“Your mouse now, dear.” Hannah extended her hand, thumb and fore-finger locked down, and between them poked a small, whiskered face. “He goes with cheese, you see. And with the watch, because that’s time passing, you see. You can take him later for practice loving.”

“Practice …” Mildred didn’t reach for the mouse. But she said it again, “Practice,” and this time she understood.

“Is it all right if I give you more gifts? Some of them might have gone off, but you can cut those parts away.”

Mildred softened. “Oh,” she whispered. Her eyes went from Hannah to Charlie, as they had many times. Chaplin was slowly coming back into his body, his knees unlocked, and he flexed his arms, feeling blood returning into them. He understood what Mildred was trying to: when Hannah explained, it almost made sense. Or it made perfect sense, as long as you watched it through the tiniest, most arcane optical-glass eyepiece.

His mother petted the mouse. Her own pink tongue tip was sticking out. “No fuss, really,” Hannah said. Mildred felt for Chaplin’s hand. She pulled her coat closed with her other hand, and Chaplin understood what she was thinking.

“I’m sure he likes cheese,” Chaplin said, which was like tumbling down a hillside.

“I’m sure he does,” Mildred said. “Thank you.” She took the mouse in hand. “Do we have a cage for him, Charlie?”

He likes cheese was like stepping away from his eyepiece and taking on his mother’s kaleidoscope. And for Mildred, Thank you was Thank you. It doubled and redoubled on Chaplin, the feeling of it being three o’clock in the morning and everyone in the world around him asleep with smiles on their faces. If he tiptoed past a crib, would the baby be asleep, or looking back at him with its own anxious gaze?

Hannah was shading her eyes, head tilted back. “Do you own that man, too?”

“What man?”

“In the melon. The sky. The, the, the sausage.”

Rollie was still in the captive balloon, descending, uniformed men in a square formation below grabbing at the ropes and pulling him down.

“I don’t own him, but, yes, that’s my cameraman,” and Chaplin brightened to the idea of showing her the studio, which would take up time. But his mother made a small noise in the back of her throat, a hard swallow, and he remembered the sound from his childhood, like the shutters of a room fastening. “Mum? What is it?”

“That’s bad.” She put her hands across her face, palms out. The noise again, a click, the sound made in a nightmare, the frustrated cry of a child. “Zeppelin.”

“It’s not a zeppelin, Mum.”

But it was too late, she was now crying. She turned her face under her sleeve and hid her eyes, as if that would keep them from seeing her. “I don’t like the zeppelins.”