“Now, back to the car. We are going home.” Mommy held out her hand.

I made to pick Olivia up, but Mommy’s fingers were like a cuff about my wrist. “No,” she said. “That stays here.”

“Why?” I whispered. I thought of how cold and alone she would be, here in the dark, how the rain would wet her and rot her, how squirrels would chew her beautiful head.

“It is practice,” Mommy said. “You will thank me in the end. Everything in life is a rehearsal for loss. Only the smart people know it.”

She pulled me back through the forest toward the car. The world was a dark blur. I was crying so hard, my heart felt like it would burst in my chest.

“I want you to feel the power of it,” she said. “Of walking away from something you love. Doesn’t it make you feel strong?”

The spiny stars of the headlights drew closer and I heard the car door slam. My father smelled of what I thought was plum pudding and sweat. He held me tightly. “Where did you go?” he asked Mommy. “What’s going on? He’s crying.” Daddy turned my face this way and that, looking for hurt.

“No need for hysterics,” Mommy said with a little of the nurse. “We tried to find an owl. They nest round here. Then he dropped that cat key ring and we could not find it in the dark. Therefore, the waterworks.”

“Oh, kiddo,” said my father. “No big deal, huh?” His arms were no comfort.

I never asked for a kitty again. I told myself I didn’t want one anymore. If I loved her I might have to leave her in the woods. Or one day she’d die, which was almost the same thing.

So it was many years before it happened that Mommy began to prepare me for her departure. I understand her better, now. Now I’m a parent I know how afraid you get for your child. Sometimes when I think about Lauren I feel almost see-through with fear, like a pane of glass.

When we got home Mommy put me in the bath and gently checked me all over. She found a scratch on my calf where I leaked out red. She drew the flesh back together with two neat sutures from her kit. Breaking me, then mending me, over and over—that was my mother.

The next day Mommy set up the bird tables in the yard. She put up six wire feeders to attract the smaller birds. She hung them high from poles so the squirrels couldn’t steal. She put out cheese for the ground feeders, wooden hutches filled with grain, plastic tubes to dispense sunflower seeds, balls of fat dangling from string, a block of rock salt.