The girls had the man in the shed for sixty-seven days before Quinn found out. Quinn found the man’s wallet in her daughter Peyton’s closet. His license showed a six-foot-two organ donor with thick, blonde hair. There were no cards or cash. She scared herself imagining the ways a fifty-three year old man’s wallet could end up in a fourteen year old girl’s closet.

When Peyton got home from school with her friend Josey, Quinn pulled Peyton aside in the bathroom, asked if there was anything she wanted to talk about, showed her the wallet. Told her she loved her, no matter what. Peyton explained everything right away. She didn’t even try to lie. She offered to show Quinn immediately. 

Behind their house and down the greenbelt to the park, over a rusted pipe above the creek that connected a dirt trail to an island of land, in a mess of trees and weeds and bushes, there was a wooden shed. And in the corner of the shed was a naked man, fully grown and barely breathing. He laid on his left side, knees tucked close to his body. On his hands were thick, bulky ski mittens made tighter with zip-ties fastened around the wrists. The pale skin on his body was no longer skin-colored, but splotched with blacks and greens and yellows. A dark purple cloud shadowed his abdomen. Blood had crusted on his forehead and in the corners of his lips. All around the shed was his filth. 

“Oh, God,” Quinn said. And then, “You found him like this?”

“No,” Peyton said.

“Sir?” Quinn said, bending down slowly so that she wouldn’t startle him. Or he, her. 

“He won’t talk,” said Peyton. “We’ve tried.” 

“He’s not even tied up,” said Josey. “Look.” 

Quinn did look. And it was true, the man was not tied up. 

“We just won’t let him die,” Peyton said. “But we’re not keeping him here.” 

“But he won’t leave,” Josey said. 

“We took videos of him,” Peyton added. “And we got his laptop from his apartment. It had so much creepy shit on it.” 

“But how?” Quinn asked.

“Josey sent him photos and said she was eleven and she told him to meet her here. And he came.” 

“But why?” Before the girls could answer, Quinn asked, “How long ago?” 

Peyton didn’t even need to think about it. “Sixty-seven days. We won’t let him die. We plug his nose and make him swallow food smoothies. He tried to scratch us, at first, so we put the mittens on.” 

The man groaned and Peyton kicked him in the abdomen with her chunky, black boot.

*

One year ago, the grocery store sent Peyton to check on the old lady because they were neighbors, and that’s when she found her dead. The lady. It was the old lady who was dead. Peyton ran out the front door and threw up in the lady’s perennials. She made it all the way home before remembering to call the police. That was the start of it. Everything got worse for Peyton after that and her mother Quinn wasn’t sure if it would ever stop. 

Quinn told Peyton’s school that she blamed Peyton’s failing grades, all the after-school fights, all the cafeteria bullying, all the physical threats taped to football players’ lockers, she blamed it all on the visions of the lady’s dead body she was certain Peyton must be having. Quinn wanted to punish the grocery store for sending Peyton to check on a sixty-seven year old recently widowed cashier who hadn’t shown up for her shift. Peyton was just a girl. 

Someone had to pay for what they’d done. Quinn knew that. Peyton was being tormented, haunted with visions. The school put her on suspension and highly suggested Quinn start setting up her daughter to transfer. Quinn just needed anyone to believe what she knew, deep down; none of it was Peyton’s fault. 

*

West Memphis is famous for a few reasons. Not being in Tennessee is near the top. There are, of course, the three boys who were wrongly accused of murder. Johnny Depp involved himself and got the boys released, but only after they’d grown into men. Next is the school system: the public schools close more than sixteen days a year because of water boil advisories. 

But at the very top is Daryl Roger Coe, whose law firm is advertised on billboards across interstates 40 and 55, who buys airtime for his commercials between Lucy reruns on TV Land.

Quinn didn’t know what to expect from the initial meeting, but Daryl was the first person in a long time to listen to her with full eye contact, listen to her without making her feel like she had to rush through what she was saying. More things came out than she intended.

“I know that some people get things and some people don’t and my daughter is just one of those people that horrible things happen to,” Quinn told Daryl initially. “Everything horrible.”

 “What else?” he asked. 

Quinn noticed he took notes slowly, by hand, in a spiral notebook. So slowly that he wasn’t possibly writing down everything she said. 

“She’s failing her freshman year because of the grocery store and the thing they made her do,” Quinn said. “It’s not right.”

“Is she losing interest in her extracurriculars?” Daryl asked.

“She’s started picking fights and last week, she had a black eye,” Quinn explained.

“So she’s exhibiting a pattern of violence,” Daryl said. “And disinterest in her extracurriculars.” 

“She won’t make eye contact with me, anymore,” said Quinn.

“Which will hinder her future career opportunities,” said Daryl. 

It was serendipitous, Daryl explained, because had been trying to take on Kroger for years. He was excited about the possibilities.

“It’ll be hard,” he explained to her. “But no one would say they didn’t have it coming.”

Daryl told Quinn she didn’t have to pay anything. He called it pro bono. He was going to win this fight and the payout would be gigantic. He said, gigantic. He would fight and win for her and for Peyton. “Quinn,” Daryl said, and he took her hands in his. “Kroger made your daughter see the devil. None of it is her fault.” 

*

Today, Quinn sits in Daryl’s office. Last night, she found out about the man in the shed. She’d gone into Peyton’s closet looking for things for Daryl. That’s why she was in there. That’s why she found the wallet. Daryl had asked for Peyton’s graded homework assignments from the past year to get as much proof as Quinn could provide that the grocery store contributed to Peyton’s long-term academic decline. So Quinn had been doing as he’d instructed and then she found the wallet. 

They had been meeting regularly on Wednesday afternoons during Quinn’s lunch break. She was always in her scrubs but Daryl didn’t mind. Daryl had food delivered and had gotten into the habit of ordering a second burger for Quinn. They sat in his office and ate burgers together and discussed various plans of attack. He had a corkboard on his wall for the Kroger case and it made Quinn feel like she was part of something big.

But today, in Daryl’s office, every time Quinn blinks, she only sees the man in the shed. She wonders about the things Peyton and Josey have done to him in the last sixty-seven days that she did not see. She thinks of all the times she has seen Peyton in the last sixty-seven days and suspected nothing. She remembers all of the instant noodles Peyton cooked, all of the TV shows Peyton watched, all while Quinn suspected nothing. She wonders if the girls have done experiments. She wonders what the girls have seen. She wonders what the girls have tried. She wonders what’s on the videos they took. She keeps talking to shut up her own wondering. She talks and talks and talks about everything. She says everything except what she’s thinking. She shares with Daryl a series of escalating truths.

“We were separated for two years right when Peyton was born,” Quinn tells Daryl. “It took me two years to get her back and even then, the state visited every month until she was five.” 

“Why did they take her?” asks Daryl.

Quinn thinks of the ways she could answer. She wants to say sixty-seven days but knows that is an answer to another question, one she cannot let Daryl ask. 

Instead, she explains, “They found suboxone in my blood. Everyone said it was safe and legal to continue to take while pregnant, that it was better than risking a potential relapse.” 

“I’ve heard that,” Daryl replies. “You had every right to believe that.” 

Quinn knows people cannot read people’s minds but she worries that Daryl can smell on her the same scent of the shed that lingers in her own nose. 

Instead, she says, “But I had an infection from labor and they tested my blood for everything. I wasn’t even trying to hide it.”

“Of course you weren’t.” 

“And then it took me took two years to get clear of the suboxone, but I did that, too,” Quinn goes on.

Quinn wonders what happens if she tells him right now. What happens right away, what happens later? How long would they sentence Peyton for? What even would the charge possibly be? 

Instead, she says, “I once threw away a loud keyboard she had just because I didn’t like the noise.” 

The man wasn’t tied up. The girls were keeping him fed. Is it a crime to hurt a man who won’t leave a shed? Is it a crime to strip a man who won’t leave a shed? Is it a crime to take videos of a man who won’t leave a shed? Is it a crime to put mittens on a man who won’t leave a shed? 

Quinn says, “I drank a little when I was pregnant.” 

The man had creepy shit on his laptop, Peyton told her. Quinn wonders, perhaps, if he’s on someone’s list, if he’s a known criminal. She wonders, perhaps, if maybe Peyton and Josey will get a medal, get a scholarship for college, get their names in the paper for catching a bad man who had evaded the cops for years. 

Quinn says, “I left her alone a lot without a sitter. Sometimes all night.” 

Last night, Quinn left Peyton and Josey in the shed and wandered back to the house alone, in a daze. She drank wine and thought about Googling answers to questions she didn’t know how to ask. But she feared putting anything in her browser history, so she just sat in bed, drinking, staring at the ceiling fan. 

Quinn says to Daryl, “I told her dance camp was full but I didn’t actually drive to the rec center to sign up.” 

Is it a crime to blackmail a bad man? Josey pretended to be eleven when they lured him, and he came. Is it a crime to lure a bad man? 

Quinn says, “Sometimes I can’t afford groceries so I pretend I’ve fallen asleep early when she comes asking.” 

A part of her knows: she likes talking like this. Quinn has never been to Confession but Daryl is nodding and smiling like there’s nothing Quinn can say that would make him ever judge her, just the fact they are sitting together means she’s already forgiven. She wants to make it last forever, but she is running out of sins, and all roads lead to a man in the shed.

There is, she knows, another truth she could give Daryl, one so definitely painful to say out loud that Quinn hopes it might sound like the biggest truth she has. 

What it is, is that she has lived for many years with the quiet fear that Peyton will kill her. Far back in the mind, but it is there. Sometimes kids do that, she knows. Last straws and mental breaks. There are many documentaries about this. 

When it first occurred to her, Peyton was just four. They’d gone to the park and Quinn watched an older boy reach out to pull Peyton off the jungle gym. Peyton’s head hit the ground with a crack and she screamed so loud the whole park heard. The older boy ran away before Quinn could get to him. She made Peyton stay awake all night at the kitchen table, wouldn’t let her close her eyes, making sure she wasn’t concussed. They played Uno and Hungry Hippos until dawn. Peyton swayed back and forth slightly, eyes sometimes crossed. Quinn snapped her fingers in front of Peyton and said, “Stay awake, P.” Eventually, Peyton grew so tired and impatient that she shouted, “STOP IT!” and pinched her mother so hard with her fingernails that she broke the skin. Quinn jumped up and knocked her chair back. She was afraid, then. She had just been trying to help. Peyton was too young, she had misunderstood. Quinn was afraid of the gap between them, of not being able to explain adult things, of Peyton reacting to the confusion like a little girl. 

Over the years, it worked its way into a heavier, cloudy dread. Peyton showed no interest in dolls or stuffed animals but liked to stab slugs in the yard, leaving graveyard trails of writhing brown along their sidewalk. Sometimes, when Quinn walked by Peyton in the living room, Peyton would try to trip her. As Peyton got older, Quinn tested out the thought in vague shapes and contexts with people, waiting for someone to dismiss her worry without having to actually say it out loud. “Sometimes I’m a little nervous. She’s like a different person every morning,” Quinn would say with a tiny laugh at her single mom’s support group. “Girls can be wicked, can’t they?” everyone would commiserate, but no one would take it further.

Quinn told herself they were right. Peyton was just a girl, and girls could be wicked. Maybe we all fear our daughters. Maybe we all tally their wickedness in a ledger. The blank stares at dinner, the stealing money from Quinn’s secret drawer, the new friendship with Josey who didn’t eat meat and lived behind a gas station. All of it just the regular wickedness of girls.

But then Peyton saw the dead lady and no one else’s daughter had to see the dead lady. And over the last year, the fear that Peyton would kill her had evolved into a tangible reality. Quinn saw a girl who might react in such a way to such an event. A girl who might forgo the consequences of death because she’d seen it up close, herself. A girl who felt no connection to the bodied, peopled world. A girl who felt no connection to her mother. A girl who had been separated from her mother. 

That Quinn now lives in fear of Peyton seems, Quinn has decided, to be entirely her own fault. It is an embarrassing fear, one that admits many things, poor parenting being the obvious, the irreparable distance between them implied.

So Quinn tells Daryl all of this. It is so much that, for a moment, Quinn forgets about the man in the shed. She is telling Daryl so much. Is it still lying if she is telling him everything, just not telling him the final thing? Daryl, Quinn figures, is a man of ethics. Decision making about right or wrong is his job, she figures. 

She tells him all of this and he doesn’t blame Peyton, not once.

Quinn figures, what child should pay for the sins of her mother? The only option is to say nothing to him, now, of the man in the shed. 

*

When Quinn enters the kitchen, Peyton is using her hands to break up large frozen chunks inside bags of Kroger-brand stir fry vegetables and Kroger-brand berries. On the counter is a blender that Quinn has never seen before. Duct tape on the side of the blender reads: property of josey. 

“Peyton,” Quinn says, taking Peyton’s hands in hers. Peyton’s skin is freezing and shriveled. “I’m so sorry.” 

“Why? For what?” Peyton asks, recoiling, pulling away.

“We missed our most important years. The skin-to-skin years.” 

“The what?” 

“I was supposed to rock you. That’s why everything is hard between us.” 

“I don’t know.”

“None of it is your fault. You were just a girl.” 

“Mom, what?”

Quinn stares at her daughter. Fourteen but looks twenty-seven. Has already seen a grown man naked. Capable of something unfathomable. 

“Most girls want their mothers to say sorry to them,” Quinn tells Peyton. 

“I don’t need that,” Peyton tells Quinn, going back to her task. She rips open the bags. A frozen green bean falls onto the ground. Peyton picks it up and throws it in with the rest.

“It’s what every girl wants,” Quinn insists.

“Well, not me.” 

“You know what I would give to hear my mother say sorry to me?” 

“No,” Peyton says and says the blender to PURÉE.

Quinn was told the suboxone was safe to continue taking throughout her pregnancy. It was the first thing she asked about when the test came back positive. She even felt proud of herself for asking. The doctor told her it was safe for babies. The doctor told her that yes, while some newborns show signs of withdrawal, the signs are temporary, and they are just typical things that all babies do, like trembling or fussiness. The withdrawal signs are treatable, the doctor told her, with skin-to-skin contact, with rocking or with breastfeeding. But then they took Peyton away at the hospital before Quinn could even see if she was trembling at all.

Quinn follows Peyton back to the shed. She begins to think that maybe Peyton wanted to be found. That maybe Peyton needed someone else to know. She and Josey told the truth so quickly. Peyton hadn’t even bothered hiding the wallet, it was the first thing Quinn found when she opened her closet. 

Peyton tilts the man’s face back and pours the thick, gray mix of blended vegetables and fruit down his throat. She pinches his nose until he swallows. He coughs and chokes and streams of liquid run down the edges of his mouth. Quinn sees him swallow, sees his Adam’s apple bob up and down. Quinn watches Peyton watch the man. Maybe, now, Peyton knows that she is in over her head. If this man will not leave, there is only one way that this ends. She cannot feed him frozen food forever. 

*

Quinn sits in an empty booth and eats a burger alone. Today Daryl gave her the paperwork to sign for what he called a class action suit. “It’s us versus Kroger,” he said. “All of America v. Kroger. There’s hundreds of millions of you and Peytons out there.” 

This did not comfort Quinn. It exploded something inside of her. She had trusted Daryl with so many truths only to be, in his equation, one of a hundred million. Peyton’s wickedness was not common. He seemed to think that it was. He hadn’t actually understood her, Quinn realized. He hadn’t actually understood any of it. 

It wasn’t Kroger’s fault, it was Quinn’s. Peyton is not a bad girl. She is a girl who has seen the devil. Quinn fingers the hamburger bun and picks off sesame seeds one by one. Inside her is a paralyzing shame. There is only one way that this ends. 

She finds it hard to think a clear and straight thought. She takes out her phone and begins writing her confession. She writes everything she knows.  

She writes, THE MAN IN THE SHED IS SIX FOOT TWO. 

She writes, HE IS AN ORGAN DONOR BUT NOT A GOOD MAN.

She writes, MY DAUGHTER HAS SEEN THE DEVIL.

She writes, MOST OF US COULD SPEND OUR WHOLE LIVES NOT SEEING HIM.

She writes, BUT PEYTON IS NOT MOST OF US. 

She writes, PEYTON IS NOT A BAD GIRL. 

She writes, I BLAME MYSELF FOR ALL OF IT.

Quinn titles the note, SOME NEWBORNS SHOW SIGNS OF WITHDRAWAL. 

But she isn’t sure where to send it.