“Homer,” Dr. Larch had said, “I don’t remember your mother. I don’t even remember you when you were born; you didn’t become you until later.” “I thought there was a law,” Homer said. He meant Melony’s law—a law of records, or written history—but Wilbur Larch was the only historian and the only law at St. Cloud’s. It was an orphanage law: an orphan’s life began when Wilbur Larch remembered it; and if an orphan was adopted before it became memorable (which was the hope), then its life began with whoever had adopted it. That was Larch’s law.
