Penny Wilson

Penny Wilson is Maren’s first and only babysitter, and her death reveals the danger hidden in Maren’s infancy. Because Penny lived alone and worked odd jobs, her disappearance could go unnoticed for days; the aftermath also begins the family’s pattern of leaving quickly after Maren harms someone.

Identity and Death

Penny lived across the courtyard from Maren’s family in their apartment complex. She was supposed to watch the infant for an hour and a half. Maren later imagines that Penny wanted a baby of her own and had shown her unusual tenderness, humming to her, touching her fingers and toes, and stroking her hair. This affectionate portrait is explicitly Maren’s speculation, not a memory: she says she cannot remember the killing and knows of it through what happened afterward.

When Maren’s mother returned, Penny’s bones lay in a pile on the living-room carpet, and Maren was asleep nearby with blood on her face and clothes. Searching her daughter’s mouth, her mother found the hammer of Penny’s eardrum between Maren’s gums. Penny’s killing becomes the first time the family has to pack up and move in a hurry. It is also the last time Penny, or anyone else, babysits Maren: afterward, her mother places her in daycare, where the overwhelmed staff are less likely to form the intimate attachment Maren associates with Penny.

Memory and Its Afterlife

Janelle initially explained Penny’s death as the work of a satanic cult, a story that placed the violence outside her daughter and made it possible to live with what she had found. For years, Maren was quiet, sober, and eager to learn; Janelle gradually persuaded herself that the terrible event had not been Maren’s doing. The account became a more bearable memory, with the cult cast as the culprit and Maren as an innocent child. The book presents that explanation not as a recovered fact but as a distortion that hardens into a truth because the alternative is too painful.

Maren has no memory of killing Penny, yet she carries knowledge of it through the evidence and its aftermath. Much later, she asks Janelle about Penny’s appearance, origins, age, reading, and character while they are driving—not to a new city. The questions reopen a subject they had never discussed immediately after Maren’s acts. Janelle responds by asking why Maren wants to know, while Maren’s careful curiosity suggests an attempt to give a name and a life to someone whose death had been absorbed into family silence. Penny therefore remains present less through remembered scenes than through the competing stories told about her: Janelle’s protective account and Maren’s effort to approach what that account concealed.

The First Move

Penny’s death also marks the beginning of a practical routine that would become more efficient with repetition. Maren recalls that her mother had to move them in a hurry after Penny was killed; by the time of their last move, Janelle could pack their belongings in twelve minutes flat. The sharp contrast turns the first hurried departure into the start of a life organized around escape, in which each new move carries the accumulated knowledge of the one before.

Narrative Significance

Penny’s brief place in Maren’s life establishes a tension between what can be known and what can only be reconstructed. The episode reaches the reader through an adult narrator who imagines the babysitter’s tenderness but cannot remember the killing itself; the hard physical evidence survives where personal memory does not. That gap shapes the scene’s moral force: Penny appears not as a villain or a threat, but as a person whose ordinary care could not protect her from the infant she was caring for. The contrast also introduces a pattern in Maren’s story, in which the people around her build explanations from what they can bear to see, while the material traces of violence remain difficult to explain away.