Foster

I go down steps until I reach the water. I breathe and hear the sound my breath makes over the still mouth of the well so I breathe harder for a while to feel these sounds I make, coming back.

‘Daddy,’ I keep calling him, keep warning him. ‘Daddy.’

Now that I know I must go home, I almost want to go, to get it over with. I wake earlier than usual and look out at the wet fields, the dripping trees, the hills, which seem greener than they did when I came. I think back to this time and it seems so long ago, when I used to wet the bed and worry about breaking things.

Everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.

‘Ah, the women are nearly always right, all the same,’ he says. ‘Do you know what the women have a gift for?’
‘What?’
‘Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before a man even gets a sniff of it.’

I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.

Where there's a secret, there's shame – and shame is something we can do without.

Безліч людей стільки всього втратили тільки тому, що не скористалися чудовою нагодою нічого не казати.

You don’t ever have to say anything. Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’

I have learned enough, grown enough, to know that what happened is not something I need ever mention.

I stay awake for as long as I can, then make myself get up and use the chamber pot, but only a dribble comes out. I go back to bed, more than half afraid, and fall asleep. At some point later in the night – it feels much later – the woman comes in. I grow still and breathe as though I have not wakened. I feel the mattress sinking, the weight of her on the bed.

‘God help you, Child,’ she say. ‘If you were mine, I’d never leave you in a house with strangers.’

‘There are no secrets in this house, do you hear?’

I don’t want to answer back but feel she wants an answer.

‘Do you hear me?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s not “yeah”. It’s “yes”. What is it?’

‘It’s yes.’

‘Yes, what?’

‘Yes, there are no secrets in this house.’

‘Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame, and shame is something we can do without.’

‘Okay.’ I take big breaths so I won’t cry.

She puts her arm around me. ‘You’re just too young to understand.’

My heart does not so much feel that it is in my chest as in my hands, and that I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside of me.