Once, before dinner, while she was shredding carrots with a knife she’d sharpened herself on a whetstone she’d conditioned herself, she declared, “You’d have to cling to the rock all night long, and I would have to find you.”

He was seven years old. He considered what his mother was saying. “Maybe you couldn’t find me.”

“I’d find you,” she said.

“You didn’t find the sailors from that frigate.”

She put down the knife. “They were stupid,” she said. She resumed her shredding. “And they weren’t my son.”

She introduced him to starfish and abalone, and how to pry them away from the rocks with a hunting knife, which he wasn’t allowed to touch. And here were hermit crabs and there were fiddler crabs and sea anemones (“If you put a finger in there, they will suck it in and it will never come out.” “Could you get it out?” “I could. But it would be very dangerous”) and sea urchins, the last of which he was allowed to take home if the spines were falling out, for that meant they were dead.

He grew up believing that the world was a place that invited his mother’s rescue. And between the ages of six and ten, he touched hermit crabs, put his finger in sea anemones, removed living urchins from their beds, and even stole the hunting knife from its hiding place in the broom closet.

The first time he was trapped in Timber Cove by high water, he was sure he was doomed, but was also curious whether his mother would somehow sense it, like a high whine only a dog could hear, and whether the station-house boat would appear on shore, with her in her uniform to scoop him up. He was surprised to see that, even though the waves were crashing against Serpent Rock, he could wade through them, and then he was on the other side, safe.

The next several times he trapped himself there, he had a great deal of time on his hands (for a child, a half hour spent waiting for the tide to rise might as well be six weeks). He speculated on how angry his mother would be. He could do her voice, rising, announcing his luck at having her for a mother.

He had never seen her row. So he populated the boat with aides and ensigns, and he did their voices, too, and he sat on the sand, rowing in place, giving himself stern orders that he dared not disobey, for he was going to rescue Sergeant Wheeler’s little boy, who was always in trouble.

No matter how often he put himself in harm’s way, Emily never needed to rescue him.

Here was the conversation Leland and his mother had most often:

“Lee? Lee!”

“Mom?”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, Mom.”