She nodded. He looked at her now and appeared to actually see her, to have come back into himself, jumping from image to image until he had arrived at what connected them. Annie had the dimmest sense that he had just done something heroic, struggling back to her through the world of this awful place.

“Where were the chiggers?” he said.

“All on her butt.”

He smiled. She thought he was reaching to his neck again, but he was just rubbing his nose.

She got off the bench and sat on the grass. “The Waggoners are still in our camp.”

“We’ll set traps for them.” He sat down next to her. “We’ll dig holes and cover them in leaves. I read how to make catapults, like the Romans. We could have one on the other side of the branch.”

“We could fire rotten eggs,” she said, “and cow pies.”

They both laughed. Annie lay down on her back, idly ripping at the grass.

Lew pulled out a couple of licorice twists from his goody bag, gave one to her, and lay down as well. The twists jutting from their mouths, they flung grass into the air and watched it drift above them.

“We’re going to build a fortress,” he said, “behind the pricker bushes, and the only way into it’s going to be a secret tunnel.”

Annie didn’t respond. She couldn’t speak. She was too happy.

Clyde sat in the small chair in front of the doctor’s desk, holding his fedora in his lap.

“So, Mr. Tivot,” Walthrop said, “how does your son seem to you?”

“Seems all right. I’m wondering when—”

Walthrop cut him off. “Your son was the perfect case.” He looked out the window, drumming his pen on the desk for a while before turning back. “Creativity at its source: in wrongness; in the lie.”

Clyde nodded as if someone had put a gun to his head and told him to nod.

“Original sin and a great imagination, Mr. Tivot. It’s all you need.”

“Sir?”

“For everything—everything: art, culture, religion.”

“I know Lew done a bad thing, but—”

“My son calls me by my first name, Mr. Tivot.”

“Sir?”

“What kind of man becomes a dentist?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“I understand your wife died.”

“Yes, sir.”

Walthrop nodded slowly but seemed agitated, staring right through Clyde. He switched tracks. “Must be nice to farm. Physical work. Tolstoy used to join the peasants sometimes, spend a day harvesting with a scythe. Said he was never happier. I understand that. I love the smell of farms. Real smells, not the damn carbolic of this place.”

“Doctor, when can my son come home?”

Again Walthrop went blank. After a moment, he murmured, “I feel close to Lewis. I have a son. I know it’s a strange thing to say, but he’s a very beautiful boy—Lewis, I mean. Perfectly beautiful. Doesn’t seem possible sometimes when you look at him.”

Leaning forward, Clyde put his hands on the doctor’s desk as if he were about to crawl across it to this man.