“Did you hit anything?”

“Oh, yes, dear. Yes. I don’t know what, but something that had some-I’d say some give to it. Do you understand what I mean? Oh, and I shouted too, some terrible things. The next thing I knew, I felt a great heavy weight on the hem of my skirt, and that was Turtle.”

“It took us twenty minutes to get her to turn loose,” Lou Ann said. Now she was holding on to Edna’s sleeve instead of her hem.

“Oh my dear, I feel terrible. If I had only thought to come in a little sooner.”

“It could have happened to anybody, Edna,” Lou Ann said. “You couldn’t have known what was going to happen, I might have done the exact same thing. You saved her, is what you did. Anybody else might have been scared to swing at him.”

Anybody else, I thought, might have seen he had a gun, or a knife.

Someone knocked at the door and we all jumped. It was the police, of course, a small man who showed his detective badge and a woman who said she was a social worker, both of them dressed in ordinary clothes. Edna told what there was of her story again. The social worker was a prim-looking strawberry blonde who was carrying two rag dolls with yarn hair, a boy and a pigtail-girl. She asked if I was the mother. I nodded, a dumb animal, not really a mother, and she took me into the hallway.

“Don’t you think a doctor should look at her?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. If we find evidence that she’s been molested we’ll need to talk with the child about it.”

“She won’t talk,” I said. “Not now. Maybe not ever.”

The social worker put her hand on my arm. “Children do recover from this kind of thing,” she said. “Eventually they want to talk about what’s happened to them.”

“No, you don’t understand. She may not talk again at all. Period.”

“I think you’ll find that your daughter can be a surprisingly resilient little person. But it’s very important that we let her say what she needs to say. Sometimes we use these dolls. They’re anatomically accurate,” she said, and showed me. They were. “A child generally doesn’t have the vocabulary to talk about these things, so we encourage her to play with these dolls and show us what has happened.”

“Excuse me,” I said, and went to the bathroom.

But Mrs. Parsons was in there with the broom. “A bird is in the house,” she repeated. “A song sparrow. It came down the chimney.”

I took the broom out of her hands and chased the bird off its perch above the medicine cabinet. It swooped through the doorway into the kitchen, where it knocked against the window above the sink with an alarming crack, and fell back on the counter.

“It’s dead!” Virgie cried, but it wasn’t. It stood up, hopped to a sheltered place between a mixing bowl and Lou Ann’s recipe file, and stood blinking. In the living room they were asking about medical records. I heard Lou Ann spelling out Dr. Pelinowsky’s name.

Virgie moved toward the bird slowly, crooning, with her hand stretched out in front of her. But it took off again full tilt before she could reach it. I batted it gently with the broom, heading it off from the living room full of policemen and anatomically accurate dolls, and it veered down the hallway toward the back porch. Snowboots, at least, didn’t seem to be anywhere around.

“Open the screen door,” I commanded Virgie. “It’s locked, you have to flip that little latch. Now hold it open.”

Slowly I moved in on the terrified bird, which was clinging sideways to the screen. You could see its little heart beating through the feathers. I had heard of birds having heart attacks from fright.

“Easy does it,” I said. “Easy, we’re not going to hurt you, we just want to set you free.”

The sparrow darted off the screen, made a loop back toward the hallway, then flew through the open screen door into the terrible night.

The medical examiner said that there was no evidence Turtle had been molested. She was shaken up, and there were finger-shaped bruises on her right shoulder, and that was all.

“All!” I said, over and over. “She’s just been scared practically back into the womb is all.” Turtle hadn’t spoken once in the days since the incident, and was back to her old ways. Now I knew a word for this condition: catatonic.

“She’ll snap out of it,” Lou Ann said.

“Why should she?” I wanted to know. “Would you? I’ve just spent about the last eight or nine months trying to convince her that nobody would hurt her again. Why should she believe me now?”

“You can’t promise a kid that. All you can promise is that you’ll take care of them the best you can, Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise, and you just hope for the best. And things work out, Taylor, they do. We all muddle through some way.”

This from Lou Ann, who viewed most of life’s activities as potential drownings, Windings, or asphyxiation; who believed in dream angels that predicted her son would die in the year 2000. Lou Ann who had once said to me: “There’s so many germs in the world it’s a wonder we’re not all dead already.”

I didn’t want to talk to her about it. And she was furious with me, anyway, saying that I had practically abandoned Turtle since that night. “Why didn’t you go to her and pick her up? Why did you just leave her there, with the police and all, chasing that dumb bird around for heaven’s sake? Chasing that bird like it was public enemy number one?”

“She was already good and attached to Edna,” I said.

“That’s the biggest bunch of baloney and you know it. She would have turned loose of Edna for you. The poor kid was looking around the whole time, trying to see where you’d gone.”

“I don’t know what for. What makes anybody think I can do anything for her?”

I couldn’t sleep nights. I went to work early and left late, even when Mattie kept telling me to go home. Lou Ann took off a week from Red Hot Mama’s, putting her new promotion at risk, just to stay home with Turtle. The three of them-she, Edna, and Virgie-would sit together on the front porch with the kids, making sure we all understood it was nobody’s fault.

And she stalked the neighborhood like a TV detective. “We’re going to catch this jerk,” she kept saying, and went knocking on every door that faced onto the park, insisting to skeptical housewives and elderly, hard-of-hearing ladies that they must have seen something or somebody suspicious. She called the police at least twice to try and get them to come take fingerprints off Edna’s cane, on the off-chance that she’d whacked him on the hand.

“I know it was probably some pervert that hangs out at that sick place by Mattie’s,” Lou Ann told me, meaning Fanny Heaven of course. “Those disgusting little movies they have, some of them with kids. Did you know that? Little girls! A guy at work told me. It had to have been somebody that saw those movies, don’t you think? Why else would it even pop into a person’s head?”

I told her I didn’t know.

“If you ask me,” Lou Ann said more than once, “that’s like showing a baby how to put beans in its ears. I’m asking you, where else would somebody get the idea to hurt a child?”

I couldn’t say. I sat on my bed for hours looking up words. Pedophilia. Perpetrator. Deviant. Maleficent. I checked books out of the library but there weren’t any answers in there either, just more words. At night I lay listening to noises outside, listening to Turtle breathe, thinking: she could have been killed. So easily she could be dead now.

After dinner one night Lou Ann came into my room while the kids were listening to their “Snow White” record in the living room. I’d skipped dinner; I wasn’t eating much these days. When I was young and growing a lot, and Mama couldn’t feed me enough, she used to say I had a hollow leg. Now I felt like I had a hollow everything. Nothing in the world could have filled that space.

Lou Ann knocked softly at the door and then walked in, balancing a bowl of chicken-noodle soup on a tray.