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T
HERE
WAS SOMETHING
WRONG
with me. I was sure of it. Why else would I suddenly be afraid of everything? Not just of big things like fires and falling
stars and the dust of falling stars, but everything: crossing the street, lockjaw, botulism, bank robbers, whatever was on
the six o’clock news. The earthquake and bomb drills at school were pretend, I knew. The siren would fade off in sixty seconds,
and we’d get up, brush our knees off and go back to the spelling test. It wasn’t real, but this only started me thinking about
when it
might
be. Terrible things happened all the time — earthquakes, tornadoes, terrorists — and how would my desk keep me safe if a
big hunk of granite were flying at my head? I couldn’t breathe thinking about it.

The math tests, too, were starting to make me crazy. Mrs. Just had started to time us. She set a stopwatch for three minutes,
and we had to get as far as we could on the sheet of one hundred multiplication tables. Everyone who finished would get licorice
and a chance to compete in the end-of-the-year math competition. A third-grader could win against a sixth-grader, she said.
It had happened before. Every time we took the tests, my heart pounded and my face reddened. Numbers floated through the filing
cabinet of my brain like dryer lint. I forgot everything I knew.

One week, Mrs. Just came up to me in the middle of a test and said, “Are you all right?” I just said, “Yeah,” but she stayed
right by my desk, leaned in and said, more quietly, “Do you have to go to the bathroom?” I suddenly realized I had my legs
crossed and was rocking back and forth. I didn’t even know I was doing it, which, however embarrassing it was, had happened
before.

It was like falling into a trance, when I touched myself or crossed my legs and rocked, a still, familiar place that was like
the center of a me-size marshmallow, soft and swaddling. It felt good, but more than that, it calmed me down. It made me feel
better on the
inside. I
don’t know how long I’d been doing it, maybe always. Samantha saw me once and told me to stop. “That’s private,” she said,
so I started hiding behind the couch, where I thought no one would see me. When she found me there, she got very upset and
said we had to have a talk. She led me into my room, where we sat on the bed.

“It’s not wrong, masturbation,” she said. “It’s just … something people keep to themselves.” Her face seemed to be wrestling
with itself, eyebrows in a tight vee, her top teeth after the same bit of skin over and over at the side of her mouth.

I had never heard the word
masturbation
before, but told her I wouldn’t do it anymore. I would have said anything to stop her worrying. It was too much;
we
were too much, my sisters and I. I could see she didn’t know what to do with us.
You’re doing fine, I
wanted to tell her,
better than anyone else ever has.
But I didn’t say anything, just sat and watched her hands, skitching around on the bedspread, straightening, plucking at
hairs and lint and invisible somethings.

S
CHOOL
ENDED, AND SUMMER
opened like a long, good book. In July we took the camping trip, and it was everything we had imagined. We fished in a thread
of cold stream, played rummy in the tent, made hot chocolate by boiling water in a tin can held right in the fire. There were
jokes about bears stealing our toilet paper, but we never saw one. One night, we heard something that might have been a grizzly
but was more likely a big truck or thunder. The air in the mountains smelled different, and food tasted better, even scrambled
eggs that browned into lace in the skillet because we had no real butter. All of it was perfect because it wouldn’t last.
We had two more months with the Fredricksons. Two more free-sucker months and then there was just the bell, ringing on and
on, all the way down.

September found us at the last of our family meetings.
The Mod Squad
was on TV with the sound turned off, and I couldn’t quite stop watching as Tom told us very slowly that his office was transferring
him to San Francisco. Although that was less than two hundred miles away, we were wards of the court and couldn’t ever leave
Fresno County. We’d have to stay and find other parents. Over Tom’s shoulder, the Mod Squad sped in a car toward a double
set of railroad tracks and vaulted, with the help of a rise, all the way over. They sailed for a moment without weight or
consequence, and then came down hard with a metallic crunch I could see rather than hear.

I felt sad as Samantha and Tom took turns clutching us tightly, but also relieved. Wanting to stay with them was like wanting
to live in the model home, or in the Barbie townhouse I coveted because it folded neatly into a suitcase with a handle on
top. All the furniture was glued down inside so it didn’t go flying when you moved the house. Real things flew and fell into
pieces, this much I knew. My sisters and I were real, and the Fredricksons were too, finally, with the crying and hugging,
the snotty goodbyes. I could stop cringing, waiting for the bomb to hit, because it was here. Here again, the same bomb, the
one I had memorized.

I
N THE LINDBERGHS’ BEDROOM
, there was a space between the waterbed and Hilde’s dresser that was exactly big enough for a skinny eight-year-old girl
to sidle in, scootch down and believe herself invisible. This is where Penny hid with the blue rotary phone when she called
back to the Fredricksons’ house to talk to Samantha. This happened not once but several times, and finally Samantha had to
phone Hilde and tell her that someone needed to explain to Penny why she couldn’t call anymore. We all had to move on. It
was for the best.

So, the Fredricksons were still in the house on Santa Rita. Maybe the transfer to San Francisco had fallen through, or maybe
there had never been a transfer. They just didn’t want us. Or they did want us but just couldn’t handle us any longer; we
were too much work. After I found out, I couldn’t stop thinking about my old room. Had the Fredricksons found the right little
girl for it? Was she waking to the wallpaper flowers at the same moment I was waking in my bottom bunk at the Lindberghs’
to Tina’s obnoxious breathing and the sound of rain that wasn’t rain at all, but Hilde watering the lawn and roses and patio
and the side of the house — pretty much anything the hose would reach.

At the Lindberghs’, I opened my eyes not to hot-pink flowers, but to Tina’s blankets, which invariably slid from the top and
over the side, making my bunk a cave. A wooly igloo. If it was a school day, I could be still in my igloo until I heard Teresa’s
alarm calling us all into the bathroom to fight for the sink. On Sundays, Rude was the alarm, hollering in German until everyone
was up and dressed and wet-combed. Then we’d pile into the car and head to church with the Latter Day Saints, which was a
big change from Granny’s Gospel Lighthouse. The Mormon preacher didn’t jump up and down and yell, didn’t raise his voice at
all, in fact. He talked in a slow, measured way and walked rickety and slow and always kept his skinny hands clasped in front
of him. This, coupled with his large bald head, made him look a lot like a praying mantis.

Saturdays at the Lindberghs’ were sleep-in days — unless Bub was cooking. He liked to experiment with leftovers and believed
anything scrambled with eggs and stuffed into a flour tortilla was a breakfast burrito: pineapple, bacon and black beans,
for instance, or creamed corn and cheese sprinkled with pimento that looked like bits of salamander tongue.

“Here, taste this. It’s good,” he’d say, holding some steaming concoction inches from my face. It would do me no good to crawl
back under my pillow: Bub Lindbergh believed in trying everything as a sign of character. If I dismissed frogs’ legs, I’d
end up wasting my whole life because I wouldn’t take chances. I might as well keel over dead right then. Same went for pickled
pigs’ feet, tripe, the tongue of a steer laid out on a plate like a bumpy pink miniature of Florida. If I made a face, I hadn’t
really tried it and got another mouthful.

Trying things extended well past food. Once I said I hated the song “MacArthur Park,” and Bub let me know I was mistaken.
“You can’t hate that song,” he said, “because it’s a parable. Jesus spoke in parables. You don’t hate Jesus, do you?”

It was actually the rainy cake lyric I objected to, but I swore to give the song another listen anyway, swore to spend a long
summer reading
Think and Grow Rich
because Bub said it was the most useful book ever written, swore to go to the county library to learn about constellations
because Bub promised the knowledge would save me if I were ever lost at sea.

B
UB
REGARDED THE OCEAN
(and there was just one, you know,
The Ocean)
with all the mystery and majesty others reserved for Jupiter or Neptune. When he learned, some months after our coming, that
my sisters and I had never even seen it, he declared this a “flat-out shame,” and we went, piled into the good car one weekend
and headed to Morro Bay, where Bub took home movies on an eight-millimeter camera. He directed us to rush into a single portable
toilet all together and come out, one by one, looking relieved. We danced in a parking lot like chorus girls, Teresa and Tina
bookending our line of four, sassing it up with some hip-wiggling. We ate fried squid and let the spidery tentacles dangle
out of our mouths for the folks at home.

Morro Rock was like a giant turd in the sand. There weren’t any other rocks around, just the beach, the dunes clumped with
ice plant and leaves of sea fig that looked like the stumpy fingers of a green dwarf. There was a fishing pier and fried-fish
shacks and a dozen gift shops selling saltwater taffy and crab magnets, ashtrays shaped like happy flounder and seashell frogs
playing seashell guitars. Behind the wharf stood a factory or refinery with three towers blinking red. They stuck up into
the Morro Bay sky like concrete cigars and made a low and steady foghorn noise. Beyond all of this was The Ocean, opening
out toward a skein of pink clouds. It was as big as I had imagined in all my drowning dreams at the Clapps’, as big as anything
ever.

Tina and Teresa had changed into their two-pieces in the backseat and were ready when Bub took up his camera and told us to
run into the water. Too embarrassed to strip down in front of everyone, Penny and I rolled our jeans up past our knees and
tugged them higher as we crashed into the white-green surf. The water was so cold it needled my legs and feet, but I didn’t
care. I stomped and splashed, popping kelp bulbs with my heels. I nearly fell down from trying to watch gulls pine and reel,
spilling from the sky like salt. I yelled into the crash of waves, while behind me the blinking towers droned steadily, a
noise I swore I could still hear on the drive home, taffy clinging to my teeth, sand dried to a paste between my toes.

That was when I got my first introduction to dream-talking, as the car climbed the snaking Coast Range in full dark.

“Close your eyes and breathe deeply,” Bub said. “Breathe in and out, and now you can taste cinnamon at the back of your throat.
Cloves. The air is hot and dry on your skin, and when you open your eyes you see sand everywhere. Miles and miles of it, the
color of amber.”