He bent over and saw at least a dozen of them crawling over his sneakers and around the folds in his socks, heading for his bare calves. By the time he got done jumping and smacking at his legs, the lizard was gone.

“So much for Artemis,” Jennifer said, still holding the piece of string.

“Sorry.”

She shrugged. “I don’t like magic, anyway. It’s silly. If we’re husband and wife, we’re an explorer team doing a study on Bigfoot.”

“Okay,” Frankie said.

“One’s been spotted right over there”—she pointed to a corner of the yard where a thatch of bamboo stood higher than the fence behind it—“and we have to go investigate the sighting.”

Frankie nodded. They started across the grass.

“The husband’s always rescuing the wife from quicksand,” Jennifer said.

“Okay.”

“And she’s his assistant.”

He nodded.

As they neared the bamboo, Jennifer put one of her bird-claw hands against Frankie’s chest and stepped ahead of him. She said, “You be the wife.”

For the next couple of weeks, Frankie continued to go to Mrs. Woodrow’s during the day. In the mornings his father would be at the dining room table, reading the paper. In the afternoons, when Frankie and his mother walked through the front door, he would be on the couch in front of the television. He stayed in his pajamas some days, and if he had a cowlick at breakfast, it would still be poking up at dinner.

One afternoon Frankie and his mother came home and the living room looked bigger. It took Frankie a moment to realize that all of the NASA pictures had been taken down from the walls. The nails were gone and the holes had been filled with white putty.

Frankie’s mother stood next to him holding her purse and looking at the walls. Then she walked out of the room. His father was standing at the sliding glass door in the dining room, staring out at the backyard. He was turning a book of matches in his hand.

“Where’d all the pictures go?” Frankie asked.

“Away,” his father told him.

“Where?”

“Just away.” He looked over his shoulder at Frankie. His chin was turning dark with stubble. “What do you say we go to the library tomorrow?”

“I’m supposed to go to Mrs. Woodrow’s house.”

“I know. But let’s go to the library. I have to look up some information. We have a project to do, you and me.”

“What kind of project?”

“The lawn,” his father said.