N.B. Ask Jane for an extra week with Danny this summer and remind her that my son should call me Daddy, not that dumb-ass dentist. The boy is getting confused.

Lew watched Kane walk away, sidling along the edge of the institution and around the corner. How had that boy known he had killed his brother? What had he called it? Wah’Kon-Tah. Last breath of the dying god. It lives in the trees. Had he said that? That it lived in the trees? Kane was mad. Lewis-of-the-ville slugger. Stupid dummkopf. Something seemed to scratch in his throat. He reached to his nape but suddenly felt afraid to put his hand there. He could almost feel it, the pulpy flesh, sending its signals. Stupid. Forcing himself, he put his hand on the back of his neck. Nothing. He walked out into the grounds. The wind had built a little. He kept checking the back of his neck now, which felt raw and cold. He went to the big sycamore, alive with the wind. Suddenly something hit his face, fell to the ground. On the grass, its mouth pulsing open and shut, lay a hatchling, a cardinal perhaps. He lifted it, wet and helpless in his hand, and shuddered to see that one of its legs was a misshapen stump. All of a sudden he imagined the chick reaching up to him out of this semi-death, its head and beak becoming huge, and he dropped it. Power of helplessness, of death. Last breath of God. The sign. Kane said there would be a sign. Wah’Kon-Tah. The last breath of God. The life of death.

Mr. Tivot was taking Annie to visit Lew at Cedar Hills today. April now, it had been near nineteen months since Lew had gone in and she had last seen him, though she had written every few days. Dressed and ready, she packed some things she thought he might like: a fossil she was pretty sure was a shark’s tooth; a pile of funnies from the paper; a huge old liberty head penny, thick and brown as a Hershey bar; and a bag of candies. Her mom had helped her bake a little apple pie.

She trod quietly around her papa, who was reading The Jackson and Pisgah Herald in the living room. He hadn’t really responded when she told him she was going to see Lew. Other people thought it unnatural that she was in contact with the boy who, as far as the town was concerned, had tried to kill her father.

In the kitchen, her mom was wrapping the pie carelessly in wax paper. Annie put her arms around her waist. Her mom was still in her white bathrobe, which smelled of cigarettes, and which she had taken to wearing all day sometimes. At the church social Annie had heard Pearline Lungwitz call her Marilyn Monroe. Aaron told her this was an actress his brother had seen in a film called Love Nest wearing only a towel. Her mom had thick blond hair, a little longer than the fashion, stone-gray eyes, and big oval lips that opened sluggishly, as if not made for use. At times her mom’s whole face could seem like this—just for show—in the way that the wings of certain moths mimicked the face of an owl. Thinking this made Annie shiver, and she squeezed her mom harder.