Leah made the namaste gesture, then lowered her head and clasped her hands on her apron. The maid （or perhaps she was a lady-in-waiting） walked with me to the road, her long gray dress brushing the ground.
“Can you speak?” I asked her.
“Little.” It was a dusty croak. “Hurts.”
We reached the thoroughfare. I pointed back the way I had come. “How far to the brick house of her uncle? Do you know?”
She raised a misshapen gray finger.
“A day?”
She nodded—the most common form of communication here, I was learning. For those not able to practice ventriloquism, that was.
A day to get to the uncle. If it was twenty miles, it might be one day more to the city, more likely two. Or even three. Counting the return to the underground corridor leading to the well, maybe six days in all, and that was assuming all went okay. By then my father would be back and would have reported me missing.
He’d be scared, and he might drink. I’d be gambling my father’s sobriety against the life of a dog… and even if the magic sundial existed, who knew if it would work on an elderly German Shepherd? I realized—you’ll say I should have before—that what I was thinking of doing wasn’t just crazy, it was selfish. If I went back now, no one would be the wiser. Of course I would have to break out of the shed if Andy had locked it, but I thought I was strong enough to do that. I’d been one of the few players on the Hillview squad who had been able to not just hit a tackling dummy and drive it back a foot or two but knock it over. And there was something else: I was homesick. I had only been gone a few hours, but with the day draining to an end in this sad, overcast land where the only real color was the great fields of poppies… yes, I was homesick.
I decided to take Radar and go back. Rethink my options. Try to make a better plan, one where I could be gone for a week or even two without anyone worrying. I had no idea what such a plan would be, and I think I knew deep down （in that dark little closet where we try to keep secrets from ourselves） that I would keep putting it off until Radar died, but that was what I meant to do.
Until, that was, the gray maid took me by the elbow. So far as I could tell from what remained of her face, she was scared to do that, but her grip was firm nonetheless. She pulled me toward her, stood on tiptoe, and whispered to me in her painful croak.
“Help her.”
3
I walked slowly back to Dora’s House of Shoes, hardly aware of the declining daylight. I was thinking of how Leah （at that point still thinking of her as Leia） had opened the blemish beside what had been her mouth. How it had bled, how it must have hurt, but doing it because the pureed gluck was all she could take in to stay alive.
When had she last had an ear of corn, or a stalk of celery, or a bowl of Dora’s tasty rabbit stew? Had she been mouthless when Radar was a puppy, gamboling around a much younger Falada? Was the beauty that existed in spite of what had to be extreme malnourishment a kind of cruel joke? Was she cursed to look well and healthy in spite of what must be constant hunger?
Help her.
Was there a way to do that? In a fairy tale there would be. I remembered my mother reading me the story of Rapunzel when I couldn’t have been more than five. The memory was vivid because of the story’s ending: terrible cruelty reversed by love. A wicked witch punished the prince who rescued Rapunzel by blinding him. I vividly remembered a picture of the poor guy wandering in the dark forest with his arms outstretched to feel for obstacles. Finally he was reunited with Rapunzel, and her tears restored his sight. Was there a way I could restore Leah’s mouth? Probably not by crying on it, true, but maybe there was something I could do; in a world where riding a big sundial backward could peel away the years, anything might be possible.
Besides, show me a healthy teenage boy who doesn’t want to be the hero of the story, one who helps the beautiful girl, and I’ll show you no one at all. As for the possibility that my father might start drinking again, there was something Lindy told me once: “You can’t take credit for sobering him up, because he did that. And if he starts drinking again, you can’t take the blame, because he’d do that, too.”
I was looking down at my shoes and deep in these thoughts when I heard the squeak of wheels. I looked up and saw a small, ramshackle cart coming my way, pulled by a horse so old he made Falada look like the picture of health and youth. There were a few bundles in it, with a chicken squatting on top of the biggest. Walking beside it—trudging beside it—was a young man and a young woman. They were gray, but not as gray as Leah’s farmhands and maid. If that slate color was a sign of sickness, these people were still in the early stages… and, of course, Leah hadn’t been gray at all, just mouthless. It was another mystery.