I never in my life saw a four-year-old walk the way this girl did. Most kids don't walk, really, they run. They run from room to room, from couch to table, from swingset to slide. Like they have somewhere to go in a real big hurry. But when this child turned away from me she walked slowly, and like a bride. Feet together, step. Feet together, step. All the way to the end of the hallway.
    "Hey," I said, and she stopped. "Where are you going? Is your mommy home?"
    "You're not the food stamps lady," she said.
    "No, sweetheart, I'm just here to ask your mommy a few questions."
    "Not Mommy. Mama. She's resting." She turned a doorknob on the left, and light escaped into the hallway before she closed it behind her.
    I stood alone in the living room. I looked at my watch. Her mother wasn't here. I'd give her exactly three minutes, then I'd check "not home" on the Census Questionnaire and go find Rodney. It was the third of the month. This kid's mother would have gotten her welfare check a day or so ago. Growing up in my house, it was like a monthly holiday. She probably went out to score some meth. Or heroin. They don't stick to booze anymore. I stared outside. Nothing but white sky. At least the window was clean.
    If I went down the hall and discovered this little girl was alone in the apartment, I'd have to do something about it, follow some goddamn Children's Services procedure, which of course they hadn't trained us in. Besides, this wasn't my problem. I was a Census taker, not a social worker. I decided to believe the kid: her mother was home and everything was fine. As fine as it could be for the child of a junkie, anyway. I got up to leave. But my feet walked down the hallway where the girl had just gone. Shit. I stood in front of the door she had entered and listened. Nothing. I stared at the floor. The décor in the place was like every other apartment I'd seen that day. Brown linoleum sucked up any bit of light that might've worked its way inside. Even the doorknobs were brown. I knocked.
    The door opened, just wide enough for the kid's face to fit in the crack.
    "You should go home now," she informed me.
    "She's not coming out after all?"
    "No. She's tired. You gotta go."
    The child's hair was in neat cornrows and the apartment was clean. I could see a sliver of the sunny room behind her. An open window, a yellow curtain with a lace border.
    "Fine." I tucked the clipboard under my arm and went back down the hall. When I got to the front door, I turned to see that she'd followed me. She stood small, in the middle of the living room.
    "Bye," she said.
    "Bye." I closed the door behind me. Rodney waited in the hall, leaning against the wall next to a greasy spot. I wished I could get my hands on some dope. I didn't care if it was eleven o'clock in the morning. In these housing projects you need a little something to take the edge off. No wonder all the kids here are high all the time.
    "Yo, Rodney," I said. "You know where I can get some weed?"
    "Naw." He checked his clipboard, as if he might find some there.
    My boyfriend Keith would know someone, but he was at work and I couldn't call him there or he'd get all pissed off.
    "Jesus, Rodney," I said, "What kind of black dude from Bed-Stuy can't hook a girl up?"
    "I don't know." He jerked his chin toward the door that the girl had just closed behind me. "You done with that one?
    "Yeah. I'll take 4C, you go to 4D." I'd already won the argument about breaking the rules and splitting up. Rodney had pointed out in this kiss-butt way that we weren't supposed to go into the apartments alone, but Jesus Christ, we'd been at it for two hours and only finished one floor of the whole friggin' building. Between the stink of piss in the stairwells and the gray wobbly light of the only working fluorescent bulb in the hallway, I'd felt a soft queasy stomach working up on me. I'd told him to shut his skinny ass up and do what I said.
    Then the door behind me opened again and the girl stood there, the knob against her cheek.
    "Lady?" She opened the door all the way. "You can come in now."
    I followed the child into the apartment, glancing over my shoulder at Rodney.
    "Awright, I'm going to 4D now," he muttered. He clearly didn't care what I did, as long as he didn't have to deal with me. With guys like Rodney, well, I don't know how we're ever going to get anywhere. And this isn't a black and white thing, either. I mean, I've had black boyfriends, and so have half the girls I hung out with in high school. Black or white or Puerto Rican, I'm saying they're all the same. Humanity is going to be hurtin' big time if these are the guys that end up running things.
    I followed the girl into the apartment. "All right, then," I said. "What's your name?"
    "Rosa Harriet Johnson."
    "That's a lot of name for such a little girl." She wore new shoes. Typical; these people always spend money on things that tell the world, no, we ain't poor — see my daughter's shiny shoes? My mother played that game. I spent my entire childhood in new dresses but didn't see the inside of a dentist's office until my wisdom teeth came in.
    She walked—feet together, step, feet together, step—to the same brown door as before. She went inside the bright room, this time leaving the door open behind her. A small bed held a person. Covered with blankets, but definitely a woman.
    "She's tired," said Rosa Harriet. She moved to the other side of the bed and stared at the woman lying there. I followed her to take a look, and the sight brought me to a remembrance I hadn't known I had. A brutal, sharp memory I'd never have believed if it had come up on me gently, like most do. The woman's mouth was swollen and purple. Her eye was black and swelled shut. A bit of pus crusted on a gash on her brow.
    "Frankie did that," Rosa Harriet said. "Frankie was mad."
    Looking at that woman I thought of my own mother's face, which I'd seen look like that, after Jackson had gotten through with her. My sudden memory didn't include my mother screaming back, defending herself. Only lying down and letting him beat on her, crumpled in the kitchen with her head inside the refrigerator. I'd heard a noise from my bedroom like someone was making dinner and I came in the kitchen and saw him slamming her head in the door of the fridge. Twice, then three times. The condiments on the door clinked violently together. A jar of pickles fell, hit her on her neck, opened and soaked her hair. The next morning after Jackson left for work I brought her a cup of coffee and watched her wince as she tried to drink it. She smelled sour, like vinegar and hamburgers. Those mornings were when I learned to brew coffee, sounding out the writing on the side of the Maxwell House can, the words longer than the ones I'd been learning in school, measuring scoops and water and trembling in fear that he'd come back and catch me taking care of her.
    "Is Frankie your daddy?" I said. My head felt light and an urge out of nowhere came upon me to get down on my knees and hold this child. But she was nothing to me, and I knew if I didn't keep it that way some kind of shadowy hole inside me that I'd kept good and covered might see the light of day, and now wasn't the right time. I'd deal with that shit some other day. That's the kind of shit you don't just open up in some strange apartment.
    "No. Frankie's..." She put her hand over her mouth. "Nobody," she said through her fingers. Even the kids know you never tell about the man living with their mama. Admitting you've got a man is the same as telling the government Go ahead, take away my welfare, I don't really need to feed the kids after all, thanks anyway. Even when I tell them the United States Census is one hundred percent anonymous. I look at my clipboard when I tell them this. I don't need to see their actual faces to know they all roll their eyes when they say Uh-huh, yeah, girl.
    "Rosa, how long has she been asleep?"
    "My name is Rosa Harriet."
    "Okay, Rosa Harriet. How long?"
    "A long time. I made my own cereal. I got the milk myself. I didn't spill none."
    I leaned close to the woman on the bed. She was breathing. I shook her shoulder. She didn't wake up. She kept not waking up, so I found the phone and called 911. Rosa Harriet and I went back into the living room and watched Sesame Street while we waited for the ambulance. We looked at the sterile show with its friendly brownstone stoops and clear-eyed black people and I wondered if Rosa Harriet believed streets like that existed any more than she believed in a purple furry beast with bushy eyebrows and two heads that sang songs about sharing. Rodney knocked on the door and I told him I was sick and going home as soon as I finished this survey. He looked relieved to get rid of me. Show me a guy with balls and it ain't gonna be Rodney. When the paramedics came through the door Rosa Harriet followed them back into the bedroom and stood at the side of the bed as the men used their oxygen mask and Velcro blood pressure cuff and talked into their radio.
    "Frankie's gonna be mad. Frankie don't like it when other people touch her."
    One of the paramedics glanced up from his clipboard and looked at Rosa Harriet.
    "You a friend?" he asked me.
    "Relative," I said.
    I felt Rosa Harriet's hand slip into mine. He looked from the woman on the bed and back at me. "You're related to this woman here?"
    "You heard me. She's my sister." If you say something with enough attitude, a guy will believe a pasty-skinned white girl like me can have a black sister. Multiculturalism and all that.
    "Your sister?"
    "Half sister."
    "I need to call Child Welfare anyway."
    "Don't. I'll take care of her tonight."
    The paramedic looked at his partner, who lifted one shoulder. Male communication. He motioned for me to talk to him into the hallway. I let go of Rosa Harriet's hand and followed him.
    "Listen," he said. "I seen this a hundred times. The kids get it the worst. If I write in my report there was a kid on the scene, Child Welfare will get involved. The asshole that did this is the father?"
    "Boyfriend."
    "This kid is screwed. I hate this shit." He looked down the hallway. I kept quiet.
    "So you're related?"
    "Christ. I told you. She's my niece."
    "Okay then. Officially, there were no kids on the scene. I'll call the cops when we get to the hospital. You two better clear out of here."
    I went back into the room so I wouldn't say anything else. If he wanted to get his big-man thrill from breaking his pitiful rules, fine. The guy expected some kind of Nobel Prize for Decency?
    Rosa Harriet stood in the corner of the living room, behind the TV, while they maneuvered the stretcher out of the apartment.
    "You taking her to Mercy?" I asked the other paramedic.
    "Yeah." He looked at Rosa Harriet across the room. "Your mommy's going to be okay, sweetheart. You can come to the hospital tomorrow to visit her."
    "She's not my mommy."
    The men stopped halfway out the door. We turned to look at her. All I could see over the television set was the top of her head and her eyes.
    "She's upset," I said. "This has happened before." Before long she would hate her mother for letting it happen over and over again. Before long she'd close her bedroom door and turn up the music and stop caring about what went on in the kitchen or the hall bathroom or the bedroom with the yellow curtains.
    "Is this your mother or not?" said Mr. Decent.
    Rosa Harriet looked at me, hard. "She's my mama." She kept looking at me. What the hell made her think I could be the one to figure out her big secret?
    As soon as they were out the door, I told Rosa Harriet we were leaving. I didn't want to be around when Frankie showed up. We went to her room. It was tidy, and her clothes were folded in the drawers. I picked out a few cotton dresses and some underwear and socks and put them into a plastic Pathmark bag I found in the kitchen. Rosa Harriet got down on her hands and knees in the bedroom and put her cheek to the floor. She whispered something into the darkness under her bed, a few words in an authoritative, comforting tone. Then she reached in and pulled out a graying beanie baby. It was a unicorn with a shimmery horn. Expressionless, she held the doll in the crook of her arm and looked up at me.
    "Ready?" I said.
    "Uh-huh."

~

I had three roommates, so I couldn't take the kid to my place. Two girls in my sociology program at Brooklyn College, who would be all in my business about this whole thing, and a dropout named Jerome who worked at Starbucks. So I got on the F train to Queens. To my mother's house. Rosa sat silently all the way to Flushing. The train screeched and rocked and as we went over the Queensborough Bridge I felt the weight of her little body against my arm. She slept, and for the first time I wondered what the hell I thought I was doing.
    It was rush hour, and the Q10 bus we caught from the subway was clammy with office workers. It reminded me of the lousy commute I used to make every day, the year after high school, before I moved out of my mother's apartment. I worked at Catholic Social Services then, on a long-term temp assignment as a receptionist. Those Catholics: all concerned and shit if you're on welfare, but come to them for a job and they'll screw you out of benefits and hire you as a temp instead. That's where I met Keith. He brought his sister in for her appointments, and he'd wait for her in the reception area. We started dating. It's been almost a year, and lately he's been letting me keep overnight stuff at his place.
    Keith is about the only person in my life I can't get control over. Last time we fought I ended up with a big bruise on my arm where he squeezed me. He didn't mean to hurt me, and he apologized like a crazy fool after we made up. I'd never seen a man who says he's sorry like that. Then he said he wanted me to move in with him. He's hard to keep in focus. He shifts around on me, bobbing like a street fighter, and I can't catch a decent breath and figure things out. It leaves me winded, like I need to sit still a minute, and make him sit still, too, so I can get a good look at him for once.
    If nothing else, my mother is predictable, so I didn't have to be surprised when she opened the apartment door and said, "What's this?" I ignored her and went inside.
    She at least had the sense to leave me alone until I gave Rosa Harriet some dinner and tucked her into my old bed. I put her in one of my old T-shirts. It fell to her knees and made her look smaller, if that was even possible. She held her unicorn and stared at me from the pillow like she knew I would take care of her. The child operated on blind faith. She'd learn soon enough that she couldn't count on that, either.
    When I came downstairs I found my mother cleaning out her birdcages. Since I moved out she's become this bird freak. A whole corner of the dining room has been taken over by the cages, all white wire with pink and green plastic bells hanging from the little wooden perches.
    "Okay, Lanie. Who is she?"
    "She's my friend's kid."
    "What friend? Do I know her?"
    "No." I sat down at the table. There was a red wine stain on the carpet under the chair. Once when I was nine years old I slept all night under this table so I wouldn't have to walk over Jackson, who had passed out on the landing upstairs.
    "Why can't she take care of her own child?" She scrunched her lips at a blue lovebird with an orange beak. The hem of her bathrobe was coming down in the back.
    "She's in the hospital. She got beat up." Saying it was like tearing a small hole in the filmy curtain that had hung between us since Jackson died.
    "Oh, Christ. Boyfriend?"
    "Uh-huh."
    "Here," she said, and handed me the sports section from the newspaper. "Make yourself useful." I folded a square of newsprint to the same size as the bottom of the cage and handed it to her.
    "You know I can't stay home with her tomorrow," my mother said.
    "I know, Ma. I'll watch her."
    I opened another cage and clucked a screeching cockatiel out of the way while I pulled out the skanky old shit-covered paper. "God. This is disgusting."
    "Beats cleaning up after kids."
    "Whatever, Ma." I removed the bird's water bottle and took it into the kitchen, and heard my mother yell from the other room. "For chrissakes, Lanie!"
    I turned off the water and ran back to her. My mother stood on a dining room chair, her hands on her hips, looking at the cockatiel, now perched on the curtain rod. "The goddamn bird, Lanie. You didn't shut the door. How in the hell am I going to get him down from there?"
    "Maybe he wants to stay there, Ma."
    "Don't mouth off to me. Grab a newspaper and flap it around. Get him to fly toward me."
    We banged around the room, running into furniture and waving our arms. The bird flew to the top of the hutch, then sat on the ceiling fan and finally landed on the cage he'd escaped from. My mother scooped the bird up and put him back into the cage. Her hands were soft and patient. I hadn't seen her handle anything so gently for a long time.
    "That's the last time I ask you to help," she said.
    "You didn't ask. You just told. Nothing new."
    "Watch how you talk to your mother, Lanie. Respect."
    "Okay, right. Respect," I said. She never came downstairs for me the night I slept under the table. I woke up the next morning and made myself a bowl of cereal and she didn't even realize I'd never been in my bedroom. "Just like you've always respected me," I said.
    "Who do you think you are, lecturing me?" She turned to the next birdcage. A white finch with a yellow and black beak made an annoying squeak.
    "I'm the one who put up with all the crap that went on around here, that's who." Now the darkness I'd kept covered that afternoon in Rosa Harriet's apartment was oozing disgusting gray angry shit.
    "What do you think I should've done, anyway?" she said. "Left him? Run to my mother's house? She would've sent me right back. We had nowhere to go."
    "We would've been fine. We ended up poor anyway, when he finally croaked. We could have been poor and normal, but you just let him fuck everything up. You could have stopped drinking all the time."
    "Easy for you to say. Easy for you to judge." She tightened her robe around her waist. "You have always been ready to judge me, Lanie. And watch your language when you talk to your mother." She walked right past me and went upstairs and I sat on the dining room chair with the birds watching and cried like I was nine again.

~

In the morning when Rosa Harriet woke up I took her on the train to Mercy Hospital. She told me her mama's name — Fabrice Perry — and when we found her room Rosa Harriet ran to her and tried to climb up the side of the hospital bed. The woman winced and lifted the child next to her. Against the white of the pillow, the bruises and cuts on her face looked worse than they had the day before. Rosa Harriet put her tiny arms around her neck and smiled. She didn't seem repulsed by the wounds.
    "Fabrice?" Rosa Harriet said. "We don't hafta go back to Mommy Frankie this time, right?"
    "Not right away, baby. She got on a bus to Georgia this morning. She's gonna stay with your grandma for a while, but she'll be back soon and everything will be okay." She noticed me in the doorway then.
    "Who are you? Where's Janelle?"
    "I'm Lanie. I don't know any Janelle." I took two steps backward.
    "They told me my sister had Rosa Harriet."
    "Oh. I guess there was a mix-up. I gotta go."
    On my way down the hallway, I heard a tiny noise and turned to see Rosa Harriet behind me. She was walking down the hall after me: feet together, step, feet together step.
    "Are you pretending something?" I said.
    "I'm Mama Fabrice. She stepped like this. I was three."
    "When she got married?"
    Rosa Harriet nodded. The unicorn dangled from her folded fingers.
    "To who?"
    She looked at me, exasperated. Like I was dense. "To Mommy Frankie. The mommy who borned me. I wore a white dress. It was a happy day. We were lucky."
    From the room, Fabrice called the child. "Okay, Mama, I'm comin'!" Rosa Harriet turned and headed back down the hall. She spoke to her unicorn: "Do the luckywalking with me." She held the doll up to her ear.
    "Because I said so! Don't sass me!" She threw the doll against the wall. It dropped to the floor and she looked at it, hands on her little hips. Maybe I had mistaken her gut full of faith for something else. Something closer to desperation, or fear.
    I had to go. I was late for work. I had to get back so they could yell at me for going home sick yesterday without permission. And I wanted to stop by Keith's place and collect my stuff before he got home from work. Maybe this is whacked, but I needed to get my toothbrush and underwear out of his apartment. I didn't know whether that would make him seem quiet and still enough for me to see clearly, but it seemed like something I should do. Rosa Harriet was at the entry to Fabrice's room. The nurse must have opened the blinds, because the morning sunshine cast a long yellow square into the hallway.
    "Rosa Harriet?" I said. She turned to me. Her body made a skinny shadow on the linoleum behind her. "You shouldn't hurt your dolly."
    From inside the room, Fabrice called. "Be a good girl, Rosa Harriet, and come on in here."
    "I know." Rosa Harriet said. She kissed the doll on its shimmery horn and walked into the room. Some day she'll stop listening to her mama. Some day she'll look around at her life and wonder why she's angry all the time.