The girl, of course, is no longer a girl but a young woman, although it is easy for Kate to forget this. Her most vivid memories of her granddaughter are from when she was young. Kate would wait for her to get off the school bus at the end of their driveway. She was looking forward to school, at first. The summer before, when they would go to town for groceries, they would drive past the elementary school and she would say, “I’m going to go to the big school,” and it was as though she thought she was going to Disney World. On her first day, Kate took a photo of her as she waited for the bus, her hair in braids and her jeans rolled up at her ankles, her Dora the Explorer backpack and her lunch bag packed with pudding cups and a juice box, her feet shaking in her shoes with the excitement of what the day would bring.

“I made an art with pipe cleaners,” she announced as she got off the bus that first day. “And I met a friend named Emma!” The second day, it was, “I got picked last for gym class. But I got a goal in soccer and Ms. Smylie said I was really fast!” The third day, Kate could tell she had been crying. “Emma called me a dirty Indian. And when I told her I had a bath last night she just laughed at me.” The fourth day, she didn’t say anything at all about school – nor did she the next day, or the next week, or the next month, no matter how much Kate tried to get her to talk. By Christmas, she had built up a shell around her that no one could get through.

No person, anyway. The girl surrounded herself with pictures of horses – taped to her walls, adorning her scribblers, patched onto her backpack. She rescued squirrels from the backyard, half-dead things with mangy tails and rabid eyes; she started up a collection on Walter’s boats to protect the snapping turtles that came up from the Kam onto Victor Street in the spring to lay their eggs on higher ground. When she was in second grade she made her mother drive her to the humane society every weekend so she could walk the unwanted dogs; it was on her innocent, wide-eyed insistence that they adopted poor three-legged Bruno. Still, she begged her mother to take in more. “We have to save them!” she would plead, and every time Kate would be overwhelmed with the desire to save her instead.