Night Light by Terri Blackstock

thumb in her mouth and grinned again. “I like having sleeping bunnies too,” she said around the thumb.
    Deni and Beth grinned as the little girl closed her eyes and drifted back off to sleep.

thirteen
    T HE CHILDREN WERE STILL THERE THE NEXT MORNING, ALL three boys piled into their bed. In Deni’s bed, Sarah lay like a little ball between herself and Beth.
    The four kids devoured breakfast as if it might be their last meal for a while. Then, as they all cleaned up, Deni rode with Aaron and her father to the Sandwood Place Apartments to look for clues about the kids’ mother’s whereabouts and find the grandparents’ address.
    The apartments didn’t look quite as threatening in the morning light as her parents had described. It was too early for most of the loiterers to be out, though one woman cooked eggs on a griddle on the grill. The smell from the garbage piled behind the place overpowered the scent of the eggs.
    “You won’t find nothing,” Aaron said. “I know everything that’s there.” But reluctantly, he gave Doug the key.
    Doug unlocked the door, and they stepped into the rancid apartment. An overpowering smell of human waste almost knocked Deni over. She covered her face.
    “You all right?” Doug asked.
    She nodded, trying not to gag. “They lived in this?”
    “Yeah. Pretty bad, huh? It looks like the commode is stopped up, but they kept using it anyway.”
    “It’s not my fault.” Shame colored Aaron’s face as he went to close the bathroom door. “It wouldn’t flush.”
    Deni coughed. “You could flush with water.”
    “We never had enough. Plus, the neighbors’ toilets were backed up too. They said the sewage system wasn’t working.”
    Deni turned her astonished eyes to her dad. “How come ours works?”
    “Because we have a septic tank.”
    Deni stepped over the piles of items the kids had stolen and discarded to look in the two bedrooms. There was a double bed in one room, and a mattress on the floor in the other. “Five people lived in this apartment. Where did everybody sleep?”
    “We slept fine. Don’t worry about it.”
    Aaron was taking her reactions personally, as if he were responsible for providing for the family. She felt sorry for him.
    She went around the boxes and into the mother’s bedroom.
    The kids had clearly taken over that room, and it too held plunder they’d looted from people’s homes. Their mother’s room had a set of beaten-up bookshelves with a few books on them; her closet was piled high with wadded clothes. She clearly didn’t own a hanger.
    Deni picked up a pair of jeans and held them up to herself. “She must be about my size.”
    Aaron took the jeans out of her hands and returned them to the closet. She glanced down at him. The corners of his mouth quivered, as if he was trying not to cry. Only then did she realize that this was difficult for the kid. They had barged in to rifle through his mom’s things — things that the boy probably held dear. She would have to be more sensitive.
    Deni went to the bookcase and perused the titles. “Hey, look. That’s my yearbook.”
    Her dad turned and regarded the book in her hand. “Crockett High? She must have been a student there.”
    “She was,” Aaron said.
    Deni sat down on the rumpled bed and opened the book. “This was my sophomore year. What’s her name again?”
    “Jessie Gatlin.” There was a note of dread in Aaron’s voice.
    That sounded familiar. Frowning, Deni turned the pages. “When did she graduate?”
    “She didn’t,” he said. “She dropped out in the tenth grade.”
    “Then she was in my class.” She found the G’s and saw Jessie’s picture. “Oh, wow. I remember her now.”
    “You do?” Doug took the book and studied the picture.
    Deni swept her hair behind her ear and looked up at Aaron. “She was pregnant that year, wasn’t she? That’s why she quit.”
    Aaron shrugged.
    “But that was only seven years ago,” Doug said. “Must have been with