A/N: The story starts to pick up from here on out.

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I watch him from behind a tree, with its limbs reaching towards heaven like grocery store owners being robbed. Leaves – all crumpled up and dead – fall to the ground and my teeth are chattering a little, becoming a cafe full of beatniks snapping their fingers in response to the groovy poetry the wind was reciting in my ears.

He is sitting on the swings in the park with Heather.

He is holding her hand and the wind turned his words into steam as they came out of his mouth.

For some strange reason, I don't feel any hate when I look at him anymore.

Now all I feel are tumors of ice growing in my stomach.

Tumors that multiply and inflate until my entire body is frozen solid and I become a wax museum sculpture with sad eyes and a hidden face.

Heather says something now and he smiles. His smile is as big and broad as the smile of a missing kid with his photograph on a milk carton. I don't know how this smile is possible. It's so genuine. So real. It seems that I'm the only one who knows that his smile is fake and forced, like the smiles of presidential candidates shaking hands with each other. It seems that I'm the only one who knows that a twisted little boy lives inside that cocoon.

And yet.

No hate.

Only coldness.

I only want him to feel the same as I do.

They laugh and the sound is stolen away from them by the wind like dirty men snatching purses from women on the sidewalk.

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Liesel finished cutting the eye and mouth holes into the pillowcase, lifted it up for inspection, and then shrugged and handed it to Charlie.

“That'll have to do.”

Charlie took it.

The material was scratchy and coarse, like the inside cheeks of men who chew tobacco, not like the pillowcases at the hospital. Charlie glanced at the Christ statue before he slipped the hood over his head and immediately felt concealed and safe and invisible, like poachers on their stomachs in the long grass watching elephants through cross-hairs. The eye and mouth holes were lopsided, making it so that Charlie had to pull the hood farther down his face and Liesel nodded with her mouth carving a slit wrist across her face.

“Better. You could be out trick-or-treating and no one would know that there's a real mask underneath. What do you say?”

“Thank you,” Charlie whispered.

“Ma'am.”

“Thank you, ma'am.”

“Good.”

Liesel stood up and took her coat off of the hangar again and slid it on and reached in her pockets for a set of keys.

“So I've gotta pick up Ms. Chadwick's laundry and spend a couple hours at the laundromat so you'll stay here with Joseph. He doesn't have to go to work until it gets dark and by that time I'll be home. If you need anything, talk to him. If you need a toilet, it's down the hall and to your right. Don't touch anything. Don't run. Don't climb. Don't do any of that Godawful boy stuff that cause houses to burn down and the police to come. I expect manners. Understand, kid?”

Charlie nodded.

Liesel glanced out the window at Joseph sitting on the steps and issuing smoke from his mouth like the exhaust pipe of a getaway car in front of a bank and shook her head as she buttoned her coat.

“Dumb brute'll sit there for another hour watching the cars go by and filling his lungs with tar. God help him. Goodbye.”

Liesel nodded at Charlie, opened the front door, and walked toward the car.

Joseph didn't move as she left.

The cigarette between his fingers twitched and flared up and Joseph's shoulders slumped a little further, exhausting the front porch. Charlie sat on the couch and tried to make friends with the naked nuns and felt all warm and secure.

Outside, ashflakes from Chicago were still twirling in the sky like dreidels and made the world as hazy as opium dens.

***

Charlie looked down the hallway leading to the bathroom.

It was as black as the insides of the lungs of a coal miner.

Shadows swirled and did break-dancing moves and swallowed up the light and the house creaked like a rusty swing-set. Charlie desperately had to go, but the blackness in front of him, he was sure, would probably slurp him up and regurgitate him in other dimensions in the form of light and residual voice. What was more, there were probably legions of people – reporters, photographers, curious children – lying in wait down the hallway to pin him down and rip his hood off.

And then their faces would shrivel up into grimaces, like the mouths of old men taking their dentures out before bedtime, and they would shield the eyes of the children who would probably have recurring nightmares for a week of little boys with melted faces.

Charlie's bladder squirmed.

Taking a deep breath, he shuffled into the darkness, feeling the walls for a doorknob or light switch, like blind people reading Braille with their fingers. Everything but the house was silent, so Charlie's heartbeats filled up the emptiness and rebounded off of the walls until the hallway was crowded up with heartbeats the same way sweaty people are jammed together in a subway.

Strangely though, the darkness was kinder than Charlie had imagined.

There was nothing lying in wait for him.

He was not being sucked into tears in space and time.

There was just smothering peace, giving him quiet embraces. It was like the hospital at night, except there were no voices. Charlie decided that maybe he could rest here and keep his face hidden from the world.

His hand felt a doorknob.

His bladder writhed.

Blindly, Charlie turned the knob, stepped into the room, and flicked the light-switch on. A bulb hanging from the ceiling twitched on and gave off light in sporadic, Tourette's syndrome whispers and Charlie saw that this was not the bathroom. There was a bed in one corner near a chest-of-drawers and a body-length mirror. The rest of the room was empty, making the furniture look small and rickety, like it would collapse if someone nudged it the wrong way.

On the chest-of-drawers however, Charlie saw that there was a model car.

It seemed so out of place, like civil war drummer boys tapping on snare drums beside men bleeding all their regrets out of their stomachs. Immediately, it was the only object in Charlie's world. After sitting in a hospital bed with only voices and sounds to play with, the red model car was a gift from God.

Maybe God was trying to make up for the fact that his breath had burnt up Charlie's mother.

Forgetting about his bladder, Charlie headed over to the chest-of-drawers and reached up to take the model car and then stopped, because he remembered what Liesel had said before she left. She was his new mother, after all. And first impressions, he knew, were last impressions.

But Liesel would be gone until dark.

And Joseph was smoking on the porch.

He would only play with it for a minute or so.

Charlie lifted it off of the dresser and sat cross-legged on the floor with the car in his lap. It was heavy and made out of tin and plastic and when he spun the tires, they hummed like room-sized computers belching out computations.

He smiled.

The expression hurt.

“Vroom. Vroom, vroom, ee-e-eech.”

Charlie guided the car from across the carpet and he felt some of the heaviness that was weighing down his chest lift up, like firemen lifting wreckage off of the bodies of people underneath rubble in downtown Manhattan. He felt the residual hospital voices leave his ears and rise through the ceiling and up into the air.

He forgot about the crippled girl down the hall.

He forgot about poppy gardens.

Vroom.

Vroom.

And then someone's hand was scrunched around his collar and yanking him up to his feet, taking the model car out of his hands, and putting it back on the dresser. Joseph gripped him by the neck, turned him around, and led him out of the room and into the hallway. His mouth and face were unmoving, like features sewn onto the burlap-sack face of a scarecrow, but his eyes were black little socket holes. Charlie tried to protest. Words and sounds dribbled down his shirt front like peas and carrots baby food dribbling out of the mouth of a vegetable in a wheelchair. But Joseph wouldn't listen. Joseph wouldn't stop.

He opened a door at the very end of the hall and pushed Charlie in.

He said, “This is your room. Stay in it.”

Joseph slammed the door shut.