My daughter turns four on Leap Day, her first real birthday since the day she was born. We celebrate giddily, with a big, leapfrog-themed party, the last time her birthday will be on a Saturday until she’s thirty-two. Two weeks later, the world closes up shop, and our family is quarantined at home together every day. My husband dresses each morning for work, but in just a t-shirt and jeans, not a button down, not dress pants. I spend many days in sweatpants or even pajama bottoms, as if I’m home with a flu. But isolated from any outside human contact, my only ailment is dread. Winter is long this year, and spring is cold, but my daughter rarely puts on any clothes at all, unless we’re going to the park or the woods, the only places we can go. Even on the trail in Raccoon Creek State Park, H takes off her shoes and puts her bare toes into the chilly stream.

She understands the coronavirus as germs and asks daily when germs will be over. One day she comes downstairs from a nap and tells me that she woke up crying.

“I didn’t hear you,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

“It was quiet crying because I miss people.”

H’s imagination is her closest companion now, with games of doctor, restaurant, school. She wraps her legs in ace bandages, checks my reflexes, feeds her father with Play-do pizzas baked in the drawer she pretends is an oven. Her games are full body, of the body. Her chief grief of quarantine is not being able to hug her grandmother and her friends. The body is her greatest loss. I want to touch people, she sighs.

My daughter likes to be naked. Everyone who knows her knows this. Nude, she twirls in our living room, waters plants in the backyard, eats a bowl of cereal at the kitchen counter, climbs into the house her father made her from cardboard. She is required to wear clothes when we go somewhere, of course, but at home, she is unencumbered. I do not remember ever possessing this freedom, if freedom is something to possess.

A babysitter when I was five or six asked if she could help me take off my clothes for a bath. I refused. “But Carla lets me see her,” she said, referring to my best friend who lived down the street. I remember this scene as if I’m looking at myself and the babysitter. But I know I felt shame—and annoyance that she’d asked.

“Do you not know that your body is a temple?” pastors read from Corinthians when I was in middle school. I knew instead that my body was a locked safe, a husky jean, an insatiable monster.

I watch my daughter stretching her graceful arms and standing on pretend toe shoes. H is exquisite and coordinated. Her body is the temple, perhaps the first at which I’ve ever truly worshipped.

In May, police kill George Floyd, and Minneapolis is burning, and the nation opens again, not just for commerce, but for revolt. In fact, it seems that the entire world is enraged, and rightly. We are still at home every day, but the weather is now warm, and the zinnias and marigolds and snapdragons H and I planted from seed are finally standing tall with the earliest of buds. Some of the first Pittsburgh protests are blocks from our house, so helicopters chop above us for hours and hours, day after day. Each morning brings news of death from the coronavirus and each night brings stories of new promise as millions of people scream for autonomy over their own bodies and lives—Black people who have been screaming for 400 years and white people who are just dressing for the fight.

If my daughter were one or two, she might not notice. If she were seven or eight, I could tell her that sometimes people are cruel enough to kill each other, and that sometimes this has to do with skin color. If she were older, we could talk about this nation’s history, its nucleus, the terrorization of non-white bodies by white bodies who designate themselves superior. But she is four and still afraid of monsters and ghosts (“ghost-ez”) who lurk at bedtime. What’s more, she still happily points out the book characters who are brown like her (almost all of them, in our house) and still disapproves of the books that tell stories only of characters who are white, as I am. “Too many pink people,” she says.

So I don’t tell her about George Floyd, or Ahmaud Arbery, or Breonna Taylor, or any of the people who are recently dead because of the ways whiteness brutalizes Blackness. Then by accident, a slip of phone and text message, she sees a photograph of a car on fire. A police car has been set ablaze during a protest a few miles away from us. Its flames fill the picture frame as black smoke billows around the charred husk of the vehicle.

I can feel a change in the air when she’s scared. A declarative “Mama” followed by silence, which means she is formulating her question, the one that will articulate her unease.

“Why is that car on fire?”

I grab the phone and wince. “Some people set it on fire because they were mad.”

“Why were they mad?”

I tell her that people are angry because something is unfair—a circumstance she associates with not being allowed a third popsicle.

She nods. I put the phone away but she pleads, “I need to see it again. Please mama, mama please.”

What do I cover up and what do I let out in the open? I look at her big brown eyes, her trembling lip. I show her the car again, and she is silent while she absorbs the destruction. “Please we can snuggle? I don’t like that car.”

Bodies are still the answer at four years old, the remedy for pain, and so I take her onto my lap and into my arms and listen while she repeats her fears into my chest. What will happen to the car? Where will it go? What if the police don’t have any cars? Can they still help people? Will they take someone to jails?

I answer each question but this is not sufficient, so we unroll a piece of poster paper as long as the dining room table and we draw. We each draw police cars with sirens on top, and with fat, greasy paint markers we smear red and orange and yellow flames so thick they engulf the cars. Then she asks me to draw the angry person who set it on fire, the police, the people in the crowd. She stops coloring her own picture and directs as I sketch the match in the hand, the hose spraying the fire, the police officer taking a person to jails. She decides that this person could be a man or a woman. She decides the person will stay in jails for two days. She decides this person can have a second chance. We hang the pictures on the wall, and by dinner time, she says the car isn’t scary anymore.

Friends give us a plastic baby pool. It’s the color of blue aquarium fish and the circumference of a hula hoop, sitting on the patio in our backyard. The water reaches halfway up my daughter’s shins, just enough to cool her on a hot June afternoon. The first day my husband fills the pool, H sits in it for hours, declaring it the most fun she’s ever had. She is used to the helicopters now, so while the country marches and police spray tear gas, she focuses on her own body in water, in this new container that’s just the right size for her.

A few days later, my mother comes for a visit, one of very few since we’ve been isolated at home. H tells her to sit on the other end of the couch when we’re inside, but she also asks to hug her grandmother, whom she calls Ema, and then she throws her arms around Ema’s legs. I have still not hugged my mother after three months of quarantine, irrationally afraid that I will infect her, but perhaps even more afraid that I will not be able to let go.

When it’s time for my mother to leave, we wave goodbye at the front door.

“I want to swim,” H tells me, already peeling off her clothes.

“Sure. Your bike is still in the driveway from this morning, though. Why don’t you take it around back, and I’ll go through the house and meet you. I want to get a drink of water.”

I watch her walk the ten or twelve feet to the driveway, and then I go inside. By the time the ice is clinking in my glass, I hear a voice, not my daughter’s, calling, “Mama!”

Opening the back door, I first see H, draped in a gray cardigan that does not belong to us. A woman is walking behind her, hand on my daughter’s back. They have clearly walked up the driveway and turned the corner to the part of our backyard not visible from the street. “Are you her mother?” the stranger calls.

Yes. I nod.

“She was running around naked.”

“She wasn’t running around—she was walking back here to get in her pool.”

“But she was naked,” the woman says, almost wringing her hands.

 “Yes, she’s naked. She’s fine. Thank you.”

The woman’s face speaks contempt, but she takes her sweater, turns around and walks back down our driveway.

 “Mama,” H says, and I feel the change in the air.

I know what’s coming. Why did she give me her sweater? Who is she? Why she was walking by our house? Why she touched me? And with a knitted brow: Why did she get so close to me? What about germs?

Much of being a parent is discovering that you have the same questions as your child.

We talk about clothes and where we need to wear them. We talk about who makes the rules. We talk about how bodies are beautiful, and nothing to be embarrassed about. I don’t know how to explain why removing a thin pair of underwear can tip the scales from acceptable to not. She forgets about the pool and instead sits on the patio furniture with me, resting a little under the umbrella in the sun. But twenty or so minutes go by, and then she hops up. “I heard a noise. I’m gonna go see.”

She looks around the corner of our house, down the long narrow driveway, and calls, “Mama, it looks like someone’s in trouble.”

I get up to join her, but history has taught me that I already know who’s here.

***

The week of Halloween the prior year, the weather was typical Pittsburgh October: an unpredictable zig zag from hot to cold to warm. Two days before my daughter would dress as a blueberry and trick-or-treat around the block, we were driving home from Ema’s house. H had been playing in just her underwear, and didn’t want to get dressed before we drove home. It was 70 degrees, we were heading straight home, I didn’t need a battle. She rode in her car seat, naked and pleased. When we arrived at home, I unbuckled her, lifted her, and set her down on the driveway behind our car. In my periphery, another car slowed. I picked up the many bags I needed to carry inside, including the clothes my daughter was not wearing. I walked to our front steps, but H dawdled behind me, so I continued up the eight or so steps to our front door and ducked inside the vestibule to set down the load, in case I needed to carry her inside. My daughter was out of my sight for about fifteen seconds.

I turned around and saw the same car stopped in front of my house, blocking traffic. H was now walking slowly up the steps, and the driver stared at us. A fuzzy giant Halloween spider hung in our front window, red eyes blinking. Maybe she was looking at that? Or maybe I knew her?

“Can I help you?” I called.

“I’m just trying to figure out why this child doesn’t have any clothes on.”

The answer came instantaneously. “Because she’s three.”

“But she’s outside with no clothes on.”

I had never seen the woman before. I felt the double rush of confusion and defensiveness. “Yes, but she’s just walking into our house. From the car, which is right there.” I pointed.

“You know better than that! You know better than to let a child run around like that.” The woman was shaking her head in disdain. “It’s not right. I’m a mandated reporter, and that’s not right.”

She drove away in her gold SUV.

“What she say, mama?”

I looked at my three-year-old. Thirty pounds of muscle and bone walking into our home with no thought of shame or self-consciousness. Into the home where her mother is also a mandated reporter, which means only that I teach kids and am legally obligated to report any suspected abuse. I told H that the woman had asked why she wasn’t wearing clothes, and then I reminded her that she was fine just the way she was.

Three days later, the doorbell rang, followed by a fist pounding on our front windows. My husband happened to be home from work, frying bacon and eggs while I set out the plates for breakfast. Our daughter was playing beside us, still buzzing from the candy she’d collected during trick-or-treating the evening before.

With no idea why someone would be knocking so urgently, I opened the front door to a young Black woman with her hair slicked back into a tight, curly ponytail.

“I’m from CYF,” she said, pulling her clipboard to her chest. “I need to talk to you about a call we received.”

As if in a dream, I ushered her inside. We offered her an armchair or the couch, but she instead chose the piano bench, and perched on it with a straight back, purse at her feet, clipboard on her lap. 

She asked us to tell her what had happened, so we did. No thoughts of resistance entered my mind; perhaps wrongly, I felt compelled to redeem myself, to show that my daughter was cared for and my husband and I were competent. The air in the living room was thick with bacon and eggs, with our exhalations of outrage. H crawled onto my lap and listened while we told our side.

The ramrod posture of the social worker had begun to slouch a bit. “We have to investigate every call we get,” she said. “This seems like it wasn’t really an incident. But let me tell you what was reported.” A non-mandated reporter had made a call. Just a citizen driving by, not someone with any obligation to report, though she’d claimed otherwise. The report indicated that she’d seen a naked child. The social worker looked up from the clipboard; did I see an eye roll? “I can tell your daughter is well taken care of.” But she continued reading from her paper: “A woman of about forty was standing at the door,” and my forty-nine-year old vanity momentarily vogued.

The social worker asked permission to interview H, who was still on my lap.

“Do you have a bed to sleep in?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have food to eat?”

“Yes.”

I recalled the hundreds of forms we’d filled out in the process of adopting our daughter. Financial statements, proof of employment, health records, criminal background checks, multiple rounds of fingerprints, letters of intent, interviews and home visits, and a stranger flushing our toilets, just to make sure. And oh, those intimate statements we’d been asked to write, wherein we elaborated our losses, our hopes, our most naked desires to make a family. Surely, we were more qualified on paper than most people who birth a child?

As I listened to the social worker’s questions, I felt my daughter lean down. I tried to right her, but she was intent on reaching something on the floor, which was, I realized then, our bloody, severed plastic arm—a Halloween decoration she’d been playing with all week, the “creepy arm” she loved and feared.

Please no no no, I thought as she reached down. Please don’t pick up the arm.

But pick it up she did, and then waved its bleeding hand slowly back and forth at the social worker, while the woman diligently tried to determine whether we were delinquent parents.

We are not. She agreed. The episode ended thirty minutes later; the social worker deemed it unnecessary to inspect our house, and filed a report, and as we repeated the story to friends, our indignation gave way to shrugs, and our rage was masked by the hilarious detail of the severed limb. “And the irony is,” I’d say, “I am a mandated reporter.” Required to report injustice where I see it.

***

Nine months later, H knows that police come when someone is in trouble or someone needs help—when, say, a car is on fire. She is still only four, though, and so does not know that sometimes police can kill. On the day the woman covers her with the cardigan, when H tells me “it looks like someone is in trouble,” I know before I even see the car. I know that the two young cops unfolding from the police cruiser are heading to our front door, so I shuttle H in through the back just in time to hear the doorbell ding.

I ask her to stay back while I open the door. My husband is already walking downstairs from the office, so he stays inside with her, hand on her shoulder, while the two white cops say almost apologetically, “Was there—did you—did something happen here involving a little kid?”

They aren’t wearing masks, so I find myself thinking of airborne transmission as I tell them, “She’s fine” and outline the bare details of the story.

“Can we see her?”

H and my husband peek out the door and the officers say hello and she looks fine, we have to respond to every call, just to make sure, you know how it is, looks like it’s really nothing, I used to run around naked when I was a kid. Laughter. It’s not against the law.

When they leave a few minutes later, H has already run upstairs to hide, convinced they intend to take her to jails.

When I call to her, she runs into my arms, clutching my body, again her chosen comfort.

The questions spill, this time about the woman and the police. I assure her they won’t arrest her.

“They take four-year-olds to jails?”

“No.” I think of a video I recently saw of a six-year-old in Florida being arrested in handcuffs because she had a tantrum in school.

“Three?”

“No.” Do I know this for sure?

“How old?”

I again have the same questions as my child. Later, I will learn that thousands of children under age ten are arrested in the United States each year. Small number, but not zero. Most are Black. I read that more than a million kids attend schools with a law officer and not a guidance counselor. What would have happened if the cops had opened the door to find a Black mother? I don’t need statistics to know they might not have been so kind.

We move to the kitchen so H can have a snack. She eats voraciously to fuel her almost constant movement and play. She holds her blanket as she sits on an orange stool at our kitchen counter. She’s always liked this blankie but started carrying it everywhere with her when the pandemic arrived.

“I don’t like police, mama.”

“You don’t have to like them.”

She says, “What will the police say if they know I don’t like them?”

“I don’t know, my love. I bet they would understand.” Please don’t apologize for your fear or your worry, or for your body, free as it is.

“I will say ‘I’m sorry’ to them.”

“That’s—kind,” I say weakly. Please when you are older and we have the talk about how to behave around cops, please heed what I tell you to do with your hands and your mouth and your body, please always stay alive.

She asks for markers and paper, a word she pronounces like “pepper.” She draws one figure, a police officer, with big eyes and small arms. She draws a second and asks her father to add two bellybuttons.

“I’ll write my name so they know who I am,” she says, and writes her name more quickly than I’ve ever seen her do it, in a perfect line, backwards.

“Let’s send it to the police station. Do you know the address?”

I do. Zone five is right next to the bike loop where kids can ride. The track where we went with her first strider bike, the one with no pedals. The one that made her feel like she was a big kid, propelling herself so fast, with those legs so slender yet so strong, the bicycle that taught her how to balance so well that the transition to a pedal bike was effortless.

In fact, she has just learned a few days ago, in three tries, as if she’s been pedaling solo her whole life.

Now she rides every day, almost comical on her mini fuchsia bike, with her mini body and giant helmet, but she is supremely confident, ever in possession of her limbs, her muscles, her balance. She likes to ride back and forth while I sit on the front steps.

“Pretend you just met me,” she says, and when she pedals past I say, “Oh hello! I don’t think I know you,” and she stops, and we introduce ourselves, strangers and then instant pals.

“You are amazing,” I say as she pushes off again.

“I know that,” she says.

Four years ago, when I became a mother, the insecurity of youth had been replaced by the despair of advanced maternal age, miscarriages, betrayals of the body despite arduous efforts. Motherhood did not start as an abstract I carried in my womb. Our first bond was as bodies, the moment I felt H’s five-pound form in my arms. Her skin was so light when she was born, so much closer to my husband’s shade, and with daily skin on skin contact with both of us, she grew and thrived, and her straight newborn hair began to curl, and her skin darkened, her essence emerged. Hallowed brown.

Like any new mother, I fervently wanted her to be safe. I nervously nudged her when her breathing seemed too shallow in her crib. I wore her in a carrier, kissing her crown. Her needs became mine. My body had failed to create anything, but it could care for another.

I knew it would be hard. Or, I thought I knew. I have spent my career trying to amplify the voices of Black writers and all writers of color, trying to teach that words are power and freedom and that kids can use them to change this oft-wretched world. But teaching Langston Hughes in summer camp is dim preparation for raising a Black girl in America. I was reminded of this early on: In a mall, I once lingered a few feet behind one-year-old H to encourage her independent toddling—and a janitor took one look at her, pulled out his walkie talkie, and loudly announced he’d call security. On the playground, when I’m not right next to her, I hear adults ask if a grown up is with her. This girl, the most sovereign body I know, is doubly surveilled: by dint of her Blackness, by dint of my whiteness.

 Because strangers cannot see how I care for her heart and mind, they look to the body for clues. We all do. I have thus learned the rituals of lotion on knees, wash day and laid edges, caps at night and silk pillowcases; friends advise me which detangling brush to buy and teach my fingers to twist. This caretaking is superficial but centuries deep, and I often feel inadequate. Even now, depending on the day, Black strangers tell me you’re doing great, those beads are so pretty, or do you know about the pink stuff for hair, or just don’t let her get tenderheaded, or here’s my card if you ever want to reach out for help. Am I acceptable as a mother? I can at least give her straight lines and clean clothes. I cannot give her the safety of white skin. I cannot give her a Black family. No one in our quarantined house has brown skin save her and the dolls that stare unblinking from her bed.

 The evening the cops come, the three of us take a walk after dinner, our near-nightly tradition since the quarantine started. We pass a neighbor’s tree, into which a carved set of eyes, nose, and mouth were stuck a while ago. “The tree is watching us,” H said when she first saw it. By now the face has lost an eye, and the owners have added periodic messages on little talk bubbles next to the mouth. For a long time, the cyclops admonished us to “Wash Your Hands!” This evening, the mouth says “Black Lives Matter.”

“That’s just like your shirt!” H says, stopping her bike and planting her feet on the sidewalk.

“It is!” I say. She’s asked me about the words on that shirt for more than a year, and by now she can name each letter. We’ve talked many times about who is Black, who is African American, and what the slogan means, but today, as we walk away from the eye peering out of the bark, we talk in a way that she seems to more fully understand.

“What that means, mama?”

I tell her, again, that Black is another word for brown skin, just like white is another word for pink skin.

I tell her that she is alive, that people are living creatures, living Lives, that she was born and she breathes. In a moment of synchronicity, I’m telling her this as we pass our neighbor Mildred’s house, the neighbor who died almost exactly a year ago—a huge loss for our family. “Mildred is not alive,” she says. I nod.

And then Matter. Whatever I say is insufficient, but my eyes well as I tell her that Black lives are precious, that that she is loved and important and treasured. Every fiber of her growing body, every inch of corporeal substance, every space her being occupies. Matter and mind.

 The day after the cops are called to our house is June 19th. Juneteenth. Day of emancipation. The day that Antwon Rose was killed two years ago, a seventeen-year-old shot in the back by a cop in East Pittsburgh.

It’s hot, and my t-shirt smells of sweat and body lotion, and I can’t remember when I washed it, or when I last had to get dressed to be anywhere. I do remember that Juneteenth was a distant concept until I was in my forties. I don’t know how to observe it now, except as a some far away ripple of an MLK dream—“sons of former slaves and sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” Our table of brotherhood today is the backyard, where H and I are playing, working, watering plants, talking about the giant Norway Maple that we’ve just learned is diseased beyond healing. We talk about how we will miss its shade cover. She wants to have a goodbye party, with cake.

When we sit on the patio furniture, H reaches over and touches my forearm. “I like your pink skin,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say, putting my other hand on hers.

Before I can return the compliment, she withdraws her hand, leans back into her chair, and raises her face to the sun. “And I loooooooove my brown skin.” She bolts upright. “You’re called white,” she declares. “And I’m called Black!”

“That’s right!

“Can I have your phone?” she asks. “I need to call Ema and tell her I’m Black.”

She is endless joy, this girl, and her father and I are reveling in her discoveries early that same evening when the doorbell rings.

H runs for the door, the dog runs for the door, barking, I head to the door, surmising UPS delivery or duplex neighbors who forgot their keys. In the time of coronavirus, no one rings our bell for a visit.

I see a white woman with mousy brown hair and a pale blue face mask.

“I’m from CYF,” she says, pulling her clipboard to her chest. “I need to talk to you about a call we received.”

She’s the first person besides my mother who has entered our home in three months. I tell myself that the thin folds of her mask are the only reason it’s acceptable to let her inside, although I know I probably wouldn’t risk defiance. I move slowly, trying to stay calm when my body is flooded with heat, flames licking my chest and face. The woman is awkward, turning sideways to walk through the doorframe, as if her slender body and her interrogation are too much to fit through the space.

The report has just been called in that day. Like the call to the police, it’s anonymous, but I have no doubt it has come from the woman with the gray cardigan. A full day later, she’s decided to report us again, mandated or not.

We know the routine. We tell our version. The social worker reads from her clipboard. This time, details have been embellished: The child was wandering a block from her home. The child was unable to say where her house was. The child appeared disheveled and malnourished.

“How can a naked person appear disheveled?” I’m asking, but I know the answer already. Her hair. “Today was wash day,” I say, “Her hair yesterday was—those puffs had been in a long time…” Why am I speaking of hair when a stranger is breathing in my house?

This time, the social worker does look in our refrigerator, does turn on the tap, does trudge to the third floor to make sure H has a bed to sleep in.

This time my voice is loud when I ask if it’s a crime for a kid to bike up the block alone—even though H has never done that, and even though the stranger found her in our driveway.

This time my voice is incredulous when I ask how much I’m supposed to police my daughter’s behavior. My brain flips through things I did as a kid: walked to Carla’s house alone, came home when the streetlights turned on. I know H has to someday be more cautious than her white friends, but now? When can I let her walk to the corner store? Six? Seven? Never?

“It becomes a question of supervision,” the social worker says. “We wouldn’t know how long she’d been out there on her own.”

I think of my daughter’s compact body jumping on the bed, dunking in the baby pool, climbing trees, pedaling her new bike. My hand was on her back for such a brief time, and then she found her balance, her momentum, and I let go, and she pedaled away from me, as she will do in increasing measures for the rest of my life.

Summer arrives and Confederate monuments topple across the country, and as the days bleed into each other, no end to any virus in sight, I imagine the motivations of the women who reported us. Both were Black. In every imagining, I strip away the varied layers and end with the same core: my daughter and I are unacceptable. She cannot be safe in her freedom, and I cannot be sufficient in my whiteness. Perhaps these women feel in their marrow that Black bodies are held to higher standards, must be draped in modesty and robed in respectability.

I have tended to every need of H’s body for four years—hunger, thirst, fatigue. I have carried her on my hips until they ached. I have spent a fortune on Band-aids for wounds real and embellished. But have I kept her safe? The women who saw her naked in our driveway carry history in their DNA, as do we all. What genetic memory discharged when they saw my daughter, bare, alone if only briefly, vulnerable to whatever force might have wanted to ensnare her? Nudge this white woman, their memory might have instructed, as if nudging the sleeping infant—make sure she is alive, alert, watchful over this body entrusted to her care. Watchful in a way that I am only, now, beginning to feel in my bones.

I do not imagine that my daughter will ever be arrested. The chances she’ll be harmed by cops are, on paper, minute. But she’s already been sent out of her preschool classroom for lying on the ground when she was mad, by white teachers I admire and trust. A question of safety, they said. We don’t want friends hurting friends.

H will be judged by the color of her skin, judged by the content of her character, by the clothes on her back, the hair on her head. She is judged by her brown skin, her glorious Blackness, by her liberated body and because of the white people who love her.

Such inconsequential layers make us tolerable or not, emancipated or bound. A gauzy mask lies between us and a pathogen. What thin fabric separates a body from shame! The body is a temple, pastors read from Corinthians. The anatomical temple is a juncture, the spot where four skull bones meet. The temple is the thinnest part of the skull, the spot that pulses with each heartbeat. The temple is where body meets spirit. Holy.

The monsters and ghost-ez persist at bedtime, so H and I have been talking about how to change worried or upset thoughts when we don’t want to feel them anymore. First, we talk about what’s scary, in detail. Sometimes she draws the monsters, giving form to her fears. And then in four-year-old terms, we talk about breathing deeply and replacing anxiety with calm or happy ideas. I ask her what she wants to dream about, and she says “you.” Worry carries her to the brink of sleep, and then she finally closes her eyes and I watch her mouth go slack and hope that she is dreaming of me, and hope that I will dream of her, too, instead of this nightmare of virus and death and white violence that bludgeons our days.

The morning after the police come to our house, my daughter wakes and tells me she dreamed about their visit in the night.

“Was it a good dream or a bad dream?” I ask, knowing the answer.

“Scary,” she says. “But I took the policemans outside and set them on fire.”

“You did? Wow,” I say.

“Then I took a deep breath and I blew them out.” She inhales and her baby belly expands, and then she blows out as hard as she can, to show me. “Mama,” she says, my wise one, my bare beating heart, the one who matters most, “I changed the dream.”