My mother looked at me like I had two heads. “The hag? When the doctor said there was nothing to be done? Don’t be foolish.” She fed another stick to the flames. “I don’t know if that dog was hers or a stray, but if you see it again, you keep away and let me know.” She kicked an ember back into the fire. “Tame or wild, a hungry dog will eat. And your brother’s still little enough to be dragged away.”

I imagined Samuel in a set of jaws, and my shoulders went up around my ears.

For a tiny boy who never looked where he was going, the woods could be especially unkind.

“I’ll tell you if I see it again,” I said. And I meant it. I truly did. But I didn’t know where that dog would lead me. Or what it would lead me to become.

Chapter Thirteen

That night, when we gathered around my father to wish him good night, I laid my hand on his forehead and closed my eyes and told him, without a word, that I was going to bring him back.

I concentrated so hard on that thought that I could feel it pulsing in my ears, and my hand grew hot on his cool skin, as if the flame in my chest had spread.

I was startled when Esther pulled my arm away and said, “What are you doing, Ellie? Daddy doesn’t need your sweaty hand on his face.”

“Do you have a fever?” my mother said, pressing her lips against my forehead, and I closed my eyes and let myself feel that almost-kiss until she pulled back and said, “You’d better get on to bed. Your father is already sick enough.”

Later, as I tried to sleep, I touched that spot on my forehead again and again, but it was no softer than the rest of me.

I hoped it would send me quickly to sleep—perhaps even to dream of my father waking and rising and growing brawny and brown again—but instead I lay in the darkness as I always did now, jangled and jarred by a memory that kept me wakeful and sad long into the night.

—

While my mother, my sister, my brother, my father all slept, I lay, wakeful, and remembered that January day, Esther gathering kindling under the trees at the edge of the yard where the snow was thinnest, watching Samuel while my mother was inside making stew.

I remembered helping my father clear trees at the edge of the garden so in the spring we could plant more beans and peas and squash.