One summer, Bea discovered a trap door off the side of our house. The door led to a crawlspace, soil rich with darkness. When she found the door, we were sitting up on the deck drinking lemonade. Rory was telling a story in his usual animated way. He awoke in the night to the sensation of tiny legs scaling him. In that viscous in-between of dream and sleep, Rory was convinced an agent had sent a microscopic robot to search his body for a wifi signal. We all listened. I held the chilled lemonade glass to the back of my neck.

Rory woke again, and again, to the spine-tingling sensation of small limbs, stirring, until he finally mustered the courage to open his eyes. Instead of a metallic invader, he found a ladybug. Ladybugs are always good luck, we decided. Now the ladybug sat with us up on the deck, enclosed by an upside down cup. Rory placed two grapes in her trapping. The early sunlight struck the glass, warping the grapes until they appeared an endless valley of green.

Rory squatted low, thighs touching his sunburnt ankles. He leveled with the barely visible bug. We were quiet for a while, then. Unwillingly, I followed his concentrated gaze. Eyes gliding over the bug’s round body splotched with dark circles, thin wings tucked beneath stomach. All it took was this brief contact to recall his bare back washed with light, passing through the door frame. When we stood in front of the window to see what our reflection would look like as one. Headlights splicing the room into red fractals.

On the deck now, all of us slouched in our weather-beaten lawn chairs. From above, we looked like a circle of stalled crows on telephone wires. None of us knew what the other was thinking.

Bea’s knees were caked with dirt. She stumbled upon the trap door by accident while playing with her paper dolls. The dolls were fragile and wore hastily colored-in dresses. Each bore a pattern: polka dot, zebra, vertical stripes. Bea’s most cherished was the polka dotted Penelope whom she folded into her pillowcase each night. Besides her paper girls, Bea rarely preferred the company of others over her own. With her friends and siblings, she assumed a position of quiet disinterest, often wandering off from the group. On long walks in the fields, especially when the milkweed was in full bloom, bleeding pink along the footpaths, Bea would cup her fists around her eyes. Through her makeshift binoculars, Bea could tame all she saw. There, the wild, yellow caterpillar hole-punching a leaf. Up on the twisted branches, nests bursting with bright eggs. Bea moved in near silence, only the occasional crumple of paper dresses shifting in the wind.

All the voices on the deck chimed mildly around Bea as she played. From down below, she could barely make out specific words, just the cadence of familiar dialogue in washing machine cycles. Rory’s wheeling tales, pitchy, pauses between transitions for emphasis. If Bea had been up on the deck that morning, she would have stared at me as Rory spoke. Sharp, successive glances. Through a gaze, transmitting the sort of assumed certainty only a child could possess.

At the breakfast table last Tuesday, spreading a pat of cold butter on country bread, Bea asked me why when I watched Rory, I got that expression on my face. I paused, yellow wad stuck to my knife. Asked her to clarify. She said that when Rory spoke, my eyes scrunched up all strange like they do when we play the guessing game with a deck of cards. Bea will draw a card, hold it to her chest, and I’ll take a stab at the color, suit, then number. We often spend an hour this way. I read her face for signals that will lend me answers—a flush to her cheeks each time my guess grows warmer. We laugh as I exaggerate each movement, cock my head, stroke my chin dramatically, narrow my eyes as if to extract the answer from her wordlessly.

Bea places little value on speech. Tracks for easy to miss spasms of movement or shifts in stature. Bea wants to figure out how exactly, kinematically, people arrive at their answers. The strange combination of luck and calculation that begins as an unpaved road and ends at certainty, card held close to her chest. When I guess correctly, which I often do in under five tries, she reveals the concealed card, raises her eyebrow, shakes her head in disbelief. I know how to get what I want. We have this in common, puzzling out quiet details, establishing a silent knowing. I knew she already had me figured out, beyond words, in that deep and unrelenting way that only a child could.

That blazing morning when Bea discovered the trapdoor and Rory the ladybug—two unrelated events drawn close by time and the way we tend to remember, grouping physical events as if they happened in one extension of motion—Bea wriggled on all fours through the crawl space, mystified by what felt like a portal to a bizarre world. For nine years she had played on this grass, the familiar mounds, patches of dirt, house in the periphery of her vision as in-place as her own limbs. She never noticed this small door, its metal latch, until that morning. So focused on the soil beneath her, the damp smell of earth, she forgot to look up until she heard the voices. Above her, light filtered through the cedar deck slabs, casting yellow slants on the dirt. Bea straightened her back a little. She could only see the bare feet, rusted bottom of lawn chairs, and splintered table legs. She knew which ankle belonged to her brother, each cousin, me. Bea craned her neck back and forth, letting the cedar-cut vision of the low deck rock like a ship.

We listened to Rory and the morning drew close around us. Cicadas in the wet barked trees. Ice melting to syrupy film in our drinks. Rory doesn’t catch my eye, I scratch at the spider bite on my torso. Imagine unseen eggs multiplying beneath my skin. Feel the future embryos rotating like a distant planet in my stomach. A pair of yellow hornets spins above us like helicopter blades. We swat at them, backs of our palms dividing the thick air. Rory addresses the ladybug directly. He tosses names out to the group, urging us to claim one as apt as Eve for the first woman. Points at us like an art house auctioneer when we offer a strong suggestion.

The open bag of grapes on the table, freshly rinsed. Rory continues to speak. One hornet, seduced by sweetness, hovers by the fruit. The second hornet joins, wings humming in sync. The problem wasn’t just their proximity, it was the noise, incessant. A sound like a close siren. Rory jerks his neck, recoiling. A moment of hot collision—Rory’s hand instinctively flying out to shield his face, the glass knocked sideways. I remember crying out, all of us on our feet and quick to action.

Bea, so focused on the thrilling mystery of moving unnoticed beneath the deckboards, only realized something was wrong once the glass shattered. In her below-deck blindness, Bea filled the gaps with details her eyes lacked. She watched our limbs in panic, cut off from our faces, imagining our contorted expressions. The glass hit the ground with rings of sound. The hornets hadn’t stung Rory yet, but the noise activated them to anger. Bea watched Rory’s palms scour the deck, frantic: he was asking for her. Bea assumed the lady he desperately begged for was me.

When the glass hit the deck, the unnamed ladybug vanished. Maybe she plotted her escape, crawling to freedom in the din. Ladybug and hornets sending signals between their bug brains—a yellow diversion of wings and buzz. The glass shards glittered in the pale light. Even the small tethers of closeness felt shattered, too. My gaze fixed on Rory, and our sweaty limbs stuck to the worn cloth seats. The steady drawl of his voice, our interjections hitching onto the backs of one other like conversation cable cars.

Bea panicked too, silently. From below the deck, she couldn’t study our faces or body language. She suddenly felt she was somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be. That if she made a noise or announced her presence, there would be even more trouble upstairs. She sat down and concentrated on the dirt in the lines of her kneecaps. Pretended the creases were streams filled with mud after a heavy rain. If she focused hard enough, the clamor upstairs could be the surge of water, and she would not be here anymore. Something inside her told her to be brave, and open her lids. It was quieter now, the smell of soil nestled far up her nostrils, growing familiar and making her want to sneeze. Her eyes adjusted to the hazy underworld, now noticing the stripes of light on the ground again. In the center of one of the yellow strips, Bea clocked movement. A small bug on its back, legs writhing in the air. She watched the small tendons click and unclick. She could almost hear them, small mechanical latches. She stared as if in a trance. Seconds like hours. Soon the motion slowed, as if the bug was carrying a heavy load up a mountain of ice, sliding backwards. Then the legs’ strange cadence stopped altogether, and they wilted against the bug’s underbelly.

Now Bea knew something was horribly wrong. She would not say a word about this to anyone—not me, not Rory. Even when she came upstairs some minutes later, she would slink quietly around the deck, chin to chest. And years down the line, the same quiet voice that told her to open her eyes underneath the house would ask, does the guilt grow with the years? This feeling that I have to say something?