“I don’t know. Probably. It’s not like him to accept change without a mighty battle, but right before we moved he got almost docile about everything he was instructed to do. He’d been spending a huge amount of time with this little round vacuum of Ellis’s, even taking it to school with him when the kids all went back. I had to buy him a bigger backpack, and even then, the vacuum plus his folders and his lunch made him walk all hunched over, like a little old man.”

I have a sudden mental image of Lawrence as a baby duck imprinting on some piece of machinery, toddling after it in the blind hope that it will care for him, and this vision affects me so deeply I almost have to swipe away tears. Wasn’t there a children’s book about that, a duck or a bird or some little bereaved creature seeking a missing parent in a junkyard, hoping every moving object would love him back?

Compton stops and stares into the distance, flinching at whatever she sees. When she speaks again, her voice is rusty. “One day I get a call from Lawrence’s teacher. She says some fifth graders got into Lawrence’s bag and found the vacuum and they tore a piece off it, and now he’s in the principal’s office because he hit one of them. His teacher couldn’t get him to stop shaking. He’d been doing pretty well before that, but afterward he quit speaking altogether. Well, that’s not right—he didn’t quit speaking altogether; he’d answer me if I asked him anything, but he wouldn’t initiate conversation. When I told him we were moving, he didn’t say anything, and finally I asked him how he felt about it, and he said, ‘I want to do what you want, Mommy.’ So I questioned myself a thousand times about whether it was the right thing.”

“Oh, Compton,” says Hannah, her big eyes shining in the dim light.

“It’s okay, Hannah. It is. For a while after the move, he stayed quiet and un-Lawrence-y, but we got another dog, a Lab mix from the shelter, and now the two of them run around the yard like they’re on fire. He likes his new school and he made a friend, the little girl who lives in the next house up the road. They play by the creek and build forts and go camping with her dad. I can’t believe it, but I think my little city slicker is becoming a country kid.”

“What about the little ones?” Hannah asks.

“They’re managing too. Rose is her same dreamy self anywhere, happy as long as she can dress up. She remembers New York and Ellis, but I can see her memories getting fuzzier by the day; I think she’s forgetting him. Walter, of course, is clueless.”