* * *
Ms. Gabby called on Monday at 11:20 in the morning, while Nora was standing in eight inches of water in Marlow Creek in chest waders, reading a staff gauge.
"Everything's fine," Ms. Gabby said first, which was what they had all learned to say first. "She's totally fine. I just wanted to give you a heads up about something she said during sharing time."
Nora leaned against the cold concrete of the culvert and closed her eyes. "Okay."
"So the theme was 'something special that happened this weekend,'" Ms. Gabby said. "And Lila stood up and told everybody that her papa came home on the train."
Nora's hand tightened on the phone.
"And then Mason said, you know, 'Your papa's dead,' because Mason is Mason, and Lila said—" Ms. Gabby paused, and Nora could hear her choosing. "She said, 'He came back with a different voice. He's being a different person so nobody gets scared.' And then she showed everybody a—I think it was some kind of coin?"
"Yes," said Nora. "It's a coin."
"And then Harper asked if her grandma could come back, too. So we talked about it. I used the language you and Ms. Okafor gave us. I just wanted you to know."
"Thank you," said Nora. "She—her uncle came. Her father's brother. They were identical twins."
There was a long silence. "Oh," said Ms. Gabby. "Oh, wow. That makes a lot more sense."
"Is he—is he going to be around?"
"No," said Nora. "I don't think so."
But she was wrong about that, and part of her knew it even as she hung up and stood there with the cold water pulling at her knees, because the night before, while she was washing the dinner dishes, she'd looked out the window over the sink and seen a figure standing at the bottom of Ferry Street, under the streetlight by the hardware store, looking up the hill toward her house. He had not come any closer. Then he had turned and walked away down toward the station, with his hands in the pockets of his canvas coat, the way Daniel used to walk when he was thinking about load-bearing walls.
* * *
Bea Okafor's office at the Willow Room was in a converted Victorian in Beacon, up a flight of stairs that creaked in three places. The walls were painted the green of the underside of leaves. There was a sand tray and a dollhouse and a shelf of picture books about dead goldfish and dead grandmothers and, more rarely, dead fathers. Lila was across the hall with an intern and a bin of magnetic tiles. Nora held a mug of tea she didn't want.
"An identical twin," said Bea. She had taken off her reading glasses and was holding them by one arm. "I've been doing this twenty-two years, and I will tell you honestly, Nora, that's a new one for me."
"Lucky me."