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sure. I aim to close the curtain again, but he stops me. He has to see me do as I’m told. I turn my back to him. I think I am going to be sick. I wipe myself and hand him back the napkin. He inspects it for stray hairs.
    “Excellent!”
    I was a girl with hair. Auburn hair. Now color has gone. Everything fades. Mama’s flushed cheeks, the smutty palette of the evening sky, our yellow clapboard farmhouse. As goes color, so the senses. I try to conjure the scent of Theo’s head, all sweaty from play; Gerhard’s voice; the smell of Suzie’s nail polish. Nothing. What does rain feel like? Only yesterday, I’d gotten drenched in an afternoon downpour. If I could just hear the sounds of the carnival, or visualize the colored lights strung along Main Street, if I could feel Arlo’s fingers on the back of my hand. Instead, everything condenses into a small point of memory, like a knot in Grandma’s needlepoint, and then— snip! —gone. In its place is absence, and the color of absence is gray. Gray walls, gray floors, gray ceiling. I can taste the gray, smell it. On my arms, the hairs have risen up to meet the stale, gray air. Gray pushes its way into my ears and up my nose. Down my throat, too thick for lungs. I start to gag. It settles in my stomach, and retching moves it not one inch.
    Dobbs bends over me. “You okay? Here, use the bucket.” On my back, his hand is heavy and damp. His forefinger rubs back and forth over my vertebrae.
    “Don’t!” I right myself and clutch the rumpled curtain so we have at least this between us.
    “Blythe, don’t be like this.”
    “Be like what? You don’t be like this! Why are you doing this?”
    He does nothing but stare at me.
    “Please! Say something!” I scream.
    “I’m sorry about your hair. They aren’t going to suspect me, but if they do, they won’t find any trace of you on my clothes. Hair fiber’s the kind of mistake amateurs make.”
    I don’t want to cry in front of him, but I can’t stop myself.
“I’m going to have to leave you again. This time, it’s going to be for a bit longer. The fluorescents are on a timer, seven a.m. to nine p.m., but if for any reason they fail to come on, or you need a light in the middle of the night, there are glow sticks under the basin.” He points. “Crack one, and it’ll give you ten hours. Try not to use them, though, because I can only get them on special order.”
    He moves toward the door. I do, too.
    “I’ll be back to give you the grand tour tomorrow.”
    I clutch his shirt.
    “You’ve got to stay now.”
    I grab him around the waist.
    “Be a good girl.”
    “Please. Please don’t leave me here.”
    “I can’t expect you to take this in all at once, and I don’t expect you to feel the way I do. But you’ll see—it will all make sense in a little while.”
    I try to get through the door when he unlocks it, but he pushes me back. Before I can recover lost ground, the lights go out. The door closes with a heavy thud.
    “Dobbs?” I beat my hands against it. “Dobbs!”
    THERE IT IS again, that terrible silence that comes when the lights go out. And the kind of chill that doesn’t come from weather. I crawl on my hands and knees back to the cot for the sweater Grandma knit that Mama insisted I take to the picnic in case it turned cool, but I can’t find my way. I tell myself crying won’t help. I give myself the small task of finding the sweater, believing if I can do this, I will be able to do greater things when the time comes.
My knees are scraped raw by the time I find it. I clutch it instead of putting it on. I find Grandpa’s watch, too. It doesn’t matter that I can’t tell what time it is.
    I rub the inscription on Grandpa’s watch.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

    I didn’t think twice about pocketing it. I took it from Mama’s jewelry box before heading out for the Horse Thieves Picnic because