Foster

These last chapters are dominated by the sorrow of the girl’s departure for her biological family’s home. From the first line of Chapter 6, the dreaded event looms as “the letter comes” (68). In contrast to the hapless quality of the narrator at her arrival to the Kinsellas, she seems prepared for this change, having “seen the signs” of back-to-school supplies in the stores in Gorey and asking Kinsella if he’s gotten a letter from Mary (68). Edna displays her sadness subtly, reading the missive once before she “puts it down then picks it up and reads it again” (70), while John has to leave the room at the news. He continues to shut down, as shown after the girl asks him to take her home sooner than later when he “goes on down the yard past [her] as though [she has] already gone” (72). Part of the novella’s tragedy hence revolves around the Kinsellas’ circular character trajectory: While they begin Healing Through Found Family, they revert back to their original grief when they lose a child for the second time.

Even the books that the Kinsellas have given the narrator amplify the unhappiness caused to children removed from their loved ones. Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1880) involves a child who is forcibly removed from her home in the Alps and the grandfather who raised her, resulting in her becoming very ill. Sarah Chauncey Woolsey’s What Katy Did (1872) depicts a girl raised by her aunt instead of her absentee father, while Hans Christian Anderson’s 1844 fairytale The Snow Queen’s protagonists are both children stolen from their communities by pernicious sorceresses. Though all these books have happy endings, while the narrator is sick, she “follow[s] what happens more closely and mak[es] up something different to happen at the end of each” (78). The inclusion of these stories suggests the harm caused by removing a young person from their best caretakers.

Keegan heightens the sense of tragedy at the end by portraying the narrator’s increased comfort with her foster parents. The trio is more relaxed, eating soup while “slurping a little, now that we know each other” (68), and the narrator observes that “it seems so long ago, when [she] used to wet the bed and worry about breaking things” (72). Attendant to this familiarity is the girl’s emotional maturation. She is now attuned to emotional undertones that used to pass unremarked. When Edna announces Mary’s request that her daughter return home, the narrator doesn’t “so much hear as feel Kinsella leaving the room” (71). Over the last few minutes of their drive to the girl’s family, she “feel[s], now, that the woman is making up her mind as to whether or not she should say something, but [the girl doesn’t] really know what it is” (79)—a burst of intuition from the narrator, despite her lack of concrete understanding. “I have become the messenger for what is going on inside of me,” thinks the girl as she sprints to stop Kinsella before he leaves (86), allowing herself to feel rather than getting tangled up in thinking. While the Kinsellas are driven to grief again, the girl’s character development is evident.

The relationship arc between John Kinsella and the narrator crescendos in this section. The girl “follow[s] him around” as they both delay her retrieval of the mail (68). Once the pronouncement of her return has occurred, “Kinsella hangs around all day doing things but not really finishing anything” (72), intimating his distress. Tenderness between the two is present, with Kinsella telling the girl, “It’s like the wind, you are” (69), which also makes explicit that the symbol of the wind equates to the child’s feeling. In the end, it is Kinsella’s belief in The Power of the Unspoken that rises to the top of the narrator’s mind as she refuses to tell her mother “[w]hat happened at all” (85). In fact, she has taken her foster father’s words to heart. “It is my perfect opportunity to say nothing,” she repeats to herself (86), before hurtling herself into Kinsella’s embrace. These unspoken intimacies suggest the power of affection in father-child relationships.

Chapter 8 marks the novella’s falling action after Chapter 7 builds to the climax: the girl falling into the well, paralleling the Kinsellas’ boy’s death. She is more fully identified with the son in these chapters, putting on what she expressly describes as “the boy’s jacket” to get water (75). The narrator then describes her experience of slipping in the water as “another hand just like [hers] seem[ing] to come out of the water and pull [her] in” (76). Though the facts of the incident are that the full water bucket was too heavy and the girl saw her own hand’s reflection, this eerie observation evokes an image of the drowned boy’s spirit reaching for a companion. The similarity to the tragedy of their son is not lost on Edna, who “turn[s] very still” upon seeing her drenched foster (77). Continuing the growing overlap between the two children, in Chapter 8, it is ambiguous whether the girl is refusing to tell her mother that she went into the well, about the Kinsellas’ son drowning, or both. She “hold[s] on” to Kinsella “as though [she]’ll drown if [she] let[s] go” (87), while Edna sits in the car “sobbing and crying, as though she is crying not for one now, but for two” (88). The parallels between the children highlight the repeated sense of grief for the Kinsellas.

In the final chapter, Keegan reflects its contents with a substantial linguistic change: It uses the past tense for over a page. Up to that point, the narration is in present tense, creating a sense of uncertainty yet possibility in the girl’s future. However, the summary of Edna’s reaction to the narrator’s misadventure and the child’s subsequent sickness are all in past tense. This makes the ending feel inevitable since the open-ended present tense becomes finalized past tense describing things that have already happened. This mimics the girl’s somber acquiescence to a decision outside of her control.