In her nearly five years as a pen pal, Lillian had had fourteen correspondents. Several of them had ceased writing without explanation, but others had become regulars until circumstance interfered. Her most recent regular, her all-time favorite, was called Henry Jones. Henry was halfway through an eighty-year sentence when he signed up for Professor Trumbull’s course. Lillian had inherited him from Gail Turner, who had been a lackluster correspondent—unimaginative, judgmental, and always slow. Lillian knew a lot about Henry, because Henry wrote a lot—he was, in the taxonomy of the Benevolent pen pals, a “confessor,” a word that had thrown Lillian at first, as she had understood it to refer to the person who heard a confession, not the one that confesses. Henry told her everything—he had a lot to get off his chest. He was seventeen when he took part in a robbery in which a man and woman had been killed, though (as he told her many times, and promised that the court records would back him up) he hadn’t been the one who’d killed them. The plan was to hold up the couple for some spending money, but then things had gotten out of control. It was not his fault, he wrote. He’d only been a kid. Too young to know any better, but old enough to be tried and sentenced as an adult.

  Despite the passage of time, Henry had been quite angry when they first began their correspondence. But with the counsel of the other Benevolents, Lillian, in her third letter, had encouraged him to focus on the readings and seek the positive in his life. After this, he hadn’t written back, and Lillian regretted her injunctions, which in retrospect seemed insensitive, even insulting: Henry’s father had been killed when he was a baby, and his mother had died of drink when he was twelve. But then, to her surprise, a letter came, with an apology—he’d been sick with a kidney infection and had been taken to the hospital. As for her question about the positive in life…Well, that would have to be his younger sisters. He thought about them all the time, he said, as one had a son who was on the same path that had landed him in prison, while the other, a spinster, suffered terribly from a disease that caused her knuckles to grow crooked and laid her up with pain for weeks.

  In addition to classifying the prisoners, the Benevolents also had their own taxonomy, of which Lillian was a “discloser.” While, for some, disclosure was an ideological stance, for Lillian, it was somewhat less deliberate. She had always been a discloser; indeed, sometimes she was so drawn into other people that she ended up in trouble. She’d fallen for her husband with such force that it had terrified her, but it was scarcely a month after his death that she had found herself with another man, and after him another. Each time, she had the sense that the man could fill an emptiness, almost impossibly vast. Of course, she didn’t tell this directly to Henry Jones, whom, she realized, she was also in love with. Instead, she wrote vaguely of how one must be careful with one’s responsibilities, which, in her case, almost all involved her son.

  For all her tendency to open her heart to other people, it had taken her nearly five months to share with Henry what she had come to understand to be the defining circumstance of her life, which was her son’s illness. She didn’t know how much Henry knew about the disease called schizophrenia, she wrote, and went on to explain how, since his late teens, her Robert had suffered from this condition, for which he had been hospitalized many times. It was for this reason that she had not married again, she told Henry. Robert wasn’t dangerous to other people, but the full force of his disease was terrifying to observe, and the few people who drifted into her life were frightened by him, and by the rituals he undertook to prevent the calamity he believed would come upon the world.

  As it turned out, Henry had some knowledge and opinions about the condition, for he had a cousin who suffered from schizophrenia, and in Professor Trumbull’s class, they’d read a book about a man in an asylum who’d had part of his brain cut out and become a “vegetable.” It was not an easy burden for a mother, he’d written, there was no doubt about it, but a mother’s love was what kept her strong. She knew that he was writing in part about his own mother, or the loss of his mother, and for a week or so, she had worried that Henry would get jealous hearing how much she had cared for Robert. But she couldn’t hold herself back. She wrote about the Harrow and the Stitching and the Soul Heirs, and when this sounded too strange, she made sure to tell him about the good things too. For he was so smart, her Robert, he knew history and science and could tell you the name of every plant, every mushroom, every bird. He kept notebooks, hundreds of them, on everything he found.

  As far as the surgery that Henry mentioned, well, long ago she’d almost gotten it for Robert. But on the day of the procedure, another mother caused a commotion, and when the doctor went to deal with her, Robert stole his case notes from his desk. She still had them! And it was lucky that he had stolen them, for the doctor had written terrible things. Had they proceeded, Robert might have been left like the man in Henry’s book, or worse. It was one of the times in her life when she’d been certain that someone was looking out for her, for him.

  Deus ex machina, Henry wrote back, for he’d learned the term from Professor Trumbull’s class. It was what every prisoner, in his heart, believed in: that one day his captor would be struck dead by a greater power, or the prison walls would tumble down.

  The doctor had marked a change, wrote Lillian, for after, there was no one she could trust. All that seemed to help her son was to let him wander in the woods; their land backed onto the state forest, and one could walk for miles. Sometimes he would go off for days. In the beginning she was scared, but then she’d come to trust him. A wandering man, Henry had written: a rambler. But that wasn’t Robert, thought Lillian. A rambler suggested a free spirit, while her son, bearing his terrifying burden, was anything but. He didn’t want to wander, she wrote, he had to. And then, last summer, shortly before she and Henry had started writing, Robert had disappeared.

  Over the weeks and months that followed, she tried to find an explanation for his disappearance. The strange thing was that he was healthier than he had been in years. They had a maid, Anneli, who had been with them most of Robert’s life, and moved with them to the country when he’d fallen sick. The year before, Anneli had gone to the doctor for a lump in her neck and returned to say that she’d been advised to go to the city for treatment for cancer. But she didn’t want treatment. The doctors said it would give her a few more months but also might make her sicker. She had come to love the house in the woods and decided to die there. For years she had taken care of Lillian, and in the end, it was Lillian who cared for her.

  What was most amazing was what happened to Robert—it was as if the demands of the real world had brought him back. Throughout the spring and summer, he stayed and helped with the cleaning and cooking and relieved her at Anneli’s bedside. He had been with Anneli when she died one summer morning, and he rose to tell his mother what had happened. Then he went out walking, and by the time he came home, something seemed to have changed. She worried that the Harrow was back, for he sat on the couch with his eyes closed and his face moved like someone who is hearing screaming all about him and can’t shut it out. But the next morning he began to write. He kept a notebook with him, and over the months that followed, he spent hours writing, even corresponding with his sister, Helen, a professor in California. And then, one day, like any other, he’d gone out and hadn’t come back.

  As it was summer and she was used to his long walks, she didn’t call the police until three days had passed. But the police were tired of Robert—they’d been called many times over the years, by Lillian and by neighbors who’d seen him stalking their woods, talking to himself. They spent a day with the dogs, but said the trail was faint. She knew this was a lie: those dogs could find anything. It was their way of saying they were giving up.

  Dearest Lillian, how you have suffered! Henry had written. For the Lord took away my mother, and the State took away my freedom, but even a childless man like me knows there is no punishment on earth worse than losing a son.

  Henry had come from a family of devout Methodists, and his belief had grown even stronger in prison. Perhaps she might find comfort in church, he wrote her. He had profound respect for the good deeds of her organization, but no work was possible without the countenance of God.

  She did not write: Sometimes, when I go to the woods, Robert’s woods, I am so shaken by his absence that I pray, I kneel down before his trees. I lift the earth up and I speak to it. I ask it to bring him home.

  And why not? she thought. Sometimes he’d heard the soil whispering. Maybe, if she spoke to it, it’d let him know.

  What she wanted, she wrote, was someone to care for her again. She thought of Henry Jones, imagined him holding her, saw his body beside hers, broke the second rule and asked if they might ever grant him parole.

  He did not answer this question, so the next time she wrote, she asked again, and he didn’t answer, and she asked again, and only then did he write that they would not consider it, no.

  She was in a low place. It was shortly after her bladder infection, and then, that October, she’d woken in the night to a howling, and she’d gone to the window and looked out on the wind whipping through the forest, and heard the creaking of the old elm outside the house. Rain was falling, and the field shimmered, and she had a sense of the earth coming loose and rocks turning in dark water. She was going mad, she thought, and she threw open the window to show herself that it couldn’t be so. The force of the storm knocked her down, water crashed through the open window, the wind sucked at the curtains, and papers whipped into the air. As she rose, she heard a tearing, as the whole house seemed to heave, and the pictures fell and the lights went out.

  She awoke the next morning on the floor beside her bed, wrapped in wet blankets, amidst the scattered papers and puddles. In the mirror she saw abrasions on her face, and her hip hurt and her wrist hurt, but to her relief she could still walk. The storm was over, but outside the world was almost unrecognizable—everywhere, there were downed trees, and rills coursed through the upturned earth.

  The terrier—Charlie, that was his name!—was barking, so she let him out and walked outside, still in her dressing gown, to where she could survey the damage. She hadn’t dreamed the tearing sound. A great limb of the elm had fallen, crushing the chimney and part of the “grand” wing of the house.

  It was then that she realized that it was still raining. She called for Charlie, but he had found something in the tangle of fallen trees and would not come.

  * * *

  —

  The police arrived later that afternoon. There had been damage throughout the valley, and they were checking to see if people were okay. She greeted them warily, worried they might judge the house unsafe and take her from there. She’d get the roof fixed soon, she promised. But she was fine. She rarely went to that part of the house anyway, for there was a horrid mounted catamount belonging to her father—yes, he had hunted it himself—but she understood the urgency, she told them, and she would get it fixed. She knew the officer well from the many times people had complained about Robert—he was from an old family in the area and always had given her son the benefit of the doubt. She thought of offering him tea, but she hadn’t cleaned in a long time, and she was afraid of the picture that it would present.

  The next day was Professor Trumbull’s visit to the Benevolents. She had three correspondents then: Henry; a second with the vaguely familiar name of William Blake, who sometimes went by Will; and a third called Edward Kelly. Neither Will nor Ed was a correspondent quite like Henry, but they were better than most, and she knew a lot about their tribulations, and had shared hers with them as well. She’d already written that week’s letters, and wondered if she might add an addendum about the storm, but she worried that one of them would tell her she should consider moving. Only to Henry did she add a postscript. I have been feeling very low, she wrote. I have come to believe that I will never see my Robert again.

  The meeting was about an hour’s drive away, but it took longer because of the downed trees, and she was late, arriving just as Professor Trumbull began. He had letters from two new students, he told them, one of whom, named Harlan Kane, had requested Lillian specifically. There was a murmur when he said this—for all her reputation, she’d never been requested before—and Trumbull made a joke about her growing fame among the prisoners. Then they turned to that week’s reading, written by an anonymous woman who’d been captured by Indians, which Professor Trumbull had edited himself in spelling and grammar. Lillian had read it, found it difficult, and wondered what kind of “edits” Trumbull had made, because she found the spelling still no better than a child’s, though she agreed with Agnes that it added “flavor.” Mostly, the woman’s baby made her think of Robert. The woman also had endured many tribulations, and though they were different from Lillian’s, in some ways, they both were trapped.

  The account was a mystery, Professor Trumbull told them. No one knew who had written it—it had been found scrawled in the margins of a Bible belonging to a colored family in Canada, handed down over the generations. The story’s end, the killing of some English soldiers, had puzzled historians, he said, and it provoked a heated discussion among the Benevolents about justice that left Professor Trumbull in a state of almost orgasmic pedagogical bliss.

  Lillian listened as if from a distance. Mostly, she was thinking about Harlan Kane and the letter that was waiting in her purse. The name was strange, but there were many strange names these days. There was only one explanation, she thought, and that was that Henry or Will or Ed had been talking and told another prisoner of their friend Lillian and how they had found such comfort in her words. Just when she thought she had reached the bottom, here came a reminder that she was needed.

  She was so lost in thought that she scarcely noticed that the discussion was coming to an end, and Professor Trumbull was preparing them for that month’s reading by Boethius, a great favorite among the prisoners, a home run. When he left, there was a snack break. But Lillian could not endure the mystery of Harlan Kane any longer, and she opened the letter as quietly as possible, so as not to draw attention to herself. It was double-sided, filled with writing to the edges. When she read the salutation, the world around her disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  He had been arrested about a year ago, shortly after Anneli died and he left home. He had traveled for a while and then “borrowed” a car to drive back to Oakfield, when he was in a crash that led to the destruction of some property, and when the police came, he’d tried to run. “Harlan Kane” was a name he’d taken for reasons he would explain later—but it was him, Robert. He was sorry for not having written earlier, but the Harrow hadn’t let him. They’d been vengeful after his arrest. Every night they tortured him until he was raving, and the doctors at the prison had to shoot him up with all kinds of drugs to make the raving stop. Then, even when the Harrow got quieter, he was too ashamed by his predicament to write. But last summer, in a therapy group, one of the prisoners was talking about the pen-pal program and a lady who wrote to him and how her son was missing. He hadn’t believed it at first, but then Henry—that was the friend—had shown him the letters, everything she had written about him, about them. He asked her to excuse his penmanship. He had broken his hand a few weeks earlier and had to learn to write with the other, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was, he missed her, and in February he was being released.

  * * *

  —

  She did not make it through the remainder of the meeting. Not for Agnes’s presentation about the Boston chapter’s gardening program for refugees, or Sally’s legendary sponge cake. She murmured something about forgetting something and something for Charlie and threw on her coat and hurried out.

  Her first impulse, of course, was to head out to Concord and show up at the prison. But Robert, in his letter, must have known this. I know you’ll want to see me, he’d warned, but, please: you must not visit. He was ashamed about being in prison, and wished to close this chapter of his life. He knew how hard it would be to wait for him…Perhaps she could write to him directly? It was hardly practical to go through Professor Trumbull, especially if he was getting out in February, just four months off.

  She was so lost in thought that she didn’t remember driving home, and when she pulled up at her house, she realized to her chagrin that in fact she had forgotten to let Charlie in, though the dog was merrily gnawing on a bone and hardly seemed to care. The house was frigid—she’d left open the door to the ruined wing—but she didn’t even bother closing it, didn’t even remove her jacket, just went straight to the table, and began to write.

  She began by telling Robert how she forgave him, she understood what he had been through, that the past was past and all that mattered was that he was coming home. She, too, had endured so much. Did Henry tell him that she’d been in the hospital for an infection? And sometimes she found herself forgetting, and then, just this week, the house had been damaged in a storm. She began to write about the old elm tree, and all the destruction in the forest, and what a mess it was, but stopped. What if Robert changed his mind? Home should be a place of refuge and comfort. So she wrote of his favorite spots, things he would miss, the late autumn’s colors, the owls in the woods. And the mushrooms, Robert! She was careful not to eat the ones he’d warned her of, but all summer, she’d found chanterelles and hedgehogs and hens blooming beneath the oaks.

  It was nearly midnight when she stopped, and she was so tired then that she didn’t change into her pajamas. She wrote “Harlan Kane” on the envelope, as he’d instructed. How strange it was to see those words, and how thrilling, as if she were conspiring with Robert against the world. She slept. In the morning, she drove the letter straight into town, though she might have left it in her mailbox at the bottom of the road. She didn’t want to take any chances, not with her son so close.