The house was big, brick, lots of bedrooms and a huge kitchen with a wide windowsill over the sink. Lined up on the sill was a parade of little white ceramic animals: horses and elephants and cows. My very favorite was the polar bear. I love polar bears. They adopt orphan cubs.

A couple of months after I went to live there, the mom got home from shopping one day and I helped her unload the groceries. I pulled out a cellophane-wrapped box of Red Rose tea.

“Oooh,” she said. “Let’s see.” She tore off the wrap, opened the box, and rummaged through the tidy rows of tea bags to pull out one of the ceramic animals. “Giraffe.” She smiled, triumphant, and put it on the sill with its friends.

Then she picked up the Red Rose box, an entire brand-new package of perfectly good tea bags, and tossed the whole thing in the garbage.

“Muiriel, fold up these grocery bags, will you?” She turned to organize the produce drawer.

I watched her do this every week. If she got an animal that was already on the sill, it wound up in the trash along with the tea. Poor little white hippos and tigers and pigs, helpless among the coffee grounds and orange rinds. It made my stomach hurt.

I started purposely hanging around on shopping days to help her unload the bags and then waited for her to leave the kitchen so I could rescue the tea and the wayward animals from the trash. I put them in clean Ziploc bags and surreptitiously dropped them into the donation bins at the church each Sunday.

I got home late from school once, a dark and rainy afternoon, and when I went to toss a banana peel in the trash, there were more tea bags, dumped loose and ruined in a pile of half-eaten breakfast scraps, and in the middle of the mess was a discarded polar bear.

I wiped him clean, hid him safely in the pillowcase, and dialed Joellen’s number.

Chapter Five

I WOKE ALONE THAT FIRST MORNING in Francine’s house after nine hours of unusually dreamless, sound sleep and found the sharp edge of the hopeless impossibility a little dulled. Maybe anxiety had exhausted my brain and body enough that they were forced to shut down for a while? And despite the lonely room, holy cats was it quiet in Francine’s fiveish-acre wood. No middle-of-the-night emergencies or kids arriving, only me and the night wind and ship bells and the bats. Some completed REM cycles. It was disorienting. All that day I walked the island, ate some stuff, had polite but brief conversations with Francine, and then slept soundly again. And again. I clung to the renewed strength and hope the sleep was offering, resisted calling Joellen, investigated the Salishwood situation, and two days later I had an interview.