheets on the bed. She walked down the hall. Without asking, she pushed open our bedroom door. It was dark with the drapes drawn. She turned on the lights. Jenny, who’d been sleeping, sat up in bed confused at the intrusion.

“My sister has a cold,” I told her. “She’s very infectious.”

The woman quickly turned off the lights and closed the door. When she was done poking around our house like a busybody, she and Mom had a quiet chat. I was once again banished to the backyard. Mom asked me to pick lemons from our tree. I think she wanted to give them to that Mason woman. By the time I came back, that woman had already gone. I stood by the window and watched her little car rattle down the dirt driveway. “Good riddance,” I murmured under my breath.

Mom’s eyes were closed with relief as we heard the last splutter of Mrs. Mason’s car engine.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“She works for the city. She was checking to make sure we’re managing,” Mom said.

And then as if she suddenly remembered, she asked, “Where’s Jenny?”

“She’s sick.”

“In summer?”

“She has a cold,” I answered evasively. “She didn’t want you to catch it.”

“She hasn’t been having enough fruit,” said Mom. She went to the kitchen and sliced in half the lemons that I’d picked. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead as she squeezed those lemons by hand and poured the juice into a glass jug. She added ice cubes, water, and sugar. When it was ready she stirred it with a long metal spoon and poured three glasses of lemonade.

“Give this to Jenny. Tell her to drink every drop. It’s full of vitamins.”

Jenny sat up in bed and drank the whole glass in a single go.

“It tastes like Mom’s lemonade.”

“It is Mom’s lemonade. She’s feeling better today.”

“Can I have more?” Jenny said when her glass was empty.

I brought her my own glass of lemonade from the kitchen. She drank that as well.

The next morning, for the first time in days, Jenny rose from bed. She spent the day lying on a picnic blanket in the backyard as laundry flapped on the washing line against a pristine sky. I lay near her, content, as I tried to replicate the exact shade of the cloudless cerulean sky with my dollar-store paint set.

27

Rachel

Scott Blair’s former roommate, Dwaine Richards, was a squat nineteen-year-old with a thick neck, wide shoulders, and a buzz cut. He was a college wrestler and he looked the part. He wore a square-cut light gray suit two sizes too big that Rachel suspected belonged to his father, who was watching sourly from the front row of the public gallery.

“We came back to our apartment with some girls after a party,” Dwaine Richards was saying, sitting on the edge of his seat as if looking for an escape route as Alkins fired questions at him. “When they left in the morning, me and Scott joked about how many times we’d each scored that night. One thing led to another and Scott bet a thousand dollars that he could sleep with more girls than me in a month. I thought it was a joke, but then Scott put up a chart on our fridge to keep track. He was mad as hell when he came back from a weekend swim-team training camp and saw that I was ahead of him.”

Alkins moved on to the night of Lexi’s party: “The defendant called you from a party. Can you tell the jury what he said?”

“Scott said that he was crashing a high school party in his hometown and he expected ‘to bag at least one girl,’” said Dwaine. “He warned me that he’d catch up to me, and that he planned to win.”

“Did you hear from the defendant again that night?” Alkins asked.

“Yup, I did,” he said. “Scott woke me up in the middle of the night. Said he’d banged a high school girl just like he’d said. He told me to ‘add her to the list.’”

“What did Scott mean by ‘add her to the list’?”

“He meant that I should add her name to the list of girls we’d slept with that month on the whiteboard on our refrigerator. We had two columns. One for me and one for him. I was ahead by three girls. Once I added her to Scott’s list, I was winning by two.”

Alkins asked Dwaine if he recalled seeing a photograph of Scott Blair with a half-naked girl, which Scott had briefly posted to his social media account that night before quickly deleting it. Dwaine said he’d seen the photo. “Scott made a smartass comment in the caption. Can’t remember exactly what he said. And then he rated the girl as—I think it was a C or C plus.”