Sam met the youngest of the children on her first night. Jake’s pleading and the enthusiasm of the older kids had persuaded old Khun Mae, reluctantly, to let Sam stay for a day or two. A day or two that became months.

She woke that first night to the sound of a baby crying, inconsolably. Ten minutes. Twenty. Forty. An hour. Finally she roused herself and crept down the hall towards the sound. The room was half lit, but she had no trouble seeing. Khun Mae was there, stern-faced. And Jake, holding little Aroon, the one year-old, and bouncing on his feet, up and down, trying to soothe him. Sarai was next to them, shushing Aroon. Aroon’s tiny mind wailed in chaos, louder than his lungs. Jake and Sarai’s minds were consternated, trying to exude some sort of peace and tranquility for the infant, but also giving off fatigue, tension, a quiet despair that Aroon would never fall back asleep.

Sam stepped into the room, softly, slowly, singing a lullaby her mother had sung to her, letting it come out of her mind as well as her voice. They all turned to look. Khun Mae, Sarai, Jake, and even little Aroon.

He cried, and she came closer, and he looked into her eyes, and held out his arms, and reached out with his tiny, magical mind. She took him from Jake, and his urgent cries turned to tired cries, then to sobs, and eventually to sleep. From that day on, all Sam had to do was hold him, and sing to him in her mind, or meditate with him, and little Aroon would quiet, and calm, and find his way back to sleep if it was bedtime. In his happy awake moments, his mind was the most wonderfully unique of any of them, all bright colors and moving shapes and form without meaning. The universe shimmered when she saw it through his eyes.

Zen mind. Beginner’s mind.

And through her thoughts, perhaps, little Aroon made a bit more sense of the world around him.

“His mother was a heroin addict,” Jake told her in the kitchen, that first night. “She was shooting up while she was pregnant with him. He doesn’t self-soothe well. Dopamine, serotonin, opioid – all his neurotransmitter systems are screwed up. Most of these kids were born to mothers that used drugs besides Nexus while they were pregnant, but Aroon had it the worst.”

Jake. Dr Jacob Foster, to be precise. He was tall and built like a lumberjack. Boyishly good-looking behind that reddish beard. A child psychologist who’d finished his PhD at U of Chicago, three years ago. He’d been at the home for almost two years when Sam had arrived, on a grant from the Mira Foundation to study these children.