The Summer Guest

SEVEN

I awoke knowing it would be a last morning: not the last morning, but a morning of final things.

I have always been a deep sleeper. My nights are long and restful, dependable as a hammer. The usual gripes of men my age-the acid reflux, pinched plumbing, and insomniac dread that send us prowling the halls to mull over every missed field goal, botched kiss, and embarrassing pratfall of our lives-have yet to affect me, and though I know the day can’t be far off, that one of these nights the boom will fall, for now I sleep the sleep of the dreamless dead. According to Lucy I don’t even snore. I just kind of snuffle every once in a while into the pillow, like a good golden retriever.

So I awoke that morning as always, 5:10 on the dot without an alarm to tell me so, just the feel of the turning world doing its work and my mind as empty as a bucket, and the first thought that came to me as I lay under the blankets in the chilly room was the fact that Harry had not died, because somebody would have come to tell me if he had; and then this other notion, a strange one: this idea of final things.

Lucy was already up and about; I heard the shower running, then the groan of the old pipes as she turned the water off. Lucy wasn’t one to dawdle in the bathroom, and it wouldn’t do for her to find me still in bed. I rose and dressed quickly for the day. Khakis and an old denim shirt frayed at the collar and wrists, a Synchilla vest that Kate had given me for Christmas, wool socks and Birkenstocks, which I’d trade for boots when things got rolling; on my belt, a Buck knife and one of those all-in-one tools in a leather holster, the only gizmos I carried. Once we were closed down for the season, I’d planned to do something about those groaning pipes, maybe even rip down the bathroom once and for all and make it nice, with some new fixtures and tile. I’m a man, a hole in the ground is pretty much all I need, but redoing the john was just the sort of project I enjoyed, and it would have made a nice present for Lucy. But those plans were now moot-a relief, in a way, and also strangely depressing. Outside the sky was paling, not black to gray but easing into a kind of mellow tan color, meaning a clear day ahead, and hot: the last real day of summer.

I was standing at the window when Lucy entered the room, wearing a bathrobe and squeezing the water from her hair into a towel.

“So,” she said, and looked at me expectantly. “A quiet night?”

“Looks like Harry may get his wish. I think we would have heard if anything had happened.”

“I thought so too.” She sat down heavily on the bed and looked at her feet. “God, I hardly slept at all.”

From the look in her eyes I knew that she was thinking about her own father, who had passed four years before. By then my in-laws, Phil and Maris, had sold the sawmill and moved down to Orchard Beach, into an apartment complex that pretended it wasn’t an old folks’ home but of course was: no kids allowed, not a single resident under sixty, ramps on all the stairways and handholds in the johns. Phil’s arthritis had gotten pretty bad by this point-all that standing around on the hard ground through too many Maine winters-and he was deaf as a fence besides, from listening to the saws; like those old-time hockey players who skate without a helmet, Phil never once used earplugs, though he made everyone else wear them. He and Maris had talked about Arizona or even Las Vegas, someplace warmer and drier for Phil’s knees, though this was just talk; they’d never been to either place that I knew of, even to visit. Phil Hansen and I had been through our rough patches over the years. I think we had far too much in common to be completely comfortable with one another, and I sometimes held it against him, the poor care he took of himself. But in the end we’d let bygones be bygones, and when he’d died of a stroke-actually three strokes spread over as many weeks, bringing him down slowly, like a chopping axe blade-I had served as one of the pallbearers, weeping the whole way from church to gravesite. The funny thing was, it had taken Maris all of six months to pull up stakes and settle in Scottsdale, where she was now keeping company with a widowed dermatologist and had a golf handicap in the low teens. I was pretty sure Phil wouldn’t have minded all that much, though Lucy fumed for days whenever we got a postcard from her mother, always with the picture of some golf course on it and three blandly cheerful sentences saying, more or less, why the hell didn’t I do this before?

I sat beside Lucy on the bed. She was wriggling into a pair of jeans, and when she stood to pull them over her hips, I stayed where I was. My head felt oddly heavy, and for a second I even considered going back to sleep.

Lucy drew a sweater on over her head and looked at her watch. “Five thirty, Joe. You have a party, don’t you?”

I nodded. “The lawyers, cabin five.”

“No rush, then.” Lucy rolled her eyes a little. “I think you’ll find they won’t mind a little extra shut-eye.”

I’d heard them, too, as I was going to bed. They’d arrived the afternoon before, up from Springfield or Worcester or some other midsize New England city down on its luck, and spent most of the day in town ogling the scenery and laying in enough snacks, beer, and ice to feed a frat house. They asked me after dinner if I could take them out the next morning, “someplace special.” A pleasant enough bunch of fellows, I thought, though lately it had seemed to be raining lawyers. They’d said they wanted to get an early start, though everybody does.

“They want to get drunk, it’s their problem.” I heard the grumpiness in my voice and let it ride. “They said early, early’s what they’ll get. I thought I’d take them up to the old Zisko Dam. Not much action anywhere else.”

At the mirror, Lucy pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “The show must go on, I guess. I’ll put together some box lunches for them. Bring the radio with you, too, all right?”

I was watching her face in the mirror. “The radio? Why do I need the radio?”

She turned back to me with a correcting look and slid into her shoes. “For Harry, Joe,” she said. “For Harry.”

By the time the pickup was loaded it was just six, the sky already lit from end to end though dawn was still a few minutes off. I thought I’d give the lawyers a few extra minutes of sleep, so I drank a quick cup of coffee with Lucy in the kitchen; we had two girls from the high school helping out that summer, but they wouldn’t come in till six thirty when their shifts started. I helped Lucy with the sandwiches and snacks and pop-if the lawyers wanted anything harder, it was on their nickel-put these in the truck with the rest of the gear, and drove down the trace to their cabin.

By my reckoning, the lawyers were going to be feeling a lot less chipper this morning than they had the night before: I counted twenty-six empty beer cans on the porch, and enough cigar and cigarette butts to send the surgeon general into orbit. An empty fifth of Jack Daniel’s Green Label was sitting on the floor, and beside it, a capsized pint bottle of what I guessed was schnapps or something worse. This bothered me not one bit-we’re hardly the Ritz, or, for that matter, the St. Regis; get drunk as a monkey on Sterno if that’s what you like, just try to keep it down-and in fact, the mess they’d made was just the sort of opener I needed: cleaning it up would take a few minutes and make enough noise to get my lawyers out of bed while also letting them know that perhaps a little better citizenship was the order of the day. I fetched a garbage bag from the truck, tied it to one of the porch posts, and was launching the last of the empties into it when the door swung open and one of them stepped out, a heavyset guy with a tonsure of gray hair, smacking his lips and blinking at the sunlight. I’m good with names, and I remembered his: Bill Owens. The reservation had been in his name, though the American Express he’d given me at check-in was a corporate card, billed to the chemical company they all worked for, an outfit called Sentocor Industrial Lubricants. If anyone needed a little time away in the woods, I figured, it’d be these guys.

“Morning, Joe.” He surveyed the wreckage and quickly grabbed a beer can off the floor. “Sorry about the mess. I guess we were all in pretty high spirits last night.”

Somebody had left a burning cigar on one of the porch rails, searing a brown rut into the wood. I picked up what was left of it with thumb and forefinger and dropped it in the bag. “Not a problem. You’re here to have a good time. I’ll have somebody get you guys a bucket of sand for the butts.”

He smiled sheepishly. “Right-o. Got it.”

“Like I said, it’s not a problem.” I tied off the bag and took it down to the truck. Lucy had made me a thermos of coffee, but Bill looked like he needed it more than I did. I brought it up to the porch and poured him a cup.

“Here, this should set you straight. Hope you don’t mind the cream and sugar, that’s how I take it. We better get a move on, though. We can grab you guys a little breakfast on the way.”

He took the coffee like a shot of whiskey and gave his head a horsey shake. I could tell he was feeling pretty bad, though part of him was enjoying this fact; the pain was ironclad proof that he was having the time of his life.

“That goddamn bourbon,” he said cheerfully. “Whose fucking idea was that?” He raised the cup in a little toast. “Though a shot of it in the coffee would be pretty good about now.”

In the cabin I heard footsteps, water running, the low murmurs of men complaining about their hangovers and laughing about it. Bill took another long sip of the coffee, leaned his head back, and actually gargled. You can take the boy out of the frat house, I thought, but thirty years later he’ll still gargle his coffee and chew his aspirins dry.

“Okeydokey.” He shook the last drops over the edge of the porch and deposited the empty cup on the rail with a purposeful thump. “We are locked and loaded, first sergeant. Give me a minute to round up the troops?”

“Take what you need. It’s your day.”

“By god, you’re right. One hundred percent right.” He stepped to the rail with his hands in his pockets and gave a long, hungry-eyed look at the lake, like a Roman general looking over the green fields of Gaul. The air had already begun to thicken with the day’s building heat, and I felt the first beads of perspiration popping in a damp line along my forehead. The wool socks and vest would have to go.

“This goddamn place,” he declared. “Just unbelievable. Like Switzerland or something. Why don’t people know about it?”

“A few do. Not many, though.”

He stood another moment with his back to me, jangling something in his pockets, keys or loose change, then turned from the rail and squinted his eyes in a way that made me wonder what he thought he’d discovered about me.

“Well, mum’s the word, my man,” he said, and gave me a chummy wink. It was just the sort of practiced gesture that had probably worked magic on any number of juries trying to decide if his bosses had poisoned the playground or not. “You got kids, Joe?”

“Just the one. Kate’s a junior at Bowdoin. She was at the front desk when you checked in.”

He nodded. “Sure, Kate. Right. How about that?” I waited to hear about his own-the son in law school following in the old man’s footsteps, the grown daughter married to an architect and pregnant with twins-but all he did was cross his arms over his chest and shake his head with an expression of something like wonder.

“Well.” He clapped his palms together. “As you said, time marches on.” Never mind that I had said the opposite; it was what he needed to hear. “I’ll get these guys moving.”

I waited by the truck for five minutes until they emerged. Fresh handshakes and first names all around: besides Bill there was Mike, fifty and change, a wiry, loose-limbed guy with a cropped beard who looked like one of those old-time marathon runners; Pete, a puffy youngster in his mid-thirties-probably the baby of the outfit-who seemed to be suffering the most, if his moist handshake was any indication; and Carl, fat and happy as a hamster, whom they all called Carl Jr. Bill, Mike, Pete, and Carl: four bleary-eyed middle-aged corporate counsels from the poison factory, nursing sour guts and ice-pick whiskey headaches, a little slow out of the gate but on the whole willing to re-up for a second tour and give the day their best manly try.

“Weren’t there five of you?” I had counted five the day before.

They all looked at each other and burst into laughter. “Right you are,” Bill said, and slapped me on the back. “But I don’t think you’ll be seeing him for a while. Poor slob looked like he died.”

At the deli in town we picked up egg sandwiches, powdered doughnuts, and more coffee all around, then headed south on county 21. It wasn’t a particularly pretty drive, the highway hemmed on both sides by mucky lowland swamps, but I took it at a crawl; those wet little shoots were like moose catnip, and hardly a summer went by that some unlucky soul (nobody local; we know better) totaled his car, and sometimes himself, on this very stretch of road. A mature bull with a full antler spread is a sight to behold even when it’s nothing new to you, but it’s not the size of the thing that does the damage: it’s the geometry. Nearly all that weight is suspended four feet in the air on legs as skinny as pipe cleaners, so you catch one broadside, driving, let’s say, a late-model Ford Taurus, and before you can say “what the goddamn,” seven hundred pounds of permanently startled moose flops right over the hood and through your windshield-what the EMTs up here call “a Maine lap dance.” It doesn’t take a bull, either; even a yearling can do serious damage.

Bill was riding in the truck with me, his buddies following in Pete’s BMW. A good rule of thumb is thirty-five at dusk or dawn, and in the rearview mirror I could see pasty-faced Pete, sighing with exasperation and banging his hands on the wheel. He mouthed a sentence I heard as “Will you fucking go?” I was already thinking I maybe didn’t like him, and that I wasn’t the only one.

Beside me, Bill polished off a second doughnut and cracked the lid on a fresh cup of coffee. He lifted his eyes to the mirror and frowned.

“Oh, don’t mind him, that prissy little fuck. Doesn’t know when he’s having a good time.” He slurped his coffee and opened his window to smoke. “You mind?” I shook my head no, and he pulled out a Pall Mall from the pack in his shirt pocket and lit it off the dashboard lighter.

“Oh, Pete’s all right. Just got some growing up to do. Going through a nasty divorce, too, not that that’s any excuse.” He waved his cigarette toward the roadside. “Pull off here a second, willya?”

I let the pickup glide to a halt and waited in the cab while Bill saw to his business. In the rearview, Pete and Carl Jr. shook their heads and shared a laugh at the boss’s tiny bladder. What with the smoking and the whiskey, I had Bill pegged for prostate problems for sure, not that any of us can avoid that forever.

“One more good thing about this place,” Bill growled, climbing back into the cab with his cigarette still clamped in his teeth. “Man can haul it out anywhere he has a mind.”

We drove the last ten miles without talking. The land we were passing through was typical northwest Maine scrub, pretty heavily logged though you wouldn’t know this from the highway, and laced with old logging roads that you wouldn’t find on any maps. Just past the town of Pine Stump Junction -three blocks of run-down houses, a post office hardly anybody used, and a general store that hadn’t been open for a decade-I pulled the truck off the road into a dirt parking area. A few other cars were parked at random angles: a couple of rust-streaked pickups and 4x4s I recognized, but also the usual smattering of wagons and sedans with out-of-state plates, most with expensive Swedish cargo racks pinched to their roofs and the familiar assortment of bumper stickers and window decals favored by the L.L. Bean set: PHILLIPS ACADEMY ANDOVER, ARMS ARE FOR HUGGING, MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE, and my favorite, VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS. At the far corner of the lot, beside a rusty Dumpster where the locals went to watch the bears make their evening raids (Kate loved this when she was little; she called it “bear TV”), the undergrowth opened like a garden door onto a dirt trail you might not have noticed unless you were looking.

“Okay,” Bill said, “what now?”

I turned off the engine and tossed the keys under the seat. “We hoof it. The dam’s about two miles in from here.”

“The dam?”

“Old WPA thing connecting the upper and lower Ziskos. Been abandoned for years, since Maine Power built a bigger one upstream and pulled out the turbines. The gate’s stuck open, so there’s fish by the ton, even when it’s hot like this. The big Atlantics come up to feed below the spillway. You’ll see.”

I walked back to the BMW as Pete’s window glided down to meet me. Carl Jr. was smacking on a last doughnut; Marathon Mike, stretched out in back, was fast asleep, his head propped on a sweater against the door.

“This is the place,” I told him. “Just park anywhere.”

Pete looked around and scowled. “This is a brand-new forty-thousand-dollar BMW. You want me to leave it here?”

“That’s the idea.” There was no use getting mad; it was going to be a long day with these guys. “Just be sure to leave the keys in it for the valet.”

In the passenger seat, Carl Jr. slapped the dashboard and burst into laughter. I felt an instant rush of love for him, balancing my already intense dislike of crybaby Pete-though I was also suddenly sure that Mrs. Pete had made off with the whole kit and caboodle, save for one very expensive BMW.

“Very fucking funny, you asshole,” Pete said to him. He looked back up at me from the window. Whatever I was going to get, I figured, would have to do for an apology. “Okay, that didn’t come out right, I guess.”

“No, it didn’t.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, just park the thing,” Carl Jr. said. “Nobody wants to steal your fucking car.”

As far as I know, Kate never minded having a convicted felon for a father. After all, it wasn’t as if I’d hurt anybody, or robbed a bank, or even cheated on my taxes. (To the contrary: my brief and rather cushy trip through the federal justice system was enough to turn me into a model citizen forever. I don’t so much as double-park, and you could eat off my taxes.) Though my crime was in every way a failure of proper obedience to the proper authority, it’s also true that the backward glance of history has been kind to those of us who, for whatever reason, hit the road when duty called. Some people even call us heroes.

“Congress never declared war. Against Vietnam, I mean.”

Kate said this to me on a day of snow in deep midwinter-a school morning, though with the drifts already a foot deep, nobody was going anywhere. We were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking cocoa after a trip outside to fill the bird feeders and taste the snow on our tongues. The room was warm and close-smelling from the wet clothes we’d propped by the open stove door to dry.

“Okay,” I said, and put down my mug. “What brought this on?”

“They didn’t. Mrs. Wister said so. We’re learning about it in social studies. She said a lot of people believed Vietnam was wrong.”

Shellie Wister was Kate’s fourth-grade teacher, something of a local character who kept a menagerie of rabbits and other small animals in her classroom and puttered through town in an old lemon-yellow VW Squareback with a faded peace sign in the window and teardrop crystals swaying from the rearview. She had moved up to the North Woods to live on a commune sometime in ’68 or ’69, about the same time I skipped town. The story went that she had been a society wife down in Boston who simply woke up one morning to realize her entire life was built on the murderous lie of warmongering capitalism. Though the commune was long since defunct, a rocket that had blown up on the pad, she still lived alone out in the country in a wood-heated cabin, raising goats and chickens and composing fierce letters to the local paper on everything from nuclear disarmament to the Nicaraguan Contras-letters that, despite their argumentative ferocity, always seemed to me unfailingly polite. Every few years she got herself arrested for chaining herself to a tree or some other good-natured nonsense meant to irritate the loggers, but the school board let her continue teaching despite these outbursts of Thoreauvian civil disobedience (required reading for draft dodgers, by the way), good teachers being about as rare in these parts as plastic surgeons. It was also pretty well accepted that Shellie was a lesbian, though in my opinion this was pure sour grapes: Shellie was a good-looking woman who simply didn’t need or want a man, and the ones who tried quickly found this out.

Though she never said as much, I think Shellie thought the two of us shared a bond as criminals of conscience. I didn’t have the heart to tell her this wasn’t at all the case with me, and that Thoreau would have called me a coward to my face. And in any event, Kate absolutely adored her.

“Well, that’s true,” I said. “Many people did.”

“Your father. My grandfather.”

“He was one, that’s right.”

“Did you?”

I sipped my cocoa and thought. I had been waiting to have this conversation for years. But now that it had finally come, I felt completely unprepared, like a kid taking an exam he’d studied too hard for. Everything I’d planned to say was suddenly forgotten.

“I didn’t like it. Nobody likes war, except maybe generals. But on the whole I’d have to say no, I didn’t think it was wrong. If there hadn’t been a good reason to fight, they wouldn’t have asked me to go. That was how I thought of it.”

“They didn’t ask you. They drafted you.”

“That’s their way of asking, Kats. Like, when me or mom says, Kats, please pick up your room. It’s a request, but we mean business. It’s sort of the same thing.”

“Quakers didn’t go. Mrs. Wister told us about them. She said they were…” Her brow wrinkled with the effort of a new word. “Con-scious objectors.”

“The word is conscientious. And you’re right. But if Mrs. Wister told you about them, then she probably also told you that Quakers are pacifists. You know that word, pacifists?”

Across the table, she nodded. “They don’t believe in war.”

“That’s right. Any war. Or any kind of fighting at all. I don’t feel that way, and if they’d asked me, that’s what I would have said.”

She frowned the way she had since she was small, her thoughts turned inward as she prowled the hallways of her argument, looking for an unlocked door.

“You could have been killed.”

“True, I might have. But probably not. And in any case, that makes no difference. It was complicated, Kats. Those were crazy days. The truth is, I wanted to go to Vietnam. Well, not wanted. I thought it was my duty to go. But my father asked me not to.”

Her eyes flashed-a hunter with the quarry in her sights. “Asked asked, or pick-up-your-room asked?”

“Well, I was a grown man by then, Kats. But yeah, that’s pretty much how it happened.”

“So, the government told you to do one thing, and your father told you to do another.”

“That’s right.”

“And you had to choose.”

“Smart kid. You’ve got it exactly.”

That frown again. She looked into her mug a moment like a diviner reading tea leaves. “Then you were one,” she said finally.

“One what, Kats?”

“Con… scientious objector.”

Kate was nine when she said this to me. Nine years old, and she actually said this!

“Mrs. Wister asked me something after class. To give you a message.”

I had seen this coming too. “Okay, shoot.”

“She wanted to know if you’d come to school someday. To talk about the draft. About being a draft invader.”

The mistake was such a treat I decided to let it go by. Draft invader-why hadn’t anybody thought of this before?

“I don’t really have much to say about it, Kats. Do you want me to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Four years cleaning fish and feeling homesick. It’s not really a very good story. It was pretty smelly, actually.”

“And you came back because I was going to be born.”

I nodded. “Yup. I missed your mom, and your grandpa was getting sick and needed me to look after things here, and the whole thing had begun to look pretty stupid. But it was mostly for you.”

“Tell me again about sleeping on the floor.”

This was the part of the story she knew and loved the best-the part in which she was the main character.

“Well, let’s see. You were born a bit early. About a month. And after you were born, Mom was pretty weak, and had to stay in bed for a while. So I slept on the floor by your crib to watch over you.”

She got out of her chair and climbed onto my lap. “How small was I?”

She knew all of this already, of course, had heard it a hundred times. “The smallest person I’d ever seen, Kats. Five pounds and something.” I showed her with my hands. “But not too small. Just the right size for a girl baby.”

“Tell me about the snow.”

“Who said anything about snow?”

“Daddy!”

“Okay, okay, the snow. A couple of days after you were born there was a big snowstorm-”

“How big?”

“Well, pretty big. Huge, in fact. Four, five feet at least. Snow like you’ve never seen in your life. And then it got cold, as cold as I’ve ever felt. Ten, fifteen below zero. It was so cold that if you sneezed it would turn to ice as it came out your nose.”

“Daddy, gross!”

“I’m just saying it was cold. And with all that snow and cold the power went out, and there was too much snow even for the plow, so there was no way anybody was going anywhere for a while, it was just the bunch of us all holed up together, me and your granddad, and your mom still weak and you so tiny.”

“And you kept me warm.”

“That’s right. When it got really cold at night I wrapped a blanket around the two of us and held you tight by the fire, and that was how I did it. It was when I knew how glad I was to be home. It was like you were saying to me, Daddy, you’re back now, and this is your job, keeping me warm. Just like now. Kats?”

“What?”

“You want me to tell this story to your class?”

She considered this a moment, then shook her head against my chest. “I guess not.”

“That’s what I was thinking too. But you don’t have to tell Mrs. Wister. I’ll tell her myself.”

Which I did: when school resumed the next day, I instructed Kate not to take the bus home and drove into town to get her instead. Waiting by my truck in the pickup line I told Shellie Wister that Kats and I had talked things over and decided that four years gutting mackerel in New Brunswick and two more pushing a broom and boiling bedsheets in a VA psychiatric hospital weren’t anything anybody else’s children would actually be interested in. Our family story would stay just that: something for us, and not for the public record.

“I’m sorry to hear it, Joe. Anything I can say to change your mind?”

We were standing by the open door of the truck, our conversation blanketed by the roar of buses and yelling kids and general end-of-the-school-day chaos. Kate had wandered up the salted sidewalk to spend a last minute with her friends; though the air was still cold, the sun was bright as a heat lamp, a shining gift after two solid days under a dome of falling snow. Kate had removed her parka and tied it around herself, the empty arms dangling at her waist. Like most of her friends she was wearing an enormous purple backpack with the name of some singing group on it-New Kids off the Tracks or whatever it was-a Christmas present I had driven nearly two hours down to a Bradlees in Waterville to find. What in blazes did she keep in that thing? When she glanced in my direction I lifted my eyebrows to tell her to move it along.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer, Shellie. I just don’t have anything interesting to say about it. You’d probably be bored.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Joe. The kids could really learn something from you.”

“All they’d learn from me is how to pack fish. I’m really not the best person to ask about this stuff.”

She let her eyes hold mine another moment. She was wearing a bunchy sweater of raw gray wool, the kind that looks homemade and in Shellie’s case almost certainly was. (No doubt she’d woven the wool, too.) A bright purple scarf circled her throat; she smelled a little of wood smoke, and beneath that, almost imperceptibly, a wispy hint of lilacs. I knew what she was doing with her eyes-she was a teacher, teaching-and bless her heart, I thought, thank God above for the Shellie Wisters of the world; though I also wanted very badly to shoehorn Kate from her friends and hit the road without having to explain any more than I already had. Shellie was clutching a clipboard across her chest, and as she stood before me, her dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully, letting the silence do what talk could not, I felt the conversation slip from its course and snap into a fresh line like a tacking sail.

“A lot of us think your father was a great man, you know. He helped a lot of people.”

I had to laugh. “Pissed a few off too.”

“True, he did. But what’s the saying? Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it’s what you believe, and the heck with everybody. It’s a hard message to teach, especially these days, with that actor in the White House. All of a sudden it’s like Vietnam never happened, like we never learned a thing. It’s worse than disgraceful. It’s a crime. That’s what I’m trying to teach these kids, Joe. To think for themselves. That’s what you could tell them about.”

Somewhere in this Shellie had placed her hand on my sleeve-not quite holding it, but not just touching it, either. The gesture was unknowable, nothing I could break her gaze to consider, a sensation that would remain at the periphery as long as her hand remained in its mysterious contact with my sleeve. Somehow, it made me feel just as I did whenever I read one of her letters in the paper: like I was in the presence of an actual grown-up. The outhouse, the chickens and goats, the clacking loom in her smoky cabin: in the touch of her hand I felt the firm existence of these things, their patient purposefulness and calm utility, the way they expressed a solid life that was far more real, in its way, than the hodgepodge or random impulses that generally pass for adulthood. And here she was, this woman who might have been the second truly charismatic person I had ever met-my father being the first-suggesting I might have something to teach anyone. She had no idea how wrong she was about me, but for a second, just one, I knew what I would have told the class. Most of us spend our entire lives trying to learn what it means to be brave. What we hope is that simply trying will count for something.

“Well, I don’t want to take too much of your time, Joe. I’m sure you have places to be.” She released my sleeve, and just like that, the spell was broken. “Tell Lucy I said hi, won’t you? And thank her again for her help with the bake sale. Those cinnamon buns of hers are always the first to sell out.”

I couldn’t have said how long the two of us had been standing there. Kate was nowhere to be seen. Then the crowds parted and I found her by the bus line, talking to a boy I didn’t recognize, a sandy-haired kid in jeans and a flannel shirt holding a hockey stick he kept flicking on the pavement, the two of them standing together on the path in a nervous, happy way that could only mean one thing. Boys, I thought, and felt the word drop like a bomb to my stomach. Just a day ago she had crawled into my lap to hear a story of her babyhood. She might have actually put her thumb in her mouth. It wouldn’t be long now until her life was full of boys.

“Joe?”

“Right. Sorry.” I shook my head and returned my eyes to Shellie, suddenly embarrassed. “Took a bit of a trip there, I guess. Cinnamon rolls. Thanks to Lucy. Got it.”

“It’s okay, Joe.”

“No, no, I’ll tell her, first thing.”

Her face lifted in a reassuring smile. “I meant about Nicky Pryor. The boy talking to Kate? Forgive me, but I saw you look. You probably know his parents, Cash and Suzie.”

I looked again. “Jesus. That’s Cash’s kid, with the hockey stick? He looks so…”

She allowed herself a gentle laugh. “Mature is the word you’re looking for. But he’s a nice boy.”

“I was going to say menacing.”

“Maybe a little of that too.”

Her eyes found mine again. What a pity, I thought, that Shellie had no children of her own. Though of course that wasn’t right. She did have them; my Kate was one.

“I know it seems to happen fast, Joe. But believe me, they’re still just children. Just barely, but they are. Maybe trying to be a little more. Certainly they’d like to be a little more. But it’s still… oh, I don’t know. Just a game. Like dress-ups, when they were small.”

“What you’re saying is, I’ve got time yet.”

“Hell’s bells, Joe.” She laughed again, this time with pleasure. “I’d say it just to cheer you up.”

In rubber waders, boots, and fly vests, a two-mile walk over even pretty flat terrain can feel like ten, and by the time I got my lawyers to the dam, the bunch of them were a sorry sight, breathing hard as horses and drenched with yeasty-smelling sweat. On the way, Bill had stopped twice more to pee-the poor guy couldn’t go half an hour without muttering an apology and taking a trip to the weeds-and though the rest of them were decent about it, waiting by the side of the trail in what passed for respectful silence, I could tell this generosity was motivated less by friendship or goodwill than their own sympathetic pangs of worry. Prostate, I’d figured, though now I was also thinking type 2 diabetes, which my father had toward the end. Either way, I thought Bill would tell me which it was before the day was through. The sun was blasting through the trees when we reached the gate, and as I fumbled with the padlock, I gave them the lay of the land.

“The dam’s about a hundred yards down this incline. Maybe another two hundred yards across, and there’s a catwalk but no handrails, so be careful. The Army Corps of Engineers keeps a watch station, but nobody’s been in it for years. On the other side of the catwalk a trail loops down to the old turbine outlet at the base of the dam. The water’s rough and tricky to wade, but you can fish from the rocks if you like.”

Bill nodded. “Okay, I’ll bite. How rough is rough?”

We could all hear it plainly now, a sound you might mistake as wind in the trees as you hiked up the path, but not this close: the muscular pounding of a thousand gallons of ice-cold water pouring out the vacant turbine channel each and every second. Where we stood you could smell it, too, all that cold water mixing with the air of the valley, like icy breath falling out a freezer.

“It sounds worse than it is. If you’re careful and stay clear of the outlet, you should be fine.”

We made our way down the last of the path. Where it cleared the trees the ground and sky opened like jaws, giving us a broad view of the two lakes and the dam between them, a wall of white concrete you couldn’t look straight into when the sun hit it. The drop on the downstream side was eighty feet; below it, water roiled in a frigid roar of boiling whitecaps, then fanned out in a broadening spillway before emptying, another thousand yards below, into the Lower Zisko. You could fish any part of it, and on any given day it could all be good, but the upper end, where the water was trickiest, was generally best; all that moving cold water churned up the small feeding fish that the landlocks loved, drawing them closer to the surface. The control station stood on our side of the dam, empty as always. A second gate, also unlocked, guarded the entrance to the catwalk, with a large sign of warning: NO TRESPASSING. DANGEROUS WATERS. NO SWIMMING. DO NOT CROSS THE DAM.

Pete stopped at the gate. “I don’t know about this. Is it safe? This doesn’t look legal. The sign says no trespassing.”

They all paused, lawyers thinking about the law and maybe that eighty-foot drop to boot, but then Bill stepped forward and swung the gate wide. “Joe, anybody ever drown out here?”

It had happened, I knew, but not for years. I saw where he was going and thought I’d play along. “All the time,” I said.

“Good.” He winked at me, then smirked in Pete’s direction. “See? We’ll make a man of you yet, youngster.”

Pete folded his arms across his chest. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

Bill snorted and stepped through the gate. “What is this, fourth grade? Don’t be such a pussy, son.”

It all seemed like a jolly joke, but by the time we got to the other side, I could tell something was wrong with Pete. His face had gone the white of chalk, and he was breathing in shallow little puffs. I sent the other three ahead to wait while he sat on a big piece of limestone, his rod across his knees.

“It’s the heights. I can’t stand heights.” He looked back the way we’d come and grimaced like he’d seen his death. “Jesus. Is there another way back?”

“Afraid not, unless you call a helicopter.”

Pete put his head in his hands, letting himself take a moment just to breathe; his hands were shaking, and for a second, I actually felt sorry for him. Bill, Mike, and Carl Jr. had already made their way down the embankment to the base of the dam and were looking the water over. In a large party, there was always one, and Pete was the one.

“Mother… fucker.” He gave his head a sharp shake and looked up, squinting into the light. “Did you mean it, about people drowning?”

“Nah. I was just kidding around.”

“Well, very fucking funny. What was that thing where the water went in? Christ, it was sucking like a toilet bowl.”

He was referring to the wide concrete tube that stuck ten feet or so above the surface of the lake on the upstream side. A series of gates, like the open spaces between rungs on a ladder, pulled water down to the bottom of the dam. Only the top gate was open, but with the water so low, it sat right at the surface, water swirling around it in a whirlpool.

“That’s the inlet tower. It used to draw water down to the turbines, though they pulled those out thirty years ago.”

“Listen,” Pete said, “I probably should tell you I don’t know how to do any of this. The only thing I know how to fish for is a can of tuna at Stop and Shop.”

“I kind of guessed.”

“It gets worse. I can’t even swim.”

“Not at all?”

He shook his head hopelessly. “Something about my body mass. I can do the strokes okay, but I sink like a rock.”

I nodded silently. What was there to say?

“I’ll tell you a story,” Pete went on. “At Harvard there’s this idiotic swim test you have to pass to graduate. The family that built the library lost their son on the Titanic, so everybody has to make it across the pool and back just to get their diploma. Like being able to swim would have helped the poor bastard in the middle of the North Atlantic. Know what I did?”

Never mind that this little story was his way of letting me know he’d gone to Harvard. “You cheated?”

“Swimming the thing was out of the question. I actually had a scheme cooked up to have one of my roommates take it for me. But when the last day for the test came, he said he couldn’t do it. Guy’s all lined up with a big Wall Street job, no way he was taking any chances for me. I went down to the pool, and there was this long line, mostly Asian kids shivering in their skimpy little suits, I have no fucking idea why, but all of them waited like me until the last day. When my turn came, I jumped in and just let myself go under. I just sat on the bottom of the pool and waited for somebody to pull me out. Who fucking knows how long I was down there, but it felt like forever. But then, the lifeguard yanked me out. ‘You can’t swim?’ he asks me. ‘Not a stroke,’ I say. For a long time the guy just looked at me. Sixty thousand dollars’ worth of education, and it all comes down to this one guy, what he’s going to do. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Get out of here.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

“Lucky break,” I said.

“Lucky? I should have killed the guy. Want to know what I did next?”

In truth, I could have done without the rest of the story, but I knew there was no stopping it.

“Marched straight down to the law school and signed up for the LSATs. Right on the spot I decided completely out of the blue to be a lawyer. My girlfriend and I had been planning to join the Peace Corps after graduation, thought maybe we’d go teach in Africa or someplace. I wanted to be a writer, too. I’d actually published some short stories in the campus rag.” He laughed miserably. “Can you believe it? Fucking short stories!”

Pete seemed a little young to mourn his life this way, and part of me, the generous part, would have liked to talk him out of this feeling, which was the worst kind of rabbit hole a man could go down on an otherwise promising afternoon. But I saw no chance of this. Streamside speeches on life’s disappointments were a staple of the trade, and I had heard enough of them over the years to learn my limits. It also seemed likely to me that it was the girlfriend he regretted losing most of all. He would misremember her completely, of course; she was the muse of his unlived, better life, and in the nostalgic fantasy he was laying out, she would appear as a figure of pure lost opportunity, as soulfully splendid as the Mona Lisa in a G-string.

“Looks to me like you’re doing okay,” I said, trying to move the day along. “Seems to me it was probably a good decision in the long haul.”

The lie was obvious, and he met it with a quick, correcting frown. “No offense, hombre, but that’s easy for you to say.” He gestured downhill, where the other three men were stringing up their rods. Bill was already wading out into the current. “You don’t work with these assholes.”

I decided not to point out that, technically, I did, at least for today; it was what I was supposed to be doing that very minute, instead of trying to talk Pete out of believing he’d wasted his life by not going to Africa to screw his girlfriend in a grass hut and write his fucking short stories.

“Oh, the hell with it,” Pete said finally. He slapped his knees and rose. “Let’s get this over with.”

EIGHT

But in the morning, Harry Wainwright couldn’t fish. He couldn’t even get out of bed.

Hal found me in the dining room. His father had gone through a bad night, he told me, up for most of it, with Hal and Frances taking shifts. Hal hadn’t actually gone to bed at all, just grabbed a few winks tucked in a chair. We sat together by the big windows overlooking the lake and drank coffee while folks clomped in for breakfast. It was a little before seven; I was already keeping an eye cocked for the moose-canoers, though they usually didn’t come along till at least eight o’clock-way past the time they were likely to see any moose, though the canoers as a group were cheerful vacationers out on a lark, ready to have a good time, moose or no.

“Maybe it was the drive up,” Hal said, buttering a muffin. “Or not eating anything last night at dinner. Hell, maybe it’s just that he’s got cancer, for god’s sake. He doesn’t want to call a doctor, and he doesn’t want to leave.” He paused to chew, using the moment to take a fresh muffin from the basket on the table and pull it into moist halves. “This puts you in something of a bind, I guess.”

I drained my coffee and told him no, that under the circumstances I was happy to wait all day; when Harry was ready to go, I’d be the one to take him. But what we were both thinking was plain enough: that maybe Harry had something else up his sleeve, that a bad night passing into an even worse day was what he’d had in mind all along. My heart went out to Hal. He was a nice guy, every bit as bright as his father, I’m sure, but he’d spent most of his adult life in the shadows, doing more or less what he was doing now: protecting the old man, and reassuring ordinary folks like me that the elephant in the dining room wasn’t going to sit on them anytime soon. I’d have bet big that morning that Hal would have traded any number of silver spoons just to sit and think awhile about what it meant to be the grown son of a dying father.

Hal tipped back in his chair and looked past me through the windows to the lake, where the mist was lifting in loose swirls the color of ice. Lucy came out of the kitchen, brushing her hands on her red apron, and when Hal saw her, he caught her eye and smiled, raising a single finger from the edge of his cup. Somehow, his eyes looked even more tired when he did this. When people die it is sometimes said to be a blessing, and in Hal’s face I saw what this meant. Lucy ducked back through the swinging doors-a sudden wash of kitchen noise, of pots and pans and spattering grease, all of it making me hungry-and Hal turned back to me. He took one last sip of his coffee and fit the empty cup back into its saucer.

“Well. Time to get the kid. If you can believe it, she slept through all of that last night. Now she wants to know why she can’t watch Bert and Ernie. I’ve promised a boat ride instead.” He gave one last look out the window and rose to go. “At least we’ll have a good day for this, anyway,” he said.

After Hal had left, I sat by the window a little longer-the day was shaping up to be a hot one-then got some more coffee and a muffin and took it outside into the damp morning air to get things under way. While Hal and I were talking, one of the moose-canoe parties had come in and sat down to breakfast, a couple with their teenage son (Lucy had shown them to a table, telling them in a voice loud enough for me to hear to take their time, the pancakes were especially good as long as you were real hungry, their guide would be along when they were done), and as I exited the lodge I saw two more drifting in my direction from the boat launch: a man about my age with a thin blond woman, pretty enough for me to pay attention. Her hair was still wet from the shower, and her face had the scrubbed look of someone in a soap commercial. The pair of them were dressed head-to-toe in high-tech outdoorsy synthetics, like a pair of models in a catalog, and they were looking around at the place with big smiles on their faces, all keyed up for a hearty meal and a long float down the river. I had them pegged as newlyweds, connecting them to the late-model Toyota with Pennsylvania plates parked by the dining room. Its rear window and one door panel were still smeared with fading congratulations and off-color honeymoon jokes they would probably be just as happy to be rid of, if only they could find a car wash.

“Dining room’s right through here,” I said, poking a thumb toward the door. They looked like they needed a little nudge to bring them back to earth, though I was as happy to let them ogle the place. They were just the sort of customers who would be back the next year for a week at full-rate with all the goodies. “You folks must be here for the moose run.”

They stopped on the path. “That’s right. We called yesterday? From the Lakeland Inn?”

“Sure thing.” I didn’t know a thing about it, not having taken the call. We shook hands all around. “I’m Jordan. Lucy’s got a table for breakfast all set for you. She says the pancakes are good.”

“Sorry we’re so late,” the man said. “We just couldn’t get our act together this morning.”

“Moose aren’t going anywhere.” They had, of course, already gone. “Take your time. We’ll get you upriver whenever you’re ready.”

“We’re staying in town,” the woman told me, a little guiltily, and for the second time. A good number of the moose-canoers felt the need to apologize like this, as if staying somewhere else was somehow disloyal. “We tried to get in here, but everything was booked.”

“It’s a popular place,” I agreed. “Lots of folks come back every year. We’ve got one guest right now who’s been coming here thirty summers.”

“Thirty summers,” the man repeated. “Listen to that.” He rocked his head upward, bunched up his lips, and gave a short, sharp whistle of amazement. He turned to his wife. “See what I’m saying?”

“I know, I know.”

“Next year, we call well ahead,” the man said.

She rolled her pale blue eyes. “I’ll believe that when I see it,” she said, laughing.

“I’ll tell you what.” I liked these two, and wouldn’t have minded being the one to guide them. By the time we reached the put-in point, five bouncy miles upriver, we’d be like old friends, and they’d hardly remember what it was they came to see-guaranteeing that on the off chance a moose actually did cross their path, they’d remember the sight their entire lives. I was glad to see the man had a camera strapped to his belt, since moose as a rule are dumb as buckets and happy to pose.

“We’ve got some groups checking out this afternoon,” I said. “After the run, come back to the lodge and we can show you some of the cabins. You can see if they suit you. You can book right now for next summer if you want. We might even have an opening later in the week. I can look into it for you.”

“I bet they’re great,” the man said. “Right on the lake like that?” He ran a hand through his hair. “Man.”

The woman leaned a little closer to me; her cheeks were pale, and I had the sense that, if I put my hands against them, they would be cool to the touch, like bed linens. For a moment I felt the urge, and also felt, strangely, that no one would mind if I actually did this. “We drove up from Philadelphia,” she told me. “You could say it’s a total hellhole.”

“That’s a shame,” I said. “I bet it’s nice to get away. Maybe when you get back, things will seem different for you.”

She let her gaze drift past me. Beyond the lodge, the lake was shiny and solid as a ballroom floor under a full morning sun. If they hung around till nightfall, they’d see the same scene in reverse-the surface of the lake so still they’d want to walk across it, a perfect mirror image of the mountains under their feet.

“Pretty nice, isn’t it?” I said.

“Nice? Holy mackerel.” The man puffed up his cheeks and shook his head. “This must be the prettiest place in God’s whole universe.”

I watched them head off to the dining room and then went to check on Kate. I found her down by the storage shed, loading up the bed of the pickup with paddles and life preservers and the old Clorox bottles we used as bailers.

“I think we can time this okay,” she said. “Don’t you have someplace to be?”

“I think I’m stuck here awhile. This thing with Harry might not work after all.” I helped Kate hoist the first canoe up onto the rack over the truckbed. “Hal thinks he may be dying. This isn’t the leaky one, is it?”

“They all leak, Jordan. That’s half the fun.” She jumped down from the bed and pulled her hair back from her face. She was wearing sandals, jeans, a gray T-shirt; over the truck’s fender I saw the sweatshirt she’d worn the night before. I felt like none of us had gone to bed at all.

“Relax, Jordan. I’ll get these folks upstream. Everyone’s going to have a great day.”

“Two groups are in, I think. I talked to one couple. They seemed nice.”

“So, fine. I’ll take care of them. We’re on schedule.” She tilted her head and searched my face. “ Jordan?”

“Aw, I’m okay. It was hard to talk to Hal.” I found myself digging a toe into the gravel and stopped myself. “I think he made me think of my own father, a little.”

“Well, we haven’t really talked about him,” Kate said, nodding. “Maybe we should start?”

“I wish there was something to tell. The problem is, there isn’t.”

She sat down on the open tailgate, snuck a peek at her watch, and squinted up at me. “We’ve got a minute. Tell me anything. What do you remember?”

“He played the guitar. He liked lifting me in the air. His hair felt like touching a broom.” I stopped. I had never said any of these things before. They were ordinary, and all that I had, but I had never said them. “I was three.”

“What else?”

I closed my eyes and thought. “Wind.”

“Wind. You mean what it sounds like?”

“No, not exactly.” I opened my eyes. “I think he felt like wind.”

“Well, he was a pilot, so maybe that’s why. Maybe it was just something that happened one time, something you remember. It doesn’t matter which.” Her eyes, as she spoke, had never left me. Her gaze felt like a warm room I had stepped into. She stood and took my arm. “I’m glad you’re telling me this. Something else, Jordan.”

She leaned her face into mine. And I was thinking, for those moments, only of her; as if for the first time in my life I was having a single thought. Then we parted and the thought of Kate was suddenly woven like a thread through everything, all that had ever happened to me, the clean smell of the pines and the lake and the memory of my long lonely winters; the very turning world we stood on. They say that the moment your life appears before your eyes will be your last, but I’m here to say that it’s not so very different when you kiss a woman like Kate, whoever your Kate may be.

“So, a big day in more ways than one.” She peeked over my left shoulder and then my right, and dropped her voice to a whisper. “You think anyone saw?”

“We’ll know soon enough, I guess.”

“And you didn’t mind?” She peered into my face as if she were reading tiny print. “I didn’t ask, which was sort of rude.”

“God, no.” I would have given it all back, every cent, to kiss her again. “I’m glad you did.”

She let her eyes fall. Her lashes, I saw, were thick with moisture. In all the time I’d known her, I didn’t think I’d seen so much as a tear from her, and I wondered why she was crying now, what I’d done to deserve it. Then she put her hands to my chest and gently pushed me away.

“Okay,” she said, and wiped her eyes quickly with the back of her wrist. “Show’s over, folks. Now go help Harry catch his fish.”

NINE

I never saw her again, my nurse with her knitting needles. I had dreamt her, of course, or the morphine had; I knew this without being told, as I also knew not to ask. Still, I thought she might visit me again, or I hoped she would, that night by the lake when I slept but did not sleep, dreamed but did not dream, was awake every minute and also not. The final unmaking of time, all its solid, familiar order undone, so that even the rhythm of day and night has lost its meaning and one is everywhere in one’s life at once; all that night I drowned in time. And when dawn came-when the blackness of the shades began to pale, and the sky began the slow unlocking of its captured light-I was so surprised to find I was alive I assumed I actually wasn’t. I was dead, but Meredith and Sam were not; while I had slept and died the earth and its heavens had flipped like a cake from a pan, and it was they who were alive, and missing me.

“Pop?” The creak of the cabin door, and behind it, a sweeping arc of day. Morning fills the room; in the chair by my bed, my grown son, Hal. I feel these things without looking. Just lifting my eyelids seems to require an impossible effort, like lifting a piano or reciting the phone book.

“Pop, it’s Hal.”

I thought I said something. I thought I said, I dreamed I was dead, Hal. I saw your mother and brother. She was giving him his bottle in the armchair by the window, the one with the maple tree outside. The leaves were fat and green, and it was long ago.

“How’re you feeling, Pop?”

The baby began to cry; his diaper was wet. She changed him on the dresser, softly humming a song through the pins she held in her mouth. That sweet time of bottles and diapers, the smell of talcum and steam from the stove and the quiet house, and days folded into days. The taste of pins. It was a good dream, Hal.

“That’s okay, Pop.” His hand takes my wrist; he is watching me breathe, I know. I do my best to give him good breaths. But all the air I possess seems to sit at the top of my lungs, the slenderest inch of oxygen, like an ankle-deep puddle marooned by an evaporated sea.

“Well, you rest more.” He pats my arm to tell me I’ve done well. “Okay? Just rest. I’ll be back in a little while.”

Footsteps, voices, all about me the rising tide of day. I hear the sound of Joe’s pickup driving down the trace, the hollow clap of aluminum canoes coming on and off their racks, the bee-like, dopplered buzz of an outboard as it rounds the farthest point-the sounds of departure, of everything streaming away. Franny enters, full of her big-heartedness and the well-intentioned pretense that with a little more shut-eye I will be as right as rain and ready to run the hurdles. She kisses me on the forehead while she smooths my hair with her fingers, tells me about the weather in her loud, husky voice, holds my head to help me take small sips of water from a plastic cup. Harry, she says, are you being good? No fooling around now; rest is what you need. The lake isn’t going anywhere, she says. When she is gone, Hal, my good lieutenant, returns with January, and a breakfast of muffins and juice I can smell but not bring myself to look at. From the little girl’s lips bubble pleasant bits of wordlike sound: “baboo,” “mawmish,” “ticknuck.” Gibberish, and yet as I watch her from my bed, her thoughts are as clear to me as the voice of an orator at a podium: Where is Mommy? Why is everyone acting this way, the way they do when I can’t sleep because my ears hurt and they take me to the doctor? Her eyes inspect my useless form with calm appraisal. I like the ducks, the ducks are interesting. There are ducks in New York, at the park where we go on Sunday and Daddy reads his paper, ducks and a carousel and a zoo with white bears like the ones in my snow globe. I like the bears best of all. If you’d asked, I could have told you. Grandpa, is that why we came, because you’re sick, and to see the ducks in Maine?

Is that what it means to be old?

Meredith’s hand healed and was soon forgotten. Even the doctor who examined it the next day-complimenting my handiwork, and the choice of diaper ointment-seemed wholly unalarmed. We’d been to a party? How many drinks had she had? She looked tired; was the baby letting her sleep? He waved a flashlight beam over her damp eyes, asked her to hold out her hands and press her palms against his own, to stand on one foot and hop. The last made her laugh with embarrassment; hopping, like some kind of pogo stick! Was that all modern medicine could come up with? Twelve hours since the smell of burning skin had filled the kitchen, and now she was joking. The doctor was nobody we’d seen before: a slim man, olive-complexioned, who exuded a faint aroma of oranges. The lenses of his eyeglasses were thick as paperweights. When he was finished with his questions, he pulled a stool to the examining table and sat. Atop his head floated a disk of pink skin that I watched while he re-dressed her hand and smoked, squinting over the cigarette that bobbed in the corner of his mouth. He had read something lately, he remarked, about cigarettes and their deleterious effect on circulation at the extremities. He tipped one shoulder and frowned. He was no example, he admitted, rising and plucking a speck of tobacco from his tongue, but perhaps she might consider quitting smoking.

“He had the worst halitosis,” Meredith said on the ride home. Her hand, wrapped in heavy gauze, lay palm-up on her lap-not part of her, but an object in its own right, like a package she was bringing to a party.

“I thought he smelled like oranges. Isn’t that strange? Who smells like oranges?”

The doctor had given her a painkiller of some kind, a large white pill he said would make her drowsy. For a while we drove in silence.

“Maybe I will,” she said finally.

“Will what?”

She turned toward me in her seat. Her left hand floated upward, a levitating cloud, and made a little wave. “Quit smoking.”

Which she did; she stopped that very day, sweeping through the house to collect the cigarettes and matches and toss them in a bag and out the door, and soon enough the bandages came off, and what happened that summer night in the kitchen on Marvine Road faded from memory-a small and curious episode, but in the end an isolated occurrence, or so we thought, and certainly nothing to fret over. How did you get that scar? a friend might ask, passing her a drink at a party. That scar there on your hand? And for a moment Meredith would pause to examine it, to hold her hand before her face and turn it in the light like an old letter she’d found in the bottom of a drawer. Oh, this? she’d say, her voice brightening with recognition This scar? You know, it was the funniest thing, what happened, the strangest thing really; we’d just gotten home from a party-Harry, do you remember? That doctor with the awful breath. You always tell it better than I do.

Then Sam was sick, and what happened that night in the kitchen was mislaid, along with everything else. We were the parents of a sick child, a baby who would not grow, who still, as he passed his first birthday, wore the same clothing, the little T-shirts and fuzzy bags with arms, that we’d bought the week when he was born. It fell upon us swiftly, that awful year, beginning with an autumn cold that became bronchitis, which became pneumonia, and on and on-a period of time that seemed not to pass but to spread like spilled ink into a single, everlasting night of panic. No one understood what was happening; even the doctors could not explain it, not completely. His lungs were weak; there was something wrong with his liver; his heart, for no apparent reason, skipped every sixteenth beat. His body was a magnet for every kind of illness and infection. For a while we thought CF-cystic fibrosis. But the tests said no. Through the winter and spring he worsened: measles, strep throat, roseola with a blast of fever and convulsions; no childhood illness failed to touch him in those months. But when I remember that time, it’s not the frantic nighttime dashes to the hospital I think of, or even the long, white hours of the hospital, but odd, unrelated moments when I found myself alone. Dusting off the car in the driveway after a sudden snowfall, in case Sam needed to go to the doctor; standing by the electric doors of the emergency room to wait for news and watching a haze of spring rain floating through the lighted cones of the street lamps; sitting in the kitchen of my quiet house on a morning in July-a morning when our baby was actually home and well-and feeling, for the first time, that Sam would truly die. Other children Sam’s age would have been walking, saying their first words, learning to eat from a spoon. Our little boy was learning only how to leave us behind.

He would be forty-five now, a grown man, if he had not died that fall. His final pneumonia took him quickly: a fever that rocketed skyward, the tiny, bottlelike lungs filling, coma, death within hours. After all he’d been through, it seemed a mercy, though of course that was an illusion, something to say to fill the silence of his missing life: the bicycle he would not ride, the books he would not read, the friends he would not have and the girl he would not kiss. The thousand pains and pleasures of his life, shelved in a tomb that the door of early death had sealed. No, there was no mercy in what happened to my boy at all. When he died, he weighed just eleven pounds.

It’s said that many marriages do not survive the loss of a child, that such grief is a room parents enter together but depart alone. I have no cause to argue the point, having sat in just that room. From that day forward we loved each other, Meredith and I, but we loved with broken hearts. And when, on a morning not long after we had buried Sam, I came into the kitchen to find Meredith standing at the window, cupping the curve of her stomach in a secret way that I alone understood, I knew we would go on.

Why Sam but not Hal? There is no knowing. I might as well ask, why Meredith and not me? I had a dog once-what a dog he was! A retriever with something else mixed in, a breed that liked to work and herd: Australian shepherd, maybe, or collie. I named him Mauritz, though Hal called him Ritzy, and it stuck. Ritzy the dog. A steadfast member of the team, as relentless as a metronome: Meredith joked that he would have taken a job bagging groceries at the corner market if only he’d had hands. I loved him, as one can only love such a dog; but I also knew what he was. Behind his eyes, twin chestnuts of the most tender soulfulness, lay, encased in its suitcase of bone, a brain that knew nothing at all of time or sorrow or even the true joy that sorrow makes possible-only its own desire to please, an aching, needful love that could achieve its fullest contentment with the most meager offering: a stale biscuit, a walk around the block to do his business, a pat on his golden head. His own existence, its nature and finitude, was a mystery to him; he might have thought he was a person, or else I was a dog. The day I took him to the vet to have him put down-he was thirteen, his hips so bad he could barely walk to his bowl-I could think of only this to say: “You have been a good dog, and a great comfort to me, and I thank you.” It was all he wanted to hear. I’d never wished so badly to be the dog he thought I was.

We waited for Hal to grow sick, as his brother had, and to this day I think that because of this fear we never quite loved him well enough: we braced ourselves against his departure with the timid fantasy that he was not our son but a kind of visitor, a nephew or refugee, a child misplaced by unfortunate circumstances and temporarily given to our care. No photo albums or memento books or birthday parties (not until he was twelve and simply insisted; by then we had moved to Chappaqua and Hal couldn’t be stopped from showing his friends he had a house with a pool). His entire early childhood went unrecorded and then, as his mother became ill, was subsumed by her struggle. I made my money, grew my business; it’s not important how. Two stores became four, four became eight, a phone call from a withering competitor, offering to sell, and then the floodgates opened. My touch was golden; everywhere it was said that Harry Wainwright could do no wrong. And yet the money was nothing, the long hours pure distraction; Sam’s death had turned me from a father into a provider, and into this task I poured myself like water from a pitcher. All of which is not to say that Hal is not a fine man, only that I can take no credit for this.

And, giving the loudest laugh to our fears, Hal was not just healthy, but robust. I realized this all at once, on an evening when Hal was fourteen. I was moving the garbage cans to the corner, a pair of large cans on wheels, when, over my shoulder, I felt his presence. The sun was behind us; his shadow, thrown on the driveway, stretched ten feet into the road. The effect was an illusion, a ten-foot-tall boy on eight-foot legs, like a giant from a fairy tale, but when I turned, the image I had just seen conflated in my mind with the actual boy before me, and what I saw wasn’t a boy at all, but a man, or nearly. The broad chest, the tight waist, the legs and arms roped with muscle: all of these were a man’s. He wore gym shorts, red high-top sneakers, and T-shirt despite the autumn chill-it was October, close to Halloween-and in the crook of one arm he was cradling a basketball. The way he held it, with such casual ease, seemed to transform the object completely, to inject it with vivid life: not a toy but a tool, like a carpenter’s hammer or a writer’s pen, it had become an extension of all the coiled energy inside him.

“What are you staring at?”

“Nothing. Just taking out the cans.”

“You were staring.”

I shrugged, still taken aback by the sight of him. I felt a little foolish. I loosened my tie. “How you holding up there? You want to shoot some baskets?”

He frowned. “You never shoot baskets.”

“I can try. I used to be pretty good, you know.”

He said nothing about this, but released the ball and gave it one firm bounce on the blacktop, catching it cleanly with a single, outstretched palm.

“Back in Scranton.”

I heard the derision in his voice: Scranton, my boyhood Eden. I hadn’t been back for years and years; my father was long dead, my mother living now in Florida. Every quarter I sent a huge check to the nursing home, and three or four times a year I flew down to visit, usually alone, since Meredith could no longer travel. But Scranton: I’d not really been back for more than a quick visit since ’43, and the day my father drove me north to the Maritime.

“Sure.”

“I’m thinking of trying out for the varsity.”

“Hey. That’s great. You should.”

He bounced the ball again. “I could have done that,” he said flatly, and pointed with his eyes to the cans.

“It’s no bother. I’ve got it.” I rolled the last can into its spot by the curb. “The varsity. That’s really terrific, Hal. What does your coach think?” I tried to remember his name but couldn’t. A heavyset man with a back wide as a tortoise, wearing a whistle on a string. Myers?

“The cans are my job, Pop. That’s all I came out here to say.”

By this time-the day I saw my son’s shadow in the driveway and knew how much I’d missed-Meredith’s hand was no longer a mystery. Another shadow falling across those years of work and worry: as Hal grew, the inkling that something was seriously wrong with Meredith grew beside him, like a dark flower in an adjacent pot. Small, inexplicable injuries, the kind of mishaps that happen to everyone from time to time but in Meredith began to accumulate with the force of a mortal argument. For a while it was a joke: clumsy Meredith, accident-prone Meredith, Meredith who could trip over her own feet on a bare floor in broad daylight. She dropped things, knocked things off tables, sliced her fingers open on knives and can openers, banged into other cars in parking lots; her arms and legs and hands accumulated scars like a Russian general’s medals. Headaches, and a permanent sheen of sweat, and she was always, always cold: For goodness’ sake, she would grouse, why is it always so freezing in here? Did somebody forget to pay the gas bill? What’s wrong with this thermostat? What’s the point of finally having a little money if we can’t heat the house? Never mind that it was summer, the windows wide open, the leaves fat and full of chirping birds. Once, on a trip to Florida, on a day of ninety-degree heat and humidity heavy as goulash, she wore a wool coat to the beach.

It was when her speech began to flatten and slur-not the way a drunk speaks, the words collapsing under their own weight, but more as a kind of snuffing out, certain syllables inexplicably melting as she spoke: peesh for peach, shuz for shoes, tawble for table-that a diagnosis was achieved. I use the passive deliberately; it was an event without agency, as when one says “It’s Tuesday” or “It rained.” Syringomyelia: nothing we had ever heard of, and for just a moment, sitting in the doctor’s office on Fifth Avenue on a pleasant winter afternoon after a train ride into the city and a good lunch downtown, the newness of the word itself made us fail to feel its weight. Seated on the far side of his desk, we shared a funny look. We had a boy in school, a business to run, ideas about the future: of a house in Maine or Florida, or selling the business and retiring early, of seeing London and Paris and Rome. If we had never heard of it, how bad could it be? Though of course the opposite was true: we’d never heard of it because it was rare, infinitesimally rare, and nothing you would want to know about if you didn’t have to, like a brutal little war fought far away among people whose names you couldn’t pronounce.

The doctor removed a fountain pen from his shirt pocket and, on a yellow legal pad, quickly sketched a pair of lines with a series of flattened circles between them. A cutaway view of Meredith’s spine, we understood; really, it ought to curve a little bit, he said, like so, but we got the idea. He pointed with the tip of his pen to the flattened circles. See these? They were cysts, he explained, fluid-filled spaces where none should be; it was possible Meredith had been born with them, or at least had had them many years. It was hard to say, though in her case he believed the condition had been present for some time. She might have a single cyst, or several. The precise mechanisms were not well understood, he continued, though it was known that over time these cysts elongated, pushing nerve tissue against the bones of her spine. Imagine a balloon, he said, slowly expanding in a tube. Patients usually felt the effects first at the extremities-she said she’d first noticed this some years ago, yes, an incident with a cigarette, when she’d burned herself and not felt it? And, as the condition progressed, other things, the complaints she knew so well: the sweating and the constant coldness, the headaches and stumbling, the cuts and scrapes and difficulties of speech and the lack of sexual responsiveness. (For we had conceded this, too, when pressed, though also saying, well, wasn’t such a thing more or less natural, didn’t that just generally fade over time in any marriage?) All of this happening as the cysts filled and stretched and did their damage.

We listened like students, feeling somehow chastened; I had the absurd thought that we had fallen into a dream in which we were kids together at school and had been held back after class. The doctor’s office door was closed; hung on the wall behind his desk were diplomas, certificates, assorted testaments to his credentials, all in heavy, gilt-edged frames. I tried to read them but failed, realizing only then, and with a mild alarm, that they were written in Latin. Time flattened under their gaze; all our life, it seemed, we had been sitting in offices like these. All right, I said, rousing myself, but about these cysts. When would they stop growing? Or could they be removed somehow? A pained and startled look bloomed across the doctor’s face. He was sorry, he said, that he had not been clear. The thing was, they didn’t stop growing. And inside the spinal column was far beyond reach. Perhaps someday such a thing would be possible, but that was years away. The nerves, we understood, were slowly being crushed. There was nothing to be done. He was truly, truly sorry. He knew we had a boy, still young. It was not good news, he knew.

How does anyone begin such a new era in their lives? We thanked him and left and took a taxi to the station. The strangest thing of all, how ordinary life goes on: even the condemned man needs to fill the hours. Beneath the smudged heavens of Grand Central, we ate littlenecks at the Oyster Bar, then went to catch our train. Before boarding, Meredith bought a magazine from a vendor on the platform, and a bag of roasted cashews. As the train carried us north, I watched her flipping through the pages, pausing here and there to read an article of interest, chewing on the roasted cashews that she removed, one at a time, from the waxed paper bag. The pages were printed with a cheap ink, and I saw that her fingers were smudged. Neither of us had said a word about the doctor’s pronouncement; we had entered a kind of trance, the bubble of first-knowing. Her condition could take ten years to run its course, he’d said, and watching Meredith read her magazine, I felt for the first time in my life the shortness of a decade. Ten years, a hundred years, a thousand-once passed, I thought, time was all the same, all over. When the train stopped at Hartsdale, I saw, under the lights of the platform, that it had begun to snow. The air was as still as held breath, absolutely without motion, and the snow descended through it in loose, unhurried swirls, following barely detectable currents. A moment of churchlike silence: the car was so quiet I could hear the snow falling. I watched it a moment, then closed my eyes and tried to hold this image in my mind, to make it last, but then I felt the yank of the car as the force of the engine was relayed down the line and we were pulled out of the station, away. A surge of cold air behind us, and the conductor marched through the car, grabbing ticket stubs from seat backs, singing the names of the towns that lay ahead: White Plains, Valhalla, Mt. Pleasant, Hawthorne.

Meredith took my hand. “It will be all right,” she said.

I wanted to tell her this was so, but couldn’t. It would not be all right. I looked at her hand in mine, then back out the window, where the darkness of a winter night hid everything from view.

“You’ll see,” she said.

Our car was waiting in the station lot, the windshield and fenders dusted with snow. Hal was still at a friend’s; we would have the house to ourselves. As we stepped into the front hall I felt a sudden rush of panic. The stairs, the narrow doorways, the bathrooms with their sleek tile floors: everything would have to be changed. Meredith would need a bedroom on the first floor; we would have to add on, or move. What a heavy task, to plan for these things, to sit at the kitchen table over cups of coffee and describe to a carpenter the ramps and handholds we would need to install before they actually became necessary.

The house was cold, even for me. I let Ritzy out into the yard, adjusted the thermostat, and got myself a whiskey; Meredith moved through the house, turning on lights and setting things to rights. I heard her dial the kitchen phone, then her voice, tired but somehow bright, speaking to the mother of the boy Hal had passed the day with: oh yes, absolutely, everything was fine, it was a nice day to be in the city, especially with the holidays over and all that craziness done for the year, and would it be all right, we were wondering, for Hal to spend the night? We so rarely got an evening to ourselves. One of us would come by in the morning, to pick him up for school. Wonderful, she said, loud enough for me to hear. We couldn’t thank her enough.

She came to me where I was sitting on the sofa, a glass of whiskey in my hand, though I had yet to take a sip.

“Do you want one?” I raised my glass. “I could make tea too.”

She shook her head: no. After all that had happened, after this long day of all long days, she still looked fresh: her gray suit still pressed, her makeup in order, her brown hair framing her face. Around her neck she wore the pearls I had given her for our fifth anniversary; somewhere between the front door and the kitchen she had removed her shoes.

“I always knew, Harry,” she said finally. “Not exactly, not the name for it, but the kind of thing it was. In a way I’m relieved to hear it.”

“How did you…?” But of course I knew how. It was her body; she’d felt it moving away.

“That’s not important. And I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “Not now. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.” Her eyes were unyielding; she had decided something. “I’m tired, Harry. I need you to warm me up.”

“I set the thermostat. I can build a fire too.”

“Never mind that.” She extended a hand to me. Beneath the skin her bones were rods of ice. “What I mean is, you’re my husband, and I want you to come upstairs with me, now.”

She led me up the stairs, slowly, each step cautiously planted, as she had learned to do. In our room she turned on a bedside lamp, a blaze of light that neither of us wanted, and she quickly doused it again. The house had never felt so quiet. It seemed as if the whole world had forgotten about us, that the lights had dimmed everywhere, all across the planet. In New York and Chicago, Paris and Peking, in all the towns and villages of the world, humanity had lapsed into a sleep that did not include us, even in dreams. In the dark we undressed and got under the covers of our bed. For months, a year even, making love had been impossible; she was simply not able. We held each other a long while without speaking, both of us crying a little; I thought how we would have to be content with this from now on, holding and crying, but then she left my side. I felt myself sink into the warmth and softness of her, then the familiar pulsing that seemed to come from everywhere at once: from what she was doing and the air of the room and deeper still, through all the walls of the house, into the foundation, straight down through miles of rock to the center of the turning earth, and I closed my eyes and followed it. I understood what she was telling me; this was how we would make love from now on. She would love me with her body, however she could, until this could happen no more.

I want to tell this story truly, so here it must be said that I also loved another, and how that came to pass: the story in which the married man with the sick wife and the son he does not love enough, or well enough, because he is simply afraid to, permits himself the one, small present he is forbidden. The story in which he is not a hero, not at all.

And yet to say I loved Lucy would be a lie, or at least a kind of self-flattering half-truth. Those weeks in summer: I took them like medicine, a balm against my life, and Meredith’s slow dying. All year long I didn’t think of the place at all; I saw to my business and took Meredith to the doctor and learned to dress and bathe her, and hired the nurses that would help me do these things; I learned, in due course, about the drugs she needed for pain and infection, and how to keep her skin healthy and dry, and about the pans and bags, when that time came. When she could no longer hold a book or magazine or even a newspaper, I read them aloud, or sat in our bed beside her, turning the pages as she asked. I did all these things, and then each July, I packed the car, leaving Meredith in the care of her nurse, and drove north, and the camp would be there waiting, as if I’d never left. Nothing was ever stated or planned; and yet Lucy would find me at the check-in desk, timing some minor chore to coincide with my arrival, or else leave a basket waiting for me in the cabin, always number nine, and tucked in with the sandwich and fruit and sweating bottle of beer still cold from the icebox, a sarcastic, flirty note: Back for more raspberry pancakes, huh? or Warning, this basket will self-destruct in ten seconds, so eat fast. Innocent enough, though they were nothing I could bring myself to throw away or allow myself to keep.

Hal accompanied me only a handful of times in those years; it was boring, he said, by which he meant quiet and always the same, and he missed being at home with his friends. He was an athletic kid who liked and did well at sports, rough games where boys collided into other boys: basketball for most of the year but also football in the fall and lacrosse when he was old enough. Standing in a cold stream or sitting stock-still in the bottom of a canoe for hours at a time, not even daring to speak so as not to scare the fish-these were as anathema to his nature as needlepoint. By the summer he was twelve he had had his fill, and it wasn’t for years and years, not until long after his mother had died, that he joined me again; for now I went alone.

“Tell me about Meredith.”

It was the summer of 1968, our fifth July, when Lucy asked me this. A year of tribulations: King was dead, Bobby Kennedy was dead, there were riots in the slums and in the prisons, that great liar Johnson had all but locked himself away, a mad king in his tower; on television every night we watched the prosecution of a war that seemed to test not one’s patriotism but the human appetite for gore. In March, Meredith had broken her hip in a fall in the bathroom; two surgeries, and it was still unclear if she would be able to walk again. The worst possible year. And yet here I was, drinking a beer on the dock after a day so idyllic I hadn’t wanted even to cast a flyline into it, lest even this small fingerprint of my presence disturb its perfection. I had spent the morning walking the long trail that ran beside the river, and then taken a canoe out for an aimless paddle around the lake. I hadn’t spoken a word since breakfast, not until Lucy had seen me on the dock and taken the Adirondack chair next to mine. That summer she had taken over the kitchen from Daphne Markham, who, it was said, had met a man through a Methodist missionary pen-pal service and gone off with him to Ecuador.

We were sitting side by side, watching the lake soak up the last of the light. A scene of such preternatural calm, the effect was distorting, like a spell: two miles away, the pine-clad mountains that rose from the far side had the softened look of Iowa hills in a Grant Wood painting. It seemed possible to reach out and hold one in the hand.

“Fair enough. What do you want to know?”

“Is she pretty, is she smart, does she like hats, what’s her favorite color?” Lucy laughed and folded her legs under herself, as limber as a gymnast. “You know, Harry, the details.”

I sipped my beer. “Yes to the first, very much, and I’ve always thought so. Yes again, but not in the same way as you. Absolutely no to hats. As for the last, I don’t know. Blue, I think. She used to wear a lot of blue.” She let the compliment pass, unremarked: just as well.

“Used to. What happened to blue?”

I took a moment to think. “Well, now that you mention it, she does have a kind of blue dressing gown she likes. My turn?”

“Not so fast. And you know Joe, anyway. Where did you meet her?”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“People meet.” She shrugged. “It’s always a story.”

“In a restaurant, near the end of the war. Where did you meet Joe?”

“High school. I was a dorky little freshman when he was a sophomore. It was kind of a May-December thing. We didn’t get together until later, though. What restaurant?”

“I don’t remember the name. It might have been more of a taproom. It had a separate ladies’ entrance, I remember, though you don’t see those anymore.”

“Thank God for small favors. Was she pregnant when you married her?”

The question caught me so short I laughed. “What gave you that idea?”

“Don’t be offended. A bar sounds… I don’t know, a little questionable. Even one with a, what did you call it”-she deepened her voice mockingly-“a ladies’ entrance.”

“I’m not offended. But it wasn’t that kind of place.”

“Okay, it wasn’t.”

I could have let the matter go. And yet to do so seemed foolish. Why not answer the question? “Well, technically-”

She stopped me with a laugh. “Technically, Harry? Oh, being pregnant is very technical, I’ve heard. Happened to a girl I knew at school. She was very technically pregnant.”

“Point taken.” I was not angry at all; far from it. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but the truth is, yes, she was. Barely, a matter of weeks. We didn’t even know ourselves. Or at least I didn’t. We just told everybody that Sam was born a little early.”

At the mention of his name, a silence fell over us, deeper than the simple absence of sound. She knew about Sam, of course. But I almost never spoke of him, not even with Meredith.

“Oh God, Harry,” she said after a moment. “Me and my mouth. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s all right.” I smiled to reassure her this was so. “It’s not bad to talk about him. In a way it’s easier up here. I didn’t realize it before, but I think he was on my mind all day.”

“What were you thinking?”

For a moment, I let my mind drift: where had my thoughts gone, through all the quiet hours?

“It’s hard to say, exactly. You don’t have specific thoughts, like I bet he’d enjoy this walk in the woods I’m taking, or he’d be this tall by now if he were still alive. It’s more a feeling, like he’s not so far away.” I shrugged, a little embarrassed. “I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“I think it does. Maybe it’s why you come here like you do.”

“Maybe that’s it.” I paused. “You know, it’s not the only reason, Lucy.”

Another silence, even of held breath. The mystery of the feeling between us, whatever it was, was suddenly out in the open, like a deer that had stepped without warning from the underbrush. Even the slightest movement would scare it away.

“Harry-”

“You have to go, I know. Feed the masses.” I made some nervous business of looking at my watch. “You’d better hurry, actually. I think I’ll stay here awhile, finish my beer.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say, but you’re right.” There was sadness in her face, though I somehow felt I wasn’t the cause; it was for something I didn’t know about. It seemed to spread from her in ripples, like a disturbance on water.

“Harry?”

“Yeah?”

She unwound her legs and rose to go, touching me quickly on the shoulder. “Thanks for saying I’m smart.”

The next summer, Joe was gone. The story I heard through the grapevine was that his father had driven him north to Canada just before he was supposed to be inducted; Joe Sr. had a special way up there, involving old logging roads that nobody used or checked. He had arranged a job in New Brunswick for his son, as he had for so many others. A warrant had been issued for Joe’s arrest, on the charge of desertion.

The sadness I had seen in Lucy’s face that afternoon on the dock seemed to have settled over her like a change of season; it was the first summer that she neither greeted me at check-in nor left a basket in my cabin, and in fact I didn’t see her at all until the following morning, when I came into the dining room for breakfast. The place was packed; I lingered at the entrance, pretending to scan the room for a table. Then the kitchen door swung open, exhaling a sweet breath of cinnamon and bacon fat, and there she was, wiping her hands on a dish towel, speaking over her shoulder to somebody at the stove; turning, she caught my eye and smiled. She looked tired, older somehow, as if far more than a year had passed. The skin at her temples was stretched by worry. Her brow was damp, her hair uncombed and tied back in a careless bun. She hugged me quickly and told me I looked well, and that she was sorry she hadn’t been able to see me sooner. “I guess you heard” was all she said of Joe.

Later that afternoon everyone gathered in the main lodge, where Joe Sr. had rigged up a television. The room was crowded with guests, some regulars, old friends I knew; someone had brought wine and was passing it around in little paper cups. A man I hadn’t seen before said he’d brought a better television, a color Trinitron. A murmur of interest went up-well, why not, if he had brought a better set? But then someone else pointed out that the broadcast would be black-and-white anyway, the images beamed from a quarter million miles away, and the momentum behind the idea was lost.

Lucy appeared and took a place beside me on the sofa. Like some of the other women, she had dressed up a little and put on a bit of makeup, as if for a party.

“I wonder if Joe’s watching this,” she said. “Do they care in Canada? Do they even have TV?”

“Look,” a woman behind us said. “He’s coming out.”

The opening door, the slow progress down the ladder, the bouncing, marionettelike steps: images at once familiar and completely new, their strangeness magnified by their very ordinariness. As Armstrong’s foot touched the surface, a hurrah went up from the room. I suddenly wished I was back in New York, watching this with Meredith and Hal. I resolved to phone home as soon as the broadcast ended. Did you see it! I would say. The moon!

“I’ve heard it’s all faked,” someone said. It was the man with the color set. He looked around the room, grinning like a pumpkin. “This is all being televised from a TV studio in Texas.”

When no one laughed, the woman beside him, his wife I guessed, swatted him on the shoulder with a magazine.

“How would you know?” She spoke loudly to friends. “Believe me, he wouldn’t know if something was faked if his life depended on it.”

That evening after dinner we all went out to the dock and drank champagne, under a wedge of gray moon that seemed somehow closer, as if the world had risen to meet it. It followed a descending arc along the tips of the trees and, just past eleven, disappeared for the night. The champagne had taken hold: some people were swimming, despite the cold. The night had opened like a book. When the swimming ended a call went up for music; somebody ran a long extension cord up the dock to connect a radio to an outlet by the lodge. A wall of static, and then the air was filled with the sound of an orchestra, Basie or Ellington, the first bars of a song I didn’t recognize, and scampering up and over the wall-like barricade of strings, the unmistakable voice of Ella Fitzgerald. Bar by bar, the song came into focus, like a picture: “How High the Moon.” The sound seemed to reach us not through the airwaves but across a sea of time.

“Hey, everybody,” the man with the radio said, “I guess they heard!”

Couples found one another and danced on the dock. Lucy had left the party when the swimming began; sitting by myself, I felt a little relieved that she was gone. Had she stayed, I would have asked her to dance-it was inevitable, a fact ordained by the evening’s currents-but I felt this would have been awkward, not only because of what had passed between us the summer before, but also because Joe was gone.

“Come on, Harry.” It was the wife of the man with the color television who pulled me to my feet. I could tell she’d had a lot to drink, though we all had. We’d introduced ourselves earlier in the evening; they were Ken and Leonie. She was a trim woman with reddish hair cut short and large, damp eyes-pretty, though in the slightly anxious way of fading beauties after forty. Her husband, a barrel-chested Irishman, was dancing with another woman from their group.

“I’m not much of a dancer,” I confessed.

“That’s good, because I’m too loaded to care. This is the first interesting thing that’s happened since we got here.”

She placed her head against my shoulder and pulled me in close. Her breath smelled of alcohol and lipstick. I thought of Lucy, wondering where she had gone off to.

“Hey, you’re good,” Leonie said after a few steps. “I don’t know what you were talking about.” She pulled her face away and directed her voice to her husband. “That’s right, honey,” she said cheerfully, “you go on and dance all you want, I’ve found somebody new.”

“Maybe you should dance with him,” I offered.

Her hand slid up my back until I felt her fingers lightly moving on the skin of my neck. The gesture was impersonal; I could have been anyone. Her body had turned to liquid, melding against my own.

“He doesn’t care, you know,” she said quietly. “It’s how we do things.”

“Really, I have to go after this one song.”

“Listen to you,” she moaned disapprovingly. “So uptight.”

We finished our dance and I made my escape. I hadn’t lied; it really was late, nearly one A.M. But it was also true that I’d felt myself on the verge of doing something foolish. Meredith’s illness had frozen that part of my life, made such urges seem trivial. But they could not be banished entirely. I’d pulled myself away from the music and dancing the way one says no to a fourth drink. But returning to my cabin down the dark path, I felt lonely, even a little ridiculous. I was forty-four years old; I might have been thirteen, or a hundred.

I undressed and lay in the dark, sleepless with the sugary champagne. Through the windows I could still hear the music of the radio, floating across the lake, and now and again a loud voice or laughter. More splashing: the swimming had resumed. I wondered if Leonie had found someone else to amuse her.

Then I was brightly, urgently awake, and wondering where I was. Someone was knocking on the door, or else I had dreamt this. I picked up my watch from the bedside table and squinted at it in the dark: 3:20. I had slept almost two hours. I lay back on the pillow and had almost forgotten the knocking when it came again: not a vigorous banging, but a quiet, almost uncertain tapping, like a code. I rose and opened the door.

“Harry?”

It was Joe. I flicked on the porch light and opened the screen to step out. His face was bearded and dirty; he was carrying a pack. The look on his face was one of embarrassment, almost fear. He held up his hands against the sudden light.

“Turn it off, please.”

“What are you doing here?”

He looked around nervously. “Please, just turn it off. I don’t want anyone to see me.”

I reached back into the cabin and doused the light. A moment of absolute confusion: I realized he hadn’t been looking for me at all.

“Shit, I’m sorry, Harry. Pretend you never saw me, okay?”

“Does your father know you’re here?”

“No, and he’d better not. I mean it.” He shuddered and shook his head. “Jesus, what the fuck.”

Another voice reached us from around the corner. “Joe? Joe, is that you?”

Joe stepped off the porch as Lucy appeared and flew into his arms. He picked her up and gave a happy growl. The months away had released something in him, a kind of animal power. He put her down and looked at her, hugged her again.

“God, you smell,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“Long story. Just never ride with chickens, is all I’ll say. What the hell, Luce? Didn’t you tell me cabin nine? I think I permanently scared the shit out of old Harry here.”

She lifted her face and saw me then, standing on the porch; I think she’d forgotten I was there. Old Harry. I understood that she’d been waiting for him, in one of the adjacent cabins, for hours-ever since she’d left the party.

“It’s all right,” I said.

Joe set himself free and stepped up on the porch again. “Sorry again, Harry. Didn’t mean to freak you out like that.” He held out his hand, and we shook. His fingers were rough as pumice. “I guess you know I’m a wanted man, so if it’s all right with you, mum’s the word, okay? If my father knew I was here, he could get in trouble too.”

“You can count on me,” I said. “I won’t breathe a word.”

He descended the porch again and joined Lucy on the path. For a moment, we all three just stood there. A part of me was honestly glad for them, and glad for myself, being there to see it, though I felt a strange ache, too. It was as if I could step forward into the darkness and be utterly consumed by it, obliterated without a trace, remembered by no one. Even to set foot off the porch would set this in motion.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I mean it. You two should get going.”

“Harry?” Lucy’s voice was a whisper.

I put a finger to my lips. “It’s okay,” I said quietly. “Go on.”

They slipped into the shadows. Their absence was total, as if I’d never seen them at all. How long I stood there I can’t recall. I would pack my bags in the morning, I decided. I would leave and not come back. I stood another moment at the rail, saying good-bye. Then I opened the screen door and went inside to bed.

TEN

I knew Joe would forget all about the radio.

It’s easy to say that now, of course, hindsight being what it is; but even as I watched him drive away that August morning, I knew. He had either forgotten to put it in the truck, or would leave it there when he arrived at the trailhead, miles out of reach; half on purpose, and half not. As he liked to say, “On accident.”

Call it ESP, or marriage, or what you like: I knew.

For the time being, though, I had to set my mind to other things: the end of breakfast, and box lunches for groups going out for the day, and sit-down for the rest; dinner, of course, which was never far off. There were sandwiches to assemble and pies to bake, apples and carrots and cookies to bag, vegetables to be washed and sliced and boiled; there was a standing rib roast to thaw for Monday, and, as I stood in the driveway, a delivery of three dozen lobsters, eight dozen littlenecks, and a small fortune in Glouster swordfish bouncing my direction in the back of a delivery truck from Portland. Never mind that we’re almost 150 miles inland, as far from the ocean as Albany, New York. It’s still Maine; people want their lobsters.

By the time I got back to the kitchen the full breakfast rush was on, tying me up till a little after nine. Jordan and Kate were still off somewhere, shuttling the moose-canoers to the put-in point; Joe was with his lawyers; nearly everyone else was on the lake or river, making good use of the morning. Our summer kitchen staff, Claire and Patty, were cleaning the last of the breakfast dishes and setting up for lunch. Both were rising seniors at Regional, just a few years behind Kate: Patty was one of those local girls you can’t help but worry about, late half the time and totally boy crazy-her current beau, a sullen, slack-eyed specimen who picked her up each afternoon in a rusty old Impala before roaring down the drive in a laughing cloud of dust and Marlboro smoke, seemed like nothing but bad news waiting to break-though Claire was totally the opposite, almost a little too angelic, with her golden curls and high, wispy voice, a girl who liked to read fat Russian novels on her breaks and actually sang when she washed the dishes.

A wedge of calm in the storm of morning: I used it to sit down for the first time that day to drink a cup of coffee and finally eat something myself, taking a spot at a clean table by the windows. The lake was calm under a strong sun, its surface uninterrupted except for a few boats here and there, small specks of human activity marked now and again by the glinting arc of a flyline. I wished one of them could be Harry, but after last night, I doubted this would happen.

“Lucy, fish truck’s here.”

“Thanks, Claire.” I rose, already weary; it was going to be a long day. The van was parked by the kitchen entrance. I signed for the delivery, and the girls and I got it all inside, eight bags of squirming lobsters and the littlenecks and swordfish besides, and wedged it into the big storage fridge.

By eleven everything was in order and humming along-I’d even managed to get a couple of pies, blueberry and apple, into the oven-and I left Patty and Claire in the kitchen and went to the office. For a moment I thought to call Joe on the radio, just in case I wasn’t wrong, but then decided against it: what would I tell him? There was no word from Hal or Harry, the kitchen was in order, nobody needed him for anything as far as I could tell. There was, of course, the simple urge to hear his voice, an impulse that was never far below the surface. But that’s all it was. I gave the transmitter a look or two, as if it might tell me something, then went to the desk to go over a pile of invoices. Even in the best summer, it was always a scrape, moving the money around like poker chips from one pile to another and hoping that I came out square by the end of the season. But not this August. My whole life I had catered to the wealthy: cooked their meals, washed their linens, cleaned their lodgings. Always between us was the understanding that they lived on one side of a line, I on the other. Now I was one of them.

The door swung open as I was writing the last of the checks. Kate’s face was flushed with exertion; her eyes widened with surprise, as if she hadn’t expected to find me there. In her hand was a freshly skinned orange. She took a seat on the sofa and looked around.

“Isn’t it lunchtime? Don’t I smell pies burning?”

“Don’t be funny.” I capped my pen. “Well?”

“Let’s see.” She was pulling the orange into wedges and popped one into her mouth. “All the moose-canoers are in place and floating downstream. The people from Connecticut are spending the morning in town, stocking up on bug repellent and wondering why they didn’t go to Disneyland this year. Cabin two needs towels. Jordan ’s around here somewhere, making himself useful, no doubt. Patty’s crying in the kitchen.”

“God, again? What is it this time?”

She shrugged; this had been going on all summer. “The usual boyfriend troubles, I guess. She sure is a raw nerve. Was I ever like that?”

“You were never like that.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” She looked at me a moment and grinned mischievously. “Okay, what’s missing? Give up? You didn’t ask me about Harry.”

I felt myself squirm. “Okay. How’s Harry?”

“You should go see for yourself. Down the path, four cabins, take a right. You can’t miss it.”

“I’m a little tied up here, honey.”

“I have a friend at school who has an expression for these things.” She raised a finger for emphasis. “She says, Kate, that’s the denial talking.”

I felt myself smile. “What a clever friend.”

“Well, her parents are both shrinks, so you have to consider the source. She’s also completely bulimic. She thinks nobody knows, but of course we all do.” Kate polished off the last of her orange and wiped her hands on her jeans. “God, I’m starving. Isn’t there anything to eat around this place?”

“We could feed an army. Boil yourself a lobster if you like.”

She shook her head. “Tourist food. I was thinking something more along the lines of a peanut butter and bacon sandwich.”

“You know where the kitchen is.” I paused, then said something I hadn’t planned on. “Kate, are you… involved with Jordan?”

I could tell I had embarrassed her. Her eyes traveled the room, then found me again. “Speaking of denial.” She gave a little laugh. “No, really, Mom, I think you should be more direct.”

“Sorry. It’s just a strange day. Mothers blurt things out like that. I saw you two on the dock last night.”

“I forgive you for spying. What did you think you saw?”

“Just… something. Boy-girl stuff. I really wasn’t spying. I was just taking some food to Harry’s cabin. You can tell me if you want. It’s okay if you are.”

“Too soon to tell.” A kind of happy light was in her face. “He is a good kisser, I will say that. The boy’s been saving up.”

Now I was the one who was embarrassed. “Maybe I shouldn’t be asking.”

“Too much information? Okay, something is. A little something. Will Daddy mind?”

“Only if you do.”

She wrinkled her brow. “It doesn’t seem a little… incestuous?”

“God, Kate, where do you get these ideas?”

“Just considering the angles.” She made quotation marks with her fingers in the air. “Jordan-the-son-he-never-had, that sort of thing.”

“No, I don’t think it seems that way.”

“Good. Because it doesn’t to me at all.” She unwound her lanky limbs from the sofa. “One last thing before I go stuff myself. Could we, like, not talk about this anymore? Girl to mother? At least for the time being?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“Because I’m trying not to jinx it, if something is. Or count my chickens, if it isn’t. Because the truth is, I really sort of really, really like him, if you know what I mean.”

“Me too.” I smiled to tell her this was so. “Just, you know. Be careful? That’s what the moms say.”

She gave me a little two-fingered salute. “World’s careful-est girl, reporting, ma’am. Asking for permission to stop talking about her love life and go eat lunch.”

“Granted.”

She stepped to the door but paused before opening it. “I said one last thing, but there’s another.”

“Okay.”

She came around behind me and, leaning over my shoulder, kissed me quickly on the cheek. “Go see Harry, Mom. Okay? Just go see him.”

If I had my life to do over again, if it were possible to go back and reenter a moment of time and do it differently, and yet have nothing else change, all outcomes the same, I would have done one thing: I would have stayed at the party and danced with Harry Wainwright.

A single dance, nothing more: a dance to tell him I wanted to. I would dance with Harry Wainwright, the two of us laughing at everyone lurching around with too much champagne, our bodies close but not too close for talking. A dance to that first song, whatever it was-I heard it from cabin number six, where I was waiting for Joe-slow and sort of loopy, with a woman’s voice, Ella or Sarah, skimming over and around the music like a single bee in flight; the kind of song you can spin a little to or just kind of move your feet in the current. I would dance with him, say thank you when the music ended; I might yawn, putting my hand to my mouth, then say something like, well, it’s late. Thank you, Harry. I really have to go. And he would say, you’re right, me, too, though I think I might just hang around a few more minutes. It’s a nice night to be out. Right, right, of course, well, see you tomorrow, we’d say, each of us speaking over the other, and off I’d go, feeling his eyes still on me as I made my way up the dock to the lodge and then stepped into the shadows, thinking: well, look at you, Lucy-girl. You’ve danced with Harry Wainwright.

Why Joe thought cabin nine I’ll never know; part of me still thinks he simply turned the number upside down in his head. He’d called early that evening from a pay phone in Machias; he’d already crossed the border. A lot of people think Vietnam draft evaders never came home, but the truth is a lot did, and Joe was one. He’d either hitch a ride in the trunk of a friend’s car, as he had that night, or else work his passage on a coastal trawler and jump ship at Portland or Grand Manan and thumb the rest of the way. No one in town could see him, of course, and after that night on the porch when Harry caught us, we agreed it was far too risky for him to set foot anywhere near the place. We’d meet at a friend’s house, or else rendezvous at the motel in Twining, thirty miles away. Three or four days, though it always felt like less: we’d barely set foot from the room, eating take-out food from the diner up the street and playing cards in our underwear, like a pair of criminals.

Once we even spent a week together in Boston. It was December, close to Christmas, all the stores dressed with lights, though the weather was mild and most days it rained. That is how I remember that week, the constant rain, and the two of us eating in restaurants and going to movies, like regular people. We were staying in somebody’s apartment in Central Square: I was never exactly clear on the arrangement. It belonged to a friend of a friend who knew somebody, who knew somebody else-somehow it had made its way into our possession. I took a bus down from Augusta and met Joe at the depot. A single room in an old frame house webbed with fire escapes, with books in towering piles and a mattress on the dusty floor. The books pleased me: I thought we might pass some time reading to one another. But when I looked closer, I saw they were all in German.

The work had made him strong; he became a grown man in those years, my Joe. I could feel this strength in him just by holding his arm as we walked, the two of us close under an umbrella, or waiting for the T, or standing in line for tickets in the never-ending rain. More than the firmness of muscle and bone: the strength in him held a deeper hardness, geological, like cooled steel. His beard was full, with flecks of red. We sat on the bed in our coats and exchanged Christmas presents. I had knitted him a scarf, dark blue, with snowflakes; in his letters he always complained of the cold.

“When did you learn to knit?” He had barely paused to examine it, but wrapped it at once around his neck.

“Don’t look too closely, there are lots of mistakes.”

“I’m never taking it off.” He kissed me quickly and removed a small cardboard box from his rucksack. “Sorry, I didn’t have time to wrap it.”

It was a charm bracelet, braided silver strands strung with multi-colored chips of polished sea glass.

“Do you like it?”

I held it up to the window so the glass could catch the light. Little bits of refracted color fell on the floor at our feet. “It’s beautiful, Joe. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

He looked relieved. “Well, I wasn’t sure. You’re a hard girl to shop for, Luce. There’s a woman in town who does these.”

I undid the tiny clasp and slipped it on my wrist. Had my face given me away? Just for a second, as he’d taken the box from his bag, I’d thought it was a ring. Though that was impossible: we’d agreed to do nothing until, somehow, Joe was able to come home-when the war ended, or else some kind of amnesty was declared. It was 1971; that fall, Joe’s father had testified before a Congressional committee on behalf of a group called WWII Veterans Against the War. I’d read about it in the Portland Press Herald. “Look at my face,” he’d said. “I know what it means to sacrifice for my country. Gentlemen, this war isn’t worth a hangnail.” An editorial in the local paper had described him as “our very own Benedict Arnold,” and “a known abettor to deserters, hippies, and other undesirables, whose own son is a wanted criminal.” But there were others in town who felt differently. Nobody believed that things could go on as they had much longer.

“It really is beautiful,” I said again. I shook my wrist to feel it move against my skin. “Thank you.”

We had the apartment for six nights. Joe had arranged passage back to New Brunswick on a commercial groundfisher out of Portland, the day before Christmas. I would see him off and take the bus back home, where I was working in the office at the sawmill and waiting tables at the Pine Tree at night. The deadline hung over our heads like a countdown. Everything we did, the meals we ate and walks we took and movies we saw, even making love, felt like items being ticked off a list. For me, the effect was always the same: the awkwardness of first reunion would yield within hours to a feeling of comfort that I knew was false, ripening over the days into a desperate, melancholy longing punctuated by moments of unfocused anger. Often we quarreled as the time of Joe’s departure neared, but the final moments were the same: I would always cry.

Our last night, we ate dinner at a hamburger restaurant near Harvard Square, a single large room, as harshly lit as a bus station, with an open grill behind the counter and sawdust on the floor. A rowing shell was suspended upside down from the rafters; the room was packed with students, stuffed into booths and wedged shoulder to shoulder at the counter. Joe ordered a T-bone, thick as a Bible; he was always hungry. I watched him eat, already missing him, but something else too: I felt like I was missing my life.

He finished his meal and lit a cigarette. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

I had barely touched my cheeseburger. I tried to smile. “It’s just the heat. And the onions.” Everybody in the room was wiping their eyes.

“My father used to come here in the thirties,” Joe said. “Everybody complained about the onions then too.”

We were seated in a booth at the rear of the restaurant; my back was to the wall. For a moment I let my gaze wander the bright, busy room. Didn’t college students go home for Christmas? But I had no idea, really, how such people lived their lives. At a large round table in the center of the room, six of them, five men and a woman, all in bulky sweaters and jeans, were engaged in a fierce conversation, the subject of which I could glean only from single phrases that punched through the din of voices in the room: “diminished capacity,” “elements of negligence,” something I heard as “actual and proximate cause and damage.” I realized they were talking in turns; one would stop, close up his notes, and then the discussion would resume as another began to speak. A pitcher of beer sat on the table; when it was the woman’s turn to lead, the man to her left offered to fill her glass, but she held her hand over it and shook her head: no. She took a sip of water instead. Then she opened her notes.

Joe glanced over his shoulder, following my look. “Somebody you know?”

“Very funny.” I shook my head. “Do you ever wish you’d, I don’t know, gone to Harvard?”

Joe laughed a cloud of smoke. “Me? I don’t think so.”

“College, then. Somewhere.”

“The subject never came up. Really, Luce. Be serious.”

“Your father did. Why not you?”

“A thousand reasons.” He was looking at me incredulously. “What’s gotten into you?”

At the center table, the woman was still speaking from her notes. Though she was sitting I could tell she was tall and athletically built; she played a sport, I guessed, or had, something interesting and maybe a little fancy, like fencing or squash. Perhaps before law school she had rowed for the college crew team, and liked to come here with her friends because of the shell that hung from the rafters and the happy memories it gave her. She had fine features and auburn hair pulled into a thick ponytail; as she read to the men at her table, one hand or the other would lift from time to time and move in small circles in the air, following her thoughts.

“You could have,” I said.

Joe’s face darkened. “I could have done a lot of things.” He crushed out his cigarette and waved for the waitress. “Come on.”

We paid the bill and left. Outside the rain had yielded to an easy snow; already an inch had fallen, clinging fast to every surface, like cake frosting. In the windshield of a Karman Gia parked at the curb somebody had written, in letters carved by a thick, gloved finger: “Make love, not exams.” We did not head back to the apartment but instead walked south, searching for the river. A maze of dormitories and classroom buildings, their courtyards sealed by iron gates, and then we emerged on Memorial Drive, a busy four-lane road separating the campus from the Charles. Cars thrummed by, their hoods and fenders washed by the damp, pushing cones of snowy light; across the river, a ribbon of darkness uncoiling through the city, the Prudential Building stood over all like a great, glowing monolith. My feet were soaked, the snow was falling all around. A feeling almost beyond words: I was suddenly touched by a vivid reality, as if I were seeing everything, the world itself, for the first time. There was nothing for me in Maine; I didn’t even have to go back. Just by saying so, I could leave my bubble of waiting and disappear into these streets, join this bright, pulsing world of people and buildings and cars. I could find a job, rent a small apartment. I felt as if I were standing at the edge of a great river of life, an endless current of possibilities as to who I might become. All that remained was for me to step into it.

We returned to the apartment and undressed for bed. The room was freezing; the third night, something had gone wrong with the heating, but of course we were in no position to complain. Whom would we call? How would we even explain who we were? We were anonymous, unseen, we barely even existed. Something as simple as a functioning radiator was beyond our reach. We piled our coats on top of the blankets and got into bed. In the dark I turned to Joe.

“I want to come with you.”

“On a dragger? Luce, it’s winter.”

“Of course not. I could just take the bus like a normal person.”

He sighed into the frigid air. “We’ve been through this,” he said. “I wish we could be together, but we have to be patient. You wouldn’t like it up there, Luce. I’m broke, I live in a filthy dump with six other guys. We’ve got mice, it smells to high heaven, nobody ever flushes the goddamned john. It makes this place look like the Taj Mahal. I’m not even working legally. What kind of life is that?”

“You said it yourself. There’s going to have to be some kind of pardon.”

“Fine, maybe so, but what if there isn’t? You want to spend your life as a fugitive? And what if they deport me? Then where would you be?”

“I’d be with you,” I said. “That’s the important thing.” But in his voice I felt him slipping away.

“Not if I’m in jail.”

We took a bus the next afternoon to Portland, slept the night in a motel near the water; at five the next morning, still in darkness, I walked him to the dock, where his boat was berthed. A wedge of white steel, eighty feet long: on the side was her name, the Jenny-Smith, dripping with rust. The last gear was being hauled aboard: great coils of rope, huge orange barrels, blocks of ice the size of kitchen stoves. They would work the Jordan Basin for ten days, straddling the Hague Line, then let Joe off at Grand Manan, the southernmost island of the Canadian Maritimes. From there he could take a ferry to Blacks Harbour and hitch the rest of the way to LeMaitre.

A man in a bright yellow slicker stood by the gangway, holding a clipboard.

“You Crosby?” He spoke through the cigarette perched in the corner of his mouth.

“That’s right.”

He made a snorting sound. “Thought we were going to have to leave without you.” He looked me over, like a man in a bar. “She coming?”

“No.”

With thick, dirty fingers he plucked the cigarette from his lips and flicked the ash away. “Too bad.”

ELEVEN

The first one showed up in the fall of ’67: a pale, skinny kid, traveling alone, carrying nothing but a bedroll and a canvas rucksack. We were just closing down for the season. He arrived on foot, hiking in from the county road at night, and slept on the porch. I found him that morning in the kitchen; my father was cooking him breakfast.

“This is David,” my father announced. “Your cousin.”

“I didn’t know I had a cousin David.”

“He’s new.”

We nodded warily to one another. He had a phony little mustache-a kid’s mustache. My father served him eggs from a cast iron skillet, rinsed the dirty pan in the sink, and wiped his hands on a dish towel. “You, in the office,” he said to me.

It was no surprise what he told me. By this time my father was well-known, a kind of public riddle, at least in our town: the war hero who had become an antiwar activist, the man who had given half the visible world to fight Hitler but would not, in his words, “see one American son die to line the pockets of the plutocrats and fatten the résumés of the Joint Chiefs.” The vagaries of the Communist threat, and the way it had been used to ratchet up the war, repelled him. “These talking heads. I knew who I was fighting,” he used to say, “and he knew me. Kids in pajamas, running through some jungle. I have no quarrel with them, and neither do you. You shoot somebody, you better have a reason to hate him. The fact that he doesn’t drink Coca-Cola or drive an Oldsmobile doesn’t cut it.”

David stayed a day; he seemed nervous, spoke little, and spent most of his time on the porch, reading a well-thumbed paperback. I asked him what it was, and he showed me: On the Road. We exchanged no other words. The next morning, my father left with him in the truck before I was awake, returning six hours later, the fenders spattered with mud: long enough, I figured, to reach an unregulated stretch of border on the logging roads that ran north from the highway. I never saw him again, nor learned what became of him, even when, a little over a year later, I followed the same path.

There were other cousin Davids: boys and young men traveling alone, dirty and long-haired, some couples, even a family or two, seeing their son off as if they were sending him to summer camp. A few were deserters, wanted men; others had simply seen what was coming. The logging roads gave them safe passage. At the other end lay jobs, a place to live, friends waiting.

I despised them all. It wasn’t that I supported the war; I didn’t understand the war. In many ways it was as remote from me as my father’s was, separated from my quiet, compact world not by time but by so many thousands of miles it was beyond imagining. Kids in pajamas, fighting other kids who should have been in pajamas.

It wasn’t long after this that we also got our first visit from the sheriff, Darryl Tanner. I think up until the moment I saw his cruiser coming down the drive I’d somehow never construed what my father was doing as actually illegal. Tanner and I had a little history: my sophomore year in high school, a bunch of us had gotten ourselves arrested on Halloween night for blowing up mailboxes with little quarter-sticks of dynamite. There was beer in the truck, too-not a lot, we’d mostly drunk it by then-but Tanner had made a big show of booking us, fingerprints and all, and waiting till morning to release us to our parents. The charges were dropped, none of us was even close to being of age, but we were all suspended from school for a week.

I was chopping wood by the shed when Tanner’s cruiser rolled up. I instantly felt nervous, though I wasn’t sure why-it was simply the effect he had on me. For a minute he sat in his car, writing something on a pad. At last he got out and looked over at me.

“Your father around, Joey?”

“Inside,” I said.

“He alone?”

“I guess. Why wouldn’t he be?”

“No reason.” Tanner hitched up his pants. It was a surprisingly warm day for mid-October, and he was sweating in the heat. “Just wouldn’t want to drop in unannounced and see something I didn’t want to. This is more of a social call.”

I picked up the axe again and tried to look busy. “Well, he’s inside, like I said.”

My father met him on the porch, and the two men disappeared into the lodge. I tried to continue my chores, but couldn’t; I crept around to the back of the house, under the office window. Sure enough, they were talking inside.

“Don’t know a thing about it, Darryl,” my father was saying. His voice was curt. “You can just go on back where you came from.”

“Joe, Joe.” I could practically see Tanner shaking his head in that disapproving way of his, fingering the brim of his hat. “What you don’t seem to get here is I’m doing you a favor. People are talking, Joe. Making some pretty serious accusations, saying you might not be such a loyal American. Course I told them that’s nonsense, you being a veteran and all.”

“People can say what they like, Darryl. Last I checked, no law says I can’t speak my mind.”

“And of course, you being a lawyer, you’d know all about the law. I said that too. A lawyer and a war hero. What was it, Harvard, Joe? An Ivy League war hero, no less. Last guy you’d think would be, say, harboring draft evaders out here in the woods. Last guy in the world.”

“Go on and have a look for yourself. There’s no one here.”

“That’s what Joey tells me, and I’m happy to hear it. That’s what I’m telling you, Joe. I don’t want to look. But you keep on with what you’re doing, the day will come I sure as hell will have to. And not just me. Real guys, army guys, from the stockade down in Portland. These people aren’t your friends, Joe.”

“I see. But you are?”

“For now.” I heard the scrape of Tanner’s chair as he rose to go. “Anyway, that’s what I drove out here to say. I hope I don’t have to come back. It’s really up to you. I’ll let myself out.”

I scrambled back to the woodshed in time to see Tanner stepping off the porch. I put up a log to split and took my time tapping the wedge, then lifted my eyes as if I’d only just noticed him standing there.

“You find him okay?”

Tanner nodded. For a moment we just looked at each other. I wondered if he somehow knew I’d been listening.

“There wouldn’t be anything you want to tell me, would there, Joey?”

“About what?”

Tanner sighed and shook his head. I didn’t like him one bit, but I also understood that no one had made him come out here like he had. He was giving my father fair warning.

“Christ, the two of you. You’re a regular chip off the old block, you know that, Joey? Do your pop a favor and tell him to take my advice. No more visitors. Comprende?”

“People come, people go, Darryl. It’s none of my business.”

Darryl opened the door of the cruiser. The conversation seemed over, but then he paused a second, as if he’d only just remembered something.

“You get your draft notice yet, Joey?”

“Leave him out of it, Darryl.” We both turned to see my father standing on the porch with his arms crossed over his chest. “You have no business with him.” He wagged a finger down the drive. “Go on now.”

Tanner smiled, spinning his hat in his hands. “I’m all done here anyway. Think I made my point.” He opened his door and turned one last time to me. “And Joey?”

“Yeah?”

He winked. “Happy Halloween.”

I was twenty-one that fall, classified 1-A. The following May I received orders from my draft board to report to Bangor for my physical exam-a letter, blandly impersonal, like a tax form. I went secretly, telling my father only that I would be gone for the day. From the Federal Building on Harlow Street a schoolbus carted us, about thirty men, to the army processing station, a frigid hangar at the National Guard base at the airport. For six hours we pranced around in the cold, wearing only our underwear, cupping our privates as we stood in line after line. A barrage of questions: Did I wear glasses? (No.) Had I ever been charged or convicted of a felony? (Not technically, unless you counted the mailboxes.) Received psychiatric care? (No again, though living with my father, I probably could stand some.)

Tanner’s threats notwithstanding, the simple truth was this: I wanted to fight. I didn’t care who, or what for. If I’d had a broken leg I would have danced a fox-trot to make them send me anyway. In my heart I knew it, had known it since the day my mother died and I looked up from the Rawlings’ floor to see my father standing over me; I was nothing, a being without courage. All my life I had lived his war. I wanted a war of my own.

I received my induction notice in early October. A virtually identical letter: for a moment I thought some mistake had been made and I was being asked to report for a physical a second time, one of those army screwups my father always carped about. But then I read more closely. Back to Bangor, two days after Christmas. Bring my social security card. Settle my affairs. And, at the bottom, a single sentence: “Failure to report to the place and hour of the day named in this order subjects the violator to fine and imprisonment.”

I showed my father the letter that night at dinner. He read it slowly, the one good eye squinting. His glass eye was nothing unusual to me-I had never known him otherwise-but still there were times when its misdirected, jewellike gaze seemed aimed right at me.

When he was done he placed the letter aside. “You passed your physical?”

“Last May.”

He regarded me a moment, but said nothing about my deception. Probably he had already guessed it. Then: “What are you going to do?”

I had imagined this moment so many times my answer was ready. “I’m going to do my duty,” I said.

“Is that a fact. Tell me what that is, you’re so sure of yourself.”

“To fight. Like you did.”

“I see.” He nodded. “Let me ask you this. What if we were Germans, and it was 1939. Your boss Hitler has just invaded Poland and told you to come along and join the fun. Would you fight then?”

“We’re not Germans. It’s not the same.”

“That’s where you may be wrong. You better hope you’re not.”

“I’m not wrong.”

“Tanner have anything to do with this?”

I wanted to laugh. “Tanner’s an asshole.”

“What are you fighting for?”

I thought a moment. There was only one answer. “Myself.”

I expected him to argue: all these strangers, shuttling through the camp, riding the rails of some underground of which my father was a part. Tanner’s warning was no joke. By this time everyone in town knew what my father was doing, or else suspected. There were people who wouldn’t have pushed my father out of the way of a logging truck, who would have watched him choke or drown. He’d given everything away, or nearly: his reputation, his name, most of his friends. And yet, when I told him what I intended to do, to fight the war he loathed, the war that seemed to undo the very meaning of his own sacrifice, he had no words. For a moment we sat without speaking, the only sound in the room the rhythm of our own synchronized breathing. I had never been more aware of his presence, the sheer, unassailable fact of him, his mysterious existence. We had lived alone, just the two of us, for thirteen years. Rarely did I speak of my mother, and never to him. Once a year, each June on her birthday, we would put on our suits and take the pickup to the cemetery; but even on those mornings, the silence was like a cold blade between us. We did not say we missed her, or that we loved her; he did not tell me, your mother would be proud of you, I’m sorry she’s not still here, to watch you grow up. We always brought flowers-irises, her favorite. After we had placed them on the ground by her headstone, we would stand a moment longer, and then my father would place his hand on my shoulder and, in his smoke-coarsened voice, say, “Well. It’s nice here. A pretty spot. I’m glad to see they take good care of it. We’d better get going.” I understand now that what I wanted most was simply to know him, and to do that, I had to be like him. But not back then; I might have said I hated him.

Finally, he pushed back from the table and rose.

“If you’ll forgive me, I’ve lost my appetite.” He carried his dish to the sink and turned to face me. “When the time comes, I’ll take you,” he said. “At least let me do that. You won’t have to go alone.”

A strange energy surged through me in those weeks, like a current in the blood. Until that time, everything in my life had been handed to me: the camp, the small world I lived in. Even Lucy, in a way, whom it seemed I had always known. And the bad things too, like my mother’s dying, the hole it scooped in my father’s plans of happiness and the kind of man he had become because of it; the stark loneliness of my need for him, so fierce and unrequited, like standing on a treeless plain, wind-blasted and without a scrap of shade, and the feeling always that I was somehow unworthy, not up to the task of being his son. I would go to Vietnam and do what was required of me: stand up straight, say “yes, sir,” clean my weapon, and sleep bareheaded in the rain, all things I knew well how to do, and also things I didn’t. Shoot and be shot at. Stake my fate on something larger than myself, on the urgent brotherhood of war. Become somebody else: a man who had earned his life.

I don’t remember telling Lucy I was going, only that I did it. Sometimes I think I told her on the porch; she swears it was in the office at the mill. In either case it would have felt the same. A year, I probably said, and then I’d be home. Don’t believe everything you hear. I’d probably end up in some supply hut, handing out socks and skivvies, listening to American radio. You? she said. I doubt that. Maybe some city boy, slept his whole life on silk sheets and taking cabs. A man like you, handing out underwear? They’ll know just what to do with you, Joe Crosby.

My father said nothing else; my impending departure was one more wedge of silence hammered down between us. There were times I even imagined that I felt in him a new respect, albeit begrudging, for the path I had chosen to follow. We were still boarding up for the season when the first snow fell, a week into November. I awoke that morning and looked out the window and saw, where just a day ago there had been channels of open water, a solid disk of ice, a world of absolute stillness mantled in white. Not since I was a young boy had I taken any pleasure in the first snowfall. For months my father and I would be locked away, like a pair of convicts grumbling their way through meals and chores and freezing their asses off. My junior year in high school our English teacher had taken us down to Orono to see a college production of King Lear-he was the new guy in town, hadn’t yet learned that anything resembling “culture” was pretty much wasted on a bunch of hick kids with nothing more serious in mind for their lives than working at the post office or shoving lumber through a sawmill-and when it came to the part where the mad king talked about how great it would be to spend the rest of his life in jail with his daughter, I started laughing so hard I had to leave the theater. We had to write a paper about the play, and all I could think to say was that Shakespeare might have been a great writer, but he had obviously never spent a hard January freeze at the end of an eight-mile driveway with my old man.

I dressed and went downstairs. I could smell my father’s cigarette smoke even before I reached the kitchen. He slept at most four hours a night, and had been up since well before dawn. Probably he had already shoveled the walk and dug out the truck. As I entered the kitchen he turned from the window.

“First snow, I guess,” I said.

He looked at me, his face impossible to read, like a headstone faded by decades of weather. He ran his cigarette under the tap, then deposited the butt in the trash pail under the sink.

“It’s stopped for now, but there’s more on the way.” He cleared his throat. “A bad one. Supposed to start tonight. They’re saying a foot, anyway.”

I took a cigarette from the pack on the kitchen table. Before that fall I had almost never smoked in front of him. I lit it and sat, his eyes still on me.

“You should call Lucy,” he said.

“Why should I call Lucy?”

“Here,” he said, and placed the saucer from his empty cup on the table in front of me. “At least use an ashtray.”

For a moment we said nothing. I smoked my cigarette and waited.

“You should call Lucy,” he said at last, “to tell her you’re going away for a while.”

“You know something I don’t?”

“We’re going for a trip.”

“A trip.” I paused another moment, for effect. Why hadn’t I seen this coming? But then I realized I had seen it, all along. “Like my cousin David.”

He took a place across from me. “Listen, Joey, there are things you don’t understand-”

“This isn’t up to you, Dad.”

“Goddamnit, I know it’s not!” He thumped the table with his fist, and I felt my insides jump. But I had long since stopped being afraid of him. His anger seemed weightless, like a bird banging at a windowpane. “If it were up to me you’d already be gone from here, you never even would have taken the physical. We would have filed an appeal months ago. There are things we could have done.”

“But we didn’t. Did we, Dad?”

He sighed impatiently. “Joey, I’m going to tell you something. I’m going to tell you something and I want you to listen. The night your mother and I came up here, that first night-”

“You’ve told me the story.”

He shook his head. “Not all of it. Just do me a favor and listen. There was a woman, at the station in Augusta. It was snowing, and we had to change trains. She showed us a picture. Her son.”

I saw where this was headed. “He’d been killed in the war.”

“Yes. In Italy, where I was. Where this-” His hand drifted upward to his cheek but stopped midair. “Close to where this happened. Not far, anyway. He was killed at Salerno. Some army screwup. His company dropped too far behind the lines. I’d heard something about it, but it wasn’t until later that I was certain. They were totally annihilated. Germans shot them out of the sky like skeet pigeons.”

“That was twenty years ago, Dad.”

“Twenty years.” His voice was quiet. “Twenty years is nothing, Joey. The boy was dead, you read me? He probably never even got the chance to fire his weapon.” He breathed deeply, steadying himself. “But you see, it wasn’t wrong, that he died. You could say it was a tragedy, somebody’s stupid mistake, or just bad luck. It was easy to get killed for all kinds of reasons. But it wasn’t wrong. The woman in the office, his mother, she knew that. She knew her son hadn’t died for no reason. That’s what made it bearable for her. When I understood that, I didn’t mind what had happened to me so much anymore. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t think about her. We got on the train and came up here, and it was like a gift, a reward for finally figuring that out.”

Is it a trick of memory, or did something happen to me at that moment? It was, after all, just a story he was telling me-a war story. I had never heard this one before, but I had heard dozens, even hundreds. Yet listening to him talk that morning, I suddenly felt all my resolve drain out of me, an almost physical sensation. The flat winter light of the kitchen and the miles of quiet all around, the smell of our cigarettes, the feeling, inexpressible, that we had reached, together, a kind of final moment, the end of a story that had begun the day my mother died: all combined to arouse in me a boy’s simple desire to help his father. And all at once I understood. I was the only cousin David. Those other boys were nothing. Everything my father had done, he’d done for me, to prepare us for this day.

“What I’m saying to you, Joey, is you’re all I have. I know I haven’t been the best father. There are things I should have told you, things I should have done.” He looked at his chapped hands. “You were there in the station, you know, with us. Me and your mother. Just a baby.” He stopped; it was as if he had never said any of these words before, not even to himself. “It was snowing, like today, and it was as if I’d found something nobody else knew, a way to understand my life. And then your mother died, and I kept on anyway. I told her I would keep you safe. Those were the last words I said to her, and that’s what I’m saying to you now. If something happened to you, I couldn’t bear it, Joey.”

He rose and stood before me. My father: it was as if I hadn’t really looked at him in years. Beneath his flannel shirt and jeans, his body had grown thin; his face was gray and lined. White stubble covered his cheeks, except for a square of pinkish skin where his jaw had shattered, a bare patch the color of a burn, where hair could never grow. Of course I would do as he asked; I had been waiting for him to ask it, all along.

“You were there at the station, you see, in that room,” he said quietly. “That’s what I’m telling you. That’s why I want you to come with me now, Joey, before the storm.”

He had it all arranged; we would drive north, ahead of the weather, and reach the border in late afternoon, where a man named Marcel would be waiting to take me the rest of the way. My father had money for me, two thousand dollars in American cash, and another thousand Canadian. Upstairs in my room I stuffed my belongings into a duffel bag: warm clothing, a few pictures, my high school yearbook, some old letters Lucy had written me on a trip she had taken with her family to Yosemite that I didn’t want anyone finding, though they contained nothing shocking or even terribly personal. It seemed meager. Hanging from my shoulder, my bag weighed less than twenty pounds. How did you pack to become a fugitive? Atop my bureau was a framed black-and-white photo of my mother: a young woman with high cheekbones and hair the color of onyx, sitting at a great, gleaming piano, wearing a dark dress and smiling. It had been taken by a professional photographer, some kind of publicity shot, when she was a student at the conservatory. She couldn’t have been nineteen years old. A scoop of pearls gleamed across the white skin of her breastbone; she wore a huge corsage. Her eyes, bright and full of pleasure, seemed to shine with all the hopeful reflection of an entire life waiting to unfold. Though, of course, this was an illusion: she had no idea what lay ahead, how little time she had left. I hadn’t really looked at the photo in years, and in fact, my memories of my mother bore almost no resemblance to the girl in the picture. She seemed a different woman entirely. When I remembered her, it wasn’t even a picture I saw, but more a feeling my mind seemed to wrap around: the heat and sound and smell of her, like a pillow I had slept on for years; the close air of the bedroom where she was sick so long; her quiet, milky voice. But not even these. If I closed my eyes, as I did that snowy November morning, and asked myself to think about her, what I remembered most was a song she used to play: Debussy, the Children’s Corner, an airy thing with notes that floated like fireflies on a summer lawn, a thousand of them winking here and there, but never quite where you looked. I think she used to play it for me when I was small, and fussing; at least that’s what I remembered her telling me. She would place me on her lap and play, giving me a song to listen to but also her hands to watch: her long white fingers and the long white piano keys moving together like dancers in a dream, to make the music that would quiet me. Her piano, a Steinway baby grand that her parents had bought her for her eighteenth birthday, was still in the lodge, in a room we called the library, where we kept old books and magazines for guests to read. From time to time someone would open the keys and try to play it but would quickly discover how badly out of tune it was. The felts were all moth-eaten; one of the pedals was permanently jammed in the down position. Once in a while I’d thought about getting it fixed, with the idea that I might learn to play. But it had been silent so long, its music sealed away in its coffinlike bulk, that even to open the cabinet seemed impossible.

The truth was, my mother hadn’t lived long enough to ever become a person to me, real and distinct; like all small children, I had absorbed her presence as a force of nature, and the day she died this feeling had frozen in me, a piece of stopped time. Looking at her picture now, I realized it meant nothing; my mother was inside that piano, and inside me. For a moment I considered leaving the photo behind, but this seemed foolish, something I might regret later, so I removed it from the frame and tucked it between the pages of an English-French dictionary I still had from high school, thinking this might come in handy, too, and tucked that into my duffel bag as well.

Outside, my father was warming up the truck. The air was damp and still; the low gray sky seemed to bulge with snow, like a river about to overflow its banks. I heaved my bag into the bed and joined him in the cab.

He gently touched my sleeve. The gesture was so surprising I actually looked at it, his hand on my arm. The realization hit me like a fist: this winter he would be alone.

“Did you call her?”

The answer was I hadn’t. Lucy would be in the sawmill office at this hour; they would probably be sending everyone home early, due to the snow. How could I explain something I didn’t understand myself? I couldn’t have said why I was going, only that I was, and that this made me feel ashamed but also relieved, as if some unseen hand had lifted a burden I didn’t even know I was carrying. I wondered if this was how cowards felt, or men lost at sea who had given up their struggles and agreed to let the waves take them. In fact, these were the very words I used when, a week later, I wrote to Lucy to tell her what had happened, how instantly sorry I had felt about leaving.

“That’s all right,” he said when I failed to answer, and with this, one more burden was taken from me. He put the truck in gear. “Maybe it’s better if you don’t. They have phones up there. It’s not like you’re going to the moon.”

By the time we reached the border it was past three and snowing hard. Marcel was waiting at the roadside, parked in a rusted Jeep with Quebec plates and a huge rack of lights over the roll bar. He was a slender man, strong across the chest, with a neatly trimmed beard and half-glasses he removed to regard me; I thought of him at once as a kind of skinny Santa Claus. He and my father greeted one another with a grave handshake, which I understood was meant for me. My father had brought many men over, but I was his son, his flesh and blood.

I put my duffel bag in the Jeep. Then, in the falling snow, my father hugged me, hard. “Be good now, Joey.” Before I could answer he turned and walked to the truck without looking back, got in, and drove away. I watched him until the image was swallowed in the whirling white and silence. A feeling of cold loneliness doused me like water. I had no idea how or even if we would see each other again. The moment had passed so quickly I hadn’t even said good-bye.

I got into the Jeep’s cab. On the passenger seat lay the Montreal newspaper that Marcel had been reading, and the remains of his lunch, a bacon sandwich wrapped in waxed paper and a thermos of coffee.

“You think he’ll get back okay?” I asked.

“It’s not him I’m worried about,” Marcel said, but when he saw my face he smiled encouragingly. “I’ve known your father since the war. We served together in Italy. Not many men could go through what he did. A little snow won’t slow him down any.”

I was suddenly perplexed. “You’re American?”

“Half and half.” Marcel turned the key, and the Jeep’s engine sprang to life. “My mother was Quebecois. My wife’s Canadian too. She’s from Toronto originally. You’ll meet her tomorrow, this snow doesn’t get any worse.”

We stopped the night outside Quebec City, then drove north the next day up the St. Lawrence Seaway on a winding two-lane road that hugged the immense, barren coastline. The storm had passed; the day was clear and shockingly bright, though in the Jeep’s drafty cab, the cold possessed a scathing intensity that felt like the grip of permanent night. Vast, empty fields lined the road on the inland side: peat farms, Marcel explained. Freighters the size of whole city blocks plied the gray waters of the seaway, which was choked at the shoreline with huge sheets of broken ice. There were no proper towns on the route at all, but every thirty minutes or so we passed an isolated settlement of perhaps a half-dozen houses and a store or two, all staring grimly out to sea and looking so weather-beaten they seemed on the verge of collapse. A terrible emptiness opened inside me, deeper than hunger: with each passing mile, I felt myself moving farther away from everything I knew.

“Cheer up,” Marcel said, when I muttered something grim about the scenery. “It’s really not so bad, you know. You’ll get used to it.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just, it all looks so… abandoned.”

Twilight fell a little after three; we arrived in LeMaitre in darkness. I felt as if we’d been traveling for weeks. A raw wind raked me as I stepped from the cab in front of Marcel’s house, my muscles stiff and heavy as iron from two days in the bouncy Jeep. The air was rich with the funk of fish. LeMaitre was a larger town than any I’d seen for hours, though still small by any measure: about five hundred people, nearly all of whom worked in one way or another for Marcel, who owned a fish-processing plant. As we crested the last rise into town I had seen it, a huge building blazing with light at the mouth of the Foché River.

“Home sweet home,” Marcel said. “Let’s get you inside.”

Marcel’s wife, Abby, was in the low-ceilinged kitchen, stirring the contents of a gigantic blackened pot. The room was like something from a fairy tale, a cottage in the woods that a lost little boy might stumble upon. A great stone hearth occupied one wall, and bundles of some kind of fragrant herb hung from the ceiling. Rich waves of heat issued from the fireplace, so intense after hours in the frigid Jeep that I could scarcely breathe.

“Abby, this is Joe Crosby’s boy.”

She stepped toward me; I offered her my hand, and she took it in both of hers. She was, like her husband, a woman of compact dimensions, with eyes the color of moss and dry gray hair that flowed away from her face as if lifted by an unseen wind. She was wearing an apron, and a long denim skirt; her nose, I saw, was rather small. All the words I might have spoken seemed to flit up and away from my mind like a flock of birds. I stood dumbly, fixed in place. Her hands felt warm as a muffler heated on the stove.

“I know your father, Joey,” she said gently.

And I began, at last-as if I’d been waiting all my life for this moment to come and take me in its grip-to weep.

TWELVE

I didn’t return to the camp for three years, after that night on the porch when Joe appeared. It wasn’t jealousy that kept me away. What happened to me when Lucy stepped from the darkness and into Joe’s arms-the arms she truly belonged in; anyone could have seen that-was the end of an illusion I had taken shelter in, precisely because it was an illusion: this idea of some current that flowed between the two of us, perfect in its way because it was never meant to be expressed. Lucy, the camp, my feelings of escape: none of it was my actual life. To learn this was bearable, but I also knew that if I returned, even for a day, the comfort of its memory would be taken from me too. I packed up early the next morning, offered some vague excuse to Joe Sr. about an emergency at home, and drove down the long drive. As I neared the main road, a car approached from the opposite direction: Ken and Leonie in a big fat Cadillac, returning from an errand in town-aspirin, I figured, or more booze. We slowed to pass one another, splashing through the potholes; Leonie waved gaily from the passenger seat, and I returned the wave, even gave my horn a little toot. A laugh escaped my lips, though it was a bitter sound. I thought of Lucy, speaking Joe’s name out of the gloom; and then the moment when the two of them had disappeared, leaving me alone. Well, I thought, you’re a little old to be so glum about a crush, Harry Wainwright. You got your wake-up call for sure. Live and learn, and get yourself home.

A year passed and then another, and the camp faded from my mind. I thought about Lucy from time to time, wondered what had become of her, but my curiosity was mild, for it had no purpose: I might have been wondering about any other friend who had disappeared into the world’s hurrying crowds. Each summer, and then in the week after New Year’s, I went with Hal someplace new, just the two of us: river rafting in the Grand Canyon, deep-sea fishing in the Sea of Cortez, on safari to the great game reserves of east Africa-his high school graduation present-where under the snowcapped shadow of Mount Kenya we watched elephants bathing in the Pangani River by the dewy light of an equatorial dawn. He had grown into a fine young man, strong and thoughtful, organized in his affairs, perhaps a little melancholy, though that was understandable: his mother was dying, his father seemed only to have just found him, like a book left carelessly on the patio, or a ring of keys he’d mislaid.

Hal left for Williams in the fall of ’71; by then Meredith was confined wholly to her bed. She had only the vaguest sensation in her hands and feet; the cysts had done their work. There was the surprising cruelty of pain, pain without nameable source, pain in places that otherwise could feel nothing at all. Even breathing was an effort. There was no place left for the disease to go.

When I remember that year, marked by Hal’s departure at one end and Meredith’s death at the other, I feel as if I am watching a movie, but a movie without sound. It was as if someone were turning a dial, and with each passing week the signals of ordinary life became less distinct, finally vanishing altogether and leaving the two of us alone. She might have spent her last months in the hospital, but she didn’t want this, and neither did I, though I don’t remember the two of us ever discussing it. What I do remember is the gathering quiet of the autumn months, then the brief burst of activity when Hal came home from Williamstown for Christmas-we opened our presents in the library, which we had turned into a bedroom for Meredith, all of us putting on the bravest possible show-and then, when he was gone again, sensing in his wake a deeper, final stillness, like a slowing of the blood. It was a cold winter but without snow, a kind of permanent, frozen autumn, as if the calendar had stopped when the wind had torn the last of the leaves away. I rarely set foot from the house; I left my affairs to others, my trusted lieutenants and their trusted lieutenants, an interlocking system of delegated duties I had created to prepare for this very day. Think of a children’s game in which sticks are piled high: the object is to build your tower well, to disperse its structural energies in such a manner that you may, at the crucial moment, snatch a single stick from the bottom and leave the whole thing standing. I had played such a game when I was small, and then later with Hal, when he was just a boy, the two of us sitting on the living room carpet or at the kitchen table. A clever trick, a bit of fun to pass the time, but like all such diversions, embedded within it one finds a meaning: do not build a life you cannot step out of.

April came, and with it, a blast of sudden, heavy warmth. Hal had spent the midsemester holiday in Florida, training with the lacrosse team, and in those early days of spring I drove north to watch him play his first real game with the varsity, leaving Meredith at home with Elizabeth, her nurse. We had dinner together at the Williamstown Inn to celebrate: though he had played just a few minutes, he had done well, getting a pair of shots on goal and making one assist in the final minute, a shot that had sailed past the goalie like a rifle bullet to put the Ephmen over the top. Though I knew almost nothing about the sport, I could see that Hal was an astute and skillful player, aggressive when he needed to be but also smart about when to carry the ball and when to give it away.

“The coach wants me to train to tend goal,” he explained. He was eating an enormous steak; his hair was still wet from the shower. “We’ve got a lot of attackmen coming up, but nobody really to take over in the net next year.”

“Goalie.” I frowned, thinking of that final shot; it was a job for a sitting duck. “I don’t know, Hal. Is that what you want?”

He laughed easily. “At least you can see it coming. On attack, half the time you never know what hit you. Like in the movies, one minute you’re fine, next thing you know, little birds are chirping around your head.” He made a little circular motion with his finger. “I’m quick enough. It’s the most important position, really.”

“We better not tell your mother.”

“Oh, trust me, I won’t.”

“I’m sorry she couldn’t come up. I know she would have liked seeing you.”

Hal said nothing. Over the years, the two of us had often spoken this way, as if Meredith’s illness were something less than what it was-not a permanent affliction but a temporary circumstance that would soon be set to rights. It was an old habit, well-intentioned but more suited to a boy than the grown man who now sat across the table from me, and I was afraid I’d angered him with this pretense. But then with great deliberateness he put down his knife and fork and looked at me, his face containing a terrible sadness but somehow smiling too. It was, I thought, the very face of bravery. I had never felt so close to him, so enriched by his presence.

“I know,” he said. “Tell her all about it, okay? Tell her I wish she’d been here.”

“I will. You bet I will.”

I left him at his dormitory, slept the night at the inn, and headed home to Westchester the next morning. It was late afternoon when I returned. As I pulled into the driveway I saw Elizabeth putting a small overnight bag in the trunk of her car.

“Is everything all right?”

She was wrapping her hair in a scarf printed with daisies. The late afternoon sun was strong and warm, and we were both squinting. “Mrs. Wainwright gave me the weekend off. She told me to wait until you came, and then I could go. I wanted to visit my sister up in New Haven. I hope that’s all right.”

“I don’t know why it wouldn’t be. Is someone else coming?”

A curious look passed over her face. “Well, I… I don’t know. I assume someone phoned the service. But no one’s here yet. She said I could leave when you got home. Do you want me to call?”

I thought a moment and shook my head. “No, that’s all right.” Elizabeth had been with us two years; I never knew exactly how old she was, but I assumed she was at least sixty. She had no children of her own, but what seemed like a dozen sisters spread from Philadelphia to Boston, whom she was always visiting. I didn’t know her all that well, really, but her duties placed her in a relationship of such intimacy with Meredith that the two of them had become the closest of confidantes. I would sometimes enter the library to find her sitting beside Meredith’s bed and know that at just that moment the two of them had stopped talking.

“You can go if you want,” I said. “I’ll take care of things here.”

Yet as I made my way up the front walk, I felt her eyes following me. I turned and there she was, standing exactly where she had been, holding her small suitcase by the open door of her little car.

“Lizzy? Is there something else?”

She seemed about to speak, but then she shrugged and gave me a wan smile. “It’s nothing. How was the game?”

“A squeaker, but they won. Hal got an assist, too.”

Her face was pleased, but something more: she looked almost relieved. “That’s good. I’m sure Mrs. Wainwright will be glad to hear it.”

The house was strangely still. In the little telephone room by the front door I stopped to check for messages and found a long list, written on a yellow legal pad. I glanced over it, but my heart was nowhere in this, and I put the list aside. The hour was just past four; I was stiff from the long day in the car, but felt also a lingering excitement from my visit with Hal. I stood in the telephone room and listened. Not a sound could be heard; it was as if the house itself had stopped breathing. Even with Hal away at school, the house always had people in it: Elizabeth, of course, but also our housekeeper, Mrs. Beryl, or one of the girls she hired to help out. There were always gardeners mowing or weeding somewhere. My phone messages had been taken by my secretary, Nancy, a divorced woman with two young children she often brought with her to the house in the afternoons. It was not unusual for me to find them, a boy and a girl, having milk and cookies in the kitchen or watching a television program in the den. The last message had been taken at three thirty. But even without looking, I knew that Nancy and her children, like the cook and gardener and all the rest, were nowhere to be found.

I looked in on Meredith and found her sleeping. In the kitchen a cold supper was waiting for me, and a note from Mrs. Beryl, taped to the refrigerator: Mrs. Wainwright gave me the night off, hope that’s all right. I took my plate to the library and had my dinner of cold cuts and cheese and pickles off my knees, watching Meredith sleep and breathe, as another man might have read the paper or watched television as he ate. When I was done, I took my dishes to the kitchen, washed and dried them and set them on the draining board, and by the time I returned, Meredith’s eyes were open.

“It’s me,” I said quietly. “I’m home.”

A barely perceptible nod. I took a rag and moistened her lips, then cranked up her bed and held a glass of water with a straw for her to sip. In her throat, the water moved sluggishly, like some enormous pill she was swallowing.

“Do you feel like eating?”

She shook her head slightly, her eyes drifting closed, but only for a moment. The day had ended. Outside, spring twilight fell like a soft cloth across the lawn and over the limbs of the budding trees. I reached to turn on her bedside lamp, but she shook her head again.

“Leave… it,” she said. Long pauses for breath split the spaces between her words. “Was it… a good day?”

I took a chair by the bed. “Hal got an assist. He didn’t play until the last half, but I think he really did well. He’s thinking of trying out for goalie too. His coach says it’s the most important position.”

“Tell me… all about… it.”

I did. I told her everything: the handsome look of the field and players, how there was still a bit of snow in the woods around the town, and Hal in his uniform with the pads bursting beneath it, though one could still see how big he was, how strong; and the bond I could feel among his teammates, like the ball that passed between them as they flew down the field, boys stepping into their lives together; and about our dinner together and the long drive home. Darkness came into the room as I talked, but I did not feel its strangeness or its weight; it was the most natural thing in the world to sit in a dark room and tell my wife the story of my journey.

“What did… he eat?” she said when I was done.

“When? At the inn, you mean?”

“You… forgot… to say.”

“Steak,” I said. I showed her with my fingers. “A great thick porterhouse. With béarnaise. Are you hungry, M?”

“No.” Her voice was thin, almost a whisper. “We’re… alone,” she said.

“Yes.” And then I said it. “You’ve sent them all away.”

From her arm the slightest movement: she was reaching for my tears. I felt this as if she had actually done it, as if her hand were on my cheek.

“Don’t… be sad.”

“Do we have to, M?”

“I can’t…” she said, but stopped. Can’t go on, can’t do this alone, can’t can’t can’t. What would I have wanted, if I were she? And as I thought this, I knew my answer, though I had known it many months, all that year in fact, and my mind seemed to move into a place where what was about to happen already had, a room in which there were only two people, M and I, and this final night forever.

“Harry… help me… do this.”

There were medicines everywhere: on her table, in the bathroom, in drawers and the pockets of coats hanging in the closets. A house of medicine. But I knew which one she wanted. The doctor had given it to us with a warning, a warning I understood was also a promise: more than the prescribed dosage, even a little, and it could compromise her breathing. I was so nervous I could barely crush the pills with the back of the spoon I took from the kitchen drawer. Water would have been easier for her, but I chose milk to cloud the taste. In the blazing light of the kitchen I kept my thoughts trained upon these small, mechanical actions, as an archer holds the target in his sights. I mixed the milk and pills together, rinsed the spoon, placed the glass on a saucer, and, dousing the kitchen light behind me, returned to the library.

“I’ve made you something.”

The faintest smile crossed her lips, as if I’d brought her a present. “That… there.”

“Yes.”

She let a moment pass. “Leave it… for now. Harry… will you do something… for me?”

I placed the glass and saucer on the table. “Anything, M.”

“Come… to bed.”

“Get in with you, you mean?”

“Yes,” she said. “Like… before.”

Standing by the bed, I undressed: shoes and socks and pants and shirt. I folded these items carefully, placed my shoes on top, and rested it all on a chair.

“So… handsome,” she said. “Now… come… to bed.”

I cranked the bed down and climbed in beside her. The mattress was narrow, and had chrome bars on the sides; beneath the sheet I could feel the squeaking friction of the rubber barrier. I pulled her across me, so that her chest lay against my own, her head resting in the hollow of my neck.

“It’s good… to think… of Hal.”

“I wish you could have been there, M.”

“I was… Harry. You… told me… and I… was there. Don’t cry… Harry.”

“I’m sorry, M. I’ll try not to.”

“Remember… that… night? I told you… it would be… all right.” A long inhalation of breath. “It will… be.”

“I know that, M.”

“Tell me… another… story.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Yes… you… can.” I felt her nod, though this was, I knew, a memory. Her breath was warm and slow on my neck. “I know… you, Harry.”

I took a deep breath, then heard myself speaking. My voice was strange and far away, seeming to come at once from inside me and from the air of the dark room all around.

“Once upon a time, there was a man and a woman, and they had two boys. The first one was very little. He was sick, and for a time they thought he might die, but eventually he became well, though he stayed little because of this sickness, and his mother and father loved him very much. The second boy grew and became a man, and they loved him, too, though differently. That is what they learned in their lives together: that the little boy, because he stayed little, would always have a special kind of love, but that the other boy, who grew, would be the one who would take care of them, when they themselves grew old. The first love was sweeter, and a little sad, because when the man and the woman felt it, they were remembering. But the second was stronger, because they knew it would last them all the days of their lives. M?”

“Yes… Harry?”

“Was the story what you wanted?”

“It… was always… what I wanted.” Then: “Tell me… more. Tell me… anything.”

I did. I told her everything; I talked for hours, or thought I did. I told her every story I knew. Her breathing grew slow and heavy against my chest, like long waves on a beach. And when I was done, she said, quietly, “I’m… thirsty.”

“I’ll get you some water.”

“No… Harry.” She seemed to shake her head. “The… other. Please.”

“M. I just can’t.”

“Shhhh… don’t cry… Harry.”

“I can’t, I can’t.”

“I am… your wife, Harry. I am… your wife… and I need you… to do this.”

Then the glass was in my hand. It was warm, from hours of sitting, and thick with the grains of the crushed pills; the mixture had separated a little, leaving a dark layer of medicine at the bottom, and so I took a spoon from the bedside table to stir it, quietly, so as not to disturb the silence of the room with even the slightest contact of metal on glass. I slid behind her, taking her weight on my chest, and held the straw to her lips. She was forty-five years old.

“That’s it… Harry.”

Her sips were small, like a bird taking water from a garden fountain: delicate, and without hesitation. A dozen times she drank, taking the milk and the pills into her. A stream of the bitter liquid ran down the sides of her mouth, onto her chin and neck, and when she was done I used a washcloth to wipe it all away.

“Let’s go… to sleep… Harry.”

“M-”

“It’s… all right,” she said, and I felt her move against me and then stop. Her voice was faraway, a dreamer’s voice, and I felt a heaviness gather inside me, taking me with her.

“It’s… all right. Sleep… my love.”

And God save us all, I did.

THIRTEEN

Joe always said it was bad luck to watch him leave from the dock. He kissed me that day, the eve of Christmas, 1971, bounded up the gangway, and I went back to the motel and slept. I awoke to the sound of someone banging on the door, and a high, loud voice, jabbering in Spanish: the chambermaid. I took my watch from the bedside table; it was just past noon. I had long since missed my bus. Already Joe would be fifty miles out to sea.

I yelled something to the maid about coming back later, pulled the blankets tight around me, and by the time I awoke again the sun was setting. I showered and dressed and stepped outside. A stiff wind was blowing off the water. The sun had set completely; the buildings by the water were all dark, but up the hill I could see lights and feel the presence of the city. In the office, I found the same clerk who’d checked us in the night before, watching a football game on television and paring his nails.

“If it’s all right, I’d like to stay another night.”

He looked at his watch, then at me. “You already did.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’ve been here two days.”

I stood a moment, taking this in. Had I really slept through a day and a night and all the next day besides? Vague memories gathered in my mind, scattered images I’d thought were dreams: a second visit from the chambermaid, more insistent, and rising in the middle of the afternoon to use the bathroom and hearing, from outside, the rush of midday traffic on Commercial Street.

“Listen,” the clerk was saying, “what you do is your own business, young lady, but we don’t want any druggies in here. This is a family resort.”

“What are you talking about?” I wanted to laugh. “It’s a motel. And I was just tired.”

“Like I said.” He cleared his throat. “We don’t want any tired people in here. You owe me thirty more dollars, tonight included. Then you be on your way.”

There was no point in arguing. I counted out the money from my purse. Joe had given me an extra fifty to help me get home. All told, I had a little over a hundred dollars left-money I had planned to spend in Boston on Christmas presents for my parents, but had not gotten around to using.

As I was leaving the office, the realization hit me all at once, like a gust of wind. I turned at the door; the clerk had already gone back to watching his game.

“If you don’t mind my asking, what day is it?”

“Today?” He looked at me and laughed. “It’s Christmas Day. You almost missed it.”

I couldn’t have said why I did what I did, not exactly. It was as if a hidden door had opened, like a passage in a castle wall. Joe, my parents, the whole kit and kaboodle that I called my life: all I had to do was go through the door, and I could leave everything behind. I thought of the girl I had seen in the restaurant in Cambridge, so confident and smart, holding the attention of the men at her table like a spell. I knew that her life-a life of money and good schools and all the choices such things buy-could never be mine. I wasn’t going to be a lawyer, or even go to college. But I wanted to know, even for a moment, what it felt like to be someone like her.

I rented a room the next day at the YWCA on Spring Street. Seven dollars a night, and another five to eat, perhaps three more for incidentals: by these calculations, I needed to find a job in five days. There were fourteen restaurants going four or five blocks in each direction from the Y, everything from greasy-spoon diners to chowder houses with big open tanks of lobsters for the tourists. It was the slow season, I figured, but people still had to eat, and I didn’t care what kind of place it was, so long as I had work. By now my parents would be wondering what had happened to me-my lie about visiting high school friends in Boston would have long since fallen apart with just a few phone calls-but I didn’t want to tell them where I was until I had gotten myself settled. I was twenty-four years old, and never in my life had I done anything so purely on my own.

By the third day I was beginning to panic. Everyplace the story was the same: not hiring, try back in a few weeks. But I didn’t have a few weeks. I was down to just thirty dollars, plus the eleven dollars I had to keep aside for bus fare home in case nothing worked out. I had a tidy nest egg sitting in a passbook savings account back in Sagonick-a little over three thousand dollars I’d managed to put away-but I would have had to go home to get it, or ask my parents to wire me the money. I vowed I wouldn’t touch it, unless I got truly desperate.

I had one solid lead: a chowder house down on Commercial, just a few hundred yards from the dock where the Jenny-Smith had been berthed. I’d visited it the first day, and the manager told me that he might be needing a waitress; one of his girls was pregnant and likely going to quit. I’d been hoping for a job as a line cook, but waitressing or even busing would be fine, I told him. Check back in a couple of days, he said. Maybe he’d know something by then.

I waited until noon on the fourth day before I returned. The weather was a sullen, dispiriting gray, and a steady ten-knot wind whipped up the waters of the harbor, making me think of Joe, now far out to sea. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how angry I was with him. I was wearing the bracelet he’d given me-I hadn’t taken it off since our first night together-and, feeling its jangling presence against my wrist, I remembered his words: There’s a woman in town who makes these. Even as he’d spoken, I’d felt a little chill of suspicion unsnake inside me. We’d been apart for three years. I’d never asked about other women, and he’d never mentioned any, except for someone named Abby, whom I gathered was his boss’s wife and an old friend of his father’s-a nurse who had taken care of Joe Sr. when he was injured in the war. Apart from that, Joe’s descriptions of life in LeMaitre made it sound like a frontier outpost from some novel of the old West, everyone spitting and pissing where they liked. But of course, even in such a place there would be women.

Feeling suddenly determined, I marched through slushy snow up to the front door of the restaurant and stepped inside. Only a few people were eating-mostly men in suits and ties, no doubt the usual lunch crowd from the law firms and government offices over on State, hunched over bowls of chowder and pints of Bass. At the bar I asked for the manager, and a minute later he came striding out of the kitchen.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said. He was an older man, maybe fifty-five, with square glasses that made his eyes seem large and a comb-over of wispy hair that flapped a little when he walked. “I’m sorry. Maybe in a few more weeks.”

The news hit me like a blow. “I don’t have a few weeks,” I said, and heard the tears pressing on my voice. “I only have another day.”

“Did you try O’Neil’s? They sometimes need people.” O’Neil’s was another seafood place, further down Commercial.

“I’ve tried everywhere.” A fat tear spilled onto my cheek, and when I tried to wipe it away, I found I was still wearing my mittens. I removed them and grabbed a cocktail napkin off the bar and blew my nose. “I’m sorry. I don’t have to waitress. Just let me sweep up or something. Please. I’m down to my last thirty dollars.”

He regarded me another moment. The restaurant seemed to have fallen suddenly quiet. Beyond the windows, the gray sky over the harbor roiled with cold and snow.

“Aw, hell,” he said, and scratched the back of his head. “I really shouldn’t be doing this. To tell the truth, I had pretty much decided not to hire anybody, with business being so slow. But maybe we can squeeze you in.”

“You mean it?”

He seemed about to laugh. “You want the job or not?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“You won’t get rich in here. I know you know that, but I’m just saying. We only pay the minimum, a buck forty an hour. That and tips, of course. And I can’t give you the dinner shift until you’ve been on awhile.”

“Anything is fine. Really.”

He took a peppermint from a wicker basket on the hostess station and popped it into his mouth. Then he leveled his gaze at me. “Listen,” he said quietly, sucking on the candy, “I’ve got to ask. There isn’t anything I should know about you, is there?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t get me wrong. But not many girls come in and say they’re down to their last thirty dollars, or whatever it was. There wouldn’t be… anyone looking for you, would there? Like, say, a husband or boyfriend, something like that? You can tell me if there is.”

“No, sir. I just want to work.”

He looked at me another moment, deciding what to believe, and finally ended our negotiation with a crisp nod. “Okay, then. But it’s Deck, all right? Like the deck of a boat.”

“Deck. Got it.”

“Ten thirty sharp, tomorrow. Black pants if you have ’em, or else you can pick up a cheap pair at the army-navy down the street. The white shirt you have on should do fine.”

I felt myself smiling. “You won’t be sorry.”

“I’m guessing not.” He turned on his heel to go. “Sorry. Stupid of me, but I forgot to ask your name.”

“ Alice.” I’d said it without thinking. It was my mother’s middle name. He was being so nice, I felt a little bad about the lie. But I also liked the sound of it, the new taste of it on my tongue: Alice. Who was Alice?

“Okay, Alice,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

As easy as that, I got my wish, stepped through the door from my old life and into another. I was no longer Lucy, but Alice: Alice, the waitress from Portland. I started work the next day, as promised, ten thirty on the dot with a smile on my face and pants so crisply new they rustled when I walked; a week later I was working the dinner shift and taking in a solid thirty dollars a night in tips. The Y was fine, if a little noisy, but they wouldn’t let me stay longer than a month anyway; one of the other waitresses told me about an available apartment in the triple-decker where she lived, and I went one evening to look at it: a single room with a toilet and tub but no sink except for in the kitchen. But the windows were big-I thought on clear days I might even be able to see the water-and it came furnished, with a bed, a table, and some plywood-and-milk-crate shelves. The only way in was up three flights of rickety stairs from the rear of the building, open to the weather and slick with ice. The rent was $120, utilities included; I took it on the spot, walked back to the Y to fetch my things-a single suitcase of clothing, a grocery bag of magazines and knicknacks, and an asparagus fern I’d bought to keep me company-and slept that night in my own apartment, a feeling as strange and wondrous to me as a first kiss.

It wasn’t until the next day that I finally wrote my parents a letter. I didn’t want to lie, but the truth was too hard to explain-I didn’t even have words for it myself-so I simply told them that I had decided I needed to set out on my own for a bit, that I was safe and well, and where they could reach me if they needed to and that they should not tell Joe where I was if he called. I tucked a twenty-dollar bill in the envelope, and explained that it was money I had planned to spend on Christmas presents, and that I hoped they would buy themselves something nice with it. Dad, I wrote, I know you need gloves, you always do, and Mom, I was thinking you might like some perfume, or else earrings. I’m sorry I had to do this. It has nothing to do with Joe, or not exactly, so please don’t be angry with him, or with me. Don’t worry, as I really am okay, better than I’ve been in a while in fact, and just need some time for whatever it is that’s going on with me. Weeping, I signed it Love, Lucy, already feeling like an imposter for using this name.

My new life felt simple, clean, uncluttered, like a child’s dollhouse, or the pages of an empty book. I worked the dinner shift from five to eleven, slept the mornings away, rose at ten to do small chores-shopping for food, or else laundry; I had very little clothing, and was constantly washing what I had-ate a small, early dinner at my tiny table, then left in twilight for the restaurant. The Y was just a few blocks away from my apartment, and afternoons on my way to work I would go there to swim, something I had never really done before, at least not in a pool. Twenty-five cents, plus a nickel for a towel; when I recall those months, it’s these trips to the pool that return most vividly to mind, each sensory detail forever etched in memory. The feel of the towel in my hand, warm from the dryer and so crisped with bleach it felt deep-fried; the cold against my skin as I undressed hurriedly in the frigid locker room; the feeling of immersion, the world above me wiped away, and the building heat of my muscles as they set to work in a rhythm that was a kind of music. Kick-stroke/ kick-stroke/head turn-breathe, kick-stroke/ kick-stroke/head turn-breathe. I saw other people doing flip-turns and wanted to try it; the first time, I got so much water up my nose the lifeguard came down from his stand to ask me if I would be all right, but before long I had mastered it, and was swimming a mile a day.

If it’s true that I was sometimes homesick-a sudden ache, nearly physical, which always took me by surprise-it was also the case that I was happy, and that this happiness felt sweeter for my loneliness. The world seemed to have forgotten me, forgotten Lucy, and when I thought about the people and places of my old life, the love I felt for them was tinged with nostalgia, as if I were recalling them across a span of many years. The sensation was so new to me I wondered if it could possibly last, until one deep, cold night in the first week of March, when I awakened to the feeling that someone was watching me. It was late, after three A.M. Not someone, I thought: something. I rose quickly in my icy apartment, and when I went to my window I was so startled by what I found that I forgot all about the fear that had pulled me from bed. A great, billowing apparition of blue-green light, like pool water, but shot with flecks of gold, hung over the sleeping city, folded like a drape. It moved back and forth, pushed by an invisible wind-a wind of light and stars. I knew what I was looking at; I had seen the aurora borealis before, of course; yet at that moment, standing by my window, I felt as if I were witnessing something far more: the purest light of angels in their heaven, remembering the world.

The next day, a Saturday, I rose early, did a load of laundry in the basement, swam my usual mile. It was just before five when I arrived at the Lobster Tank. Only a few customers were eating, mostly older folks in for the early bird four-dollar special. I took a clean apron and a tray from the pile by the dishwasher and got to work. By six the place was packed. I was putting up an order on the clips when I turned and saw Deck watching me.

“What? Is there something in my teeth?”

“Somebody’s in a good mood.”

The bell rang behind me: my order. I dressed the plates up with little custard cups of tartar sauce, a piece of lettuce, and lemon wedges, then hoisted the tray onto my shoulder.

“Deck, what?”

“You. Smiling like that.”

I laughed, embarrassed. But it was true. “Okay, I’ll cut it out.”

“No need. One thing I know, a woman only smiles like that when she’s in love. Or so May tells me.”

May was Deck’s wife. She always picked Deck up at the end of the night, waiting outside in her little orange Pinto while we reset the tables; I’d met her in the parking lot my first week on the job. Twice they’d had me out to their house for dinner, the first time with some of the other girls from the restaurant, the second just me alone. May was a secretary at the high school, a big woman but not soft, and when she hugged me, as she now did whenever I saw her, I felt the wind come out of me a little. Their kids were grown and gone: their daughter, Peg, a girl about my age, lived in Nashua, and was married to a fireman; their son, George, had been through some rough patches but had eventually settled down, played semipro hockey for a while, and now taught high school phys-ed someplace down south-Memphis, or Mobile. Their house was out in the country, a post-and-beam thing that looked big from the road but felt snug inside. The second time I’d gone out for dinner, and the hour had gotten late, I’d slept the night in Peg’s old room, using one of her old T-shirts as a nightgown.

“We smile for lots of reasons, Deck. We’re a mysterious species.”

“Well, whatever it is,” he said, nodding, “it’s nice to see.” I thought the conversation was over but then he reached into his back pocket. “Also, and I don’t want to kill your mood, but I’m guessing this might be for you.”

I put my tray down on the garnish counter and took the letter from his hand. The envelope was small, and thick with folded notebook paper. It was addressed to me, care of my parents, with a big X across the address and, written beside it, The Lobster Tank, Commercial Street Wharf, Portland, ME. The second handwriting was my mother’s.

“Lucy, huh?”

It took me a moment to gather myself. I suppose I felt the way all liars did, when they were finally found out: guilty, but a little relieved, too. I also realized, holding Joe’s letter, that whatever was inside didn’t matter to me anywhere near as much as it might have even a few weeks before.

“I’m sorry, Deck. I don’t know what to say.”

He frowned in a way that struck me as reassuring, though I could also tell I’d hurt his feelings. I’d eaten at his table and slept in his house, and not even told him who I really was.

“It’s all right,” Deck said finally. “I don’t mean to pry.”

“Could we maybe keep this between us for now? Just you and me and May.”

“If that’s how you want it, sure.” He stopped, his face a little flustered. “Lucy. Alice. Listen, I know it’s not my business. But if there’s anything I can help you with, any sort of problem at all…”

I looked him in the eye. “It’s okay, Deck. Really, I’m all right.”

“Well, the offer’s open. You ever need someplace to go, Peg’s room is yours for the asking. May says so too.”

I could have kissed him right then, that sweet man. Over the counter, the bell rang again; I was now stacked up two orders, and could see, through the little window separating the prep area from the dining room, more folks coming in. I hoisted the first tray to my shoulder. “Trust me,” I said. “I’ve got it all under control.”

I planned to open the letter when I got home, but in the end I couldn’t make myself wait. When my shift was done, and once we’d broken everything down for the night, I got a glass of water and took a stool at the bar. Dear Lucy Joe wrote:

Not knowing where to send this, I’m mailing it to your parents. When I didn’t hear from you I phoned the house and they told me that you were in Portland, but wouldn’t say where. It’s funny to think that you never left, after that morning on the dock. I hope you’re all right.

Lucy, I’m sorry. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it now. I know how hard this is for you, my being stuck here, and I know you’ve probably had it with me, with the whole situation. I wish it were different, but it is what it is. There’s more talk of an amnesty, but we’ve heard this before up here, and I’m not sure I’d qualify anyway. The rumor is it will only go to people with dependents. No one really knows. That asshole Nixon is probably going to be reelected, which would deep-six the whole thing.

Lucy, I know I have nothing to offer you. This sounds a little stupid as I write it, sort of old-fashioned, but the truth is you deserve a real life. Abby and Marcel are nice people, and they’re looking after me-all of us, really-but there’s only so much they can do. It’s taken me a while to admit this, but I see it now. I think I figured it out that night in Harvard Square, when we had dinner. You think I didn’t see you watching that girl, but I did. I knew you were thinking it should have been you. I wished it for you, Lucy, I really did, and I was sorrier than I’d ever been in my life. This sounds dumb, but maybe it’s not too late. I don’t know what you’re doing now, but I hope it’s what you want, and that it will take you where you want to go.

You know the funniest thing? I still wish I’d gone to Vietnam. I read about the war, I see shit on the news, but I still wish I hadn’t let my father talk me into leaving. But there I go, blaming him, when it was really something I did, nobody else. A lot of us feel that way, even the die-hard antiwar types. It’s hard to stay political when you’re standing in the pens surrounded by forty tons of ice and fish, so cold your hands freeze to the pitchfork, and some jerk yelling at you to hurry the hell up before it all rots and turns to cat food, and it looks pretty much as if your life is just fucking over. If I’d gone, by now it would be done with, at least for me. Whatever was supposed to happen would have happened by now.

The other thing I want to tell you is that my father isn’t well. A few days after Christmas he had a small stroke. I don’t know all the details, and as usual he’s pretending it’s nothing, but the truth is it’s a bad turn. He was shoveling out the truck when it happened and I guess he was outside for a while in the snow before he managed to get into the house and call someone. He had some pretty bad frostbite too, on his hands and feet, which is probably worse than it would otherwise be, without the diabetes. He’s out of the hospital now and staying in town for the winter at the Rogues’. I think you know them-Hank Rogue, Rogue Drillers? They have a daughter who was a couple years ahead of us at Regional. Anyway, Hank and my father have always gotten on, probably because they’re the two crankiest men in northwest Maine.

The real upshot is, between the stroke and all the rest of it, it doesn’t look as if he can hold on to the camp much longer. My guess is he may try to get through next season, but if somebody showed up tomorrow with the money to buy the place he might not say no. It’s been a hard run for him the last couple of years, and I think he may be ready to throw in the towel. When I heard about the stroke, I called him and offered to come home, just take my chances, but he flat-out refused. He actually got pretty pissed off and the whole thing dissolved into one more shouting match. I think knowing that I’m up here is the one thing that keeps him going. And I wouldn’t be all that much help to him in jail, either.

It’s weird to think of the camp, gone just like that. I think I’d gotten to hate the place. Maybe getting away was the reason I came up here to begin with. Now I’ve spent the last two years missing it. Remember how we used to talk about someday when we’d take it over? It seems like years since we talked like that, and I guess maybe it really has been years.

I know my father has always thought the world of you, Luce, and from what your parents said I get the feeling you may not be able to do this, but if you get the chance to visit him, even just to say hello, I know it would be some help. Though he’d never say as much, I know he’s pretty lonely. He doesn’t even have a lot of friends left in town, and seeing you would brighten him up. I know it may not be in the cards, and I understand if it isn’t, but I just thought I’d ask you.

Lucy, I hope you’re happy wherever you are, and try not to worry about me, as I will try not to worry about you, though I’m sure I always will, every day as long as I live. I guess this is something like good-bye. I can barely write the word. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Love,

Joe

I finished the letter and returned it to its envelope. All along I had thought I’d be the one to end it, not the other way around. I was crying a little, though what I felt was not exactly like sadness. Just this: I was alone. I had fallen half in love with my solitude, and now I’d gotten exactly what I’d asked for, and it wasn’t what I’d expected at all.

A shot glass appeared on the bar in front of me.

“Here.” Deck pulled a bottle of tequila off the shelf and poured. “Drink up.”

The glass was heavy in my hand; I took a tiny sip. My mouth bloomed with the heat and sharpness of it, making me swallow, and I felt the liquor burning all the way down to my stomach.

“Go on now, knock it back. Deck’s orders.”

“I’m not much of a drinker.”

“And tomorrow is another day. But I never met a broken heart yet wasn’t made a little better by just the right amount of tequila. Go on.”

I did as he said, tipping my face to the ceiling and taking the rest of it in a single gulp. My eyes and nose were running, and I wiped them with the back of my hand. “Oh, shit, Deck. Shit, shit, shit.”

“We’re assholes, we are. Men are worthless. There’s no denying it. You want another?”

“What would May say?”

“This was May’s idea, actually.” He tipped his head toward the front windows and the parking lot, where the Pinto was waiting, chuffing smoke into the air. “Ask her yourself.”

The second week of March 1972. For the first time in my life I had no idea what would happen next. Deck pulled an extra glass from under the bar, set it up next to mine, and filled both of them to the lip. He raised his in a little toast.

“To you, Alice,” he said.

FOURTEEN

It seems now as if there was no time before-before Kate, before the camp, before Harry Wainwright and his last day of fishing-but naturally there was, and that is part of the story too. There was being a child, of course, not all that interesting-the fact that I had no father made me less different from other children than you might suppose-and after we had moved to Maine and my mother remarried, my years in high school and college: again, ordinary in every way, chock-full of minor triumphs and failures and bad experiments that pulled me in no direction in particular. I might have become anyone, chosen any kind of life. Out of college, I floated down to Boston with a couple of friends-hard-drinking jokesters with even less on their minds than I had-waited tables in a ferny restaurant in Back Bay while I looked for something better, and ended up, of all things, as a sales representative for a drug company out on Route 128-a job that entailed crisscrossing the city in a big leased Pontiac with a sample bag crammed with capsules and pills to stop your heart and start it again, thin your blood or thicken it, adjust the body’s metronome in a hundred different ways. These were boom times, when everyone was making money quick as could be, and I was too-not getting rich exactly, but certainly making more money than I knew how to spend, and under the spell of my success, I actually began to see myself as someone who might prosper in this world. My job, after all, seemed easy as pie, requiring little more than the ability to read a map and recite memorized data to overtired general practitioners who’d try anything once. (The truth was, I didn’t really need to understand what I was saying, though my courses in forestry were more help than you’d think.) I had friends, I had money, I had a closet full of suits. It wasn’t a cure for cancer or even the common cold, but it was something, and it was mine.

And yet. When I tell people about those two years of my life, and they see how differently I do things now, they assume my decision to walk away was just that: a surrender. And they’re absolutely right. I did, in fact, give up. But it didn’t have anything to do with the money (which was fine), or the long hours (what else would I be doing?), or the feeling that I was wasting my life on trivia (nothing wrong with prescription drugs; just ask the guy who’s crawling across the kitchen floor to get to his stash of nitroglycerin in the breadbox). I didn’t get fed up, burn out in increments, find myself in some desperate tailspin drinking away the lunch hour and boring the barroom with some cockamamie philosophy I’d cooked up as to why the world was the way it was-i.e., depraved, ruinous, and totally out of control. (This is exactly what happened to a guy I knew, a story that ended badly, though most of the salesmen in my group were happy as hamsters to kill their quotas and skeedaddle on home to drive their daughters to ballet lessons and prowl the classifieds with their wives after dinner for a time-share in Stowe or Fort Meyers.) No. What happened was, one sunny April afternoon, fresh from one successful sale and on to the next, and looking forward to a dinner date with friends at a seafood joint near Faneuil Hall-that is to say, with a song in my heart and my life charging downfield like a running back with the game-winning ball-I turned off Storrow Drive into Beacon Hill, and found myself slowed, then slowed some more, then finally stopped in traffic.

It was just three o’clock, too early for the rush. A line of two dozen cars waited ahead of me, and as I leaned my head out the window to see what the problem was, first one and then another began to honk, the noise piling up with a feverish intensity that was, of course, contagious. I was too far back in line to see anything; my bet was an accident, though there were no lights or sirens yet; and as the minutes ticked off, making me later and later, all for no apparent reason, the whole thing ballooned into a crisis. What I mean is, I couldn’t go anywhere-couldn’t fucking go-and I found myself pounding the wheel and then the ceiling of the Pontiac with my fist, pounding and pounding until my knuckles shrieked, my heart hammering in my chest, the blare of the horns smothering my head like a plastic bag, so that I thought I might actually burst. People had begun to climb out of their cars, and I took this as a sign; I threw the door open and marched ahead, toward the intersection where the problem, literally, lay.

It was a man, an older man, and at first I thought he was dead-that he had stepped into the intersection and been hit by a car. I bullied my way into the small crowd that had gathered around him. He lay on his back in the middle of the southbound lane with his arms draped loosely at his sides, and I saw that he was conscious. His eyes were open, almost too open, giving an unblinking blue-eyed gaze to the sky above, and a policeman was crouched on one knee, asking him in a South Boston accent the kind of questions you’d expect: could he stand (not sure), what was his name (Fred something), did he know where he was (Boston? Near the Ritz?). His clothing was neat and clean-khakis, a madras shirt, shiny black loafers: the uniform of a semiretired accountant or a bank loan officer on vacation. Though some in the crowd were saying he was drunk, I didn’t think he was. He was just there, lying in the street as if he didn’t have a care in the world, apparently comfortable and totally uninterested in anything the cop was saying to him or where he was and why it was worth a fuss. I craned my neck upward to see what he was seeing: the crowns of the buildings, an airy gauze of clouds, a blue dome of April sky. Nothing, really, to account for his look. A second policeman arrived, and then a third, barking into the radio clipped to his shoulder; an ambulance appeared in the oncoming lane, shoving itself up onto the curb with a tart bleep of its siren. Two of the cops helped the man up onto the ambulance’s tailgate, and while the EMTs were checking him out, waving a tiny flashlight over his eyeballs and taking his pulse, the third cop told us all to get back into our cars, there was nothing to see, and so on. Which, I guess, there wasn’t.

It took me only a month after that to quit, though not why you might think, which is one more reason I don’t tell the story all that often. It wasn’t my father’s body I saw there, as my college shrink would have claimed, or even, in some theoretical way, my own, although the poor sap might have been a drug rep as anyone else. I didn’t conclude, as a person might in the face of something so desperately mortal, that life was short, do what you want, make every second count-the easy stuff, all of which I knew in the first place. What I saw instead, in a heartbreaking flash, was the absolute arbitrariness of most things. Before I’d walked back to my car, I approached the first cop and asked him what it was all about. He was scribbling in a notebook and looked up at me with a scowl. “Beats me.” He barked a nasty laugh. “The guy said he was tired and wanted to lie down!”

And as he said it, I thought: Well, why not? Why not lie down in the middle of the road? Driving away, I suddenly couldn’t think of a single reason, hard as I tried. Traffic would stop, the cops would come; they’d haul you off somewhere for observation, maybe a little “treatment”-reuptake inhibitors by the fistful, bad food on metal trays, serious conversations with some joker in a white coat with a blackjack stashed in his sock-while, meanwhile, the world would turn without a stutter. In a crazy way, it actually made sense to lie down, to drop your guard and let the truth come out. I thought: who cares?

Which, of course, was absolutely no way to live. There’s more to the story, but before I knew it I had second-guessed myself into the worst kind of box. I went back to my mother’s house in Bangor, loafed the summer away under the charade of “getting some thinking done” and “looking for a new direction,” and in September answered a want ad in the Maine Sunday Telegram that turned out to be Joe’s. I drove up to Sagonick and looked the place over; it seemed, then as now, as far away from everything as I could get without actually hauling myself to some dope-smoking Oregon commune or an ashram in India (both of which I actually considered for at least ten minutes), and when Joe put the ring of keys in my hand, I felt in their solid, singing weight the answer to my problems, and knew that I was cured.

End of story; or the beginning, if you like.

All of which is just to say that these were the things on my mind that morning, as much a part of the feel of the day as Kate’s kiss, Joe’s drunk lawyers, and Harry Wainwright. For two hours I went out with a party from cabin two-a couple of guys who just wanted somebody to show them a good spot and then beat it-then into town for some screws and other things I needed to repair a set of steps by the dock. Lucy had made it clear that I was supposed to stay close to camp, to keep myself available for whenever Harry wanted to go, but I thought a short errand wouldn’t hurt, since Harry, even if he experienced some kind of miraculous recovery, would need a while to get ready. I would have asked Kate to come along for the ride, but she was off somewhere, shuttling the moose-canoers, and probably wouldn’t be back till nearly noon.

What happened next I can’t explain. I was driving into town, mulling over what size screws I wanted and that maybe I should pick up a case of engine oil while I was at it, when I caught myself thinking about my father, and the day I learned he’d died. This in itself was odd, as right till then, driving the Jeep up the long hill into town, the wind and sun roiling around my face, I would have sworn I had no conscious recollections of that day at all. Standing by the canoes, I’d told Kate all that I remembered of him, or thought I had; so maybe finally talking about these things had cleared a space in my mind for other memories to flow in behind them. In any case, the things I suddenly remembered hit me so hard I actually tapped the brake, then found myself pulling the Jeep to a stop by the side of the road.

We were living on base then, the three of us in a small, prefabricated house built of nothing much better than cardboard. It was summer, the air of the tidewater thick as clam chowder. I don’t think we had an air conditioner, because the house was always full of whirling fans-table fans, ceiling fans, fans on tall stands that rocked to and fro like the heads of robots-and that was where my memory began: with the feel of fan-pushed air on my face. I was in the kitchen, which was really just a kind of galley with a small extra space for a table and chairs. The fan, an old-fashioned model with metal blades and a cloth-covered cord, was positioned on a chair so that it pointed toward the stove, where my mother had been cooking dinner for the two of us. She had left me alone there when the doorbell rang-I was playing on the floor, pushing a toy dump truck around-and in her absence the fan had worked a kind of magnetic pull on me: I left my playing and went to stand before it, to watch its blur of blades and soak the skin of my face in the cooling relief of its man-made wind. My father flew jets, aircraft held aloft by forces as invisible to me as magic, but there were plenty of propeller-driven planes around, and one could not be a small boy growing up on the grounds of the Oceana Naval Air Station without grasping at least the basics of aeronautical propulsion. In my mind I connected the action of the whirling fan blades to my father’s mysterious and important job-a job that, I knew, scared my mother half out of her wits even as she told me constantly what a great, brave man he was-and the longer I waited alone in the kitchen for her return, the more I experienced both a deepening anxiety at her absence-there was a boiling pot on the stove, which I also dimly understood to be a danger-and a strong, almost mystical pull toward the blur of metal that floated before my face. It seemed to contain a strange and ancient power-the power of my father, of men and their machines-and I longed to touch it, a desire sharp as hunger. I had been warned against this a thousand times, as I had been warned against the stove, the electric outlets, strangers who might want to talk to me, and traffic on the street. The urge to obey such commands was strong, but in my mother’s lengthy absence I detected a quality of permission. For a long moment, two seconds or ten, I held my hand up in front of the fan to feel its wind more intimately, weighing my options. And then, from the hallway, the sound traveling unmuffled through the cardboard walls of our house, I heard my mother scream.

Which was exactly when my defenses collapsed and I extended a single, outstretched finger toward the fan, through the metal cage that wrapped it, and into the whirling blades. I did it quickly, furtively-so quickly I didn’t realize for a moment what I’d done, though the pain was, I imagine, instantaneous. The sharp metal sliced off the end of my finger so neatly that it seemed to simply vanish, and then a jet of blood shot out from this open tube of flesh into the blades, splattering everything-my hand and face, my arm and shirt, even the wall and floor, with its vibrant, Martian-red confetti-and it was this fact, as much as the pain itself, that made me scream too.

Jesus Christ almighty, I thought, and probably said so too, remembering all this in the parked Jeep on the side of the road. A logging truck roared past me, a hundred tons of naked trees stacked on its bed like corpses in a mass grave, detonating the air around me and making the Jeep rock like a toy in a tub. In the silent wash of its departure I held up and examined my right index finger, its end stublike and flattened, the nail stunted to the shape and size of a shirt button-a familiar sight, nothing I had ever given a second’s thought to, or not for years and years. I’d always thought I’d sliced it somehow on, or with, a bicycle; I’d even constructed a mental story as to how this had happened, riding my first two-wheeler and then, for no reason at all, reaching down and sticking my finger into the grinding gears of the chain ring. But this made no sense. Maybe it was something my mother had told me, though I quickly tossed this thought aside. It was, I understood, a tale my mind had told itself.

I drove on into town. At the hardware store, still feeling a little dazed, I fished through the little file drawers of screws, filling a sack with the ones I needed-up here we pay by the pound, like fruit-slung a case of motor oil onto my shoulder, and took it all to the register in back, where the owner, Porter Dante, was sucking on an unlit cigar and paging through a hunting magazine.

“How do, Porter.”

He gave me a curt nod from the chin, the North Woods equivalent of a full body hug. “ Jordan.”

He weighed the screws, then wrote up the price on the bag with a carpenter’s pencil. On the wall above him, clipped to pegboard, was a new display of power tools: not the retail junk you see in Wal-Mart, but contractor’s grade, high-voltage Makitas, all cordless, with rechargeable battery packs thick as a grown man’s fist stuck on the handles.

“Just got them in last week,” Porter said, obviously happy to catch me looking. He poked his pencil over his shoulder at the display. “Figuring a few people around here might appreciate the real stuff and save on the drive down to Farmington.”

An assortment of drills and drivers of various sizes, a reciprocating saw, three different circular saws with dust collectors and carbide blades, assorted belt- and palm-sanders, even a gruesome-looking thing I guessed was a rebar cutter, though I couldn’t be sure: Porter had sunk some serious money into this little display. Positioning them above the register the way he’d done, where you could have a good long look at them while your wallet was out, was a bona fide bear trap for any man between the ages of sixteen and a hundred and probably a few women besides (Kate, for one). I thought about the hours I would be spending that very day shaken to pieces by Joe’s old drill, and the death-defying hassle of running a long extension cord up to the lodge and trying to keep it out of the water.

I waved a finger at the board. “Say, Porter, if it’s not too much trouble, let me have a peek at that drill, will you?”

A look of sly pleasure skittered across his face. “Which, now?”

“The big drill, the eighteen volt.”

He brought the drill down from its pegs and placed it in my hand. It was heavy as a handgun, the plastic of its grip smooth and a little rubbery. A dangling price tag told me it sold for $168.95-a hell of a lot for a drill. I felt like I was holding an atom-smasher.

“Feel the weight of that baby,” Porter said proudly, talking around his cigar. “We’re talking all-metal gear transmission, dual ball bearings, a three-stage, thirteen-planetary gear system.” He rapped the countertop with his knuckles. “That’s a tool.”

I did my best to look like I didn’t care one way or the other. But the fact is, once you hold something like that in your hand, part of you marries it forever. “What’s a planetary gear system?”

Porter shrugged. “How in hell should I know? Something good, according to the sales rep. Something you want. Nice fellow. Should be back on Tuesday, you want to talk to him about it.”

I placed the drill on the counter, my heart breaking. “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

“You sure now? I can take off five percent for you.”

“That’s tempting, Porter. Since when did you dicker on anything?”

He frowned. “Since I got into the tool business.” He leaned over the counter and looked at the floor. “The oil’s yours?”

He rang me up, recorded the bill on the camp account, and handed me the bag of screws. “I’ll tell you something I heard. You know my sister-in-law, works over for the county recorder? She tells me some pretty interesting paperwork came across her desk the other day. Very interesting. Wondering if you might know anything about it.”

“I’m just the handyman, Porter. Nobody tells me a blessed thing.”

“From what she tells me, looks like you have a new boss. Maybe you should ask around.”

I did my best to meet his gaze in a way that would seem agreeable, while also putting the matter to rest. “You know bosses, Porter. They’re all the same.”

“Not according to my sister-in-law. She tells me Harry Wainwright bought the place. The great Harry Wainwright. Liza’s so dumb she thinks a taco’s something Indians live in, but even she knew who that was. Spent a bundle, too.”

“Sounds like you know more about it than I do.”

He looked at me skeptically. “Don’t get me wrong, Jordan. I like Harry fine, and his boy too. Been in here from time to time over the years. Wouldn’t know he was such a muckety-muck from the way he acts. But even so, a family like that. Up here. Makes people wonder what he’s got up his sleeve. This isn’t the Hamptons, some chichi place like that. People would like to keep it that way.”

“Like I said, Porter, nobody tells me anything. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think you have to fret.”

“Maybe so, and maybe not.” He removed the cigar and frowned, taking a moment to regard the damp stump he held between thumb and forefinger. “I read an article in Time about this place in Colorado -what’s it, Aspen? Nice town until the movie stars found it. Now regular folks are living in trailers and a hammer costs twenty dollars.”

I plastered a grin on my face. “Sounds like you’d make out fine, Porter.”

“I’m just saying people around here would have reason to be concerned.” Porter closed the register drawer with a cling. “So all this is on my mind this morning and what do I see? Joe Crosby passing through town with a nice-looking Beemer trailing behind. They stopped up the corner for coffee, so I had myself a good look. A more suspicious man than I am would have thought they were developers for sure.”

It took me a moment to figure out just what he was talking about. “Hate to disappoint you, Porter, but what you saw were clients. Joe was taking them up to the old Zisko Dam.”

I couldn’t tell if he believed me or not. For a couple of seconds, neither of us spoke. I felt like a man trying to smuggle something through customs.

“God’s honest truth, Porter. Just a bunch of lawyers on vacation. They got so drunk last night Joe will probably have to save half of them from drowning. You can ask him if you like.”

Porter considered this a moment more. “Aw, hell, Jordan,” he said finally, and looked like he might smile. “I don’t mean to be giving you any third degree.” He leaned over the counter a little and lowered his voice. “Tell you what. I can go ten percent on that drill for you, you keep it under your hat.”

“Throw in an extra battery?”

“Comes with two. What are you building, an ark?”

“You never know. But two should do it. Toss in some bits and you’ve sold yourself a drill.”

I left the store, put it all in the Jeep, and headed home. Porter didn’t have the whole story, or even half of it, but in his own way he had a point, and I felt the first inkling of a brand-new worry. For eight years I had lived a life as anonymous and consequence-free as you could ever wish for, a life of one chore strung after another, receding to a far horizon that seemed to recede with every forward move I made. It was a life I truly liked, or thought I had. I was free to do as I wished, to think what I wished, and if you described a day of my life, told me what the weather was and how I’d spent my time, then asked me what year that was, I wouldn’t have had the slightest clue. It was entirely possible that this was what death felt like, death being, in the end, not so bad, or all that unfamiliar. I felt, driving home, that for the first time in many years, maybe ever, I was coming truly alive, and here’s the thing: the problem of being alive is that it makes you frightened.

I was just on the edge of town when I pulled the Jeep over in front of the post office and our one pay phone-the same one Hal had used the night before to tell us they were coming, though that now felt like it had been years and years ago. It was Sunday, a little before twelve, an hour earlier in Houston. I made the call collect.

“Mama, it’s me.”

“ Jordan?” My mother’s voice was bright and pleased; we hadn’t talked in at least a month. “Listen, Estella’s on the other line. Let me get rid of her and I’ll be right back.”

“If it’s a bad time, we can talk later.”

“No, no. I’m glad to hear from you.” She paused. “Is everything all right?”

“Fit as a fiddle.”

“Good to hear it. It’s about a hundred and five degrees here, by the way. Just a minute, okay?”

The line went numb as she put me on hold. Estella was my mother’s literary agent. About four years ago-just about the time she and my stepfather had moved to Houston so Vince could take an administrative job with the Harris County Parks Department-my mother, always a reader, had gotten it into her head to write romance novels, a task for which she had demonstrated such remarkable proficiency that she now had a three-year, six-book contract. My mother was the most levelheaded person in the world, really, a churchgoing Southern girl who drank her whiskey neat and read a passage from the Bible every night in bed, and I couldn’t quite resolve my image of the woman who had raised me with the woman who now churned out novels with titles like Summer Love and Belle of the Ball at the superhuman rate of one every six months. She traveled constantly to trade shows and book fairs and got fan mail by the sack-load; on the back of her books was a glossy color author pic, in which she was wearing of all things a double-stranded pearl choker and a mink stole (both of which she had assured me were as phony as a magician’s mustache).

The line clicked free. “I’m back, honey.”

“How’s Estella?”

“Fine. Making me money, like she’s supposed to. She’s having trouble with her dogs.”

Estella, I knew, had lots of dogs. “How are you doing?” I said. “What’s Vince up to?”

“Oh, you know Vince. He just went out to the store to buy a new deep-fat fryer. His latest thing is learning to make cannolis.”

Though born and raised in Bangor, my stepfather was quite serious about his Italian roots, and was always involved in some new culinary project: canning his own tomatoes for sauce, making his own sausages and ravioli, taking trips down to Boston to the North End to hunt up weird things like squid ink pasta or flayed rabbit haunches. Where he shopped for such things in Houston, I had no idea.

“Sounds like a plan.”

“It’s a mess is what it is. Flour and grease all over the place. The first fryer just about exploded. I’m worried about his cholesterol too.” She paused. “But I’m thinking maybe you didn’t call to talk about Vince’s cholesterol?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Oh, your voice, I guess. Something about it. I’m your mother, Jordan. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

“There’s really nothing.” I looked at my finger, its strange blunted tip; its tiny, orphaned nail. “I just bought a new drill.”

“You men and your toys. If Vince were here I’m sure he’d love to talk about it. You really called to tell me about your drill?”

I thought a moment. “I might be in love too.”

“You see?” I could hear the smile in her voice. “There was something. There’s a nice surprise. I’m happy to hear it. Is she nice? Does she love you back, this person?”

“I think so. I’m hoping so. I’m a bit out of practice. It’s Kate.”

“Kate. I’m sorry. I know about Kate, don’t I?”

“Joe’s daughter.”

The phone seemed to go dead a second. “ Jordan, isn’t she, excuse me, about thirteen? Do I need to fly up there right now?”

“That was years ago, Mama. She’s going to medical school. Will go, I mean.”

“How about that,” I heard my mother say. “Kate with the pigtails? She’s really a doctor, all grown up?”

I nodded to myself. “It surprised me too.”

“Well, that’s the thing about it,” my mother said. “It always sneaks up on you that way.”

“Was it a surprise with Daddy?”

“Daddy.” Her voice seemed to catch and hold on this strange word. “Your daddy, you mean?”

“We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“Well, that was a long time ago, Jordan. But yes, it was. You know the story. Do you want me to tell it?”

How many years since she had done this? It seemed like forever, and no time at all. I said, “A dance.”

“That’s right. But not really the dance itself. After the dance. It was the summer after high school, so I was, I guess about eighteen, not a thing in my head, and a bunch of us went without dates to this thing, I guess you could call it a dance, though it was more like a party. And after, my friend, the one with the car, left with a boy, and your father gave me a ride home. I had no idea who he was, just some flyer from the base. We talked in the car, and I just knew. Both of us knew. I guess you were… thinking about him?”

“I guess I was, a little.”

“Well, you’re entitled. That’s perfectly fine if you were.”

“Tell me…” I stopped to breathe, embarrassed. But more than that: I was afraid.

Her voice was quiet. “Tell you what, Jordan?”

“Tell me… about the day he died.”

Silence, and I was sorry, so sorry I’d asked it. And yet I had to know.

“Mama-”

“No, no,” she answered firmly. “I said you were entitled, didn’t I? It was just one of those things, Jordan. The inquest said something about mechanical trouble. A faulty rotor, I think it was.”

I’d heard that, too, or remembered so. A faulty rotor, something that went round and round, and then for some reason stopped, sending my father into the sea.

“How’d they know it was a rotor if they never found the plane?”

“Well, they did find it, Jordan. I thought you knew that. It was a pretty expensive piece of military hardware.”

“But not Daddy.”

“No, honey,” she said. “Not your daddy.”

The line went quiet, and I heard my mother take a long, melancholy breath. I pictured her in her bedroom office in this distant city her life had taken her to, looking out her window at the lawn and thinking about these old, sorrowful things.

“Mama?”

“I’m sorry, honey. You’re just making me a little sad, is all. I was just a baby myself, really. I wasn’t even twenty-two when it happened.”

I remembered something else. “Everybody called him Hero, didn’t they? Short for Heronimus.”

“That’s right. They did.”

Silence fell once more. I looked at my finger again, rubbing the end of it with my thumb. “The day you found out about Daddy. Did anything else happen?”

“Anything else, honey?”

I shook my head. “I don’t even know what I’m thinking about.”

“I think that was all, Jordan. It was plenty.”

I moved the phone to my right hand. Cars passed on the street, tourists, people I knew. In the close heat of the tiny booth, I’d begun to sweat.

“You’re a lot like him, you know,” my mother said quietly. “I’ve always thought so.”

I said, “Like Daddy.”

“ Jordan,” she said, and I heard her breathing change, “you’re making me sad again. It’s not your fault. But I’m going to put the phone down now.”

Before I could say anything, there was a dull thud on the line. I waited, the receiver pressed to my ear, listening to the soft sound she made as she wept, two thousand miles away. Please don’t cry, Mama, I thought, please don’t. A minute passed.

“There now,” she said. “All better.”

“I’m sorry, Mama. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Don’t be, Jordan. You just blindsided me a little bit. It’s funny to go back like that.”

“Is it a good life down there?” I said. “Are you happy?”

“Shouldn’t I be the one asking you that?”

“Well, let’s just say.”

“Oh, it’s hot as hell, Jordan. And the trees are all wrong. It’s funny, but that’s the thing that gets me the most, the trees. And missing you, sometimes. All the time. But yes. On the whole, yes. It’s a good life. Vince is the sweetest man alive, I write my books, the winters are easy as pie.” She stopped. “Your finger, Jordan.” Her voice was amazed. “You put it in the fan. I remember now. That’s what you were asking about, wasn’t it?”

“I guess it was.”

“Your father was always telling me to put it up on the table, someplace high and out of reach, but it was so hot that day, I guess I just forgot. I was cooking dinner, and you were playing on the floor, and then Colonel Graffam came to tell me, and that awful chaplain, I forget his name, everybody hated him. I guess I left you alone and somehow you got it stuck in the fan.”

“I think I did it on purpose, Mama. At least that’s what I remember.”

“Why would you have done that? No, it was my fault, honey, for leaving the fan where I did. God, it was an awful mess, blood everywhere, and you screaming like you did. It was all so crazy. I’d just found out about your father, and there I was, rushing you off to the doctor, not even a second to think about what just happened. The colonel offered to take you but I wouldn’t have it, just wrapped your hand in a towel and charged off to the infirmary. How could I have forgotten a thing like that?”

“Sounds to me like you remember pretty well.”

“But the thing is, I didn’t, not at first. Not until you asked about it. Why should that be?” She was silent a moment, lost in this question. Then: “It’s all right, isn’t it? There isn’t something wrong with it?”

“It’s fine,” I said, and wiggled it, as if she could somehow see. “Same as always. I’m having a little trouble playing the violin, but otherwise, no worries.”

I was glad to hear her laugh. “Well, that’s a relief,” she said. “You gave me a start there. I was worried something was wrong with it. Jordan?”

“Right here, Mama.”

“My turn. Are you happy? Is it a good life for you?”

“I think so,” I said, nodding as if she were right there with me. “I think it is.”

“And you love Kate, and she loves you.”

I listened to my breathing in the phone, the sound traveling the miles of wire from Maine to Texas and back again. “Somebody may ask me to do something today. Something I don’t want to do.”

“What kind of thing is that, Jordan?”

I cleared my mind and thought. But the idea of what I was feeling seemed to arc beyond my mind’s reach, like a skater racing past me on a frozen pond.

“I don’t know,” I said finally. “It’s just a sense I have.”

“A sense.” She paused over the word. “Well, whatever it is, I’m sure you’ll know what to do when the time comes, Jordan. That’s all you can do.”

“I hope I can.”

“No, honey. I know you can. That’s the kind of man your father was. I would have kept him longer if I could have, but even so, I was never one bit sorry. I want you to remember that.”

And suddenly, just like that, I wasn’t afraid anymore. A new feeling flowed into me, strong and purposeful, and with it, a sudden awareness of my surroundings, the place and hour where I stood. It was just past noon; the sun was high. I think I loved my mother more just then than I had ever done in my life.

“I will, Mama,” I said, and realized it was the second promise I’d made in a day. “I will.”