Brenda was letting a tarantula crawl on her arm. Ruth had not allowed this at first, but Charley had convinced her they were both unlikely to bite and not actually deadly poisonous. He'd looked it up in an ancient set of World Books in the school library.

“Are there ghosts here?” Nancy asked Allen.

Ruth watched Brenda's tarantula unfold its first set of legs, which stretched delicately forward and planted themselves, levered the crawling mass of the body forward. The creatures did not look at all efficient, Ruth thought, but they sure did cover country.

“There's nothing to be afraid of,” Allen said. “Most days the population of Berlin is entirely tarantulas.”

“Thomas Edison invented a machine that could call the dead,” Charley shouted. Nancy winced, covered her ears. “Or he tried to. It didn't work.”

“Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, not a dead guy phone,” Brenda said.

Ruth sighed. None of her children had made friends at school, but she didn't worry about the girls. She had shared not just a room but a bed with Sister when they were young, Mano joining them straight out of the crib. Ruth knew sister love was like a gas—it could lift the barometric pressure of the entire atmosphere if you needed it to.

“But if there are ghosts,” Allen said, “they're over there in the old hospital. The doctor was nothing but a Chicago stockyard butcher. Could be the ghosts of his lost patients haunt this spot, only they must be scared of tarantulas, since I don't see any here now.”

Brenda giggled, intertwined her fingers so that the tarantula could walk from one arm to the other. Nancy went wide-eyed, scooped a tarantula off the ground, held it between her body and the old hospital. Ruth clutched St. Christopher. Charley went back to tarantula-stalking, tracing their paths on a piece of lined binder paper. Sometimes he stopped and held the map he had created up to the sky, studying both intently.

“What are you looking for?” Allen asked.

“Patterns,” Charley said. “Trajectory matches.”

“Smart,” Allen said. “You should try it at night too, against the stars.”

Charley and Allen were like Sister, Ruth supposed, all of them seekers of faith, or magic, or whatever meaning could be found combining the two. Ruth dismissed the alien talk from the men in her life the same way she'd walked away from Catholicism, with just the tiniest nagging doubts that it all might, in fact, be true. Ruth imagined St. Christopher at the controls of a lenticular spaceship, heading for Orion's Belt. She imagined each star in the constellation a nosy ghost ancestor with strong opinions about her choices.

“What do you see?” she asked, kneeling down next to Charley.

“I haven't been looking long enough to know.”

She could prove nothing, disprove nothing. She decided then to stop doubting Charley, to stop worrying about how he did or did not fit into the world. What if a hand-drawn map of tarantulas skittering across the desert really could unlock some mystic secret of the cosmos? Navigation might be the boy's hobby now, but Ruth recognized its potential for practical application.