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I stuffed my mouth, but didn’t swallow right away. I didn’t want them to ask me any questions. I didn’t want to have to answer anything.

Once we were done eating, Bob ran all over the apartment, with Kelly showing him where everything was. Eventually Karl slipped away and joined them. My father followed. My mother showed me where we were sleeping, in the second bedroom, the one overlooking the train tracks. Aside from the wall with a line of ribbon windows, every other wall had a bed pressed against it. I had inherited a full-size bed from my mother’s sister, Tante Grace, who had been living with my parents before we came. Kelly and Karl shared a metal bunk bed with Kelly sleeping on top and Karl at the bottom. Bob’s bed was a twin-sized cot, but had the advantage of being closest to the twelve-inch television set that stood on top of a wooden dresser.

“Do you want to go to sleep?” my mother asked.

I nodded, adding “wi.” Yes.

She had already placed a flannel nightgown on the bed for me. When I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, my brothers were there.

“I’m so glad you guys speak Creole,” Bob was saying to them. They were already a trio, a team.

My bed smelled of citronella and vetiver, of getting dressed and going out, rather than of falling asleep. (The scent, I would later learn, was of a brand of fabric softener.) Liline was probably sleeping on my mattress that night, I thought, taking a break from her own smelly one. How could this vetiver-and-citronella-scented bed, I wondered, ever really be mine?

My parents turned off the lights and left the four of us in the dark. A few minutes later, I heard their muffled laughter coming from the next room, as well as the occasional sound of our names. They were already telling each other stories about us.

“Do you see how much Bob can eat?” asked my mother.

“Did you see how Karl wouldn’t let Edwidge go?” asked my father.

“I don’t think Kelly’s quite sure what’s going on.”

Somewhere below us, the train would clatter by, drowning their voices, and then there would be only silence again.

In the dark, Kelly, whose Creole was a bit halting but clear, whispered, “Are you guys adopted?”

“No,” answered Bob.

“They say you two are older than me,” he continued, “but it’s not true. I’m the oldest.”

Kelly’s words reminded me of a puzzling, until now, story that Granmè Melina used to tell about a young mischievous billy goat who came across an old decrepit and hairless horse on a narrow trail one day.

Blocking the ancient horse’s path, the youthful goat said, “You should let me go first, because I’m older than you.”

“You should let me go first,” replied the old horse, “because I’m truly older.”

“Can’t you see I have a beard and you don’t?” replied the bouncy goat, laughing. “Aren’t beards a sign of old age?”

Kelly’s time with our parents was his beard. Indeed, he had spent much more time with them than Bob and I had combined. How much had he and Karl been prepared? I wondered. Had my parents ever spoken to them about us? Had they even told them we were coming until today?

Later they would both tell me that it was as though we’d dropped out of the sky. They had no memories of their trip to Haiti and my parents had told them nothing. (A fear perhaps, as in the letters, of shattering all the hearts involved.)

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Bob whispered back to Kelly in the dark. “We’re really spies from space. We have spy stuff inserted in our heads.”

I was continually amazed by Bob’s pool of knowledge. Where had he learned this? From comic books that only he and Nick had read? Tales that only the two of them had told each other?

The next morning, before our parents woke up, Karl got out of his bed and crawled into mine. His fire-engine-covered pajamas also smelled like citronella and vetiver. I was beginning to think that all of America would.

Karl was kneeling and had to press his hands against the wall to keep his balance as he leaned down to kiss my forehead.

“It must hurt