THOUGH Sara hadn't yet arrived at having disconcerting grown-up moments, she was as hard to understand as Robert and there were often times when it was as impossible to catch her thoughts as it would be to capture erratic butterflies. They would flutter around Alice, but always just out of reach. What Sara meant by the things she was saying would remain interesting but tantalizingly obscure. That Robert had always been an articulate child made it all the harder to understand Sara. Jamie at three was more comprehensible. Jamie's communications were mostly in the imperative. "Give me!" "Let go!" alternated with a fair amount of regularity with "I want," and also with softer demands such as, "Kiss Jamie."
But in Sara's life realities were not. Things she wanted to be so, were. Time had no existence, and all unpleasant commands, and unpalatable ideas were hastily shoved away in a mental glory-hole whose door opened inward easily, but had to be pulled outward by force. Those fatal words: "Don't you remember what Mother said?" would fire no answering spark in Sara's mind. What "Mother had said" had gone to the glory-hole and there, for all Sara cared, it could stay. But of course if Alice wanted to resurrect her own prying and unpleasant words, why, let her; she could do it without Sara's help.
If you wanted to find out why Sara wanted to do certain things or why she had done them, then, indeed, you had a chase before you, and just as you thought you had
