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leather sofa and big chairs. I asked if I could stay, but she said it would be better if she talked to Sara alone, so I stood in the waiting room, trying to listen through the door. There was a radio playing soft rock, just loud enough that I couldn’t make out what they were saying. A sign taped to the radio read, “Please do not touch.”
    At the end of their session, Kim invited me in. Sara was cross-legged on the sofa with crayons and a pad of paper, drawing what looked like an ambulance.
    “Do we have to leave right this second?” she said. “I’m not done.”
    Kim suggested she finish her picture in the waiting room. After Sara was gone, I mentioned her having thought we might have caused the accident. I was hoping to get a sense of what she’d told Kim.
    “Actually,” Kim said, “she said she was afraid the police might blame you, even though it wasn’t your fault.”
    “Really? She never told me that.”
    “I think she’s still trying to sort it all out.” Kim put on a pair of green reading glasses and opened her appointment book to schedule Sara’s next session. “Seeing what she saw, trying to understand what dying is—it’s a lot for a six-year-old.”
    By the time we got home, there were more flowers at the tree, another skateboard, a poster with laminated photographs.
    “What about the gauze?” Sara said.
    I told her we’d bandage the tree again later, when the memorial was gone. She asked if I’d take her over for a look.
    “Just for a minute,” I said, not wanting to be there when the next person showed up with flowers.
    The workers had finished with the lawn and were now replacing damaged shrubs along Clarice’s driveway. They greeted us mostly in Spanish but made clear that it was okay to walk on the sod. Sara circled the tree. She looked at the photos. She picked up the teddy bear and hugged it.
    Then she got down on her knees, put her hands together, and began to pray.
    I was dumbstruck. I’d never seen her pray before. We didn’t go to church; we didn’t even say grace. The families of the kids in her class, the ones who were religious at all, were so low-key about it that you could hardly tell the Christians from the Jews from the Muslims.
    “Are you praying for the tree, or the boy?”
    She was moving her lips, but no sound was coming out. The workers were watching us. With nothing else to occupy myself, I glanced at the photos. That’s where I first learned Juwan’s name and saw what he really looked like. A happy kid. A goofy kid. Most of the shots were candids, he and his friends with skateboards, mugging for the camera. There was also a yearbook picture, a prom photo, a portrait of him in a band uniform holding a trumpet.
    I wondered if his parents had been there yet. That morning, as I was driving Sara to school, they’d probably been on their way to the morgue. I imagined a cold hallway, a smell like a high school biology lab, a Polaroid that looked just like their son but also nothing like him at all.
    “Dad?” Sara said. “Don’t you want to pray too?”
    A crowd was gathering in Clarice’s yard when we got home from the train station that night. Cars were parked up and down the block.
    “Must be some kind of vigil,” I said.
    Sara asked what a vigil was, and Liz said it’s when people stay up at night to remember someone.
    I suggested we go out for dinner again, to avoid the scene. “Maybe this’ll be over by the time we get back.”
    “No! I want to see,” Sara said.
    “I think that would be okay,” Liz said.
    I looked at her— Really? —and she looked right back— Yes, really. Since when do we hide things from her?
    Inside, the three of us stood at the window. I felt like a vulture, but also as though I couldn’t resist. There must have been fifty people out there, teenagers mostly. They were hugging each other, laying flowers at the tree, writing messages on the skateboards. Now and then you could hear the sounds of one of them crying.
    Off to