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downstairs and get you a brand new spoon.”
    Joranne continued to cry but she nodded. Then she backed into her room and closed the door.
    Hope looked at me and smiled. She headed downstairs and I followed.
    In the kitchen, Hope grabbed a spoon from the pile in the sink and then reached under the cabinet for the Ajax. There was no room to wash the spoon in the sink, so I followed her into the bathroom.
    “Did you see her hands?” Hope asked, taking a pair of Agnes’s tattered white underpants out of the standing water in the sink and slinging them over the curtain rod.
    “Yeah,” I said. “Why were they so red?”
    “They were red,” Hope said as she scoured the spoon under hot water, “because she’s been washing her hands. She gets into this thing—hand me that towel.”
    I grabbed the towel off the back of the toilet bowl and handed it to her.
    “Anyway, she gets into these, like, mental traps. She can’t stop washing her hands. She’ll do it for hours and hours until Dad makes her stop. He’s the only one who can stop her.”
    In some strange way, I understood this concept. When I was a little kid, I would have to bathe with a towel next to the tub to wipe stray drops of water from the insides of the tub. I liked the water to be at one level with no splatters, anywhere, ever.
    “The spoon must have set her off.”
    I wondered how any doctor could fix a person who could go crazy just because of a spoon. I decided that my mother must be right. Dr. Finch must be a very special doctor, different and better than all the others. A thin layer of trust had formed in my mind, like a scab.
    “I’m gonna bring this upstairs to her. You better just wait down here. I’ll meet you back in the TV room in a few minutes.” She paused and lowered her voice. “Dad’s trying to wean her off all of us because he feels she’s nearly ready to live on her own. He’s already found her a nice apartment in the center of town and in a month, she’ll be living there. So it’s good that she met you, she needs to get used to meeting new people.” We left the bathroom with the newly cleaned spoon and headed to the front of the house. Hope smiled at me, mouthing the words, wish me luck . Then she headed up the stairs.
    I backed into the hall slowly, listening to see if Joranne screamed when Hope brought her the spoon. I didn’t hear anything. So I walked into the TV room and it was empty. I sat back down on the sofa and glanced at my watch. Five-and-a-half days until my mother came to pick me up. Assuming she hadn’t lied about me only staying here for a week. Before she left with Dr. F she told me that I’d be “spending a lot of time with the Finches in their home.” So I knew it was going to be more than just this one week. It would be a day here, another day there. Maybe even weeks at a time. I could sense that it was getting more and more difficult for her to have me for even a day. And my father didn’t want me at all. He had found himself an apartment in the bottom of a house deep in the woods. I’d only been there once since the divorce.
    For a second, I felt a bottomless sadness. So completely alone. Like one of my stuffed animals at home that I was too old for now, that sat on the shelf in my closet, mashed against the back wall.
    And then a thought entered my mind that was too terrifying to contemplate: had Joranne only planned to stay here for a week?
    I stopped biting the inside of my mouth and stared straight ahead, my eyes unfocused. What if I was being tricked? What if I ended up staying here not for a week but a year? Or more?
    No, that could never happen, I told myself. Don’t freak out, it’s just a week.
    And then I heard something crash down the hall in the kitchen and this made me smile and wonder what new mess had just happened. In a way there was enough confusion and distraction here to keep my mind off the fact that my parents didn’t seem to want me. If I let myself think about that too much,