Without the experience and wisdom of understanding the complications of life and fallibility of human beings, Ben and Ella for instance are mired in a place in which they have only one way of understanding their world -- returning to the comfort of antagonism.

The loss of a mother comes to us again in "What We Save." In this case, Helena is juxtaposed between understanding what is really happening to her sick mother, while at the same time dealing with her burgeoning adolescence and the rather unsavory advances of the young sons of her mother's own, ironically, childhood boyfriend. Again, Helena initially "sees" the world through a rather childlike haze of hierarchical events: mothers take care of children, not the reverse; people are nice to one another, not implolite and rutting around like an animal. Helena simply cannot understand what makes the boys act this way -- and her own...
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