We hope that he will kill himself.

“Go ahead and shoot,” Louisa says to our brother over his wall, as we hear him throwing things and breaking them. He has been trying to get back together with Toffee, but she keeps saying no.

“I’ll do it for you,” she says through the door. “Just give me the gun.” She turns to us and says she would, she would, under the chin is a good place, and she takes her fingers and sticks them up under Jody’s chin and then my chin and then the dog’s and says, “Right there, bang bang bang.” We fall dead to the floor, all except the dog who tries to lick us back to life.

I come home from school and lock myself in the bathroom and sit on the floor and read. It is the room farthest from his room and where I cannot hear him breaking things he broke already, breaking them again. But then my mother is screaming and I come running out. My brother has smashed his fists through the glass, ruptured a vein, blood pumping through the air with the beating of his heart. My mother holds his wrist with her two hands, leading him out of his room while he cries, the snot clear and hanging long from his nose.

Fires burn in New Jersey. Our mother calls us up. “Are you all right?” she asks. We haven’t been to New Jersey, no one was in New Jersey today, we tell her. “Stay inside,” she says, “the smoke.”

Ma Mère is sick, a blockage in her leg. She sleeps in a chair sitting up, she says there is no other way. We hear Bambi yapping in the background.

“I cannot walk my dog,” she says. We bring them to the house. She stares at what’s left of the burned-down trees in the empty lot below. She wears a leopard-spotted robe that she clasps with both hands at her neck.

“I’m so cold,” she says, but it’s hot in the house. “We are the hot little tomatoes,” we tell her.

The phone rings and she says, “That’s your father,” every time, but it’s never him. There has no been word from him at all. “When you were babies and you still cried after you were fed, he would walk you around the room for hours. He would walk you into the closet and turn the light on, he would hold up sleeves, showing you the pretty colors and the patterns of the clothes. He thought you cried because you were bored, that your brain didn’t want you go back to sleep because it needed new information. Whatever he did worked. You shushed in the closet. Quiet as a mouse. He was a good father, the best,” she says. Then she says she wants to go down there and points to the back lot below. There is a way through the basement, a metal-hinged thick metal door you can swing open, but it takes strength. My brother helps us, carries her down in her leopard-spotted robe while he still wears his bloodstained blue silk robe. I hold a beach chair. We get the door open partway, enough to slip ourselves through.

She sits on the beach chair. Bambi runs in the lot, gnawing on old milk cartons, barking at rats through missing bricks in the building’s wall.

“This is the life,” she says.

In the evenings we bring her back up. My brother holds onto one side of her and my mother holds the other side as if Ma Mère were still sitting in her chair. Ma Mère grabs my brother’s hand, “Weren’t you going to kill yourself?” she asks.

We used to hide the liquor, but now my mother says, “Oh, give it to her, just give it to her.” And we do.

Her leg hurts her more each day. They cannot operate until she is stronger. We all wonder what that means.

“Give it time,” they say. We don’t know what we are giving time to. At night she moans in her chair and bangs at her leg with her fist.

“Mon livre,” she sometimes says, and we know she wants To Kill a Mockingbird and one of us gets up to give it to her.

Some nights I think our mother is talking in her sleep, but she has just gotten up to sit by Ma Mère and speak in French. Sometimes Ma Mère is crying, but through it all she is still hitting the blocked side of her leg. I can hear the steady thump of her fist on her thigh. Sometimes they fight, yell merdes and sacre bleus, and I wish our mother would just walk away from Ma Mère and let her die in the chair with its cushion stained by the beige Cover Girl powder that’s rubbed off her cheeks as she tries to sleep leaning back, the pain making her turn her face from side to side.

Bambi runs off. He’s gone and we all have to look for him. We cross through the lot with its skinny pale burnt trees and stick our heads down into the basements of the other buildings. We walk the streets in our neighborhood, calling, “Bambi, Bambi.” Our mother tells us Bambi probably won’t work, what will instead is Mon Cherie, so now we are all walking down the streets calling “Mon Cherie, Mon Cherie,” and there is still no sign of the bulging-eyed dog.

Jody comes home mugged. She was down in our hallway and two guys came up from behind her and held a knife and then they slashed her down coat with the knife before they left her. The feathers are all over and some are stuck to the tears on her face. She’s coughing so much she can’t tell the story and we sit her down and more feathers fly up around her and we wave them away and kneel by her chair and ask what the hell happened.

After that we are everywhere with the dog. No one leaves the house without her and she goes on so many walks that she slinks away when one of us gets up to leave. I bring her with me to visit John, and we balance hot dogs on her nose and she goes crosseyed and salivates and finally I give her the okay and she tosses them up in the air with the end of her nose and catches them in her mouth, swallowing them whole. Fuck, what a dog.

John wants me to sit on his lap, but the dog growls and bares her teeth when he gets near me, even after he’s given her all those hot dogs.

“Don’t bring her again. It’s bad for business,” he says. He makes to hit her with his tongs and she rears, her ferocious bark turning heads from as far away as the fountain, turning the head of the stallion, stopping him up short and pricking his ears. I see his tongue glide over the brass bit, back and forth, as if he wants to swallow it or spit it out, a tic brought on by all the pulling of reins and the jabbing of hard boot heels.

I signal the dog. Just one hand raised in the air by one of her family, and she knows to stop, to sit and obey. But I still hear a deep growl come up from inside her, like the far-off roar of the subway.

Rena’s missing weeks of school. The boys all ask me when she’ll be back and I tell them I don’t know. Her letters are about roosters she hears in palm trees at night, their scuttling keeping her awake.

*   *   *

Our brother’s in his room again with the gun. I climb the ladder and look down over at him. He’s got the gun spread across his knees.

“That’s a small gun,” I say. “Isn’t it?” I say. “Isn’t that the one Grandpa hunted rabbits with? Maybe it’s only big enough to kill a rabbit and not big enough for bigger things. Maybe it’s the wrong kind of gun,” I say and then I get down off the ladder and leave my brother alone.

If we leave Ma Mère alone in the house, she falls from her chair, on her way to where we don’t know, still wearing her leopard-spotted robe.

Our mother straps Ma Mère to the back of her chair with brightly colored belts from all our different bathrobes. We think about strapping her head back too, because it falls so often to the side and onto her shoulder or forward when she’s sleeping or drunk, but our mother thinks that would be too cruel. “We just don’t want her to stand up and hurt herself while we’re out during the day,” she says.

When I’m alone again with Ma Mère I ask her to tell me more about my father, but she’s not hearing now. Her head is leaning back over the top of her chair. Her mouth is partly open and her eyes are closed.

I find a picture of our father. One our mother didn’t cut in half, probably because I’m in it. I’m maybe two years old, sitting on his lap. He’s got his arms around me, his hands holding the bottoms of my bare feet. I look like any moment I could stand up and he would help me spring into the air and I would do a perfect gainer, a graceful headlong dive.

I made a few ten-cent copies on the machine at Woolworth’s, using change I found at the bottom of the fountain in the park. For a few nickels and dimes, I can always count on the fountain, where tourists think the dirty, wrapperfilled water can make a wish come true.

With scissors I cut out the part of the copies that have the image of myself and then I write “missing” on the bottom of the pages. I leave our phone number to call and I also write “reward,” thinking no one would bother to call if I didn’t offer one. I think about giving away the TV as a reward, or maybe even two or three of Jody’s mice.

I don’t have scotch tape, just band-aids. I use those to hang the signs to lampposts. After I hang up the signs, I go home and sit by the phone. It doesn’t ring. I go out and check the signs. Maybe someone had seen him but didn’t have a pen to write down the phone number so they tore down the sign. If that happened then I’d know I was closer to finding him. The signs are still up though, the band-aids doing a stellar job.

The doctors say not yet when they see Ma Mère. They take her blood pressure, roll up the faded sleeve of her leopard-spotted robe. They ask our mother what Ma Mère is talking about because she speaks in French.

“She’s telling you her dreams,” our mother answers.

“Ask her if this hurts,” they say, pressing on her leg.

“She says there are things that hurt worse but she has never felt them,” our mother translates.

When she’s sleeping and I come home from school and no one else is there, I tell her about John the hot dog man. How he lost a tooth and it fell into one of the bins. He rolled up his nubby sweater’s sleeve and plunged his hand in after it, then he said the water’s burning hot, that he now knows how the poor hot dogs feel being boiled to death. She doesn’t wake up and it’s not until our mother comes home that she wakes up and asks in French for more wine or more gin.