Trust is the same as loyalty, I said.

No, it’s not, he said.

Yes, it is, I said.

No, it’s not, he said. Then he said, I won’t betray you. I’ll even help you.

So I had to do the project without him.

The first visit the yarn was purple and the second visit the yarn was gray with flecks of emerald green, and by the third visit, when the yarn was yellow like a goldfinch, the death portal had begun to seal. I could taste Grandma Barlow’s pies, I could taste her pancakes, and the wizard had dropped the crystal ball and disappeared, and the crystal ball had shattered and inside it was my old brain back and my old brain was a mushroom it was a drum it was a fist that opened and closed.

LILY

I’ve stopped trying to defend myself. I won’t claim that I was a good parent, only a parent in love.

If I couldn’t kidnap Perley back, I could kidnap the pills. Instead of moving from bottle to hand to mouth to throat to gut to bloodstream to brain, now they moved from cheek to plastic egg to yarn ball, and then, when I smuggled them home, the pills moved deep into a hole in the ground, out in the woods, buried and forgotten, so that even I couldn’t find those small deposits of metal and chemical, sulfur and chalk.

When Perley told me to send, I almost scolded him. Oh lord, I thought. ElfQuest. Always ready to show me I’m not good enough, and now it’s because I can’t read minds. I almost told him, This isn’t a comic book, Perley. This is real life. But then I thought, Why not? We were the same body once. Why shouldn’t we be able to see inside each other? So I willed it. I wouldn’t let it not work. I wouldn’t let doubt in. Half by code, half by mind reading, Perley and I embarked on our great project. I sent to him, mama elf to baby elf. He received.

Each visitation day, as March turned to April and the maple sap ran in the trees and the hills churned toward spring and toward the ninety-day review, Perley and I sat side by side in Pariah Park, stitching and winding and talking, fingers flying, the caseworker watching jealously from the sidelines. She’d begun to bring her own handwork, a crocheted purse that she said she’d been working on for years. I didn’t offer her a word of encouragement. It was her job to stay cheerful, not mine.

Eventually, she began to sit farther away, so finally Perley and I could speak almost freely again, though Perley insisted that sending was an easier way to talk to each other.

One day he said, “Did you hear that?”

“Were you sending?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.