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nightmare, because he blinked hard and started to wail and pulled at the blanket I’d covered him with. He was getting big, too big for this kind of thing, but I went to him and he wrapped his arms around me and hugged me hard. Slowly, his sobs diminished to whimpers, and he pressed his face into my neck, his tears mixing with Rascal’s blood.

C HAPTER 8
    R ASCAL SPENT THAT NIGHT lying on the linoleum floor, close to the front door. In the morning I examined his stitches. The pink line of his scar was so faint that it was practically invisible, punctuated by the bits of thread I’d used to stitch him. Even more amazingly, fur was already growing over the area. How could flesh heal that fast—how could fur grow that fast?
    Earlier, in the moments before my alarm went off, it had flashed through my mind that I had dreamed his injury. Now I was really starting to wonder. But the black threads were proof that it had happened.
    I went to the front door and called his name. He got up obediently, without any stiffness or pain that I could see, and trotted outside and did his business, then came back in and returned to his blankets. I got Gram’s embroidery snips with tiny pointed blades, and a pair of tweezers. I said, “Rascal, come,” and he followed me to my room, where Chub was just beginning to stir under his mound of blankets, yawning and humming softly.
    Rascal sat when I told him to, his pose show-dog perfect, erect and still. When I gently pressed on his shoulders he lay down, exposing his scar. He didn’t complain as I cut the threads and tugged them out with the tweezers. It was almost as though he didn’t feel it. I wondered if somehow the accident had damaged his nerves, had taken away his feeling without hurting the rest of him, and I prayed that he was healing on the inside as well as he was on the outside. I gathered up Gram’s tools and threw the bits of thread in the trash, then shooed Rascal out of the room.
    Behind me, Chub coughed and then mumbled sleepily. “Hayee. Mockingbird.”
    I turned around, Rascal forgotten in my amazement. Chub had said a word—one he’d never said before, three entire syllables as clear as a bell.
    “What did you say, Chub?” I asked slowly, my mouth dry.
    “Mockingbird,” he repeated.
    “You—you want me to sing? Sing you the mockingbird song?”
    He rubbed at his eyes, nodding. Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe he hadn’t said “mockingbird” at all but some other word.
    But strange things were happening. Milla, Sawyer, Rattler … nearly losing Rascal … the money and plane ticket in Gram’s room … the things I had done without even understanding what I was doing. As I lifted Chub out of his crib and hugged him tight, the words from the pages played in my head, a whispered sound track that seemed almost like it had been running, the sound turned down, all my life.
    But Chub wanted me to sing. So I lay down on my bed and held him and rested my chin on his downy hair and sang his favorite lullaby until he had enough and wiggled out of my grasp and ran out of the room to find Rascal. And then I lay there a few minutes longer, wondering what was happening to me, to us.
    At school I skipped lunch to go to the library and use the Internet. I’d gotten pretty good at doing research online, trying to figure out what was wrong with Chub. Not that it helped much; there were so many things that could be wrong with him, I felt like the more I read, the less I knew.
    I didn’t have much more luck when I tried to research what was wrong with Rascal. I didn’t know exactly what to search for: “fast healing” brought up natural remedies and health-food sites. Searching on Rascal’s symptoms brought up “catatonia,” which involved repetitive movements and ignoring external stimuli, but that didn’t seem to be exactly what was wrong with him.
    I gave up and unfolded the piece of paper on which I’d copied a few lines from the pages I found in the closet. I