Ezra stood, hesitating. The veins throbbed in his neck.

You can do it, Ezra, I thought, willing him to take one more step.

But he couldn’t. His fear held him back. He knew any more radiation exposure could be lethal. He’d taken such a high dose. Only a little more could kill him.

Ezra wanted to live. He wanted it too much to risk leaving the safety of the room. This room, which had been the death room to Gramp and to my mother, offered the only hope of life to Ezra.

Slowly Ezra turned and limped back to his bed. He threw the canes down with a clatter and collapsed, defeated, onto the quilt. He wouldn’t look at me again.

Outside in the biting dark, halfway up the road to Muncie’s house, bundled in my wool clothes, I scanned the night sky for shooting stars. At least the nuclear accident couldn’t meddle with this.

The fine white dust of a star chased across the sky over Ripley’s land.

The cry of coydogs on the ridge startled the clear, cold night. Caleb whined at my side.

With Tyrus on the loose and the threat of winter-hungry coyotes, I had plenty reason to worry about the sheep. “Ripley’s right,” I told Caleb. “We do need another guard dog.”

A dog to guard the sheep. It could be Ezra’s dog. I remembered the first night of Ezra’s stay with us, how I squatted in the hallway. The light from the bathroom stole over my shoulder to touch the curly-headed boy in the dying bed. I remembered his words: “I had a dog.” Maybe time had come for him to have a dog again.

I shivered outside in the frigid night, watching another meteor streak across the sky. I imagined Ezra bounding through the pastures, a Great Pyrenees at his side.

“Ezra’d get along great with a dog like that,” I told Caleb. “They have so much in common—they’re both stubborn. And it’s hard to say who has the bigger feet.”

That weekend Gran drove me in the truck up north, the back way, to Holland Farm. Mrs. Holland said they’d felt the effects of the Cookshire accident too. No radiation, but everything delivered to the area had to come from the north or the west. The government had shut the southern route down.

We bought the last male in the litter. Mrs. Holland led us out to the barn where we found him packed in with the sheep.

I held the fat, fuzzy mop of a puppy on my lap the whole way home. Over and over I stroked his little bearlike head. Playing with the droopy ears, I breathed in the rubber smell of his puppyness. I imagined how Ezra’d feel having a new dog. The puppy’s almond-shaped eyes reminded me of Ezra.

Mrs. Trent smiled and clapped her hands when she saw the puppy. “How wonderful.”

Ezra sat up in bed reading a book I’d borrowed for him. I had the puppy stashed under my sweater. It kept squirming.