.

does not get any feelings and does not know that by Christmas, Frank will have left town for greener pastures.

      Too bad Annie Fournier wouldn’t just disappear. Fold up and get tucked away somewhere like the registration sheet for Brownies that her mother lost that fall.

      They are in Suzanne’s room. Annie Fournier has appropriated Suzanne’s Barbie doll. She is amazed that Suzanne has only one.

      “Me, I have six, almost.”

      Suzanne does not want to know about the “almost” doll. Truth is Suzanne has not figured out the hard-bodied dolls, so different from Annabelle, and so unresponsive compared to the frogs by the river. Annie Fournier can have the doll if she wants it. Maybe she’ll leave the other stuff alone.

      “How come you have so many Barbies? How come your mother buys you so many?”

      Annie snorts. “She’s not my mother! I got no mother. I just live there ’cause they tell me to.”

      This is news.

      Annie Fournier, whose mother works with Mrs. Cardinal, has no mother?

      “She fosters. She’s no mother to me.”

      This is a world Suzanne does not know at all, a world of no mothers or fathers, where children travel across town or between towns to live with people who are not their parents. She doesn’t know what to say to Annie Fournier.

      “Are you sad? That you have no parents?”

      Annie Fournier is edging a Barbie earring into the plastic smiling head.

      “Doesn’t matter. She gives me all the Barbies, right?”

      They sit in unaccustomed silence.

      No mother or father. Suzanne can’t understand it. When Carla was gone, it was so strange, like one part of the house disappearing, like you’d walk down the hall to go into a room, but the room wasn’t there any more. You opened the door into a blank. No parents? Like there was no house at all.

      In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Suzanne knows something is going on. Her parents are actually excited about the season again, decorating the house with the vinyl wreath, the fake poinsettias. They’re going to get a real Christmas tree after a couple of years of artificial. Her father, despite his terrible health, has spent all of one Saturday putting up lights outside. The porch roof, the banister. He comes back inside red-faced and not coughing. Suzanne watches carefully as she gums a social tea biscuit.

      And then they tell her. It is all arranged. Annie Fournier will not be coming over once a week to play with her. Annie Fournier will be moving in, living with the Cardinals, sharing Suzanne’s room!

      Suzanne sits back in the armchair.

      “There’s no . . . but there’s no room . . . in my room . . .” she sputters.

      They can’t mean this. She’s had no feeling, no warning.

      “It’s the same size it was. You would have shared it, eventually, with Carla.”

      The name so plainly spoken. Carla slipping down under the earth.