Campanius, missionary-cum-lexicographer, as a would-be companion.

I don’t broach the irony that her father was quasi-fluent in this dead language while the only English words he ever practiced to his wife were “cow” and “pig” and “ungrateful bitch.”

III

In the bassinet (twenty years assembled), beneath a blanket (threadbare yellow yarn), in a tackle box (its cascading trays), she runs her fingers through dozens of arrowheads. The flint trickles like she is a brook, as if she is a current, a ström (Swedish for “stream”).

“Hoona sattaande,” she says to me.

I look at her. Hoona sattaande?

“I remember that one,” she says. “He’d say it before leaving. It means leaving or something.”

“You want to leave?” I ask encouragingly.

“Hoona sattande,” she repeats.

“I thought you wanted trophies,” I remind her. The garbage bags are still empty.

The trophies are in a corrugated box for an artificial Christmas tree. I find them wrapped individually in newspaper — crosswords and classifieds, Sudoku and comics crumpled around the gold-plastic figurines, medals dangling from their napes. She staggers them in a row,