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behind her, and she rolls her head on it. “You have a son.” She’s talking to me. “Let me tell you something. If you see drugs you take him to the hospital.” Each time she says “you” she points at me, right up near my collarbone. I am sure she was once a woman who would never have pointed. “You make themlock him in. If they won’t, you don’t leave. Oh, God. No wonder I’m in an institution.”
    â€œYou’re not, you’re in Martha House.” The nun glares across the thrashing woman at me.
    â€œYou make them. You don’t let them tell you, Go home. You tell them. Or you’ll never, never . . . you’ll be like me. I can’t read a book any more. I can’t pray the rosary! I can’t drive a car.” All together we drink, as if there has been a toast.
    â€œNever mind that. Why not tell them a bit about your son,” the growl-voice says calmly, with no sentiment at all. “He liked to read, didn’t he? He was good at drawing.” She’s setting up a known routine; she speaks as though the woman’s son, long dead, can show himself decently as a child.
    â€œThere was a fairy tale he liked,” the woman begins obediently, her forehead smoothing out with that look that goes with the repeated, the taken-out-and-unfolded, the engraved stories. “A little pig found a marble that turned him into a rock . . .”
    â€œ Sylvester and the Magic Pebble !” But I stop myself; this is no time for yelling out, “That’s not a fairy tale, everyone knows that book!” Instead I say quietly, “It was actually a donkey.”
    â€œAre you sure?” she says dreamily. “Well, this—donkey’s parents went out to look for him. They looked everywhere and years and years went by . . .”
    I know this story. I have read it to my son, regretting that it is not one of his favorites. It’s a book parents read aloud at night with tears in their eyes.
    Staring in front of me at the seatback, where there is a phone, I am lost for a minute in missing my son at bedtime, unmoved though he has always been by the boy turned into a rock and, worse, by the parents—who are somehow old in the illustrations—as they search and search. Unmoved by any of it. The despair of it. The hopeless decision the parents make one spring day to go on a picnic.
    Unmoved. It is good that he is so. A sign, a small sign, of strength. I say to myself, there’s a phone right here, I can call him.
    The woman’s son had another reaction altogether. “Everytime I would read it, he would hum . He couldn’t stand to hear it! You see? This was a boy they said was heartless. Heartless, they said, at the trial. He’d put his hands over his ears and hum the whole time the pig was a rock.”
    â€œAnd then he’s released!” I say. Uh-oh. The nun has a repertoire of black looks. She thinks I mean the son. The woman knows, though. Surely she remembers the ecstatic ending of this story. She must remember that. I remind her, I urge her on: “They spread the tablecloth on him! They find the pebble and put it on him by chance while he’s wishing!”
    â€œNever was he heartless,” she replies in a dry, tearless whisper.
    â€œNo, no,” the nun, who seems blessed with no skill but patting with her hand, concludes the matter with a last scowl at me.
    I can’t do anything with this anyway; I’ll have to start all over again in another direction when we get to Lourdes. The woman squeezes her eyes tightly shut when I thank her, and weakly waves me away as she lets her head fall on the nun’s shoulder.
    I switch off the recorder and lean back. There in the seatback in front of me—the sight of it filling me with an almost intolerable desire to wake my son up so that he can speak to me—is the phone.
    I didn’t want to think, on this trip. It’s as simple as