Or tries to pray, but no words come. When she was eight her Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Morgan, said that if she prayed she’d feel Jesus lay his hand on her forehead in bed at night. And so she did, hoping it might keep her safe, but from what she wasn’t sure.

But Melissa is now fourteen, Mrs. Morgan is dead, and Jesus is too, crucified on the bloody cross.

Melissa prays anyway. What else can she do? Every night she prays. “Jesus Jesus, show yourself.” She sings it, over and over, under her breath. Each night she waits, but he doesn’t return. Or maybe he does only after she’s sleeping. The door opens, creaking, in her dreams. At least she thinks she must be dreaming.

“Jesus, Jesus,” she sings in a whisper as friends pass, biking home from school. They wave once, and are gone. It doesn’t matter. Lily’s birth didn’t surprise them. Her devotion does. They don’t understand, though how can she blame them? She doesn’t understand herself why, for eighteen months, she’s hovered like a moth drawn to Lily’s clear bright flame. Her crib is next to Melissa’s bed. Melissa insisted. She needs to see Lily’s face first thing every morning. Lily, somehow, belongs to her.

Before Lily, Melissa hugged trees. The white birch, bark soft as skin, was Melissa’s favorite. Ear pressed to the bark, she heard the tree whisper, “I am here. Always. You are not alone.” For if Lily is a star, Melissa’s mother is the moon. Untouchable. And if her mother is the moon, her father is the planet Mars, fierce and flaming. A businessman, he travels, and when not traveling, orbits through the house day and night from room to room.

For thirteen years they were a trinity, a word Melissa knows from Sunday School. Father, Mother, little girl until she’s twelve and her period comes. The Curse, her mother calls it. Her mother is right. It is a curse. She’s a woman now and wishes she weren’t.

When Lily arrived, glad was too small a word for what Melissa felt. She spent hours sitting beside her, listening to her feathered breathing. She studied her face, the skin like silk, the rosebud mouth, searching for clues. Whose was she really? She held Lily’s ear to hers, listening as if to a shell, hoping to hear whatever secrets were hidden inside.

They reach the park, where Melissa unbuckles Lily and lifts her onto the back of the life-size iron deer that stands beneath the copper beech. She swings up behind her. Holding Lily tight, she tells her how she used to ride through afternoons of lemon light and winter days of cut-glass blue. “Sometimes,” she whispers into Lily’s ear, “I felt the deer rise, and I went soaring where no one could find me.”

Melissa’s breath tickles her ear and Lily laughs, but Lily is always laughing. She is the happiest of babies. And though Melissa knows Lily can’t understand, it helps to say out loud what she’s told no one. There is so much she hasn’t told, but it’s hard to know what’s real. Sometimes she thinks she must be dreaming, or someone else is dreaming her, that she isn’t real either.

Grass shivers in a gentle breeze, and Melissa yearns to feel the lifting with Lily anchored in her arms. Together, the deer will carry them over the ocean to white-capped mountains in Peru where hidden caves await them. The caves are real, Melissa’s seen photographs in the National Geographic; one showed a girl exactly her age, an Aztec princess, who appeared to be sleeping though she’d been dead two thousand years, buried deep in the secret dark. “You’ll be safe there,” says Melissa, though Lily’s too young to understand what Melissa can’t explain, not even to herself.

Holding Lily, she slides down from the deer’s back, slow and smooth like water from rock, and strapping her into the stroller again, pushes Lily up the hill to the library. She sees Juneau sitting on the stone bench in front of the building, the ground littered with the prickly balls of chestnut burrs. She sits as if waiting just for them, blue sneakers set apart, planted solid. Rooted. She sits in silence. Her hair is gray, her eyes a liquid brown flecked with gold.

The secret understanding Melissa shares with Juneau dwells in silence. There is silence everywhere but the silence at home is deep and dark, a well without water. Juneau takes Melissa’s hand, holding it between her own. With Juneau she is not afraid. Their silence flows like light through leaves, a river of honey, sweet and thick. Behind them the library rises, a cathedral of gray granite shot through with mica that glitters in the autumn sun.

Juneau works in Fiction, scrubbing floors. It was there Melissa met her years before when as a child she dreamed her way down the long high-ceilinged stacks. Eyes closed, she fingered dusty pages, smelled the warm book-scented air. Melissa liked the narrow tunnels she followed, her fingers tracing along the spines of books as if reading Braille, so she didn’t see Juneau until she tripped across her kneeling form, and fell.

The floor was wet, slippery with soap, and Melissa, looking at Juneau, felt cold marble melt beneath her. Juneau, kneeling, smiled, revealing white teeth interrupted by one of gold. Melissa was too surprised to cry. In fact, she thought she might be dreaming.

But Juneau lifted her lightly back to her feet. Melissa was six then, maybe seven, small for her age with too thin arms and legs. At fourteen she is almost grown, and almost as tall as Juneau. She sits beside her on the bench as Lily, tugging at the straps, strains towards Melissa, a flower reaching for the sun. Melissa slips off the straps and sets her like a small jewel upon her lap.

Juneau pulls from her pocket a wrinkled waxy paper bag, and from the bag an onion. She peels the layers, one by one. There are so many layers, too many to count. There is an egg, hard-boiled; three radishes, and thick black bread. She breaks the bread. They eat together in silence, safe and easy.

When the bread is gone, the breeze picks up. Melissa shivers. What, she wonders, does Juneau know? Melissa leans against her, listening. She sees her feet, planted, imagines roots thrusting down, holding firm. She imagines Juneau as the trunk, Melissa a branch, and Lily a leaf. Connected.