She was ill the day sites were chosen, and later tried to convince the professor to change her topic. But the professor told her it was only one small paper and it would be good for her to branch out early in her career. Perhaps, he said, she would find out her interests lay beyond corpses and coffins. She had gritted her teeth and said nothing. She was a second-year graduate student but had been researching for years—books on the burial rituals of the Ewe of the Volta Region and the Ga of Accra—and she had spent the previous summer at the University of Ghana at Legon, studying and doing preliminary research alongside the program director. She was twenty-seven, not one of these fresh-out-of-college kids with notions of discovering the missing link. But she accepted the assignment and told herself to think of it as a kind of test; if she could put up with fifteen hours of the alphabet song, she would prove herself worthy of higher pursuits. So she sat in the corner with the coats and the lunchboxes thinking Tyler just one of the many towheaded boys who kicked their sneakers against the table legs and peeled the paper wrappers from his crayons. But on her second day, Tyler approached her after lunch and said, “This classroom is twenty-four feet by twenty-five feet and three inches.” He stood so close, he was almost on top of her shoes, and he looked at the ground and fumbled with the measuring tape in his hands.

“And the ceiling has seventy-four tiles on it,” she said. He froze and then looked up and at her right shoulder.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“I counted,” she said. He didn’t say anything else, just stood there pursing his lips and pulling on his zipper until Mrs. Grayson told him to take his seat. But after that, he began seeking her out. The bell would ring for recess and he would hurry to her chair and spout distances as if they were observations on the weather. Mrs. Grayson would try to talk him into going to the playground and, when that didn’t work, try to physically pull him away, but the truth was, Josie didn’t mind. “It’s okay,” she finally said. “Let him stay.” There was something calming about the emotionless hum of his numbers. She would sit in her chair and go through her notes and listen to fact after fact play reliably in the background.

This went on for a week until one morning Tyler dragged his mother into the classroom. Mary was pale and dark-eyed with a halo of black curls, and although she looked nothing like her own mother, Josie was struck by their similarity—the vast amount of space they seemed to occupy despite their small frames.

“So you’re the infamous Josie,” Mary said. “I’m Tyler’s mother …”