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concentration, so she kept talking as she was used to doing. “Maybe it scared you when I said that?” He looked at the place over her shoulder where she believed he put his eyes when he was listening to what she said. “That must be it. That must have scared you a lot, I think. It’s good to be scared of cars, but remember nothing bad can ever happen when I am with you.”
    She thinks about those words now, and how patient she has had to be courting him out of his self-imposed absences, to join her in this world with all of its imagined and legitimate dangers. As the main office around her fills up with strangers, Cara prays that he hasn’t taken in whatever he’s just witnessed. That when she gets to him, she will find him confused by the attention, by the policemen at school, by everything so out of the ordinary when all he did was walk out to the woods at recess. She also knows that Margot is right—he has been changing recently. He has registered and gotten upset about unexpected things—another child on the playground getting a splinter, two children on the bus fighting over gum. Still, there’s a chance. Four years ago, when both of Cara’s parents died in a car accident, he came to the funeral, came to the wake, came everywhere with her because she couldn’t bear to part with him in the days that followed, but in that whole time, surrounded by tears and somber faces, he seemed unaffected. He loved his grandparents but, even so, never once asked where they were or what had happened. For a whole week she let him do whatever he wanted: dribble stones outside, push little pieces of paper through the opening of a soda can. She didn’t pull him to a table, didn’t line up the flash cards she’d made to build his vocabulary, magazine photographs pasted to colored index cards. She didn’t say once, to his body, rocking at her side, “Point to lettuce. Point to plate.” She wanted to wait, see what he would do, if the fact of his grandparents’ deaths had gotten through to him, and by all evidence it hadn’t. The night after the funeral, they ate their hot dogs in the silence that would always reign if she let it. They listened to a tape of Sesame Street songs. He had a bath. In bed, she read him the story of Christopher Robin leaving the wood. Did he understand this was about loss and saying good-bye, about love that continued even when you didn’t see the people again? No, she finally decided, hoping then it was a blessing, praying now it would still be true: he didn’t take in the terrible pain of the world, didn’t understand the finality of death.
    For some immeasurable time, she isn’t allowed to see Adam. He’s fine, she is told, he’s all right, there’s an EMT on the scene checking him out. Finally, a tall, surreally thin policeman leans into her chair: “Are you the mother?” he whispers, and she nods, though of course there must be another mother somewhere, the girl’s. “Follow me. And bring your things. We’ll need you to go to the station afterward.”
    She follows the officer outside, stands beside him as he points to an ambulance parked in the middle of the field where, two years ago, she brought Adam for a season of Saturday soccer, fifteen games in which he never touched the ball once. If she asked about soccer now, he would probably remember the oranges at halftime and the shin guards he always wore on his arms for the car ride home. Please, she prays, starting toward the ambulance. Let him be untouched by this. Let him remember this field, look around, and wonder where the oranges are.
    When she gets there, though, she knows before she climbs inside that it is too late.
    She has never seen him in this posture before, bent over like this, with his arms gripped to his sides. She races to him, bends down to get his face on her shoulder. “Adam. It’s okay. Mom’s