“No. Wait. I don’t know about the phone.”

“It’s working. I called you from the city.”

“Yes. That must be it. I thought I heard it ring. But I thought it was part of a dream. I’ve been dreaming.”

He released the quilt and hid his hand; he was trying to sit up.

“Don’t. Don’t move,” she said.

“Annie?”

Had he only now recognized her?

“Do you remember Helen Sears?”

She thought he was going to tell her of the old times, of the Sears family who had lived a few miles away, of the fire started by old Ephraim Sears fifteen years ago when he threw a kerosene lamp at his wife, a woman who had abjured speech in favor of her hands with which she pummeled her husband, her children, her sisters, her own father while he had been alive. The house had burned to the ground. Annie remembered Uncle Greg’s stunned horror as he told her that no one had survived except the old woman and her daughter, Helen, forgetting for once that Annie was only a child and should not hear of such things. Smelling of smoke, his hands covered with soot, he’d spewed out the story in the downstairs hall, then tried, later, to retell it and soften it. But it had been too late. She’d sneaked to the still-smoking ruin the next day, walking there directly from school, wondering if old Ephraim’s bones were still somewhere among the charred wet boards. And there had been Helen’s young brother, burned alive too.

“Uncle Greg—”

“No, no, no.” He was abruptly cranky, scowling. “It’s Helen I want you to call. Not the hospital. She’s got a nursing home. That’s where I’ll go. I have this hernia. That’s all. It’s why I haven’t been able to move.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Not hungry.” He sighed terribly. His eyes closed. She put her hand on his head. His hair was wet.

She made her way back down the stairs. He was so wasted! How long had he gone without food? She lit a match. Out of the dense dark, the bronze lion seemed to shake his bronze mane as he reached a paw toward the waiting mouse. She saw the lines where her fingers had touched the lion through the dust. The phone was there as it had always been.

It was easy. The place was simply called the Sears Nursing Home. Miss Sears herself came directly to the phone. Yes, of course, she remembered Annie.

“Uncle Greg is terribly sick. I think he’s not eaten for days. The ceiling is nothing but holes, and the snow is melting right over his bed.”

“Can you bring him here?”

“I’m pretty sure he can’t walk. He says it’s a hernia. But he looks almost dead.”