“But we must take on what comes at us in life, or we are worthless worms,” said Sina.

Sina had decided opinions and liked things black-and-white. Old Tom was more apt to see the advantages of letting matters be gray. But I swear I remember this, coming up from the ocean, being held so that my eyes beheld the naked light of the sky and the eagles swooping and the flight of one lone heron. I was filled with a happiness so large that it seemed to have no boundaries from around me to it to the sky to this stretch of land and sea and field. I am home, I thought happily, I am as home as anyone in this earthly life can be. And Sina and Old Tom often wondered that I didn’t cry more or carry on, but who could be happier than to be growing in all that light and changing sky and life, and I was part of it.

I had dinner that very first night on their dining room table, propped up in the baby seat that Tom had bought, and I slept peacefully every night after. Sina said that the first few months of my life at their house she found herself talking to the walls quite a bit because she felt she needed to relate to someone the momentousness of what was going on, and Old Tom was always in the garden. And every night after dinner she settled down in the rocking chair on the second-floor landing, which has a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the sea. She rocked and rocked and gazed and gazed at the horizon, where the sea stopped and the sky began. She said she had often rocked there but it was different with a baby. It had a more grounded, more anchored weight to it and at the same time a kind of link to a great, nebulous future.

The first night as she rocked, Old Tom went out to the kitchen garden as he often did after dinner.

“You don’t mind, do you? Taking on a baby?” she called to him from the window.

“Would it matter if I did?” he called back over his shoulder.

“Probably not,” she said to herself. “At any rate, for all of us, Franny, for you and me and Old Tom, everything is now changed. But that is the whole of what life is. See the sun sinking over the edge of the sea? This day is done. This day will never come again. Everything has changed. Remind yourself of that every morning and every night, and then you won’t come to expect anything but what is. It’s expecting anything but what is that makes people unhappy.”

I don’t know if I heard her that first night, but as she gave that speech a fair bit at sundown, I heard it enough times afterward to have it memorized.

And then I grew up. At least to twelve, which seems plenty grown to me, and this was when Crying Alice made her entrance and, of course, that changed everything, too.