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nursing him back to health.
    They kept his wounds clean and handfed him antibiotics and morsels of fish and chicken. Glenn held a medicine dropper over his mouth until his tongue emerged and he’d take water one drop at a time. She’d sneak down into the basement with her blanket and pillows and lie by his side, running her hand over his soft fur until he began to purr and they both fell asleep.
    When he was strong enough to stand on his own, Glenn’s mom
    bought him a blue ceramic food dish and placed it just beyond his bed of rumpled towels. Each night she would move the bowl a little farther away: across the room, out the door, down the hall. It broke Glenn’s heart to watch him struggle for it, but she knew he was getting stronger each time he moved away from his bed and bent his long neck to eat on his own. Finally the bowl ended up in Glenn’s room, and once he found it, he rarely left her side. He slept with his nose pressed against her cheek and his paws kneading her chest, his deep purr surrounding them like another blanket.
    Once he had recovered, Glenn saw the name Gerard Manley
    Hopkins printed on the spine of a book on her mother’s nightstand and liked the way it sounded in her head, musical and precise.
    “You are Gerard Manley Hopkins,” she decreed, touching the tip of her finger to his small pink nose, as if she was knighting him.
    It was the morning of her sixth birthday.
    Ten years ago.
    Glenn tried to resist what came next, but the memories had the quality of water — the harder she pushed away, the stronger they rushed back.
    After Hopkins’s knighting, Mom had made Glenn’s favorite —
    mushroom lasagna and garlic bread with a salad made of greens she had pulled from their garden that morning. Glenn sat across from her parents at the kitchen table, wearing a new bright yellow dress and blue sneakers that didn’t match but were her favorite that week.
    Mom and Dad held hands under the table and kept up a steady chatter. Dad listened more than he talked, greedy for her mother’s every word.
    Mom wore blue. It perfectly set off her ink-dark hair and pale skin, which were so like Glenn’s own.
    “Daddy,” the younger Glenn said as they sat around the remains of her birthday dinner. “What did Gramma Kate and Grampa Joe do for you on your sixth birthday?”
    “Well,” Dad said. “I worked in the coal mines all day —”
    “Dad!”
    “— and then I was whipped soundly, given a bike, and sent to bed without supper.”
    “Mom, why does Dad have to be so silly?” Glenn said in her very serious six-year-old way.
    “I don’t think he can help it, dear. He’s what we adults call incorrigible.”
    “What did you do on your sixth birthday?”
    “I had a party,” Mom said brightly. “Just like yours.”
    “Mom, why don’t we ever see your mom and dad like we see
    Gramma Kate and Grampa Joe?”
    Mom glanced across the table at Dad. “Because they live very far away,” she said.
    “Will I ever go see them?”
    Her mother’s hand, spread out on the white napkin by her plate, tensed slightly, then relaxed again. “Maybe,” she said, retreating from her chair to get more salad from the kitchen. “Maybe one day.”
    Later that night, Mom lifted Glenn into her arms and glided up the stairs and down the hall, Hopkins following dutifully behind. Glenn dropped her head onto her mom’s shoulder and listened as she sang her familiar lullaby, a lilting song made up of nonsense words that rolled off her tongue.
    She slipped Glenn into her bed and then her face hung over
    Glenn’s, for one quiet moment, like a moon.
    “ Meera doe branagh , Glennora Morgan.”
    The strange words drifted down from her mother’s lips,
    whispered as light as falling snow.
    “What does it mean, Mommy?”
    Fingertips grazed Glenn’s cheek. “It means I love you. It means I’ll always love you.” She kissed Glenn softly on the forehead, then backed away. “No matter what.”
    She stepped into the bright