It was possible that they had been found out, caught, and taken somewhere. With all the planning and precautions, that seemed almost impossible, but it was still a possibility. If they were caught somewhere, they would get out, and then they would come for me. They could not leave me. But I knew that, at the same time, they had no clothes hidden in the blind for themselves, they had left nothing of their own behind. That was hard to understand. I imagined what I would say to Audra if she were next to me, swinging in the hammock. I don’t think I would have told her about sneaking into our house, about her bedroom painted blue. I would have just reminded her how we are sisters, how she could help me calm down and settle, how when she got hurt she didn’t want anyone else around her. I thought about the sunny corral at my grandparents’ ranch in Colorado, the round metal water trough with a dent in one side. Two thick orange fish always swam in it. The trough was dented because Audra once climbed onto Duke, the old blind horse, and he’d bucked and kicked the trough as he threw her off.
