Then, always, a turn of the head so that one supernaturally clever eye could determine whether he knew what he was talking about.

When he was very small, he had to consider—if his mother wondered, perhaps he wasn’t well. But then he learned to answer quickly, “I’m all right.” Said with exasperation, until he learned that impatience was treated with castor oil.

He never cried as a child. He sensed it wasn’t worth it. The “I’m all right” was delivered with a flat demeanor. He learned how to vary “all right” with “well,” or a wise nod as if he were weighing many complex feelings, or, when he wanted to make her laugh, “adequate.”

When he was playing outside, he could feel her eyes upon him. He didn’t mind; the attention was flattering. When he climbed trees, he would hang upside down from a low branch. He took to waving fondly, even if she wasn’t there, as if he had an audience.

Emily was impressed, then baffled, then concerned by the progression of Leland’s “Why?”s. His questions evolved from “Why do we live in a lighthouse sometimes?” and “Why does the current change twice a day?” to, when he was about eleven, “Why are we alive?”

The first time he asked this was after dinner at his grandparents’ cottage, which was about a hundred yards from their own. He and his mother were walking home along the sandy pathway, and he blurted it out. She seized on her first thought: See that wave in the distance? We’re here to see how lovely it is. God wants us to see beauty and to make the lives of others better. And there’s a pleasure in responsibility.

For the next weeks, he asked it repeatedly, in different ways, in questions about ambition, about existence: Why was she a lighthouse keeper? Why not just stay in bed all day? Why do chores when nothing actually mattered, if you thought about it?

“You should go play,” she said in exasperation.

“But I’m plagued by feelings of unreality.” He wasn’t looking to get smacked; he was perfectly serious.

“Lee, you have a reason to exist.”

“What?”

“You have to trust me on that.”

The look on his face chilled her. He tried to look exuberant, but it was as if a bright shroud lay over a wounded animal. His serious eyes took on a melancholy bent that she recognized from long before, which frightened her and made her miss someone, and then they were back to being an eleven-year-old’s.