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its usual tangle, she was wearing one of her mother's pink sweaters over lint-balled red leggings. Her wide belt and turquoise beads completed the ensemble.
    “Oh, it's the young lady who lives in the playhouse,” he said. With his mind on Dianne and Julia, he felt lousy for forgetting about Amy.
    “You saw me?” she asked, breaking into smiles.
    “With those beautiful green eyes looking out the window-how could I miss?”
    “I was hiding,” she said. “Sick brats were pounding at my door, but I put spells on them and sent them back to their mamas. What do they all have?”
    “Never mind that,” Alan said. “What brings you to my office today?”
    “I like that little house,” she said, turning her back to stare at the black-cat clock, its tail ticking back and forth each second. “I like it a lot.”
    “I'll have to tell the lady who made it,” he said.
    Amy nodded. She moved from the clock to the Wall. Scanning the gallery, she found her pictures inthe pack. Last year's school photo, one from the year before, Amy at Jetty Beach, Amy sitting on her front steps. She had given him all of them.
    “Are there any other kids with four pictures here?”
    “Only you.”
    “No one else has more?”
    “No,” Alan said.
    Wheeling around, she bent down to read the papers on his desk. Alan heard her breathing hard, and she smelled dusty, as if she hadn't taken a shower or washed her hair in a while. Her forearms and hands were already summer-tan, and she had crescent moons of black dirt under her fingernails.
    “Julia Robbins …” Amy read upside down. Gently Alan slid the pages of Julia's chart under a pile of medical journals. He knew that Amy was jealous of his other patients. She was one of his neediest cases. Alan had the compulsion to help children who were hurting, but he knew some things couldn't be cured.
    Amy came from a lost home. Her mother was sinking in depression, just as Alan's mother had drowned in drink thirty years earlier. She didn't hit Amy or give him any clear cause to contact Marla Arden, Amy's caseworker. But the state had gotten calls from neighbors. There were reports of Amy missing school, the mother fighting with her boyfriend, doors slamming, and people shouting. They had an open file on Amy. But Alan knew the terrible tightrope a child walked, loving a mother in trouble. They were always one step from falling.
    Amy had latched on to Alan. From her first time in his office, she had loved him all out. She would clutch him like a tree monkey. His nurse would have to pry her off. She would cry leaving his office instead of coming in. Her mother slept all day to killthe pain of losing her husband, just as Alan's mother had drunk to survive the death of his older brother, Neil.
    “Come on,” he said to Amy. “I'll drive you home.”
    She shrugged.
    Alan knew the cycles of grief. They spun all around him, taking people far away from the ones they were meant to love. His mother, Amy's mother, Dianne, and Julia, even his brother Tim. Alan wanted to save them all. He wanted to heal everyone, fix entire families. He wished for Julia to live through her teens. He wanted Dianne to meet Amy because he believed they could help each other. People needed connection just to survive.
    “I'll drive you,” he said again.
    “You don't have to,” Amy said, starting to smile.
    “I know,” he said. “But I want to.” Doctors were like parents; they weren't supposed to have favorites, but they did. It was just the way life was.
    Amy worried that someday Dr. McIntosh would stop her from coming to his office. She didn't need to be there: She was as healthy as a horse, her fourth favorite animal following dolphins, cats, and green turtles.
    “I only got two spelling words wrong today,” she said.
    “Only two?” he asked. “Which ones?” Amy frowned. She had wanted him to congratulate her: She had never gotten so many right before.
“Judge
and
delightful,”
she said.
    “How'd you