Free You Are My Only by Beth Kephart

back of a car, in a room with a bulb—bare and too bright and banging, and the bulb is swinging, it is blinding, and who is the man asking questions? The two men? Peter? Is Peter asking questions?
    â€œNothing you have done can be explained.”
    Someone has Baby.
    Nothing you have done.
    What have I done? Another room, another man. A flapping blue jacket.
    â€œYou were never right in the head.”
    Where is Baby?
    Book says it’s right to love your baby.
    â€œShouldn’t have married you for pity, like I done.”
    â€œYou married me for my cake.”
    â€œMarried you for your cake? You see how it is, Your Honor? Your ears bear witness? My wife is wrong in the head. She’s crazy.”
    â€œOrder in the court. Order, please. Mr. Rane, you keep your fists down.”
    The white skirt whishing.
    â€œMrs. Rane.”
    â€œI’m Mrs. Rane.”
    â€œFor your own good.”
    â€œFor my own good, what?”
    â€œOrder in the court!”
    Who’ll look for Baby?
    â€œI hereby declare …”
    Declare?
    â€œâ€¦ in light of her breakdown …”
    Whose breakdown?
    â€œâ€¦ or until otherwise remediated.”
    Thirteen steps up, thirteen steps down, and the dogs barking. What is a mother’s first rule? What is? What is? What is?
    The man and the world on his handlebars.
    Speed and hurry.
    Release me. I have done nothing.
Sophie

    I hear the old Volvo pull up along the street curb and stop, the key turn and the motor flop, the car still chugging. Now the car door slams, and she’s dragging her feet up the walk, past the acorn splat, pulling her worst knee after her bad one and jumping the keys on the ring in her hand until she finds the one that fits the door, which I locked myself when I came back home, too early for Joey, in time for Kepler, the good daughter I am, the be-gooder.
    â€œSophie?” she calls, and I hurry to relieve her of the weight of the Styrofoam boxes she’s carried in from the diner. “Turkey meat loaf,” she says. “Garlic potatoes.” There’s heat in them still.
    â€œNot bad,” I tell her, like she cooked them herself.
    â€œA little bit of luck, I’d call it, if I hadn’t worked so hard to earn it.”
    â€œI’ll put them in the oven,” I say. “Keep them warm.”
    She heads for the La-Z-Boy, lowers herself in. She levers the footstool, fits her head inside the leatherette wedge. When I return from the kitchen, her eyes are closed, and there’s the sound of a far-off train in her nose. I wait for her eyes to open, for the chance to say, I wrote you a perfection ode to Kepler. I wait for something. Nothing. I say, “Mother” gently, and her eyes stay closed. I head for the stairs, walk the outside parts, where there’s hardly any squeak, leaving the meat loaf and the potatoes in the cold cave of the oven.
    â€œDid you make it up to me?” she asks now, talk from her sleep.
    â€œI did.”
    â€œDinner in an hour,” she mumbles.
    But the train rolls on, high speed.
Emmy

    A wheeled chair at the end of the bed. One woman, then another coming. “Six weeks for the ankle,” the one says, leaning in, snapping the spring on the clipboard someone tied—how long ago?—to the metal post of this bed. “A month for the arm. You’ve banged yourself good.” She goes away and she comes back—teeth straight as boxcars, hair chopped off at the ears, high egg of a head. Her eyes are like hyphens between the broken part of words. Her nose is a man’s nose, the wrong kind.
    â€œWhat’s the wheels for?” I ask now, my voice crunchy.
    â€œFor taking a ride in,” she says. Leaves the clipboard hanging from its string, leans in over the foot end of my bed, snaps the sheets off my legs. The dust goes for a crazy swim over the bare bones of all the others, over their glass bottles and their feeding tubes, their