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The glass bell of night settled over the farm, turning the sky the midnight blue of church windows against the glow from the lighted house. Kerosene lanterns whooshed and sighed as Mama put Clara to sleep in the addition, and I read in the light as Heidi dangled her feet on the doorstep, looking out for Papa to return from the campground to tuck us in, the cool spring air breathing through the door.

“Bedtime,” Mama called to us, but she was nursing Clara and couldn’t do anything about it. The peepers increased in volume with the darkness. I knew the cricking came from the inflated sacs on the throats of the frogs, but it was hard to understand how the slimy shapes we caught at the pond with our bare hands could make such a piercing sound. Their concert filled the night with a noise so distinct it had a three-dimensional presence, solid with longing. The noise shapes came right up to Heidi’s feet, praying to her like their goddess.

I looked up from my book to make sure she hadn’t drifted from the doorstep, pulled sleepwalker-spirit-like into the night, across the dew-damp garden, but she just sat on the step, listening. I began to fade off, Papa coming and going in the distance, Heidi floating out over the night, becoming bigger and bigger like a balloon of light until she became the morning.

A chorus of first-light birdsong shattered the morning sky with the same velocity as the peepers. Papa had returned last night but was already long gone out to the gardens, the endless list of all the things that needed to be done cycling in his head. No sooner had he recovered from his amazement at Clara’s birth than Mama’s baby blues set in, and his unsuccessful efforts at helping her left him afraid to try again. He began to confide instead in Bess as they worked together in the garden. It was simple talk about day-to-day details and the bigger questions of existence, but it filled for Papa an innocent need for connection and camaraderie. Mama began to imagine otherwise.

I knew Mama wished she could sleep all day, her body molded into the soft mattress tossed off by summer folk, the seldom-washed sheets, the old striped Pendleton blanket pushed down to her feet. The back addition was cooler and darker than the rest of the house, shaded as it was from the south-facing windows, luring her toward ever-elusive sleep. “Sleep deprivation is a form of torture,” someone had told her recently.

I could hear the sounds of Clara’s mewing cries as Mama pressed her breast to the tiny mouth. Then peace. Nursing was Mama’s escape, her imprisonment and her freedom, when her mind could wander away from the more familiar and well-trodden paths of her darker worries. Papa’s thyroid. Work your fingers to the bone. Bess and Papa eating breakfast together on the patio as they planned the workday. European farm tours she wouldn’t go on. Broken seals on the mason jars that meant her canning efforts had been compromised. They all became someone else’s troubles. But soon the milk would drain from her breast, Clara would satiate and squirm and beat her tiny fists in the air. Time to get up.

Mama slid from the bed, the sound of her bare feet padding on the cool of the wooden floor. From my bunk I could see Mama in the kitchen drinking water from a jar with a glug-glug sound as she looked out the front windows. She wore the same T-shirt she’d slept in, the same loose pants, her fine hair conformed to her head in yesterday’s braid.

Mist was rising at the edges of the clearing, but the center of the garden glowed with sun from above. A child was walking toward the house on the path from the well, carrying something Mama couldn’t make out. The child’s fair hair caught the sun coming through the mist. Mama felt she was recognizing someone she hadn’t seen in a long time—as if a face on a crowded street suddenly matched one stored in her memory.

“Heidi,” she said to herself. Her middle daughter. Where had she been?

“Mama,” I called from the bunk,