I looked at the three piles of weeds we’d collected, at the troubling inequality of them. I took some of my pile and added it to his, evening them in size. Shawna paused, a strangled weed in her right hand. She tossed it onto Gabriel’s heap, then added some more from hers in a moment of complicity.

“She thinks her flowers don’t grow because deer eat them. But I think the flowers don’t grow because they don’t want to look at her,” Shawna said. Her voice sharpened in mockery. “Oh, roses! Please come out! Tulips, where are you?”

Gabriel’s eyes crinkled at the corners. His tiny, pearly teeth shone as he laughed.

In that hour, even as we toiled, each of us reverted to our disparate origins. The deeper we dug, the closer we got to our true selves. We unearthed worms and beetles and a dozen other defenseless creatures. Grass stained our knees. The sun warmed our scalps. Thorny wildflowers pricked our fingers, and yet we did not bleed because, in that brilliant hour, we believed we were God’s children.

Chapter 32

My back ached from an hour of hunching over in the garden. I tossed and turned in bed but couldn’t find a comfortable position. Shawna and Gabriel would be off to school in the morning. I missed them already. More than anything, I didn’t want to fall asleep in a dark bedroom. But when Janet passed the room, she reached in and flicked the light off.

“Shawna?” I whispered.

“Yes?”

“You are not sleep?”

“No.”

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask her. I was afraid of questions, unsure if my asking some would end in more questions being asked of me.

“How long you are here?”

“You mean in this house?”

“Yes.”

“One year,” Shawna said, her voice resigned. “It is not a good place. But I haven’t been in a good place in a long time.”

This frightened me. What if it took Tilly a very long time to get better? Would they move me to some other place that was worse than this? Would Everett sit on the edge of my bed while I tried to sleep too?

Before I could ask any more, Shawna rolled over and turned her back to me. I listened to the quiet, trying to imagine where Janet and Everett were in the house and what they were doing. I could make out their voices coming from the kitchen.

I thought back to the church and understood that I’d lost myself in that stained-glass window because I was thinking of my mother. I’d wanted to feel what she’d felt when she had sat in an American church for the first time, watching color and light radiate over people looking for God. Had she prayed in church? Why hadn’t I asked her this?