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chew it or go climbing Mount Sofa. But Abra showed no interest in those things; she was busy
constructing what looked like a Stonehenge made out of her plastic toddler blocks.
Lucy and Chetta were unloading the dishwasher when Abra began to scream.
“She sounded like she was dying,” Chetta said. “You know how scary that is, right?”
John nodded. He knew.
“Running doesn’t come naturally to me at my age, but I ran like Wilma Rudolph that day. Beat
Lucy to the living room by half a length. I was so convinced the kid was hurt that for a second or two I
actually saw blood. But she was okay. Physically, anyhow. She ran to me and threw her arms around
my legs. I picked her up. Lucy was with me by then, and we managed to get her soothed a little.
‘Wannie!’ she said. ‘Help Wannie, Momo! Wannie fall down!’ I didn’t know who Wannie was, but
Lucy did—Wanda Judkins, the lady across the street.”
“She’s Abra’s favorite neighbor,” David said, “because she makes cookies and usually brings one
over for Abra with her name written on it. Sometimes in raisins, sometimes in frosting. She’s a widow.
Lives alone.”
“So we went across,” Chetta resumed, “me in the lead and Lucy holding Abra. I knocked. No one
answered. ‘Wannie in the dinner room!’ Abra said. ‘Help Wannie, Momo! Help Wannie, Mama! She
hurted herself and blood is coming out!’
“The door was unlocked. We went in. First thing I smelled was burning cookies. Mrs. Judkins was
lying on the dining room floor next to a stepladder. The rag she’d been using to dust out the moldings
was still in her hand, and there was blood, all right—a puddle of it around her head in a kind of halo.
I thought she was finished—I couldn’t see her breathing—but Lucy found a pulse. The fall fractured
her skull, and there was a small brain-bleed, but she woke up the next day. She’ll be at Abra’s birthday
party. You can say hello to her, if you come.” She looked at Abra Stone’s pediatrician unflinchingly.
“The doctor at the ER said that if she’d lain there much longer, she would have either died or ended
up in a persistent vegetative state . . . far worse than death, in my humble opinion. Either way, the kid
saved her life.”
John tossed his pen on top of the legal pad. “I don’t know what to say.”
“There’s more,” Dave said, “but the other stuff’s hard to quantify. Maybe just because Lucy and I
have gotten used to it. The way, I guess, you’d get used to living with a kid who was born blind.
Except this is almost the opposite of that. I think we knew even before the 9/11 thing. I think we
knew there was something almost from the time we brought her home from the hospital. It’s like . . .”
He huffed out a breath and looked at the ceiling, as if for inspiration. Concetta squeezed his arm.
“Go on. At least he hasn’t called for the men with the butterfly nets yet.”
“Okay, it’s like there’s always a wind blowing through the house, only you can’t exactly feel it or
see what it’s doing. I keep thinking the curtains are going to billow and the pictures are going to fly
off the walls, but they never do. Other stuff does happen, though. Two or three times a week—
sometimes two or three times a day—the circuit breakers trip. We’ve had two different electricians
out, on four different occasions. They check the circuits and tell us everything is hunky-dory. Some
mornings we come downstairs and the cushions from the chairs and the sofa are on the floor. We tell
Abra to put her toys away before bed and unless she’s overtired and cranky, she’s very good about it.
But sometimes the toybox will be open the next morning and some of the toys will be back on the
floor. Usually the blocks. They’re her favorites.”
He paused for a moment, now looking at the eye chart on the far wall. John thought Concetta
would prod him to go on, but she kept silent.
“Okay, this is totally weird, but I swear to you it happened. One night when we turned on the TV,
The Simpsons were on every channel. Abra laughed like it was the biggest joke in the world. Lucy
freaked out. She said, ‘Abra Rafaella Stone, if you’re doing that, stop it right now!’ Lucy hardly ever