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he believed
     her when she swore the baby had been there only a moment before. She knew because of his eyes. She’d told him that the baby
     was gone like magic, and his eyes had filled with a grief she’d never known in him. He had never seemed less like a grown-up
     and more like a child. This was a sadness that she pondered.
    W ILLA
    New Milford, Connecticut
Wednesday, May
7,
1997
    Willa would tell you that the story began on the breezy morning her father sped into the parking lot where she stood at the
     Bellwether School, his old Volvo station wagon packed to the brim with their worldly possessions. It was the twelfth time
     in the past seventeen years that Willa’s father had done this. Three years before, he’d promised he was never going to do
     it again. She’d made him promise on her life.
    Willa was outside the art studio, resentfully spraying fixer on her charcoal drawing in preparation for the following week’s
     art show. She was listening to the wind skating through the newly greenmaples that dotted Bellwether’s main lawn. When she felt the wind splaying her ponytail, she stopped the spray and waited
     for the gust to pass. Though only a junior, Willa was the art star of the school. But over the last few weeks, she had come
     to realize that Bellwether would champion her only as long as she made the art that the school wanted her to make. This realization
     had replaced her initial excitement over the upcoming art show with unshakable sulkiness. Willa’s terrible mood was annoying
     even herself. The stupid wind wasn’t helping matters.
    Bellwether’s Catholic headmaster adored Willa’s ten drawings of the Connecticut natural world, collectively named
Hill and Dale.
It had been decreed: the drawings—safe and beautiful—would be framed and hung in the main hall beside the faculty artwork
     and the work of the best seniors. The main hall was where the reception for the art show would take place the following Friday.
     Willa had been reminded more than once that it was an unprecedented honor for an eleventh-grader to be asked to participate.
     She pretended to be thrilled when all she could feel was a quiet kind of fury. She didn’t care about the drawings. They were
     a technical exercise in giving people what they wanted. Willa believed they were “good” only in the eyes of people who didn’t
     understand art.
    In contrast, Willa’s photography series,
Scars,
had been relegated to a drawer in the cramped darkroom, which technically was to be opened for public viewing that same Friday
     night. But everyone knew no parent, let alone any of the students, was going to take the long trek across campus to the art
     building, down the gloomy back stairway into the basement, and into the ugly, dank darkroom to open up the drawer that happened
     to hold Willa’s series of condemned photographs.
Scars,
twelve black-and-white close-ups of the scars of twelve unidentified students, had caused a kerfuffle in the Bellwether administration,
     primarily because two of the photographs featured breasts, and one a pair of buttocks. Willa had argued and argued. The breasts
     and buttocks were there only because of the scars upon them: a removed cyst, a healed surgical incision,the remnants of a bicycle accident. The headmaster had offered his version of a compromise: remove the offending material
     and the photographs would be hung. No, said Willa. Nonnegotiable. And so she’d endured her first lesson in censorship. The
     photographs were not going to see the light of day. The students she had photographed—members of the Socialist Club, the Comic
     Books Club, the Democrats for Peace Club—kept their secret and smiled in solidarity at Willa across the dining hall.
    Miss Finlay, the young, brightly dressed art teacher whom Willa adored, had been telling Willa since the ninth grade that
     she had what it took—the talent, the drive, the anger—to make it in the art world. Miss Finlay said that at her alma