The Wrong Family

The Crouch family has caught the stomach flu, so Juno is trapped in her hiding place while they are home recovering. Her supplies are running out and she has a full bucket of waste she needs to dispose of. Juno remembers a patient of hers, Cynnie Gerwyn, who had lupus’s telltale butterfly mark on her face. Juno felt sorry for her, and now that she herself has been diagnosed with lupus, she wonders how she’s doing now.

The family members return to their routines, allowing Juno to wash up, refill her food, and take care of her needs. She has just started a bath when someone comes in the front door. She hides under Winnie and Nigel’s bed. Sam comes into the room; he’s on the phone and is looking for the Oxycontin that is in his parents’ room. Juno is disappointed in Sam and also distressed that the effective painkiller has disappeared.

Juno finds a lockbox in Winnie’s nightstand that contains passports and other important documents belonging to Winnie and Nigel, but not to Sam. Sam told Juno at the park that Winnie told him his birth certificate had gotten ruined in storage and that she hadn’t gotten it replaced yet. Juno is suspicious because that does not align with what she has observed of Winnie’s parenting.

Juno discovers police reports and six bloody pieces of cloth. She reads the reports and decides to keep them.

Winnie is at work. She blames Samuel for the missing food that Juno has stolen. Wondering why Nigel would research missing children, Winnie recalls that she used to scour the internet looking for such reports. She was primarily interested in the parents and wanted to feel their pain: “She got off on the hurting” (144). She decides to confront Nigel about the names of missing children she found etched on the notepad. She’s afraid Nigel might leave her but thinks he feels unable to. She walks home as she’s thinking, leaving her car behind at work. She sees someone standing in her bedroom window (Juno, as indicated in the previous chapter). She thinks that maybe she imagined it: “The only thing haunting her [is] her past decisions. She [is] more afraid of that than ghosts” (149).

Juno leaves the house to buy stamps and print something unspecified at the library. While she’s out, Juno buys some soup and runs into Joe, an unhoused man she knows from her time in the park. Juno is counting on Sam coming home from school and turning off the alarm, which would allow her to sneak back into the house. As she’s making her way back, Joe follows her to the house and asks what she’s up to. She shakes him off and gets back into the house, but she’s disturbed that he noticed her connection to the house.

Winnie is not keeping up with the mail and other chores like she normally would. The “ghost” she thinks she saw in the window is disturbing her, and she tries to convince herself that it was just her imagination. She receives a hand-addressed envelope in the mail that contains cut-up printouts of online news stories about abducted babies. Winnie fears that someone knows about her secret and throws it all away. She starts to obsessively search the internet for the names of the children in the cutouts. She thinks about someone named Josalyn whom she knew while working at Illuminations. Josalyn was 18 years old and experiencing suicidal ideation: “[Winnie] wanted to help her. She’d done the opposite” (159).

Winnie receives a text from her cousin Amber letting her know that Amber saw Nigel with a woman at a restaurant called Palomino. Amber sends a photo, and Winnie recognizes Dulce Tucker, a coworker of her husband, and notices her hand on Nigel’s chest. She decides to go to Nigel’s work building. On the way, she notices an unhoused man carrying a soda (presumably Joe). Winnie follows Nigel and Dulce, who go to lunch at the restaurant that Winnie thought was special to her and Nigel. Winnie almost dismisses the idea of Nigel cheating, but when Dulce feeds Nigel some food, the intimate gesture confirms what Amber said. Winnie confronts Nigel outside of the restaurant and then again at home. He claims that they have not yet slept together but that he was considering it.

The King County Library sends Winnie a message about a library fine for an overdue book entitled Child Abduction: A Theory of Criminal Behavior. Winnie did not check it out herself and is so upset that she drinks from Nigel’s stash of Jack Daniels until she’s sick.