We’ve been close for so long now that I can’t remember all we talked about that afternoon. Jasper, of course. My aunt, my sisters, what looked to him like a jar of dirt next to me (Samuel was hiding). Link’s earlier adventures, which he knew lots about. During Link’s race with Barney Oldfield, he’d tapped his wheels on the roof of Oldfield’s car.

“Not,” Adrien added, “that I’m blaming him for what happened to you. The newspapers were hard on him at first, but he was flying perfectly cautiously that day. The coroner’s jury was fair when they ruled it an accident. But I figured you’d want to know more about the person who changed your life.”

That he’d thought of that—that he grasped how much I longed to know everything possible—made me like him. So did the fact that when I asked him why he’d really come, he looked steadily into my eyes and said, “I’d do anything for Jasper. Anything,” in a way I didn’t really understand, then. By the end of his visit I knew that although he’d enjoyed the quick fellowship of Mrs. Mackenzie’s boardinghouse, the drunken mock duels and rowdy card games that cut through the different languages and occasional jealousies, his life too had been changed by an accident. His friend Kondo, who had clipped a windmill while practicing before a crowd of gaping farmers, was dead when they pulled him from the plane.

“So I know,” Adrien said, “a little bit about how you feel.”

He dreamed about Kondo, he said. And about how, if Jasper’s family were different, he’d have taught Jasper to fly. After he left, I dreamed about Raney again. No one was hurt, no one was dead, Raney was wearing a blue-sprigged dress with wide sleeves, which as she walked calmly into the lake ballooned around her upper arms and caught the wind, keeping her afloat. She scudded across the water, one hand on her chest.

Through the winter Adrien kept visiting, finishing off the Amundsen with me and also telling me things about the flying school and making friends with Aunt Henrietta too. They went to some lectures; he showed her the machine he hoped to buy. She took him to search for fossils at the Glen. Just after Christmas, she arranged with my other teachers a schedule that would let me keep up until I could go back to school, and after that Adrien sometimes helped me study. I read everything I was supposed to and then, as my interests veered, other books that Adrien and Aunt Henrietta brought me.