Not a tear. A hole. Someone had cut it with scissors, carefully, an oval about the size of a quarter, right where a third child's head and shoulders should have been. You could see the rest of him. Short pants. Knobby knees. Two hands holding something, a ball maybe. But where his face should have been, there was nothing, and through the hole Carter could see the old woman's blue dress.
"Whoa," he said. "What happened to that one?"
She put it face down in the box. Not fast. Just firmly. "Somebody had a pair of scissors," she said, "and a bad temper."
He knew he should leave it alone. He didn't. "Who was it? The kid?"
"Just a boy," she said. "A long time ago." And then she smiled at him, with her mouth only, and said, "You didn't tell me your name. I can't keep calling you 'the young man who saved my life's work.' It's too long."
"Carter," he said.
She went perfectly still.
It was like the storm had come back inside the shelter, but silently. She didn't move. She didn't blink. The handkerchief stopped halfway to a photograph and stayed there. He watched her face do something he didn't have a word for at eleven. Later, much later, he would think it was like watching somebody hear a song on the radio that had been played at a funeral.
Then she made a sound. A small, sharp intake of breath, like she had touched a hot pan.
"Carter," she said.
"Yes ma'am."
"Carter." Her hands had started moving again, but not dabbing now. Digging. She was going through the shoebox fast, faster than before, flipping past the hard hats and the ponies and the Easters, her fingers clumsy, a photograph falling to the wet floor of the shelter and her not even noticing. He picked it up for her. She didn't notice that either.
"Ma'am?"
"Carter," she said again, and found what she was looking for, and pulled it out, and held it up between them in the gray rain light. "Carter? Look at this."
It was a boy.