“Listen,” said Florence. They were driving around the city. Georgia was locked up in rehab near Medford, but Florence was showing Thea the places she would need to look next time: the public parks, a particular arch under a particular bridge, the empty houses, the old communes gone off the rails. “You can’t blame yourself, and you can’t blame Georgia. She’ll lie to you. I mean, obviously she’s already lied to you, you know that. But she will lie and she’ll steal. It’s not her. It’s the disease. It’s out of her control. Your job is to love her. You have pills in the house? She’ll steal them, and once she’s stolen drugs she’ll steal the next thing. That’s what I’ve learned. Once your kid has done the first thing he’d never do there’s nothing he won’t do. Sorry. This is the truth. Sweet Georgia. I’m sorry. I just love that girl, we all do. Sometimes I think the mistake I made was I was too easy on him, and then I remember what he was like when he came back from Cullen—sorry, Idaho, the place we sent him—and then I think that was the mistake, that’s what we couldn’t come back from. I never wanted to send him there. It was Loren. He hit me once. Orly, I mean, Orly hit me. I don’t think he ever remembered that he did that. In the ear. Thought he’d take it right off my head. You see this place? There’s a group of kids? Goes all the way back. I’ve missed you, Thea. I’m sorry this is what’s taken for you to call me. Nobody called me. Nobody. No, nobody. I had a kid everybody loved, and then he died, and where did that love go? Into outer space. Into other people’s kids. I hope you know, Thea, that I will love you forever.”

You could think a grackle was somebody you’d lost, or wronged, or owed a favor to, come back to settle accounts.

If Georgia, for instance, had not survived, Thea would have looked for evidence of her persistence everywhere. She would have kept everything, the board game called Life, the board game called Sorry!, the board game called Monopoly: Georgia’s existence. Chinese checkers, and wept over the missing marbles, the empty dimples in the metal board.

“You,” she might have said to a particular grackle. “Georgia. Is it?”

When Georgia got out of rehab, Thea took her to all her childhood favorite places: the ice cream parlor decorated like a nineteenth-century brothel, the mall skating rink, the walk-through heart at the science museum. Inside, you could hear it beat.