Except he couldn’t. He was a twelve-year-old boy who couldn’t really do anything.

After a few miserable empty minutes, he saw something that he didn’t understand. The two men in overalls were heading back toward the car, carrying his sobbing sister between them. His father was walking alongside them, holding the clipboard in one hand and the suitcase in the other. As they got closer, the boy’s father hurried ahead. The boy heard the sound of the trunk opening and something heavy being thrown into it. Then he heard a thud as the trunk was slammed shut, and his father appeared by the open back door of the car, minus the suitcase and the clipboard. This made no sense to the boy; the clipboard belonged to the lunatic asylum—why would his father think he could make off with it as if it were his own? Stealing was as wrong as lying, the boy and his sister had always been taught. Had their father changed his mind about that?

The two men who weren’t his father shoved the boy’s sister back into the car. She was shaking as if an electric current were ripping through her, and wiping her face with her hands. Her father produced two envelopes from his jacket pocket and handed one to each of the men. Then he got into the car and the family set off for home.

“So,” said the father to his daughter, “you begged for another chance and now you’ve got one. Are you going to lie to me again?”

“No,” she said.

“Is that a solemn promise?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” said the father. “Because if you go back on your word, next time there’ll be no joking around. Next time it will be the real thing. Bardolph House is a hospice, not a lunatic asylum, but there are lunatic asylums, real ones, and plenty of them. Don’t think we wouldn’t go through with it just because we didn’t today.”

The boy, the brother, didn’t understand. Somehow, he mustered the courage to ask about the two men: who were they, if they weren’t real lunatic asylum workers? His father told him that they were friends who had agreed to help him out.

The boy hoped that his sister would stop lying after that, but she didn’t. She lied as much as she ever had. Mercifully, though, there were no more trips to lunatic asylums, and somehow, after that awful day, the closed-door games room tirades didn’t seem quite so frightening. They seemed normal. The boy’s mother stopped crying when they happened. Instead, she listened to the radio in the kitchen and got on with preparing the dinner or the breakfast. The boy started to listen to music, through headphones, and found that he was able to think about other things, even knowing that the yelling was going on in the background.