Fire glances at us and says in a sad voice, “Sometimes, my mom doesn’t think she needs her pills anymore—that she’s well now—or she can’t stand the side effects and she just . . . stops. Trust me,” Fire says in an old, old voice, “it’s not a good thing.”

I look at the clock.

“I have to go or Mama’s going to kill me.” I put the postcards and pill bottles back in my pack. My fingers touch the other plastic ziplock. Photos. Dang. Too late to look at them now.

“Let’s each think tonight about what we know and what to do next,” Karina says like the troop leader she is. “We’ll meet after school tomorrow and come up with a plan.” Like I said, her superpower.

Fire and I ride the elevator up. She and her mom live on the fourth floor. For once, I’m glad this elevator is so dang slow.

“I’m sorry about your mom,” I say. “That must be hard.”

She nods. “I know how important those pills are because I know what my mom’s like when she doesn’t take them.”

Fire’s a head shorter than me and a year younger, but right now, she seems a lot older.

I give her a sideways hug. “You may have figured out the most important clue yet.”

We reach the fourth floor. The doors slide open.

Fire raises her chin, the old glint back in her eyes. “Just call me Sherlock Holmes,” she cracks.

Watching her walk off down the hall with her shoulders thrown back, I think of a word Mr. Koehler taught us: resilient. It means being able to bounce back from something really bad and move ahead. That’s Fire, for sure. Now that I think about it, resilient would describe most of us kids in Hope House.

We have to be.

37

Questions

White coats come and go in and out of Jewel’s hospital room.

The people in white coats ask more questions.

“What year is it?”

The Year of Loss.

“Who is the president of the United States?”

Jewel refuses to say his name.

“What was your mother’s name before she married your father?”

What a silly question. It’s her own middle name.

“Can you count to one hundred by sevens?”

Who needs to count by sevens?

Why don’t they ask her something important, like, “What year did the hummingbirds come early and the dogwood bloom blood red?”

The year she was born.

“How many movements are there in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony?”

Four.

“Who wrote ‘Hope is a thing with feathers’?”

Her favorite poet.

“Where is Baby?” Jewel asks.

The nurse, the kind one with eyes the color of cornflowers, says to one of the white coats, “She keeps talking about her baby.”

They shake their heads.

Jewel did not know she had spoken this question out loud.