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couldn’t speak.
    The sun came out suddenly from behind a cloud. Sophie held up her arms to it. And then Lalo asked what none of us had dared to say out loud.
    “What if,” Lalo said, looking at Sophie, “what if her mother never comes back?”
    Byrd studied Lalo for a moment, then looked out to sea as if there was something important out there. She whispered her answer.
    “What?” asked Lalo, leaning toward her.
    “She will, Lalo,” said Byrd. “She
will
come back.”

    It was late when Mama and Papa came home. Lalo and I had spent the afternoon trying to teach Sophie words.
Good-bye. Larkin. Lalo. Hands
. Byrd and Lalo were setting the table for supper. I sat on the porch, Sophie sleeping in my arms, when I saw them come up the path from town. They walked slowly up the grass, my father ahead of my mother. Sophie sighed in my lap. I put my arms around her tighter, watching. My mother’s face was set, my father’s sad.
    Sophie woke without crying and sat up, looking at me. Then she turned and saw them. She reached out to my father.
    She spoke, the word as clear as an autumn sky.
    “Hands,” she said.

chapter 6
    We could not keep Sophie a secret, a small child at our house. We tried inventing stories.
    “A niece?” suggested Papa. “A long-lost niece.”
    “A cousin,” said Mama. “A cousin’s baby, left for the winter.”
    “That sounds like hibernation,” said Papa.
    “Maybe a crown princess,” said Byrd with sarcasm, “dropped from a balloon.”
    So we stopped trying and told the truth. And Sophie became the island’s child, loved by everyone, fed by everyone, baby-sat by everyone, read to and carried about and sung to by all.
    We took her to Dr. Unfortunato, as Byrd called him, because of his wife who talked too much. His name was really Dr. Fortunato, and Sophie blew into his stethoscope and made him smile. He read the note from Sophie’s mother.
    He handed Mama back the note. He looked closely at her.
    “How are you with this?” he asked softly.
    “Fine,” said Mama. “Fine,” she said louder.
    Dr. Fortunato glanced at Papa quickly, then at Sophie.
    “Sophie is healthy,” he said. “Has she walked yet?”
    “Not by herself,” said Mama.
    “She climbs the furniture,” I said.
    “She dances on my feet, holding on,” said Papa.
    Dr. Fortunato smiled.
    “Call me when she does the soft shoe,” he said.

    Sophie liked carrots and didn’t like milk. Beets were for spitting. She hated baths, screaming so hard we had to shut the windows so no one wouldhear, but she loved to sit in the bay until her skin wrinkled, pouring water from one bucket to another. She napped with Byrd in the afternoons, and Byrd sang every song she knew to Sophie: lullabies, show tunes, hymns, folk songs, and once, in a loud and happy voice, something about a drunken sailor until Papa knocked on the window for her to stop.
    School began, and I went off the first day. No plaid dress.
    “How come?” I asked Mama.
    Mama saw my expression.
    “But, Lark, I thought you always hated those plaid dresses,” she said.
    “I did,” I said. “I do.”
    I smiled at Mama, but my thoughts startled me.
    But I wanted one anyway, Mama
.
    Sophie cried when I left. She sat in her pajamas, her arms stretched up to me, her lower lip jutted out.
    “La!” she cried mournfully.
    “La!” Sophie said, smiling, when Lalo came to walk to school with me.
    “I could stay home from school,” I said.
    “You’ll do no such thing,” said Mama, “She’ll learn that you come back.”
    At school the library had been freshly painted, the smell of paint mixing with the smell of old books. The shelves were dusted, the books neatly lined up as if daring us to take them down and read them. Ms. Minifred was slicked and clean and ready for us.
    “Good morning. Sit up straight, Lalo,” she said. “Slumping may stop the blood from going to your brain.”
    Lalo grinned. Under the library table was his new lunch box, black and shiny like