He looked thinner than Nate remembered, and his hair had been cut very short, but he had the same proud forehead. Unlike some of the people here, whose chins almost rested on their chest, he sat upright, with his face to the window.

Junie reached him first. “Daddy!” she cried. She placed her hand on his sleeve. Then on his cheek.

He turned very slowly toward her. “June bug,” he said. “Juniper girl.”

“I came to visit,” she said. “I brought Nate.” She stood next to his chair, waiting, like the way she’d stood when their mother had brought her to a department store in town one time to visit Santa.

“Junie,” he said again. Then, “Nathan.” He was smiling, and his face looked more like his old self than Nate had expected. Still, there was something different too, and not just that he was thinner. His eyes, which had always looked so intently at everything, had a blankness to them, like the water of the catchment pond. Flat and still and nothing underneath the surface but mud. Then he tilted his head as if he were trying to pick up some kind of vibrations in the air. There was a questioning look, like he was trying to find them, even though they were right in front of him.

In his pocket Nate fingered the photograph he’d taken the night before. All the hours of his drive, he’d imagined how he’d show it to his father as he explained the cloud chamber. But suddenly a wave poured over him, like grain spilling into the silo, of grief and pity and regret. Studying his dad’s face, he understood what nobody had told them all this time: His father was blind.

“I brought you a picture I made,” Junie was telling him. “It’s me on Bucky. I got to ride him!” She held the picture out. He didn’t take it.

“You’re going to have to describe your picture to me, Junie,” he told her. “My eyes don’t work anymore.”

He stretched out his arms, and she climbed on his lap. She rubbed her face against his cheek. “Not too scratchy,” she said. “You shaved.”

“I must’ve known you were coming. I wanted to make a good impression.”

Then she was crying. “I waited so long to see you. I kept wanting to see you, and they wouldn’t let us. I kept thinking you were coming back, and you never did.”

“I wanted to see you, too,” he said.

All this time Nate just stood there, watching his father and his sister.

“Nate built a cloud chamber,” Junie went on. “He was trying to win the science fair prize so we could come see you, but a girl got it instead, for a stupid project about making candy. Nate’s was really the best.”