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with the angle of his jaw. Whenever he turned to speak she once again remembered the meandering path those same lips had traced across her bare skin only a few short hours ago.
    That intimate portion of her life, in particular, didn’t seem quite true. She felt the unreality most acutely each morning when she awakened beside him. Would she ever learn to stop holding her breath, waiting for the next bad thing to happen? Lately she had begun to feel a gradual easing, another few degrees of difference each day, but would it ever be enough? After wandering so long in the underworld after her sister’s death, the past year had felt like trying to claw her way back into the realm of the living. She had yet to face the fight for her niece’s good opinion, a struggle that hadn’t yet begun. Elizabeth refused to see her, wouldn’t even speak her name. You couldn’t blame the child for clinging to her father’s memory, refusing to accept the part he had played in her mother’s death. Cormac kept saying that Elizabeth would come around, but it hadn’t happened yet. And Nora refused to press. How could you ask a twelve-year-old to see such things?
    She glanced over at Joseph, nodding beside her. In some ways,he remained in a shadowy otherworld, bound by a tangled thicket of words without meaning. As she studied the delicate, translucent skin at his temples, the darting movement under his eyelids, she wished for even a fleeting glimpse of the images taking shape inside his head. Were a person’s dreams transformed when words slipped their meaning?
    They had spent a lot of time together in the back garden these past few months—she on her knees in the dirt, Joseph basking in a chair—on the days when the sun god deigned to show his face. After her own father, she’d taken to cultivating roses and had found restoration in tending to growing things. Cormac’s father, too, seemed to find a sense of calm in being surrounded by virescent life. The back garden had become an oasis for the two of them.
    In all the days they had spent together, she had yet to discern any sort of pattern in Joseph’s speech, or to crack the garbled code of his stroke-damaged brain. He could speak quite easily, and indeed often rambled on and on, but there seemed no logic to it—one day “fork” meant “tree”; the next day it meant another word entirely. That was the trouble—if there was a code, it was corrupt, the circuits faulty. Only his frustration level remained constant.
    Once in a great while, he would have a small breakthrough. Two days ago, she’d been standing at the kitchen sink doing the washing up after supper, looking out into the garden and absently singing under her breath the words of an old song that she and Tríona used to sing to pass the time on long car journeys:
     
    Up the airy mountain ,
    down the rushy glen ,
    We daren’t go a-hunting
    for fear of little men—
    She heard a noise and turned to find Joseph standing behind her. He’d looked agitated, his collar askew, white hair sticking straight up from the side of his head.
    “Can you do her angle?” he said, and opened his mouth. “Bowling over, to-to-to give it up. Get up the barking again.”
    Did he want her to keep singing or to stop?
    “The barking! Um, umma.” He took her by the hand and gestured to his mouth, to suggest something pouring out. “Do-do the hemming!”
    She began to sing once more, slowly drawing out the words—“Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen”—and watching as his lips began to move, following along.
    He joined in then, each word perfectly formed and clear: “We daren’t go a-hunting for fear of little men.”
    She pressed on: “Wee folk, good folk, trooping all together.”
    Joseph finished the line once more, on his own, in a scratchy but rather tuneful baritone: “Green jacket, red cap, and white owl’s feather!”
    He let her hand drop and shook his head. “Ah, God, a shinna what’s gone,” he said. And then,