I started with Charlotte, singing her to sleep with Dashiell occasionally howling along, his subtle way of telling me to keep my day job. The princess was so taken with Dashiell she removed her crown and tried it on him. But I had to call a halt to her fun when she tried to secure it with bobby pins. I passed David’s door without knocking. I’d visit him later, with Homer. We visited the guy we’d seen carrying his shoe around. He laughed when Dashiell kissed him. He seemed to be an awfully nice man who’d simply lost his way as he got old.

Some of the old people seemed to get sweeter as they got more senile, going back to childhood and, in doing so, shedding all the burdens that come with being an adult. A few, like Cora and Dora, perhaps because they were a pair, stayed peppery. Still, what you saw in either case was pretty much what you got. Those with autism were infinitely more complex and unpredictable.

We stopped in on a man who appeared to be in his thirties. Or forties. He said his name was Richard. But then he asked if Dashiell’s name was Richard. I thought of telling him it wasn’t, but didn’t bother. By then, Dashiell had hopped up on the bed, and for a while both Richards, cheek to cheek, communed. When I told him we had to go, he reached for my hand and patted it. I promised I’d come by again as soon as I could.

Dora wanted to see the dog, but Cora didn’t.

“I have gas,” she told me.

More than I needed to know.

Homer was in Venus’s office, the door propped open with a wedge. My guess was, he’d saved the job he dreaded for last, and he didn’t want to be in there alone with the door closed. For a moment he didn’t hear me over the sound of the vacuum cleaner. When he noticed me, he looked startled, just staring at me, the vacuum still going. Then he reached under the handle and shut it off.

“How’d you get stuck with this job?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Who else was going to do it? Anyways, couldn’t be done before, while Dr. K. was talking to the police. Couldn’t be done until they all left.”

“Did the stain come out?” I asked. Some kind of white foam was covering where the blood had been.

Homer shook his head. “I doubt it’ll ever come all the way clean,” he said. “I scrubbed it three times over. I been in here an hour. It’s all I’ve been doing, that and the vacuuming. Got to vacuum up that foam, then we’ll see.”

He turned the vacuum back on and ran it over the spot where Venus had fallen, shaking his head when he was finished.

“It’s still wet, but a rug this light, it’s going to show. Dr. K. won’t want that, won’t want the kids to see that. You never know what they understand.”

“Will they replace the rug?” I asked him.

“For now, at least, I thought I’d move the desk. If it’s just a couple of feet over, it’ll cover the spot nicely.”

“Good idea,” I said. “Let me help you.”

“Went straight down, right near it, I guess,” he said, looking at the desk.

I looked at the desk, too.

“If she’d been over there when she fainted, she’da been in the clear,” he said, looking at the space between the desk and the shelves. Another wishful thinker.

“Have you seen her, Rachel?”

“It’s not good,” I told him. “She hasn’t woken up.”

He seemed not to hear me, reaching out and putting his hands under the lip of the desktop.

“We’ll walk it back,” he said, “until it covers the stain. I want everything just so for when she gets back here. On three,” he said. Then he counted.

When the desk was in place, he noticed the books lying down. Now he was looking for the bookend, bending to look under the desk, see if in all the excitement it had gotten knocked onto the floor, shaking his head when he stood up. Then he stepped over to the bookshelves and took a bookend that was there, a brass sailboat. He laid down the last few books there to hold the rest, and carefully propped up Venus’s reference books and wedged them in place with the bookend.

“That’s better,” he said, straightening the blotter, moving the leather cup that held Venus’s pens an inch back. “Now what’s this?”

We both peered over the desk at the dark spot that had been hidden by the out-of-place blotter. Homer took a cloth from his back pocket and spit on it. When he rubbed the spot, the stain vanished.

“That’s better.”

I reached for the cloth and turned it over, and we both stared at it, brownish red where it had cleaned the surface of Venus’s desk. Homer had a look of panic on his face.

“The paramedic,” I said. “He was holding a compress on Venus’s head, and when he changed it—”

“We ought to put some flowers here,” he said. “She likes that. Likes it cheerful for them. They all come here, you know, just to be near her.”

He went back to the shelves, where there was an empty vase, and stood that on the other end of the desk.

I wasn’t thinking about flowers. I was wondering where the missing bookend had gone.

“I’ll go out into the garden and cut her some greens,” he said. “She hangs their pictures up on her door, too, everything to make them feel good. I wouldn’t want for her to come back and have the room looking bad.”

“Let me, okay?”

I walked around the desk and opened a couple of drawers, looking for a pair of scissors.

“I’ll get the polish,” he said, looking over at the dull spot where the blood had been. “I’ll make her desk shine.”

Dashiell followed me to the garden door, and I noticed no one had remembered to turn on the lights. The lights would attract insects, so I left them off, unlocking the door and letting Dashiell out first. There was a moon, and the pearly gray light it cast into the garden was sufficient for us to see.

As soon as he was outside, Dashiell’s tail began to beat so hard that every few times it made a complete circle. It wasn’t just that he was out, which for a dog, except when it’s raining, is always preferable to being in. It was more than that.

He headed right for the back of the garden, to the southwest corner. Not knowing why, I followed him to find out.

It was Jackson, not stretching skyward and being a tree. He was folded into himself, looking more like a stone, looking unbelievably small for such a tall man. Sitting on the ground, knees bent, head bowed so that I couldn’t see his face, arms limp at his sides, his hands encrusted with dirt, lying palms-up on the bricks that covered the garden floor, he was immobile, not even looking up when Dashiell wedged his big head next to his face and began to lick his cheek.

I crouched in front of him, putting the scissors down on the brick ledge.

“Jackson?”

There was no reply.

When I reached forward and lifted his chin, I saw that he was crying.

I leaned forward onto my knees and put my arms around him, and Jackson let me hold him, arms still at his side, his head leaning on my shoulder. I rocked him gently for the longest time. When I pulled back to see if he’d lift his head and look at me, I noticed that Dashiell was no longer there.

It was the noise of his tags that made me look. And another sound—his nails scraping against something hard. Dash was at the center of the back wall, in a space between two round pots of flowers, digging at the bricks.

“Leave it,” I told him, but he didn’t seem to hear me. I let go of Jackson and went over to Dashiell to stop him.

Looking down, I saw that the dirt all around where he was trying unsuccessfully to dig up the bricks was darker and looser than the compact, sandy-looking dirt a foot or so away. I crouched and quite easily lifted up a brick, then a second one, setting them off to the side.

Dashiell pushed his way in now that there was an opening and dug some more, the dirt flying backward as he worked. Two more bricks came loose. With that, he dug at the dirt, and I could see his nostrils moving, taking in the scents coming up from the ground.

“Back,” I told him.

This time he paid lip service to my command. He took the smallest possible step back. His forehead squinched with concern, his head hanging over the hole, Dashiell was pressed against my side, his eyes on the ground.

I brushed away the dirt with my hands and felt something hard and smooth in the hole, grasping it with my fingers and pulling it up. It was Venus’s missing bookend, and even in the moonlight I could see two things: the brownish red dried blood on its base, and the green paint at the top.

When I turned back to where Jackson had been, he wasn’t there. Concerned, I stood, bumping into him. He had been standing right behind me. I hadn’t heard him, but there he was, practically on top of me and tall as a tree.

With one hand, he was reaching out for what I was holding.

In the other, he held the scissors.