They took a ferry to the island of Ærø. In the old shipyard Leo made rope with a crank-operated machine, and, with the help of a blacksmith, a plain iron hook. The blacksmith was a lean man with a sad, rectilinear face and hair the color of clapboard. The black iron glowed orange when you put it in the forge, and when you hammered it orange sparks flew off and then you were left with something so black and solid you couldn’t imagine it had ever been otherwise.

They went to the Workhouse Museum, three maritime museums, the Danish Railway Museum. Of course Joanna missed her father, seeing his dullest passions alive in his grandson. Who else could love trains so much that they were still interesting in a museum, where they were robbed of their one power, movement? Not Joanna, but she could love somebody who did. She felt a useless pride in Leo’s peculiar enthusiasms; Leo’s pleasant father liked action movies and video games, like any American boy.

Joanna had arrived with three pieces of Danish: Taler du engelsk? (The answer was always yes, I do), tak!, and the words for excuse me, which she remembered because it sounded—she thought it sounded; she had a terrible ear—like unskilled. Unskilled! Taler du engelsk? Tak! Soon she picked up the vocabulary of ice cream—Aksel was right, vanilla ice cream in Denmark was hallucinogenically delicious—kugler, waffler, softice, flødebolle, though a month after they got home Joanna would wake up in the middle of the night wondering, Is the Danish word for thanks pronounced tock or tack? And which pronunciation had she used? The wrong one, she was sure.

Aksel’s watch was in her pocket. She’d put it in a Ziploc bag to keep it clean and hadn’t so much as wound it. It wasn’t hers to wind. She liked the weight of it about her person.

Did she still love Aksel? No, but the memory of him came in handy sometimes.

They found the Souvenir Museum the old-fashioned way: first one roadside sign, then another. The museum was in the grounds of a modest castle. Like Legoland, the name was full of promise. Souvenir: a memory you could buy. A memory you could plan to keep instead of being left with the rubble of what happened.

A teenage girl with a drowsy, dowsing head slid a pamphlet across the ticket desk, and then pointed to the door to the museum. Leo opened the pamphlet. The museum was made of six rooms. He was startled to see that the last one was called Forbidden Souvenirs.

A year ago Leo might have asked his mother what Forbidden Souvenirs meant. Now he was seized with a terrible, private fear that he didn’t want her to disturb or dispel. He read books about war; his mother didn’t. Soldiers took souvenirs: ears, teeth, shrunken heads, scalps.