Nana opens her mouth, then closes it. Maybe she understands that I don’t want to hear how we can always stay at Bower One. Sometime, I know, she will say it, but I just don’t want it to be today.

“Not today, anyway,” I add, so her feelings won’t be hurt.

“Okay, Henry.” Nana is quiet for a minute, watching me stir the beans. “How about you bring your mother a sandwich.”

She takes a spoonful of egg salad from a bowl in the refrigerator, smooths it out on a piece of white bread, adds a slice of tomato, and covers it with another slice of bread. She puts it on a plate and I take it over to Mom. Birdie leans against Mom on the couch.

Mom takes the top piece of bread and the tomato off the sandwich and stares at it like she’s never seen an egg salad sandwich before. She picks up the other half, takes a few bites, and hands the plate back to me.

Sometimes when a big snowstorm was coming, we stayed at Nana’s house, but we always had our house to go home to the next day. Tonight feels different. Mom and Dad sleep in the other upstairs bedroom, Uncle Lincoln’s old room. Birdie sleeps there, too, on a couch cushion Dad brought up for her.

I wake up during the night and I’m confused, thinking my bed got turned around and the windows are in the wrong place. Then I realize I’m at Nana’s house.

Thump thump thump Thump thump thump.

A thumping sound comes from downstairs.

Thump thump thump Thump thump thump.

I tiptoe to the top of the stairs and look down into the living room. Dad is pacing back and forth like he did down by the water. I tiptoe quietly back down the hall.

Dad is like a nocturnal animal, awake when everyone else is asleep. Mom is like an animal going into hibernation, eating less and slowing down her movements to conserve energy.

In my father’s old room, I push the bed so it’s up against the wall in the same direction my bed was at home. It’s colder in here than in my bedroom at home, so I take the blankets off the second bed and pile them over myself. I get my notebook from my backpack. There’s a pencil marking the page where I wrote my last question.

Is the other mammoth tusk still in the mud?

I imagine digging in the old drainage pond in Scarborough and suddenly hitting something as hard as the antler James found on the snow as I uncover the second real tusk. It would be like the moment I stood on the roof and watched the meteorite flash across the sky.

I pick up the pencil and write:

When it traveled through the universe, did the meteorite ever pass anything that was alive?