Chapter 1

When my sister turned thirteen the school where she lived got her toilet-trained and my mother decided she ought to come home to live, once and for all.

My father and I weren't so sure, but he agreed that we would all give it a try and he and I got the suitcase out of the storage room and loaded up the trunk of the car and drove to the gas station to have the tank filled while my mother was still up in the apartment writing with the whipped-cream squirter on a cake she had baked: WELCOME HOME.

Which my sister of course cannot read.

My mother's idea was that my sister would be able to taste WELCOME HOME and also appreciate a little bunch of flowers she put on the window still in her room, which used to be the dining room until the superintendent, Mr. Parrish, had a wall with a door in it put up and turned it into a bedroom.

I'm not sure what my father thought because he has just grown a new moustache, and his mouth disappears under it and it's hard to tell what his expression is. Usually when he drives he hums along with the car radio or complains about traffic, but it was my mother who seemed to be doing most of the talking today.

A few times she asked my father to slow down and then, when we passed a bunch of cows in a meadow, she said that my sister had probably never seen a cow in her life, or a horse.

Then she talked about a farm she'd visited one summer and she went on and on talking about how she had loved the chickens and pigs and used to shuck corn, which had nothing to do with anything. My father asked my mother why she was so nervous, and my mother said she wasn't nervous a bit, and she told my father to please slow down. To me she said, "Neil, please close the window," and a few miles later, when we'd stopped to eat our sandwiches, she turned right around and looked at me and said, "Why did you close your window, Neil?"

It seemed a longer drive than usual, but finally I could see the school in a valley below us, a whole bunch of green roofs, a little darker than the houses in a Monopoly set, short roads between them and a few benches set here and there under trees. Not bad. My sister seemed to like the school most of the time and only once in a while cried when we left after a visit.

Inside it looked okay too, although the whole place smelled like the stuff our cleaning lady, Mrs. Shrub, uses to clean the bathroom, and once when I just wanted to get some fresh air and tried to open a window, the window let out alarm scream like the phantom of the opera and people came running from every direction like I'd set the place on fire.

Most of the rooms were big, with beds in rows and a bunch of lockers at one end, and a tv set and a chair in the corner for the guard. The guard sat there all night to make sure everybody slept. My mother said not to call the guard a guard. The guard was an attendant, she said.

Anyway, the attendant told us my sister was in the dining room having lunch and we would have to wait, and my father asked if it would be all right if we went into the dining room to see if she was finished. The attendant said it was against regulations, and when he said that, he sounded like a guard, not like an attendant.

So we sat on my sister's bed and waited and waited, and my father kept looking at his watch and finally he said it was getting late and he didn't want to get into heavy traffic and why didn't we just walk in the direction of the dining room and peek in and wave at my sister to hurry up?

My mother knew the way. We went through a lot of empty corridors and one that wasn't empty. An attendant was wheeling a sleeping person in a wheelchair and talking to him at the same time. I couldn't figure out why he was talking to someone asleep until we came up close, and then I saw that the man in the chair wasn't sleeping at all. His neck was just bent down like that, his head resting on his shirt as if he were trying to push his chin into his pocket. And he was wide awake and looking at us, especially at me. When we passed the chair, the man never moved, but his eyes just followed us as we went by. He had very fierce, dark eyebrows over staring eyes, but I pretended not to notice, because my mother had warned me about a hundred times to expect to see people behave in ways that might seem peculiar but not to embarrass anybody by bugging out my eyes and staring or asking, "What's wrong with him?"

My mother said that even if the people here had been doled out a little less smartness, it didn't mean they had any less feelings.

The dining room was in the next building, so we had to go outside. We passed a fenced-in area where a group of girls were sitting in a circle on the ground and doing what looked like exercises with a leader. One of the girls was lying outside the circle flat down with the face smack in the grass, and another girl was racing along the fence, grabbing it here and there and waving to us. I remembered what my mother had said about people's feelings, and I waved back.

The dining room door had two portholes. They were too high for me to see into, but not too high for my father. We were about to go in and just wave at my sister to hurry up, when my dad suddenly said, "I don't think we should," and he stopped dead and turned his back to the door. I guess he'd just taken a peek and changed his mind. I thought that was funny since it had been his idea in the first place, and I guess my mother thought it was strange too, because she just looked at him without saying much and then suggested she take just one step inside alone and see if she could find my sister.

"I want to go too," I said. I guess I was curious to see if it was anything like our school cafeteria, but the minute we stepped inside, I knew it was a lot different.

Almost immediately a lady jumped out from nowhere and blocked our way. Her hair was the same ghost white as her uniform. "I'm sorry, no guests are allowed in the dining room," she said. She sounded like my old fourth-grade teacher, Miss Drummond, who'd had a voice like the loud notes on an electric organ.

"We're just here to–" my mother started to say, but the lady had each of us by one elbow and was trying to turn us right around so we wouldn't see what was going on.

I only had a glimpse and I'm not sure my mother saw what I saw, but right away I figured this dining hall was one reason my mother wanted my sister to come home to live.

All the kids were wearing the same big white bibs marked "Green Valley Regional Training Center," and they were all eating off plastic plates. They didn't have knives or forks though, just little spoons. And everybody was eating the same thing–no kidding–baby food. On every plate was a little orange pile of baby food and a little grey pile of what looked like the same stuff. There were older people here too, some who looked older than my father, and they were wearing bibs and eating baby food too. Some were being forced to eat it. Attendants were holding their jaws open and spooning it into their mouths. I saw my mother turn her head away and I didn't much want to look either, so we allowed ourselves to be ushered right out again the way we'd come, but not before I'd seen that a lot of the people there, seated at the long tables, were tied into their chairs with heavy leather straps.

To save time, we decided to open my sister's locker and pack her things into the suitcase before she returned. The attendant came and opened her locker and we took out her stuff: a little bunch of clothes, four crayons, papers with her drawings, a flashlight without a battery, part of a tea set my mother had given her on her birthday, and a Christmas card I'd sent her two years ago.

My mother called the attendant after she'd put everything into the suitcase. "Where are the rest of my daughter's things?" she asked.

"Is anything missing?" the attendant asked. He was yawning, maybe from having to stay up all night watching everybody else sleep.

"But this can't be all!" I sent my daughter a little radio just two weeks ago! And what happened to her drawing pad and the big box of pastels? Where are the picture books and the lacing cards? Where are the rest of her clothes?"

The attendant shrugged. "Things get stolen here all the time," he said.

My mother's face turned very red. She looked at my father. My father took her arm. "Forget it," he said. "It's all over." He looked into the large suitcase we'd expected to fill and then at my sister's things, which were bunched up in one small pile, and he didn't say another word. My mother shook her head and looked down at the floor while he closed the bag and set it at the foot of the bed.

The girl who sleeps in the bed next to my sister got back from lunch first, and I didn't know whether I was supposed to say hello and pretend I hadn't noticed the contraption on her head or just look down at the floor and act as if I hadn't seen her at all. I was really scared for a minute; if they had to keep her head in a cage like that, was she maybe dangerous?

But she just laughed and said hello like any other person would and we all said, "How are you?" and the attendant came over and unstrapped her cage so she could lie down and take a rest. The cage actually looked like the white skeleton of a football helmet with a chin strap. The girl lay down on her bed and I noticed the bed had sides, like a crib; there were also rubber pads all around on the floor, in case she fell out anyway. Later, my mother whispered to me that the girl often had seizures and the helmet protected her if she fell suddenly to the floor. She explained that seizures are blackouts that happen very suddenly and without warning.

Other kids started coming in from lunch and pretty soon the dormitory was almost full, except for my sister.

My mother and father kept staring at the door, wishing my sister would hurry, anxious to leave, but I knew shy she was going to be the last one in for sure. She is not that fast at walking and has a funny step, as if she never quite got the hang of putting one foot in front of the other and it's almost as if she's learning a new dance routine and wants to get it really right. Step/step, step/step.

In she came at last and sure enough, she was the next-to-last kid back from lunch. She stepped in and I took one look and my mouth flew open. Of course, I hadn't seen her for quite a while, not since last Christmas, but good, grey grief! What had they done to her, anyway?