“When my mother died, I had a hard time letting Doris be her chief mourner. My mother’s church needed to do some changing as well. They managed, though, as did I: we’ve learned to change our hearts and our minds and become open to love in its many wondrous forms.

“When Doris called and said she was disturbed by activity around her farm, I wanted to come back, to help her, and to make my own peace with the past. I’d been there in 1983 to support the protesters at the silo, I’d come back a month later for Lucinda’s funeral, but I hadn’t been in the town since.

“Young August agreed to come with me, to video some of the scenes of my childhood for me.

“When we got here, we found Doris in distress over her land, as you know, but her distress increased after our arrival: she pulled out a box of Lucinda’s belongings that she hadn’t been able to bear to go through in the weeks after my mother’s death. She’d put these keepsakes away in a back cupboard and only remembered them as my arrival drew near.

“We went through them, she and I, cozy in front of the fire, and then came on the basket that Lucinda had used for carrying supplies down to Jenny Perec in her tent. And in the bottom, under a hand-knit baby bonnet that Lucinda had originally made for me, we found the movie.

“My old high school in Eudora had a projector that they let me borrow. We watched the movie in Doris’s living room. We didn’t know that poor, tormented soul, Sonia Kiel, was watching it with us through Doris’s front-room window.

“My mother had told me about the people in Dr. Kiel’s lab. His unfortunate graduate student, Matt Chastain, and Magda from Czechoslovakia, with her crazy jealousy of Dr. Kiel’s wife. Sonia, with her sad, silly crush on young Chastain, and the way Dr. Kiel was forever taunting his own daughter. It was an unhappy story, but my world was filled with unhappy stories. I didn’t pay much attention to Sonia’s.

“Sonia apparently kept telling people in Lawrence that she’d seen all these people—Magda and Matt, Jenny Perec and the babies—in a movie. Most people didn’t pay attention, thought they were just more drug-addled ramblings—but the wrong ears did listen, as you well know.

“August and Doris and I had been out for a drive. We came back to find Magda dead on the kitchen floor. We were badly frightened, as you can well believe. Doris kept her head the best. She sent us on to Aunt Nell—Ms. Albritten—while she stayed behind to collect her soil samples. She was obsessed with those. It was the last I ever saw of her.”