TAYLOR IS GETTING A LONG, hard look at someone’s bald spot. He has reclined his seat to a point where he’s closer than a dinner plate, maybe twelve inches from her face. The top of his head is covered with fine, almost invisible fur that lies flattened in a complicated pattern, like a little prairie swept by a tornado. It reminds Taylor of a theory Jax once told her about, that humans evolved from some sort of water ape and spent the dawn of civilization in a swamp. Streamlined hair patterns are supposed to be the proof, but Taylor wonders as she stares, Does that mean we moved through the water headfirst? Could be. Kids move through the world that way, running into things with the tops of their heads. This man has a scar up there, no doubt forgotten through the decades until now that it’s lost its cover.

The pilot comes on the intercom again. He’s a chatty one; right after takeoff he introduced himself as “your captain,” and Turtle’s eyes grew wide. She asked Taylor if he only had one hand. Now, after mulling it over the whole afternoon, it dawns on Taylor that the only captain Turtle knows about so far is Captain Hook. She may never get on a plane again without envisioning a pirate at the helm.

Captain Hook now explains they are passing over the Mississippi River, and that if he can do anything to make the passengers more comfortable they should just let him know. Frankly, although she doubts the captain can help her out here, Taylor doesn’t feel comfortable being intimate with a stranger’s hair loss. She doesn’t even know the top of Jax’s head this well. She’s looked at it, but not for three and a half hours.

Turtle is finally sleeping. She seems to be coming down with a cold, and really needed a nap, but was so excited she sat for hours with her face pressed hard against the window. When the window turned icy cold, even when there was nothing to see but a vast, frosted field of clouds spread over a continent, rutted evenly as if it had been plowed, Turtle still stared. Everybody else on the plane is behaving as though they are simply sitting in chairs a little too close together, but Turtle is a child in a winged tin box seven miles above Planet Earth.

Taylor hasn’t flown before either, and for the first few hours she felt the same excitement. Especially when they were taking off, and before, buckling up, watching the stewardess show how to put on a yellow oxygen mask without messing up your hair. And before that, leaving the airport: walking behind Turtle down the sloping hallway to the door of the plane, stepping across from solid ground to something unknown, furtively checking the rivets around the door, but what can you do? She has no choice but to follow her daughter into this new life she’s claimed from a fortune cookie.

Chicago is tall on one side of the freeway, open sky on the other, because of the lake. Taylor never thought of Chicago as a beach town, but there they are, hundreds of people in swimsuits throwing Frisbees into the wind. It’s the first week of June. She and Turtle are cruising down the freeway in a long white limousine with smoked-glass windows and baby blue velvet upholstery. As they speed away from the airport, people in other cars turn their heads to try and get a look inside this vehicle of mystery. The driver calls them both “Miss,” as if they are the types to travel everywhere by limo.

It occurs to Taylor that this would be quite the line of work, driving Oprah Winfrey guests around: some would be royalty and some would be famous murderers or men with a wife in every state, and if you’re only the driver you’d never know which was which. You’d have to play it safe and treat them all politely.

“This is the best-planned city in the nation,” the driver explains. Turtle is glued to the window, still. “It all burned down in the great fire of October 8, 1871. Everything went. Two hundred million dollars of property damage. So they had the opportunity of starting it over from the ground up.”

“I’ve heard of that fire,” Taylor says. “I heard it was started by a cow.”

“No, that is not true, that is a myth. The Great Chicago Fire was not started by a cow.” He hesitates a little, and Taylor realizes she’s blown their cover; bringing up the subject of livestock has put them more on the criminal than the royalty side of the fence.

“Well, it makes a good story,” she says. She doesn’t care if he thinks she and Turtle are serial killers. He still has to take them to their hotel.

For all this city’s famous planning, the traffic is horrible. As soon as they turn away from the lake toward the tall glass buildings, they are mired in a flock of honking cars. The driver has evidently finished with the glories of his city. Once in a while as they sit there he hits the horn with his fist.

Turtle sneezes. She’s got a cold, there’s no getting around it. Taylor hands her a tissue out of her pocket. “How’re you feeling, Toots?”

“Fine,” she says, blowing her nose carefully, still looking out the window. Turtle almost never complains. Taylor is well aware of how unusual this is. If all you knew about kids came from watching the sitcoms, she thinks, you would never guess there were children on earth like Turtle.

“Mom, look.” She pulls on Taylor’s finger and points at a City of Chicago garbage truck, which is stalled next to them in the traffic jam. A fancy gold seal painted on the side gives it an air of magnificence. The driver smiles down at them from his perch on high. Then he raises one eyebrow and winks.

“Why’d he do that?”

“He thinks you’re cute,” Taylor says, “and he likes my legs. Also he probably thinks we’re rich.”

“But we’re not, are we?”

“Nope, we’re not.”

“He gets to drive a better truck than Danny’s.”

“Definitely.”

Taylor is wearing a skirt—something she’s not accustomed to, but Lou Ann insisted on loaning her a nice beige suit for Oprah Winfrey. She claimed it was against some regulation to wear jeans on television. Jax got a good laugh out of that, but to his credit, he is nicer to Lou Ann than most guys would be.

Taylor gets a nervous stomach when she thinks about the taping tomorrow morning. She suspects these shows are just a way of making a spectacle out of bad things that happen to people. But Turtle really wanted to do it. She’d never understood before that actual people could appear on television. She seems to have a vague idea they will meet the Ninja Turtles.

The garbage guy is still looking. He has curly hair and a terrific smile. Taylor crosses her legs and raises her hand just a little. If he can really see in, he’ll take it as a wave.

He does. He makes a small motion with his chin, indicating that she and Turtle should abandon their limo in favor of his garbage truck. Taylor gives it some thought, but decides to go ahead with Oprah.

“It’s an adorable outfit,” the wardrobe woman tells Taylor, “but I’m just suggesting something a little more feminine. We have this little jumper from wardrobe, see? The color would look absolutely super on the set.”

Lou Ann can have the last laugh now: Oprah Winfrey’s people don’t want Turtle to wear her overalls on television. The overalls are brand new, bright green, perfectly decent. “That dress is ten sizes too big for Turtle,” Taylor says.

“Doesn’t matter. We just pin it in back, see? Nobody sees the back. That’s the secret of TV—you only have to worry about what shows up front, your back can be a mess. And we’ll put this bow in her hair, okay, sweetheart? She’ll look super.”

“She’ll look younger,” Taylor says. “If that’s what you’re going for. She’ll look like a baby doll that saved somebody’s life.”

The woman crosses her arms and frowns. Her short, black hair looks wet and oiled, like a sea otter. The comb rakes through it stay perfectly in place. “It’s going to be difficult,” she says. “We’d have to run her mike wire up from the back.”

“You can manage,” Taylor says, knowing this can’t be the problem. Men wear pants on television every day of the week. The other guests are not being harassed about wardrobe concerns. Taylor met them all in the hotel lobby this morning while they waited for the limos. There’s a Cub Scout who flagged down help when his scoutmaster collapsed on their tenderfoot survival hike; a fourth-grader who saved her sister from a pitbull attack by hitting it with a dog dish and the whole Barbie Dream Date ensemble, including the convertible; and an eleven-year-old who drove the car home when her baby-sitter passed out from multiple bee stings in a city park. Taylor feels, frankly, that the eleven-year-old showed bad judgment all around, and the other two probably just acted without thinking. Turtle is the youngest and has the best story. She doesn’t see why they need to blow it out of proportion by dressing her up like Barbie’s baby sister.

The small green room where they are waiting is crowded and tense. Turtle fidgets, and the wardrobe woman hovers, her raised eyebrows still pushing the question.

“What do you want to wear?” Taylor asks Turtle.

Turtle hugs herself. “This,” she says.

Taylor smiles at the sea-otter woman. “Looks like she’s made up her mind.”

The woman pushes the purple jumper against Turtle’s front, looking at Taylor. “I really think, look, don’t you? It’s so much more of a visual.”

“My daughter said no, thank you.” Turtle recoils from the bunched fabric, and Taylor narrows her eyes at the woman, who seems nevertheless to be holding her ground. A makeup man comes over at a trot. He’s wearing the laced-up, tassely loafers that people call “boating shoes,” even though most of them will never lay leather to a boat. Taylor wonders why everyone here seems dressed for some kind of sport—the secretaries in leggings, the camera crew in running shoes, all bustling around frowning, with nothing the least bit sporty on their agendas. It’s as if they’re expecting at any minute a sudden announcement: Vacation starts now.

“You have wonderful cheekbones, dear,” the makeup man tells Taylor, and he lobs her in the face with a powder puff.