Among them, the woman passed, oblivious to it all, leading the pups once more through what they surely must already have learned-the foolish pups who made them all stop and watch, such was their power. Almondine sat and watched them and then, somehow, the boy would be sitting beside her, arm across her withers. The pups had so little time inside them they barely stayed attached to the ground. As it had been with her, she supposed. And then she turned her head and looked and Edgar was missing all over again. Had he really been there? Had it only been some bit of time inside her?

The answer mattered more and more, even as the power in her to find him ebbed. They’d shaped each other under the heat of some more brilliant sun whose light had quietly passed from the world. The towering pines in the front yard knew it; they suffocated one night when an ocean mist drifted into the yard, though no one noticed but she. Three days she lay beneath them, mourning. The squirrels, respectful of nothing, ransacked the carcasses. The nights grew darker, the stars distracted. She slept beside his bed because, if nowhere else, he would return there. He had been tricking her-he had hidden so cleverly! What a reunion they would have when he stepped out of his hiding place, how they would laugh, what joy there would be! The greatest trick of all revealed by him, there all along and watching while she searched! All along! The thought was so startling she rose and panted and shook her head. So many places worthy of another look. But empty, all of them, and all extracting their penalty, impassive, blithe, unconcerned.

And then, midmorning of a day when the sky rang overhead, she reached a decision. She rose from her sleeping spot in the living room. In the kitchen, she set her long soft jaw on the woman’s leg and tried to make it clear she would have to look elsewhere. The woman stroked her absently, a hand familiar against her flanks and caressing behind her ears. Almondine was grateful for it. The door stood unlatched. She still had the strength to pull it open. She walked between the rows of trees on the long slope of the orchard and waited near the topmost tree.

Perhaps he traveled. Now she would, too.

From far away, she heard the traveler coming. For as long as she could remember, they’d passed her yard, acquaintances of the truck, exchangers of the empirical, the factual, the mathematical-traders in unknowable quantities. Longitudes and azimuths. Secants and triangulations. She had thought them intruders when she was young, but learned to pay no attention, her alarm foolish. They were benign, careening about for reasons of their own. Unstealthy, broad, and stupid, they were, but they saw a lot of the world.

It was coming up the far side of the hill; its cloud of dust filled the air between the trees. The glint of its frontpiece appeared. She was not scared. One must try new things. Inside, she held the image of him on that first morning, awake in his mother’s sleeping arms. She’d thought what had begun then would never end. Yet he’d been too long missing for things to be wholly right. Nothing knew of him in the yard. Nothing in the house. All of it forgetting, slowly, slowly, she could feel it, and one could last only so long separated from the essence.

A quest waited in those circumstances, always.

The traveler was almost there. If this one knew nothing, she would ask the next. And the next. One of them would know. She’d asked the truck her question, but with silence it professed ignorance. It had not carried him lately, though it would not deny it had carried him many times before. She had never thought to ask the other travelers until that morning. The idea had come to her in a whisper.

She stepped onto the sharp red gravel of the road. She was very nearly not there at all, so deeply was she inside her own mind. There was a time in her when he had fallen from an apple tree, a tree she’d just stepped away from. He’d landed with a thump on his back. A time in the winter when he’d piled the snow on her face until the world had gone white and she’d dug for his mittened hand. Inside her were countless mornings watching his eyes flutter open as he woke. Above all, she recalled the language the two of them had invented, a language in which everything important could be said. She did not know how to ask the traveler what she needed to ask, nor what form its reply might take. But it was upon her now, angry and rushed, and it wouldn’t be long before she knew the answer. A bloom of dust like a thundercloud chased it down the hill.

She stood broadside in the gravel and turned her head and asked her question.

Asked if it had seen her boy. Her essence. Her soul.

But if the traveler understood, it showed no sign.

Part V.POISON

THEY WALKED UP THROUGH THE MANTLE OF TREE SHADOW stretching across the western field. Ahead, the red siding of the barn glowed phosphorescent in the mulled sunset. A pair of does sprang over the fence on the north side of the field-two leaps each, nonchalant, long-sustained, falling earthward only as an afterthought-and crashed through the hazel and sumac. The air was still and hot and the hay rasped dryly at Edgar’s legs. Stalks of wild corn dotted the field, leaves frayed and bitten to the cane, and the Indian tobacco was brown and wilted from the heat. All of it brittle and rattling as if folded from sheets of cigarette paper.

By the time Edgar reached the rock pile, Essay had already coursed the yard, whipping the kennel dogs into a frenzy. He perched on a rock and listened. Equal parts of longing and dread washed through him, but the sound of the dogs pleased him the way a lullaby might please an old man. He picked out their voices one by one and named them. From where he sat, he could see only the roof of the house hovering darkly over the yard. He waited for some human figure to appear, but there was only the flash of Essay’s body, low and elongate, cutting through the grass as she made another round.

He stood and walked the rest of the way. The house was dark. The Impala sat parked in the grass. In the garden, he could see the green tract of cucumber and pumpkin vines and, far back by the woods, a half dozen sunflowers leaning bent-headed over it all. He peered through the living room windows hoping to see Almondine, knowing all the while that had she been home, she would already have found some way to bolt from the house.

When he entered the barn, the dogs braced their forepaws on their pen doors and greeted him with yodels and roars and howls. He went from pen to pen, letting them jump and claw his shirt, laughing at their mad dashes and play-bows and rolls. He saved Pout and Finch and Opal and Umbra for last. He knelt and mouthed their names into their ears and they washed his face with their tongues. When they had quieted, he found a coffee can and dished kibble into a pile for Essay. She started eating daintily, then leaned into it as if suddenly remembering food.

Two pups greeted him in the nursery-just two, from the litter of eight whelped before he left. They were weaned and fat, shaking their bellies and beating their tails. He squatted and scratched their chins.

What did they name you? Where are the others?

He walked to the workshop. He looked at the file cabinets and the books arranged atop them. The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language weighed so little in his hands. The scent of its pages like road dust. He leaned against the wall and thought of his grandfather and of Brooks’s never-ending admonitions, and he thought of Hachiko. Among the mishmash of correspondence he found the letter from Tokyo and withdrew the crumpled photograph he’d hidden there. He looked at Claude and Forte through the webwork of cracks in the emulsion, then slid it into his pocket.