The Summer Guest

FIFTEEN

May, and the drowsy blur of spring: we buried Meredith, Hal and I. The funeral was held at St. Thomas ’s on Fifth Avenue -gigantic and faintly frenetic, like a huge, grieving carnival, though for most of our friends, Meredith was already a memory, gone for years. When this was done, we traveled together the next morning, just the two of us, to Philadelphia, where we planned to bury her beside Sam.

It was just past noon when we arrived. I hadn’t been back to the cemetery for several years, not since the worst of Meredith’s illness had consumed me. As the limo pulled up, I saw the funeral director waiting for us at the gravesite. Beside Sam’s small headstone was Meredith’s casket, suspended on a metal bier with straps to lower it, and next to that, a mound of freshly turned, coffee-colored earth. It was a strange and unsettling experience to see these things, a feeling I had not prepared for-this place that had for so long been the site of one grave, now remade for two, like a hidden symmetry revealed.

But something else was different, wrong. A sky too abundant, and a feeling of exposure; the air itself seemed distorted, hazy with dust and unfiltered heat. As we stepped from the limo, the full magnitude hit me like a fist. Not a hundred yards away, where before had stood a field of headstones, there now was naked earth. A fleet of bulldozers, giant earthmovers with their beetlelike carriages and wide gleaming blades: half the cemetery had been scraped away.

“What the fuck,” Hal said.

He was wearing sunglasses, his chest and shoulders broad as a bodyguard’s inside his dark suit; his anger seemed fierce, a black force uncoiling inside him. Days and days of grim death-the awful phone call he surely knew was coming, then the bleak journey down from Williamstown, and of course the funeral itself-and now this. I actually worried that he might hit someone, or else turn and strike the car. But then he shuddered, reaching a hand out to brace himself against the limo’s gleaming fender, and I saw his strength was false; there was nothing at all behind it. The slightest puff of air might have brought him to his knees.

“Jesus.” He shook his head despondently. “What the fuck.”

“I know.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “Wait here.”

I left him at the car and approached the funeral director, a man with long gray sideburns who was wearing a slightly too-tight suit of blended navy, a suit he must have had dozens of. Under the warm sun, his brow was glazed with sweat. Without pausing to shake his hand I pointed past him toward the construction site.

“You mind telling me what that’s all about?”

He turned, a quick dart of the head to follow my gesture.

“I’m sorry,” he said nervously. “I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?”

The color had drained from his face. “The new interstate, Mr. Wainwright. The Blue Route. It’s going to run from Conshohocken all the way down to Chester. They started work last fall.”

The air was so full of grit I could taste it, feel it grinding between my teeth. “No, I sure as goddamn hell did not know.”

Hal had stepped away from the car to join us where we stood, under the wispy shade of a threadbare hemlock-just a sapling when we had buried Sam, but now thirty feet tall. The plan was that we were going to read a poem: Emily Dickinson, a little thing without a title, not a dozen lines long, about death coming in a carriage. That was all: no priest or other mourners, no long line of cars in the dust, just the two of us and the warm spring wind and these words of good-bye. Now we would have to read it over the roar of heavy machinery and men in hard hats yelling to one another about the baseball scores.

“How can they do that? It’s a cemetery, for god’s sake.”

“Eminent domain, Mr. Wainwright. I’m afraid it means the state can do whatever it wants.”

A bolt of raw anger surged through me. “I know what eminent domain is. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

He stiffened his back and swallowed. No doubt he wanted to tell me to go to hell, and he wouldn’t have been wrong. But his voice when he spoke was calm, professional. “I’m truly sorry, Mr. Wainwright,” he said. “If you wish, I’m sure we can make other arrangements.”

“Our son is buried here. He’s been here twenty years.”

He nodded. “And believe me, I do sympathize. You’re not the first to complain. But the state’s promised to build a retaining wall to deflect the noise and fumes. If you came back a year from now it would all be different. It’s really just a question of the timing.”

Timing, I thought. Good God. But it was Hal who spoke next.

“What’s to stop them from digging up this end of the cemetery?”

“Well, technically nothing.” The director took a handkerchief from his back pocket to mop his forehead. “But as far as I know, the state has no plans to condemn any other parcels. This area should remain just as it is.”

“Christ,” I said. “They better not.”

I felt completely powerless. How had I missed this? What else had escaped my attention? What would Meredith have said, if she’d known we were going to bury her within a hundred yards of the Pennsylvania Turnpike? A canvas tarp was spread on the ground around her casket, dressed with flowers, banks and banks of them piled high, and on the casket too-all of their petals coated with a film of gray dust.

“Mr. Wainwright? Shall we go ahead with the service, then?”

I turned my eyes to Hal. He knew nothing of what had happened that night in the library. No one did, except for Elizabeth, who probably had guessed, and perhaps Mrs. Beryl as well, who would have wondered why Meredith had given her that particular night off. But I knew neither would ever say a word. Nobody official had bothered to examine the situation more closely; as far as the world knew, Meredith had died in her sleep.

“Pop?”

I managed a nod. Hal turned on his heel to the director.

“All right then,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

We decided to stay the night in Philadelphia. I can’t recall whose idea this was, but I think we both knew, instinctively, that it was the right one. The long drive home, and the eerie quiet of the house on our arrival, the specter of Meredith’s bedroom still waiting to be dismantled; the two of us puttering around the place, trying to figure out how to occupy ourselves, what or even if to eat and whether or not to turn on the television, and when to go to bed. It was a prospect I dreaded almost physically; surely Hal had envisioned these things too, and the idea of a night in a good hotel, and a meal together in a city we hadn’t lived in for years, seemed like just the ticket.

We rented a suite at the Rittenhouse and decided to send the car away; it would be a simple enough matter to take a train back to New York the next morning. We’d brought no luggage with us, but even this odd fact seemed unimportant. At the front desk we gave the concierge a list of things we’d need for the night, toiletries and fresh shirts and underclothes for the morning, and rode the elevator up to our two-room suite, so neutrally decorated we could have been just about anywhere: San Francisco, Paris, even Bangkok. I went to the windows and opened the drapes. It was midafternoon, a Friday in spring. Our suite overlooked Rittenhouse Square, a section of town that always reminded me of certain parts of London: polished and old-world, its slope-shouldered brownstones and old churches laid out on a grid of hushed, well-planted streets that radiated from a central park with pathways and green lawns and, at the center, a pool with a sundial and a sculpture of a lion. From where I stood at the wide windows, eleven stories up, a soft haze of pink-and-white dogwood blossoms seemed to float over the square, punctuated by an understory of red azalea bushes in riotous bloom. A scene of mute activity, like the opening shot of a movie: men in shirtsleeves, hurrying to and fro; the usual lovers lazing on the lawn; women in scarves and spring jackets, some pushing strollers or accompanied by young children, bits of birdlike color that seemed to gather and disperse according to some unseen physical principle; a pair of long-haired college boys tossing a Frisbee, and, hunched over a cluster of concrete tables, a group of black men playing chess. Upon everything the sun poured down like a golden liquid. After such a day, it was a handsome sight-a vision of human life that seemed to hold the properties of eternity-but soon the scene would change: between the buildings and above them, a billowing bulk of storm clouds had sailed into view. First the puffy crowns, churning heavenward on waves of heat; and then, as I watched, the dark prow and undersides, dragging a blade of shadow, like a great ship docking over the city. A spring thunderstorm: of course. The heat had been building all day. As I watched, a greenish gloom descended over the park, into a hundred upturned faces, and then the wind arrived. It raked the dogwoods like a claw, swirling the air with petals; the Frisbee, ripped from its trajectory, squirted upward and shot out over Walnut Street, away. I turned from the window as huge, penny-size drops of rain began to thud against it.

“Hal?”

A moment of inexplicable panic: my heart contracted with a fear as biological as breathing, as if he were a little boy again, and I had lost him in a crowd. But when I looked through the door I found him, stretched out on one of the room’s two big beds. He was still wearing his tie, though he had taken off his jacket, which hung from the corner of a chair. One foot was bare, the other clad in a sock he hadn’t managed to remove before unconsciousness had taken him. A minute passed as I watched him sleep. Outside, the sizzle of lightning, and moments later, the rattling afterthought of thunder. I selfishly wished the noise would rouse him, so we could watch the storm together, but all he did was turn against the pillow. At last I closed the drapes and pulled a blanket over him and sealed the door behind me.

I slept two hours on the sofa, dreaming of rain, and awoke to darkness and the knowledge that the storm had passed. Beyond the window the evening sky was the color of a bruise; a single star glittered in the twilight. Voices reached me from the bedroom, and then the vapid music of a commercial. I checked my watch; it was nearly eight thirty.

Hal was sitting up in bed, watching television. His eyes flicked toward me as I entered the room.

“News flash. You snore, Pop.”

I sat beside him on the bed. Time seemed to have slipped its moorings entirely; it seemed like whole days had passed since we’d visited the cemetery. My body was suffused with an unexpected physical contentment, as if I’d received an injection of iron. I gave Hal’s knee a shake. “Hungry?”

Hal’s eyes had returned to the television: Star Trek. He nodded slightly, his mind still lost in the program. “God, will you get a load of this guy.” He gestured dismissively toward the screen, where the actor Leonard Nimoy, wearing a Greek robe and laurel wreath, was strumming on a lyre. “Oh,” Hal said, as if he’d just thought of something. “The concierge dropped off our stuff a while ago.”

“Really? I didn’t hear a thing.”

“Well, we all heard you, like I said.” He cheerfully tapped the wall behind his head. “The people next door called to ask if somebody was strangling a walrus.”

“Very funny.”

I rose and stretched. Atop the bureau I found a shopping bag from Brooks Brothers-the fresh shirts and underclothes we’d requested-and a selection of toiletries on a glass tray: toothbrushes and paste, razors, a tin of old-fashioned beard cream. My desire to leave the hotel room was suddenly acute; even to remain another minute would steal some essential energy from us. Though the shirts were for the morning, I opened the bag, removed the one I knew to be my size-a robin’s-egg blue, with some bit of white snaking through the weave-and changed quickly. The room had grown dark, save for the flickering, fish-tank glow of the television.

“What do you say, Hal?” I clapped my hands together. “Turn that thing off and let’s get some dinner.”

At last he pulled his eyes from the television. A thin smile crossed his lips. “Okay,” he said. “You know me. I can always eat.”

We set out into streets washed clean as laundry by the rain. The air had cooled and smelled of damp concrete. We walked up the block to a brasserie the concierge had recommended, the sort of restaurant he would probably suggest to two men, but not a man and a woman together: dimly masculine, with a long mahogany bar and just a few tables pushed against the wall. The menu was written on a chalkboard the apron-clad waiter brought around to each table and propped on a folding chair, waiting with a look of boredom while we read. We ordered quickly and each drank a beer while we waited for our meal: a plate of oysters followed by slablike chops of veal and heaps of mashed potatoes in a dark, smoky gravy. We were hungry and spoke little, saying just enough to keep silence at bay, but the truth was, it was not an evening for talk; I was satisfied for the moment just to share Hal’s company. All day, since the cemetery, the feeling had grown within me that I was leaving the world, and that it would be Hal’s from now on. It was not a feeling I knew or had a name for. But as I sat in the restaurant watching Hal eat, each measured portion finding its way from plate to fork to mouth, the sheer fact of his physical existence seemed as inseparable from my being as my own flesh, my blood and bone. Our time together would be short. In two days, he would be returning to Williamstown, to take his final exams and finish out the semester. I had called the dean, to ask if he could be somehow excused from this obligation, and though I was told that under such circumstances arrangements could be made for him to take makeups at some later date, Hal had refused. The last thing he wanted, he said, was to have a bunch of tests hanging over him. He’d made plans to spend the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, where a group of his friends from the lacrosse team had rented a house and planned to get jobs-construction, bartending, whatever they could find. It didn’t matter; the point was to be together, I knew. So there was this, too: the emptiness, oddly pleasurable, of missing him.

When the waiter came to clear our plates, Hal settled back in his chair and issued a small, satisfied groan.

“How about some dessert?” He had always loved sweets, could pack them away like a longshoreman.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

I lifted my face to the waiter. “Just coffee, then.”

The waiter marched briskly away, returning moments later with cups and saucers and a small pitcher of cream.

Hal shook his head with a bitter laugh. “A fucking freeway.”

“I know.”

“Mom hated freeways,” he said. “She hated driving.”

“What could we do?”

He shrugged. The answer was what it was, though I also felt his disappointment: I was his father, I should have done something, carried an entire highway in my hands if that’s what the situation required. He took a sip of his coffee and returned it to its place on the table. A shadow fell over his face.

“You know, maybe I shouldn’t say this. But when we got to the cemetery, I realized I’d forgotten all about Sam. I mean, I knew he was there. But somehow it hadn’t really sunk in that we were burying Mom in the same place.”

“That’s perfectly understandable. If you want to know the truth, I thought the same thing.”

“Yeah, well. Even so. He was my brother.” He frowned, disconcerted. “Just that word. Brother. Even to say it.”

It was almost eleven; the room was nearly empty. At a long table in the rear of the restaurant, a group of busboys were smoking cigarettes while they rolled out clean napkins and silverware for the next day.

“This may sound, I don’t know, kind of weird,” Hal said, “but did you ever think I was him?”

“How do you mean?”

“Not that I believe in reincarnation, any of that. It’s probably the stupidest idea I ever heard of, that you come back as a bug or something. But still, it must have seemed strange, the timing of it. His dying, then me born right after.” He stopped and shook his head. “I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

In fact, the idea was not so surprising. Once or twice Meredith and I had even said as much, not really believing it, but trying to take some small comfort in the idea. Over time, though, as we spoke of Sam less and less, the notion had faded away.

“Never,” I said, and did my best to smile. “Not once.”

“Not at all?”

“I promise. Sam was Sam, you’re you. That’s the whole story.”

Silence fell again. “You know,” Hal said, “sometimes Mom, I don’t know, she would look at me. Just look at me. And I would feel like she was seeing somebody else.”

“Sam you mean.”

He shrugged a little nervously, his eyes cast down to the table. “Or maybe me, but also not me. I remember once when it happened, I was doing homework in the kitchen, back before she got so sick. I looked up and she was watching me, you know, that kind of intense look she sometimes had? And I thought, ‘I’m Sam. I’m not Hal. I’m Sam, right here.’ Like I knew. I almost told her.” He lifted a little in his chair. “Crazy, huh?”

In the split second that our eyes met, I saw how painful this memory was for him. It came from a place inside him that I had never seen.

“I don’t think it’s crazy at all. I wish you’d told me.”

He laughed uneasily and looked away. “Now, that would have been some conversation.”

We paid our bill and left. The sidewalks were empty, like the corridors of an abandoned city. A crisp breeze made me pull my collar around my neck as we walked: a last vestige of the spring chill, sneaking in behind the day’s departed heat. When we reached the door of the hotel, Hal stopped and took my elbow.

“Listen,” he said, and looked at his watch. “I probably should have said something before. But if it’s okay, I’m going to go meet some people.”

I was astonished. “What are you talking about? Who do you know in Philadelphia?”

“You remember Dave Rosen, Josh Miner, those guys? They both go to Penn now. I called them when you were asleep just to say hello, and they said they were planning to go out later. They asked if I wanted to come along.”

“Where would they be going? It’s nearly midnight.”

He tipped a shoulder, doing his best to look as if the invitation was inconsequential to him. “Some place on South Street. I don’t think it’s far. I can grab a cab. I think Josh has a car; he can drive me back to the hotel.”

Now that we were standing still, the air was so brisk I shivered. I felt a little ridiculous-because I was so disappointed, but even more, because I’d let Hal see this. I shook my head to clear this thought away. “Never mind. Of course, go ahead. It’s probably just what you need.”

“You know, you could come if you want, Pop. I’m sure those guys would get a kick out of seeing you.”

A kick. I let the word hang in my mind and thought about his friends. Loud voices in the kitchen and car doors slamming in the drive, strange coats and piles of books in the hallway, the tang of animal sweat when I entered a room they had just departed and the feeling that the electricity humming off their bodies still crackled the air. For years they had moved on the periphery of my life like a pack, young men so brimming with life that being in their presence was like standing beside some muscular spectacle of nature, a geyser blowing its top or a hive of swarming bees. Josh was a tall kid, slender with hair the color of a lit match, like his father, a lawyer whose path I had crossed a few times in the city; Josh had played on the basketball team with Hal, all elbows and long limbs crashing under the boards. The other boy I couldn’t remember, but didn’t need to; he was part of the herd. The invitation was not really meant to be accepted, of course. Still, on another night, I might have called Hal’s bluff and gone along.

“I think it’s a little late for me. Just don’t stay out all night. We have a long day tomorrow.”

His face was delighted. “You’re really okay with this?”

“Hal, enough,” I said, and waved him toward the taxi stand. “I’m fine. Go before I change my mind.”

He got into a taxi and sped off. The hotel lobby was empty, except for the desk clerk and a lone porter, a black man in uniform, dozing on a stool by the elevator. Even the bar was dark, closed down for the night. Upstairs, I undressed and got into bed, my mind humming with wakefulness. I didn’t have anything to read, not even a newspaper. The television glared at me from across the room, but the thought of turning it on, as tempting as this was, filled me with a kind of nausea. At last, not knowing what else to do, I turned out the light.

When I awoke, it was after three. I’d neglected to close the drapes, and the ambient light of the city pulsed across the ceiling. The bed next to mine was empty. I lay still for a moment, gathering myself. I realized it was Hal’s voice, coming from the other room, that had awakened me. Who could he be talking to?

I rose and opened the door. The lights were off, and for a moment I just stood there, uncertain of what I was seeing. Hal was on the couch. Somebody was with him-a girl. The same ghostly light flickered across them. The image and the sounds I was hearing suddenly coalesced in my mind, a feeling like falling, as if I’d placed my foot on a step that wasn’t there.

“Hal?”

“Jesus!”

A burst of activity on the sofa, and a flash of light-glazed skin; I turned away quickly and shut the door behind me. I sat on the bed, my heart hammering in my chest.

“Dad?” Hal was standing in the door. His shirt was on but unbuttoned; his belt hung loosely at his waist. If there had been light to see his face I knew it would have been flushed red with desire, embarrassment, a thousand agitations.

“Goddamn it, Hal.”

“Dad, I’m sorry. I thought you were asleep.”

“I was asleep. What were you thinking, bringing a girl here at, what… three in the morning? Who the hell is that?” I shook my head. “Forget it, I don’t even want to know.”

“We met at the club. She’s a friend of Josh’s.” He stood another moment. Part of him was deciding, I knew, what right he had to be angry with me, for bursting in.

“Look, I said I was sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I don’t know what else to say. She has a car, she can just go if you want.”

“Of course that’s what I want. Jesus Christ, Hal. What the hell is on your mind? A girl like that.”

“She’s nice, Dad. Okay? It’s not what you think. She’s a fine arts major.”

“I don’t care if she’s the president of the United States. Just get her out of here.”

He turned and left the room. I heard the two of them talking, low enough so that I couldn’t make out the words, then the sounds of their departure. I lay back in bed, not knowing if I would see him again that night, or even the next morning. But then, just a minute later, Hal returned. Without a word, he undressed and got into bed.

“Dad? I’m sorry. Okay? I wasn’t thinking, I admit that.”

I took a deep breath and held it. I had no idea what to say. The fog of anger had passed, and I knew I had handled the situation badly; the truth was, if I were Hal, I might have done exactly the same thing. A feeling of desolation burned through me, but something else too. That flash of skin, the soft murmurs my body knew but hadn’t heard in years-I realized they had aroused me.

“That’s all right,” I said. “Just… forget about it.”

I watched the ceiling, the drifting light. Time seemed to have bent under the weight of the evening’s events, so that the morning was both hours, and minutes, away. I closed my eyes to will away the image of what I’d seen, our day in the cemetery, the remembered taste of dust in my mouth-all of it. Even the thing I could not name: the stream of gritty milk on her chin, the feel of the rubber sheet beneath me, M’s slow breathing against my chest, those long waves, fading and fading.

“Dad?”

My eyes popped open; amazingly, I had dozed.

“Dad, are you awake?”

From across the gap separating our beds came a soft, damp sound of breathing. It took me another moment to realize Hal was crying.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, son.” I rose on my elbows. He was facing away. “Really, it’s okay.”

“Not about the girl.” He shook his head against the pillow. “About before, what I said in the restaurant.”

I felt completely at sea. “What are you talking about?”

“I never thought it, about Sam.” I heard him sniff, then rub his face on the sheet. “I don’t know why I told you I did. I sometimes wished it was true. But it never was.”

My heart was pierced with a sadness I’d never known before. The feeling, always, of a shadow over his life: I’d thought it was his mother’s illness. But it was Sam.

“What did she say?” Hal asked quietly. “Mom, at the end.”

I paused and thought. “She said that she loved you. She said she wished she could have seen your game.”

“Did she say she loved Sam?”

“Yes, she did. She loved you both.”

The clock said it was just past four A.M.; the night seemed endless, not a thing merely of time but also space, like a vast ocean spreading over the world.

“That’s good,” Hal said finally. “I’m glad she said that too. Dad?”

“Yes, Hal?”

He rose on his elbows and turned to face me; his cheeks were streaked with tears. “It’s okay, about Mom. I don’t want to talk about it, but I just wanted to say that.”

I don’t want to talk about it. My breath caught in my chest; I closed my eyes. The words seemed to swirl inside me, releasing a memory, from years ago: Meredith and that first night, when we’d returned from her doctor in New York. I don’t want to talk about it. Not now. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.

I opened my eyes: Hal.

“How did you-?”

He shook his head to cut me off. “She told me, that’s all. Months ago. She knew what would happen, and she told me. I promised I wouldn’t say anything more about it.”

Here is grief, I thought, here is grief at last: the full measure and heft of it, the warp and woof. I watched myself enter it as if I were stepping into a pool of the calmest, darkest waters, the surface reaching to my knees, my waist, the point of my chin-a feeling like happiness, everything drifting away, the weight of my body and its parts dissolving into the great sea of time and all the world’s sorrows. I paused to breathe. How strange, even to breathe! The tip of my nose, my hair and its roots, my solitary, beating heart: each detail of my physical existence had become both part of me and also not, as vivid as a jewel on felt and just as elsewhere. I had begun to sob, tears pouring forth at last, but even this-the sounds of my weeping and the rough unveiling of each breath sweeping through me-seemed to be happening to another man. My face was in my hands.

“Pop? Pop, what is it?”

I tried to answer but failed, and then Hal was beside me. I missed him, as I missed everyone, and as he put his arms around me, all I could think was, how strange he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know I’ve died.

After that night, it took me just a month to dismantle what was left of my life. Hal returned to school, took his exams, stopped at the house to deposit his belongings before driving off to spend a week in the city with friends. We talked a few times on the phone, always in bright, clipped sentences, speaking only of schedules and who could be reached where on which days. There were simply no more words for what had happened, no sentences to add to the recognition that had passed between us. He returned to the house for Memorial Day weekend and then, on Tuesday, packed up his suitcases and headed off again, crammed into the back of a friend’s Volkswagen that announced both its arrival and departure with a single beep of its horn. I stood in the driveway and watched him go, then went inside to my office and called a realtor to put the house up for sale. How much was I thinking, the woman asked excitedly, in terms of price? And what were my plans, where would I be looking to move? I had already forgotten the woman’s name; though I told her she had come recommended to me by friends, in fact I had taken her right out of the yellow pages, giving the matter less thought than hiring a plumber. Well, I said, I didn’t really know. I was going away, I told her, and gave her my lawyer’s telephone number; get the contracts over to me right away, I instructed, and I’ll sign them and he can take it from there.

When this was done I wrote letters to the housekeeper, the cook, and my secretary, letting them all go; I cut each one a check for five thousand dollars, put them in envelopes wrapped by their individual letters, and left them where they would be easily found on the kitchen table. I was completing this task when the bell rang: the realtor. When I opened the door I was immediately pleased; before me stood a woman about fifty, her face plain as a schoolteacher’s. Though she’d done her best to look presentable, putting on lipstick and heels, she possessed none of the high sheen of someone who sold upmarket real estate. Her car sat in the drive, an ancient Volvo with rust on the quarter panels where road salt had gnawed through the paint; one of the tires was missing a hubcap. Up close she smelled a little of liquor, some candy-sweet cordial that probably came in a bottle shaped like a mermaid. A listing like mine must have felt like she’d won the lottery. Her face fell with confusion when I didn’t invite her in to have a look around-I could already hear what she would say when she returned to the office: Harry Wainwright! That huge place on Seminole! And he didn’t even ask me in!-but she brightened when I took the contract from the leather folder she held under her arm and signed it on the spot, giving her an exclusive, with a six-month time frame. We shook hands-hers a little damp in the summer heat, though that could have been my own-and I sent her on her way.

Back at my desk, I wrote a note to my lawyer, explaining my plans to sell the house, and one to my accountant, saying more or less the same; I wrote a check to Williams, Hal’s tuition for the coming year, and another to the lawn service, to carry them through till fall. By this time it was early evening; I made myself a sandwich, poured a glass of beer, and took it back to the office, to continue my work. I paid my taxes, made a promised donation to Hal’s private school, resigned from the country club and the board of the local hospital, and fired the gardener, for stealing tools. When this was done I washed a load of laundry, reading a magazine while my clothes flip-flopped in the damp heat, then descended the stairs to the basement, to extinguish the pilots and shut off the gas. I thought for a minute about draining the pipes, thinking this customary, but how this was accomplished was a mystery to me, a thing I’d never learned; and in any event, the house would certainly be someone else’s before winter. I turned on the sump pump, opened the fuse box-not even certain what I was looking for, though it seemed fine-and checked the bulkhead door.

Upstairs, I emptied the contents of the refrigerator into garbage bags and hauled these to the garage; I filled the cans and dragged them outside where the carting service would see them and sealed the lids tight with rubber cords, so the raccoons could not get in. I stacked the patio chairs and covered them with a tarp. In the backyard, I saw that a large limb had fallen from the big oak that stood beside the garden; it was too heavy to move on my own, so I retrieved an axe from the gardener’s shed, whacked it into smaller pieces, and carted them beyond the house’s circumference of light, where the lawn met a tangle of woods, and left them in the weeds.

The work had made me sweat, and I thought to take a shower before I remembered that I had already shut off the water heater. No matter; the house was cool and dry. I changed my shirt and poured myself a Scotch and ascended to the attic to fetch a suitcase, brought this down to the bedroom, and packed it quickly. It was a little after nine, later than I’d hoped, but to consider this contingency too closely seemed fraught; one moment of doubt, and my courage would collapse. I carried my case downstairs, out through the breezeway to the garage, where my car, a Jag, was parked; I went back into the kitchen, made a pot of coffee to fill a thermos, retrieved a warm jacket and a pair of boots from the hallway closet, then moved through the house one final time, top to bottom and back to front, dousing the lights as I went. When I reached the door connecting the house to the garage, I removed my key from my ring, placed it on the little table by the door, and set the lock; I stepped through the door and closed it behind me, listening for the little click as the mechanism dropped into place-an irrevocable sound, final as a plunge. I placed the jacket and boots on the backseat with my suitcase. Then I got into the Jag and started the engine.

It took only a minute, what happened next. Sitting at the wheel, the engine roaring under me, I lifted my eyes to the mirror and saw, with mild surprise, that I had neglected to open the garage door. Ah, my mind said, the door is closed; I never opened the door. My right foot pressed the gas pedal, pressed it again. The car was fussy as a thoroughbred; half the time, the damn thing wouldn’t start at all, or else the choke would stick and flood the carburetor. But not that night. The engine eased onto its idle, pushing more gray exhaust into the air of the sealed room. I pressed the gas again and watched the tachometer leap. A wondrous calm had eclipsed my awareness of events, floating inside me like a bubble. The windows of the car were open; I felt a tickle in my nose, accompanied by a curious lightening of the senses, and heard this as a sentence: My nose is tickling. In the rearview mirror, the image of the closed door wavered like a mirage as the garage filled up with smoke.

Another ten seconds, twenty, thirty. It’s hard to say how long I sat. Long enough, and then I wasn’t sitting anymore: I was outside the car in the smoky garage, hauling the door open to a blast of evening air. Twice I coughed, but only twice, and before the air had cleared-quick as anything, quick as death-I was back at the wheel. I put the Jag into reverse, the smooth engagement of its gears like something snapping into place inside me, and backed away; my head still roaring with the fumes, I turned the wheel and gunned down the drive, lifting my eyes quickly one last time to see the garage door-a message to any who might care to look-standing open behind me.

SIXTEEN

I didn’t go, not right away; it took me three more months, after I received Joe’s letter, to work up the nerve. And even then, I hedged my bets. I didn’t want to let go of my apartment, not for good, so I put an ad on the bulletin board at the Y, and two days later sublet it to a couple of Irish girls looking for a place to spend the summer while waitressing on the waterfront. In early April I’d written my parents and asked them to sell my car and send the money on to me; a month later a fat envelope arrived at the restaurant, with a piece of blank paper wrapped around fifteen twenty-dollar bills. It was more than I’d expected-my car was actually an old one of my parents’, a rusted Rambler station wagon with nearly 120,000 miles on it-so I decided to hold a hundred back and used the remaining two hundred dollars to buy an ancient VW bug that one of the line cooks had been trying to unload all winter. The car was the color of a rotten pumpkin and stank of stale smoke and old socks, but it ran; with the leftover hundred I bought a pair of retreads for the front, new wiper blades, and a little pine air freshener to hang from the mirror, and parked the car in the street outside my apartment, waiting like a jet on a runway for the day of my departure.

The morning I left, a Monday in the second week of June, Deck and May came to see me off. It didn’t feel quite like summer yet, but a sharp, salty wind was blowing off the harbor, and seagulls wheeled promisingly in the air over the house. I stood in the gravel driveway beside my car, and hugged Deck and May, feeling very much as if, sublet or no, I would never see them again. The Irish girls didn’t seem like the types to spend the summer worrying about my asparagus fern, but it seemed silly to take it with me, so I’d carted it downstairs with my suitcase, and gave it to May and Deck.

“I’m sorry, this is the only present I could think of.”

“We’ll take it as a loan.” Deck hugged me again, tightly, pressing me into his chest. Since that night at the Lobster Tank, when Deck had poured shot after shot to ease my aching heart-I’d gotten good and drunk, as ordered, and awoke the next morning in Peg’s room to see May placing my clothing, freshly washed and folded, at the foot of the bed-the two of them had been like family. Not a week went by that I wasn’t at their house for dinner at least once, and I sometimes spent whole weekends there. One funny thing: they never called me Lucy. To them, I was Alice.

They were the kindest people I had ever known, and it suddenly seemed absurd to leave them. But then Deck blinked and looked aside, brushing an eye with his thumb. “Go on with you, then,” he said.

I got in the car and drove away. I hadn’t actually turned the engine over for almost four weeks, and oily-smelling smoke huffed out the tailpipe in a blue plume that billowed behind me. But after a few miles it settled in and actually drove quite nicely. I cried for a while, but by the time I was out of town I knew I was done with this. Look at you, Lucy girl, I thought, and turned north, away from the water, so that I was watching the seasons turning in reverse; where I was headed it was still just spring. Look at you, going home, where nobody knows you’ve been Alice.

I had no idea what I was looking for, only that I would find it, or not, when I got there. My parents were away until July, visiting my father’s sister in North Carolina. Only this part of my trip was strategic: I had two weeks before I would see them, and by then I would know what to do.

My immediate destination was the Rogues’, where Joe had said his father was staying. Hank Rogue was a crotchety cuss, even by the standards of my town; I had a memory from years ago of standing in the yard behind our house and watching him back his drilling rig right over my mother’s flower beds, then step, scowling, from his cab, a cigarette bobbing in the corner of his mouth, spitting once at his feet and then lifting his head to give me a look that said: “Got a problem with this?” His wife was a mousy thing with a permanently sad look stitched on her face who punched a register at the IGA; the story went that the pair of them were actually divorced, but Hank had refused to move out, so they’d stayed that way for years. The only mental image I had of their daughter was taken from a dance my freshman year at Regional: a tall girl in a macramé poncho, sitting on a stone wall outside the gymnasium, loud music throbbing inside-“Smoke on the Water” or “Brown Sugar” or “Takin’ Care of Business,” the usual cover crap that were the only things the local bands knew how to play-drinking from a widemouthed bottle in a paper sack that one of her friends had handed her, and then her laughing in a way that made me think of a bird flying into a window-something stopped midair. It wasn’t a promising picture, the sort that usually ended badly in my town, but then the girl, whose name was Suzanne, astounded everyone by taking first place in the all-state spelling bee and winning a full ride to a college in Texas nobody had ever heard of. As far as I knew, she’d never been back.

The Rogues lived in a little house with pea-green asbestos siding just behind the fire station, hard to miss because of Hank’s drilling rig parked in the yard like the wreck of an alien spacecraft. Four hours after leaving Portland I parked behind it and released my cramping hands from the wheel-I hadn’t noticed how tightly I’d been holding on. A cold wind was blowing, and some of the trees were only just beginning to bud out. I had a feeling of exposure, as if, at any second, everybody I’d ever known would leap from the bushes and demand to learn where I’d been all these months.

When Hank Rogue answered my knock, I knew at once he had no idea who I was. He was wearing loose denim overalls, same as the day he’d spat at his feet in my parents’ yard, and his hands were caked with grime and oil. The skin of his face had the bubbled texture of cooking pancake batter. A sour smell of cigarettes and unwashed skin floated through the open door.

“I’m Lucy,” I explained, and heard the nervousness in my voice. “Lucy Hansen. Phil and Maris’s girl?”

He gave a slow, indecipherable nod, and tipped his head slightly to flick his eyes over my shoulder, as if my parents might be standing behind me.

“They got problems with their well?”

“No, nothing like that. They’re in North Carolina, actually.” I felt ridiculous. Why was I explaining this to him? “I’m here to see Joe Crosby. Somebody told me he was staying here.”

“He’s here, all right,” he answered flatly, and crossed his arms over his barrellike chest. “Sleeping.”

“His son asked me to look in on him. Would it be all right if I came in?”

His eyebrows lifted in a warning. “I said he was sleeping now, didn’t I? That’ll have to satisfy you.”

This was a wrinkle I hadn’t considered: that I might get to the door and simply be turned away. “Please, Mr. Rogue, I’ve come a long way.”

“Thought you said you were Phil Hansen’s girl.”

“I am, Mr. Rogue,” I said. “I’ve been… away. In Portland. I just drove up this afternoon. I used to cook for Joe at the camp.”

“He owe you money, then?”

“No, of course not,” I said. “I’m just a friend.”

He snorted. “Ain’t you heard? Joe Crosby ain’t got none a’ those.”

“Well, he does, and I’m one.”

He considered me another moment. His eyes flicked up and down my body like a butcher eyeing a carcass.

“You’re a persistent one,” he said finally, and stepped back from the door. “Suppose you might as well come in. He won’t like being woke up, though. You’ll see for yourself.”

He led me into the kitchen. Dirty plates were piled like poker chips under a dripping tap, and opened cans were strewn everywhere-chili, beef stew, Campbell ’s soup, their crinkled lids all standing at attention. A half-gallon jug of off-brand bourbon, mostly empty, sat on the counter. The room reeked of wet dog, though I saw no trace of one. Beyond the kitchen was another door.

“Through there,” Hank said, and pointed.

The room was dark, its one window covered with a yellowed shade; what light there was seemed soaked up by the wavy paneling that served for walls. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. The space was tiny, obviously some kind of makeshift addition hammered onto the back of the house-the sort of extra room where people usually stored tools or skis or muddy shoes. A thin cot was pushed against the far wall, and beside it, an orange crate, covered with pill bottles. Joe’s father was sitting beneath the window in an overstuffed chair, his head rocked back and mouth slightly open, hands folded at his waist. His glass eye was slightly open; the other one was closed. A chrome cane with a rubber tip leaned against the wall beside him.

“Joe?” I knelt before him on the plywood floor. His body seemed smaller than I remembered, half swallowed by the immense chair. He needed a haircut, and his fingernails were long as a woman’s; a smell rose off him, sharp and a little sweet, like overripe fruit. I took one of his hands and gently shook it.

“Joe, it’s Lucy Hansen.”

His eye flickered open. He tipped his head and looked at me a moment without recognition.

“It’s Lucy Hansen,” I said again.

“Lucy.” His face brightened slightly; he licked his lips and swallowed. His mouth seemed off-kilter, as if he’d just gotten back from the dentist and the Novocain hadn’t quite worn off. It was hard to tell, of course, Joe’s face being what it was, but between this and the cane, I wondered if he’d had a second stroke, or if the first one had been more serious than he’d let on. Hank Rogue, the filthy kitchen, this dismal little storage room with its caved-in cot: no one deserved this. It all felt like a terrible punishment for my being gone. It was all I could do not to burst into tears.

His voice when he spoke was thick in his throat. “Lucy, what are you doing here?”

I squeezed his hand. “Joey sent me. I’m here to take you home.”

I turned over the orange crate and quickly filled it with his pills and the small pile of folded shirts and pants I found on the floor at the foot of the bed. With my other hand I pulled him upright, surprised by how light he was, and guided the cane into his hand. He was breathing hard, and I heard a phlegmy rattle in his chest that worried me. Then I turned to see Hank Rogue standing in the doorway.

“What the hell you think you’re doing?”

“What does it look like?” I said. “We’re leaving.”

“Is that right? The fuck you are.”

I positioned myself in front of him, holding the crate between us. The urge to cry was gone; taking its place was a feeling of pure anger, like a thunderhead climbing inside me.

“Get out of my way,” I said.

He reached a hand down to his crotch and rubbed. His eyes went soft, trying to hold my gaze. “Little girl.”

Which was when I took two steps forward and rammed the crate, hard as I could, into Hank Rogue. I had no idea what I was doing, but it worked; momentum was on my side, and all that swimming had made me strong. The crate caught him across the loose flesh of his stomach, pushing the wind from his lungs and sending him tumbling out of the room. He crashed backward into the kitchen table, tried to grab the edge for balance as it slid away behind him, then went down hard. He was a big man, and the whole house seemed to shudder under the weight of his fall.

“You fucking cunt!”

I did the only next thing I could think of, which was to grab the half-empty jug of bourbon from the counter. It had a curved handle, perfect for throwing, and glass sides thick as a windshield. Without aiming I flung it, like a center spikes a volleyball, in the general direction of Hank Rogue. A perfect shot: he managed to deflect the bottle with his hand but the corner still caught him over the eye, knocking him down again before it smacked, miraculously unbroken, into the wall behind him. A line of blood surged along his brow.

The blow hadn’t knocked him out, but I knew I’d bought the time we needed. I turned to Joe’s father, where he stood at the door with his cane. It took me a moment to realize that the look of mute wonder on his face was meant for me.

“I’ll be god… damned.”

“Quick as you can, Joe.”

He let me lead him across the kitchen. Hank had risen to a sitting position, a fat palm pressed to his bleeding head. It was possible I’d hurt him badly, but I didn’t spend a second fretting over this. All I wanted was to get away. Outside, I helped Joe down the front stoop and across the weedy yard and into the VW, then shoved the orange crate into the back, scattering the bottles of pills everywhere. I’d gotten myself into the driver’s seat and was fumbling for the keys-too damn many of them, keys that seemed to multiply and tangle in my hand like scarves pulled from a magician’s sleeve-when the clock ran out: I heard a bellow and looked up just as Hank burst out of the house, swinging a baseball bat. For an instant, my brain seized with a vision of Suzanne, sitting on the gymnasium wall, and her high, frightened laugh. Whatever had happened to her, I knew how the story had ended: she’d run for her life.

“You little bitch!”

Joe turned toward me in the passenger seat. “Lucy-”

“Got it!”

The key found the ignition; the engine caught and held, and I shoved the car into reverse and hit the gas just as Hank, realizing he’d never reach us in time, launched the bat straight for us. I didn’t have a second to be afraid; I saw it coming, closed my eyes, and ducked. The hard, heavy end of it punched the front hood with a sonorous clang, pinwheeling the thing up and over the car like a majorette’s baton. In another instant I heard it strike the pavement behind us and bounce harmlessly away-just a child’s toy rattling in the street. A high, wild joy filled me as I swung out into the road and turned and sped away.

We’d reached the corner when Joe finally spoke. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

“Pure instinct. You lived with that guy? Tell me you weren’t paying him, Joe.”

Beside me, Joe said nothing.

“Jesus, Joe. What happened to his wife?”

“Gone. Last winter.” He looked at his hands. “It wasn’t so bad. Just twenty-five a week. Plus help with the groceries.”

I figured it was worse than that but held my tongue. We passed through town; I realized I was speeding and made a conscious effort to slow the car to thirty-five. The streets were empty, just a few cars and pickups parked here and there, their fenders spangled with spring mud. Most of the tourist businesses were still closed for the season. As we passed the police station, a pang of dread quickened my heart: whatever else was true, hitting Hank Rogue in the head with a bourbon bottle was certainly against the law. All he had to do was wander down to the station and file a report, and I would be a wanted woman. But in another moment this fear left me. Who would believe that little Lucy Hansen had laid out the likes of Hank Rogue?

“Well, I wish you’d told me,” I said. “Told somebody. I never would have let you stay there.”

We reached the edge of town and the intersection of Highway 9. To the left, forty-five minutes away, thirty if I gunned it, lay the hospital in Farmington. Right would take us to the camp. It was just six o’clock, barely late afternoon that time of year, but in the half hour since I’d rolled into town, thick, doughy clouds had moved in from the north, sucking the light away. It felt more like deep fall than the June evening it was. I considered both options, and then a third: taking him back to Portland.

“Joe, we have to get you to a doctor.”

He shook his head. “No hospitals.”

“Don’t be stubborn. You’re sick. On top of everything else, I think you might have pneumonia.”

But the look on his face told me this line of argument would get me nowhere. I’d rescued him from Hank Rogue’s clutches; for now, that would have to do. I heard myself sigh.

“Jesus, I really shouldn’t be doing this. Promise me you’ll let me call someone? At least let Paul Kagan have a look at you.”

He nodded grudgingly. “All right.”

The spring thaw had done its damage. The road to the camp, a tricky proposition even in the best years, was a minefield of potholes deep enough to make me worry about banging the oil pan; by the old stone bridge, where Forest Creek emptied into the river, a section had been so completely washed away I had to stop and let Joe direct me across it, the VW leaning so precariously I thought I was going into the drink for sure. It took us almost an hour to drive those last eight miles, and by the time we reached the camp, the rattle in Joe’s chest had blossomed into a nasty cough.

I took the keys from him. “Let’s get you inside.”

The building was dark, the shutters closed tight. The only sound was the soft whistle of the wind in the pines. The scene was so desolate to my eyes I might have been gone for years. A misty rain was falling into the lake, so light you might not have noticed except for the fanning shapes that drifted over its surface in the waning light. Holding the box of pills and clothes, I managed to get the door open and Joe inside and find a light switch. In the main room, I got Joe down on the sofa, then went to look at the kitchen. A bowl of something long hardened sat on the table, and beside it, a mug stained brown from evaporated coffee-Joe’s breakfast, the morning he’d had his stroke. The big fridge held only a quart of milk long soured, a package of American cheese, a few sticks of moldy butter, and a six-pack of Budweiser. The cheese was probably okay-hell, that stuff could last a year-and the beer was a welcome sight, but everything else was a total loss. I threw the milk and butter in the trash and opened the kitchen tap. A few puffs of air, a groan from somewhere below me, and a blast of brown water gushed from the spigot. I sipped a beer while I let the water clear over Joe’s six-month-old dirty breakfast dishes, then filled a saucepan and put it on the stove for tea. I found some not-too-stale crackers in the pantry, and melted the cheese over them in the broiler, then took it all out to the main room.

Joe was sleeping where I’d left him, facing the cold hearth. His face was flushed with fever; I stood and watched him, listening to the wet clutter of his breathing and second-guessing my decision not to take him down to Farmington General. But the hour was late, the road was too bad to try again in darkness, and I figured this was a discussion that would have to wait till morning.

“Joe?” I showed him the tray. “I made you something to eat.”

He roused himself and did his best to nibble at the crackers, his crooked mouth sputtering crumbs when the coughing took him, then gingerly sipped the tea. The room was clammy as a ship at sea; I’d have to look into lighting the furnace, too, or at least get a fire going. When he was done I took the tray and put it aside.

“Off to bed with you now.”

Upstairs, I stripped his bed and remade it with fresh linens, and waited outside his door while he undressed. I’d brought all his medicines upstairs, and when he was ready, I carried them in and helped him with the bottles: seven of them, each containing a different-colored pill the purpose of which I could only guess at. When he was done he lay back on the pillow, and I drew a heavy blanket over him.

“What happened to you, Lucy?”

I sat on the edge of the bed. All day I had been running on adrenaline, and just the feel of the mattress beneath me left me suddenly exhausted. I could have put my head down and instantly been asleep.

“It’s a long story.”

“Were you with Joey? It’s all right if you were. I know he comes back to see you.”

I nodded. “For a while, at Christmas. I told my parents I was visiting a girlfriend in Boston, but it was Joe. After that I was in Portland.”

“How did he look?”

For almost four years, we had never spoken of these things. I thought his question strange, but then I didn’t. The Joe he remembered was a boy, or nearly. By now his son was somebody else entirely.

“Stronger. A little sad. It’s hard for him up there. I think he wants to come home.”

“Your parents were worried, Lucy.”

I felt a familiar shiver of guilt move through me, the same one that had dogged me for months. “I know they were. I’m sorry about that. But there wasn’t any helping it.”

“What did you do in Portland?”

The rain was rattling the metal roof outside his window; I let my mind drift through the memories of my time away, listening to the sound the rain made.

“Nothing all that interesting, though I guess it felt like it at the time. I waitressed at a restaurant on Commercial. I swam a lot too. I had a little apartment.” I shrugged and made an effort to smile; already I sounded nostalgic. “It’s not important. Let’s just think about getting you well.”

As I’d spoken, a deeper stillness had enclosed him. His breathing was slow and even, and I thought for a moment he had fallen asleep. I rose and tightened the blanket around his chest. I was about to shut out the light when he spoke again, the words seeming to come from deep inside him.

“I didn’t know what I would do without you here, Lucy.”

I bent down, fingered his hair aside, and kissed him on the forehead, something I had never done before. The heat of his fever lingered on my lips and fingers, like a faint electric charge; it would be a long night, I knew.

“Well, I’m here now,” I said quietly, and shut out the light. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”

I spent most of the night in a chair by his bed, finally moving down to the sofa just before dawn. A little after eight, I telephoned the doctor. Paul Kagan had been the town’s only physician as long as I could remember, the sort of cradle-to-grave practitioner you think exists only in movies: gruff, wise, and beloved, a man who on any given day might see a toddler with an earache or somebody in their eighties with enough problems to sink a battleship. He kept his office in the back of his small, shingled house by the post office, and as a child the thing I always liked best about it was the big tank of tropical fish in the waiting room.

I told him about what I’d seen at the Rogues’, the cough and fever, and my suspicion of pneumonia.

“If he’s as you say, you should take him down to Farmington.”

“I don’t think he’ll go.”

I heard Paul sigh. Given the general crustiness of his clientele, half of them holed up in trailers and shacks miles from anything you might call a respectable road, this was a conversation he probably had five times a day.

“Well, I’m seeing Sarah Rawling later this afternoon. She’s out your way, more or less. I guess I could come then. Woman’s got congestive heart failure, and she won’t go to the damn hospital either.”

“You’re an angel.”

He chuckled. “Hardly, but spread it around. Where you been keeping yourself, Lucy? Your mother said you’d gotten some great new job someplace. Sort of thought maybe we’d seen the last of you.”

“Just needed to get away for a bit, I guess.”

“Don’t we all. Course, I never will. You should come in and see the fish. I got some new ones just last month, real beauties.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Think three o’clock, maybe a little earlier. He gets any worse, though, no fooling-you get him down to Farmington, don’t wait for me. He’s not as tough as he thinks he is.”

I returned to Joe’s bedroom. He was resting quietly-the worst of the coughing had abated for the moment-and I decided not to rouse him. I was wearing the same jeans and blouse I’d put on a day ago in Portland, and would have liked a shower, but even this seemed like work. For a while I dozed in the chair. Sometime in the night the rain had blown through; a weak, unhurried sun, the sun of illness, pulsed in the drapes. For lunch I made the last of the cheese and crackers, though Joe ate just a few bites, and I finished what was left. How would I get into town for groceries? I wondered; what would become of us, stranded out here? And, a dark thought I couldn’t push away, much as I wished to: what would I do if he died?

I was in the kitchen, taking stock of the larder-not much, just a few cans of soup and some stale spaghetti I thought I might be able to do something with for dinner-when the phone rang. I hoped it might be Paul, but the voice on the other end was a woman’s.

“I know it’s probably too late, but do you think we could get a reservation for the last week in July?”

For a second I was lost. “I’m sorry. The camp’s closed.”

“Oh.” The woman seemed not to believe me. “Really? We were there last year, and my husband just loved it.”

“Like I said, we’re closed. You might want to try the Lakeland Inn.”

I gave her the number and hung up the phone. Not five minutes later it rang again. The voice this time was a man’s.

“Is this Crosby ’s?” Before I could answer he charged ahead. “I’ve been trying to get through for days. Listen, Joe said he’d hold the same week in August for us, party of four, name of Gaudio. I was wondering if we could move it up a week. We’re taking the boy off to college, and I didn’t realize he’d have to be down there before Labor Day.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gaudio. The camp’s closed. It doesn’t look like we’re going to be open this season.”

“Closed.” Like the first caller, he paused, taking this in. “Closed, like out of business?”

I didn’t really know the answer. The question seemed too large. “Why don’t I take your number?”

“And do what with it?” he huffed impatiently. “See here. We had an agreement, young lady. Are you people going to live up to it or not?”

“No,” I said, and hung up.

It went on like this. Over the next couple of hours I fielded three more phone calls, each replaying more or less the same conversation: a question about a reservation and my news that the camp was closed, followed by incredulity, various forms of bargaining (one man actually asked if we would be selling off any of the furniture), more apologies, expressions of anger and disappointment, and so on, until one of us hung up on the other. It was all perfectly understandable-who wants to hear that the rug’s been yanked from under their one week of reliable fun?-and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of this before. Usually the camp opened two weeks after Memorial Day. What would happen when people who had booked the year before just started showing up?

I was fretting about this when I heard a car outside, and then, below me, Paul Kagan’s heavy steps in the main room.

“Lucy?”

I went to the top of the stairs and called down. “Up here!”

He met me on the landing. Paul Kagan was probably close to retirement, but like many fixtures of small town life, he seemed ageless, a permanent fifty-five. He appeared a little flustered at the sight of me, not certain if he should kiss me hello or not, and we settled on an awkward hug.

“How’s the patient?” He was carrying an instrument bag, old leather so crinkled it looked chewed.

“His temperature’s 101. And he won’t eat a thing. The cough’s gotten a little better though.”

We entered the room together. Joe was sitting up against a pile of pillows, his face white as paper. I realized for the first time that he was afraid, though I didn’t know how much of this was caused by his illness, and how much by the prospect of being examined by a doctor.

“How we doing, Joe?” Paul said loudly. He sat on the bed and opened the bag at his feet, removing a thermometer, which he began to shake down.

Joe stifled a cough. “Been better.”

“Oh, you don’t look so bad to me. Don’t know what Lucy’s so worried about. Let’s see about that temperature.”

He nimbly popped the thermometer into Joe’s mouth, then took his wrist and counted off his pulse. Paul had unusually large, long-fingered hands, which I knew he kept soft with a bottle of moisturizer stationed on his desk.

“You’ve been taking your pills?”

“Hm-mm-hmm.”

“No need to talk, just nod.”

Joe nodded. Paul released his wrist and bent at the waist to take out his stethoscope and blood pressure kit from the bag. He placed the head of his stethoscope in the crook of Joe’s elbow and listened as he pumped the little bulb, his eyes turned up to the ceiling, away. The cuff gave a little hiss of gas as he released the pressure. He pulled the thermometer from Joe’s mouth and peeked at it quickly, frowning.

“All right, handsome, off with the shirt so we can hear those lungs.”

With slow fingers Joe undid his pajama top and leaned forward from the pillows for Paul to reach behind him.

“Deep breath now. That’s it.” Paul padded the stethoscope up and down his back. “So Lucy tells me you were staying with Hank Rogue.”

“For a bit.”

Paul paused to listen, then moved the stethoscope again. “Funny thing. I suppose you could call it a coincidence, but guess who came in yesterday afternoon with a nasty cut on his head?”

My whole body clenched with alarm. “God. Was he all right?”

Paul’s mouth dipped in a frown. “Light concussion. Took a few stitches, but no permanent damage.” He pulled the stethoscope from his ears and gave me a dark, knowing look. “Just between us, couldn’t have happened to a nastier son of a bitch. You do what I do, you learn a few things about people.”

I thought of Hank’s hand groping downward, his eyes gone soft where he stood in the door, and about his daughter, gone to Texas without a trace. Little girl. A cold shudder of revulsion snaked through me.

“Okay, all set here. You can button up, Joe.” Paul gave Joe’s leg a solid pat, rose from the bed, and tipped his head toward the door. “Lucy?”

We stepped into the low-ceilinged hallway, sealing Joe’s room behind us with a muffled snap.

“Well, I think you’re right,” Paul said quietly. “I’m hearing some fluid, mostly on the left side. The temperature has me worried. We really should get films.”

“Films?”

“I’m sorry.” He circled his hand over his chest. “An X ray, to see what’s going on in there.” He shrugged. “As for the rest, it’s hard to say. He’s got a touch of malnutrition. You see this in stroke patients. It’s hard to eat, so they just give up on it.”

“I really don’t think he’ll go.”

Paul nodded gravely. “I figured that. Okay, let’s run a course of antibiotics, just to be on the safe side. It’s a question of whether he improves in the next twenty-four hours. He could turn a corner, or this could all gather fast into a real emergency. Keep him warm, give him lots of fluids, and watch his temperature. Any signs of trouble, any, and I want you to get him down to Farmington.”

Downstairs, he wrote out a prescription for penicillin and gave me a bottle he kept in his bag to get Joe started.

“Like I said, mind that temperature. And try to get him to eat something. I know it won’t be easy, but do your best.” He cleared his throat. “His boy’s still away?”

I took the prescription from his hand and nodded.

“You’ll be all right out here by yourself?”

“Have to be, I guess.”

He frowned with concern, holding my eyes with his. “Well, you’ve got the number. Don’t be afraid to use it.”

I walked him to the door. I hadn’t been out of the house all day, and as I stepped onto the porch, a wave of shockingly warm, dense air washed over me, prickling my skin. While Joe and I had been locked away, the weather had turned like a clock with a too-tight spring, leaping straight into midsummer.

Paul trotted down the steps into the ricocheting sunlight and opened the door to his car. “One other thing, Lucy.”

I was looking at the prescription in my hand. How I’d get into town to fill it I hadn’t a guess, though I kept this worry to myself. There was barely anything left in the house to eat. I looked at him and tried to smile. “What’s that?”

“Next time, skip the whiskey bottle and hit that bastard with a hammer.”

He reached into the car to put his bag on the floor by the driver’s seat, then stopped abruptly, his attention directed out over the lake. He placed a flat hand over his eyes.

“I thought you said the camp was closed.”

“It is. The place was all shut up until yesterday.”

Paul pointed. “Then who’s that?”

Alarmed, I stepped quickly off the porch to investigate, cupping my brow as Paul had done. The lake’s face shimmered like pounded tin in the misty heat, a blinding brightness. Someone, a stranger, was standing on the dock, his hands in his pants pockets, facing away.

“What the hell…”

The stranger turned then, and I saw. Those blue searchlight eyes hit me where I stood. He turned, and as he turned, his face and form and all that he was opened to me, like the pages of a book, one I’d read years ago and had forgotten. Somebody had come, after all. Somebody was already here.

“Lucy?”

“It’s all right, Paul,” I said, calling back to him, for I had already begun making my way down the hill. “It’s all right. I know him.”

It was Harry Wainwright.

SEVENTEEN

These goddamn lawyers: if I had ten cents for every one I’ve watched splashing around in the shallows, his fly rod snarling in the trees above, I wouldn’t have sold the camp, to Harry Wainwright or anyone else. I’d let the place rot under the pines and retire to Florida on my gangster Chris-Craft like the rich man I’d be, and if anybody asked me what I wanted on my headstone, when that day came, I’d tell them to write: “Here lies a man who earned it, every dime.”

None of them, not just Crybaby Pete (I couldn’t help it: the name had stuck in my mind like Velcro) was much of a fisherman; the Atlantics were everywhere, piling up below the aqueducts, but a sharp breeze had blown up just past noon, and even Bill, who seemed to know best what he was doing, was having trouble reaching them.

“Punch it!” I called out from the bank. I stood and mimed the motion. “Don’t let your backcast drop-shove that sucker out there.”

“Goddamn, this wind.” He pulled in his line and set to cast again. For a moment the breeze stilled, and he managed a solid cast, straight and clean. The instant his pattern hit the roiling water his rod bent like a twig and I heard the whiz of line running out.

“Holy mother!”

I knew he was about to panic. “Set the hook now,” I called to him, scrambling down the bank. “Just a lift.”

But the excitement was too much: he yanked his rod upward, and the pattern sprang away, soaring back over his head.

“Fuck! Fuck it to hell!”

He climbed back out to me, splashing all the way. “Okay, you tell me what happened.”

I asked to see his rod. As I’d suspected, the drag was clamped down tight as a jar lid. I loosened it a turn and held it up to show him.

“See this? Forget the drag, at least until you’re sure you’ve got one on. Just use a finger to tighten the line when you set the hook. A quick jerk, but no higher than your shoulder.” I demonstrated once more, then passed it back to him. “These are heavy fish, they break off real easy.”

He fingered the line as I had done, lifting the tip of his rod just so.

“That’s it.”

“Why’d I give up golf? I still feel like an idiot.”

“It’s trickier than it sounds.” I shrugged. “It just takes practice.”

“These fish, like fucking movie stars. Won’t come out of their trailers.”

A bit downstream, Carl Jr. and Marathon Mike seemed to be having better luck; while I watched, each of them got into a fish, first Carl and then Mike, so that, for a magic minute, both had something on their lines. Just a couple of rainbows, but Mike’s was a nice one, over ten inches, and he held it up with a satisfied grin to show me before setting it back down into the riverbed. A bright, splashing flick of its tail, and off it went, none the worse for wear.

I was watching this when Pete stepped up beside me. He’d been gone about an hour, claiming he wanted to try the shallows down where the spillway opened out into the lake. Though, of course, this was a lie; he’d just wanted to go off somewhere to bob his line in the water and be left alone to think about his woe-filled, Ivy-educated life.

“Any luck?”

“Some.” He didn’t elaborate. I could smell a bit of whiskey rising off him; in one of those bulging vest pockets, I figured, was a flask, now mostly empty. The air was full of the cold water that roared with pulverizing force out of the aqueduct; even standing in bright sunshine, it was impossible not to feel its chill.

“How about these guys?” he asked, not at all interested.

“Nothing much. Couple of rainbows. The Atlantics are being fussy.”

“How’s Bill doing?”

“Nada so far.”

My answer seemed to satisfy him. He walked up the bank and took a beer from the cooler.

“Have one?”

“On duty.” I gave him my you-go-ahead-without-me smile. “Maybe later.”

“Aw, come on, Joe.” Pete patted the rock next to his. “Fuck it. Have a beer.”

There was no harm in this, really, though I knew that if I sat to drink with him I’d soon enough be getting an earful: the nitty-gritty of his divorce, the whole unhappy inventory of who-got-what. I could practically hear it already-the final ugly words, and some sour, eleventh-hour scuffle over a dog no one really wanted, the sound of luggage being hauled in anger into the trunk of someone’s car and the spray of gravel in the driveway. It was nothing I wanted, but on the other hand, given the way the day was shaping up, I would probably hear about this sooner or later, and four hours of standing in the sun had made me thirsty.

I took a can and sat beside him. It was good beer, something Belgian I’d never had before and wouldn’t expect to find in a can.

“I think I had something on for a while there,” Pete said.

“There you go.”

He ran a hand over his damp hair. The flesh around his jowls and neck had a kind of looseness that made me think he’d been heavy as a kid, not truly fat but big enough that certain things had not come easy, and that this might explain a good deal about him.

“Didn’t have a good guess what to do about it, though. I was actually sort of relieved when he got away. Tell me again, why is this fun?”

“Couldn’t say. People seem to like it, though.”

“So to you, this is all just a day at the office.”

“Never had an office, not the way you mean.”

Pete sighed good-naturedly and rolled his eyes. “He couldn’t say. Christ.” He pulled on his beer and looked at me. “You are one monosyllabic son of a bitch, if you pardon my saying so.”

“You think?”

He laughed, getting the joke before I did. “Touché.”

For a moment we sat and sipped our beers. Bill, still trying to cast through the wind to the Atlantics below the aqueduct, had closed the gap by wading out another ten feet into chest-high water. I thought about saying something to reel him in a bit, but then figured what the hell, it was his vacation. The worst that could happen was a long, wet walk back to the truck.

“So,” Pete said, “I screwed Bill’s wife. Did I tell you that?”

This, of course, was exactly the sort of thing I had expected to hear, minus the specifics. “Can’t say you did, Pete. That’s something I’d remember.”

He rubbed his eyes and squinted out over the water. “You don’t have to worry, he doesn’t know.” He gave his head a little shake. “Christ, you should see her. Beverly, I mean. It’s his second wife, you know. The first one-” He waved his beer out over the water, to mean long gone. “So, Carol and I had just split up, over all kinds of other crap-you know, stupid stuff that basically added up to we couldn’t stand the sight of each other another minute, and I ran into Bev at, get this, the office Christmas party, and she’s wearing this thing, showing off her brand-new rack, flirtatious as hell, you know how that is.” I had no idea, needless to say, not that it mattered. “I’d heard she liked to horse around a bit. We got to talking, and next thing I know I’m calling her up and the two of us are up in Boston riding the linens at the Copley Plaza.”

At just this moment Bill’s rod bent hard; he swiveled his head quickly to look for me, like a kid showing off to his old man, shouting, “Woo-hoo!”

“See?” Pete said to me, lifting his can toward the water. “Dumb-ass doesn’t have a clue.”

“You don’t mind my asking, where was Bill while all this was going on?”

Pete drained the last of his beer and crunched the can in his fist. “Oh, off in East Jesus someplace, tramping around in the cattails with some douche bag from the EPA. He really loves that stuff.” He frowned suddenly and gave me a worried look. “Why do you ask? He say something to you?”

A crazy question; of course he hadn’t. That Pete would ask it told me just how tippy the whole situation was. “Just filling in the details.”

“So he didn’t say anything.”

“No, but let me toss an idea your way. You guys always take vacations together?”

Pete mulled this over. “I see what you’re driving at. I do. But I’m telling you, you’re barking up the wrong tree. If he knew, I would have heard about it. Believe me.”

We sat another minute, watching Bill fighting what looked to be a pretty-good-size Atlantic. I just hoped he had the good sense to break off before it dragged him into the drink and filled his waders with water the temperature of a thawed Popsicle. I was figuring by this point that Bill didn’t just suspect something was going on-he absolutely knew, probably right down to the hour. This little outing was his way of saying, Up yours, junior, see if I care. I’ve got you in my sights.

“She’s a lot younger than him,” Pete said.

“I had a feeling.”

“Guess how old.”

I heard myself sigh irritably: guessing games, like junior high. “I don’t know, thirty?”

“Close, Joe, very close. Twenty-eight. Twenty-fucking-eight.” Pete scratched his cheek and flicked a bit of grunge away. “Probably I’m not the only one, I admit that. Given what everybody says. But I mean-Jesus, if you only knew.”

The day had gotten strange under the spell of this conversation; the air seemed full of bad energy, like incoming weather, something about to break open. He was in love with her, of course, or thought he was. This fact was plain as day, just as it was also plain that Beverly Christmas didn’t give a sweet goddamn about Crybaby Pete. Whatever had gotten her up to the Copley for a weekend of bouncy fun probably had less to do with love or even Pete himself than the price of peas in Paraguay.

“Christ,” Pete moaned, and shook his head again. I could have been miles away, the way he was talking. “I’m a complete mess. She won’t even take my calls now.”

“That could be for the best, you know.”

“Yeah, maybe.” He scowled, suddenly angry. “Maybe I’m about to get my ass fired on top of everything else. Ever think of that?”

I held my tongue, though of course this was exactly what he needed, and so richly deserved. A little trip to the woodshed, and a chance, behind closed doors, to come clean. On the other side: blood and pain, a memory of pure hurt, but then the calm, open spaces the mind makes when the worst is over and the body steps out into sunlight again.

Pete climbed to his feet and placed his hands at the small of his back to stretch. “Aw, just look at him, the big dumb shit. He’s having the time of his life, I’ll bet.”

By this point Bill had actually managed to get his fish under control and was thrashing around in the shallows, his rod hand held high over his head to keep the line tight while, with the other, he made unsuccessful, scooping lunges with his net. Done properly, this can be one of the most satisfyingly graceful moments in the sport, but in Bill’s case, it was like watching a man trying to hail a taxi while simultaneously chasing a piece of blowing litter down the street. Who was going to tire out first, man or fish, was anybody’s guess. For a second I thought he’d done it, but then the fish darted around him in a burst of speed that wrapped the leader hopelessly around Bill’s legs. He cursed and waved me over.

“Joe? A little help here?”

I rose from the bank and splashed down to him, letting the icy water fill my shoes. I didn’t need the net, because no one really does; bending at the waist, I snatched Bill’s fish and rolled it over on its back, calming it as quick as a mallet whack. With my free hand I reached up to release the pliers from my belt and used them to back the hook out of the Atlantic ’s jaw. I waited another moment, moving the fish gently back and forth to run water over its gills, then rolled it over again, wrapped thumb and forefinger around its tail, and lifted it from the streambed to hand it to Bill. Four pounds easy, though it always feels like more: a heavy fish, thick as a man’s forearm and translucently white along the underbelly, like a single clenched muscle.

“God-damn.” Bill’s chest was pulsing with exertion; from under his heavy rubber waders squeaked the sour tang of sweat. He turned toward shore and held out the fish in triumph. “Hey, Pete, get a load of this!”

Pete, standing where I’d left him, had opened another beer. He raised the can in a listless toast. “Nice fish.”

“What are you talking about?” Bill snarled happily. “This is a great fish. This is Moby goddamn Dick. Haven’t I taught you anything, junior?”

“What do you want me to say? I think I saw one just like it at the A &P.”

Bill shook his head and muttered, “Jesus, that guy.” But I could see how incurably happy he was, holding this fish. “What do you think?” he asked me, wagging his eyebrows conspiratorially. “Let’s keep this one.”

“It’s your license. State says you can keep three per day.”

He made a face of disbelief. “Don’t go soft on me now, Joe. Who cares what the state says? Let’s you and me eat this bad boy up.”

“I’m not much for salmon, to tell you the truth. But you want me to clean it up for you, I’d be glad to. Lucy can cook it for your supper if you like.”

At just this moment, while we watched, the flesh beneath the fish’s tail opened like a hatch and a rush of milky fluid roared out, splashing over Bill’s hands and down the front of his vest. His whole body jerked like he’d been hit with an electric current as he thrust the fish away from his body.

“Christ! What the fuck is that?”

It took me a moment to realize what we’d seen. “He’s a she,” I explained. “Those are her eggs.”

“No fucking way. That’s disgusting.”

“Hey, Bill!” Pete yelled from shore. I could hear the beer and whiskey boiling in his voice. “Looks like she digs you!”

“Will you shut the hell up?” Bill’s face had gone a mild green. Still clutching the fish like a piece of firewood, he gazed down with horror at the front of his vest. The fluid had left behind pinkish clots that stuck like glue to the fabric. “God, this crap’s all over me.”

“It’s no big deal,” I said. “It happens sometimes.”

He wiped his cheek with the knob of his shoulder. “Jesus.”

The fish’s mouth was snapping at the air in frantic little puffs, revealing gleaming fencerows of tiny, diamond-bright teeth. Much longer and the question of letting it go would be moot. Without the strength to fight the current, she’d be smashed to atoms against the rocks, or simply float downstream and drown.

“Aw, the hell with it,” Bill said finally. He lifted the fish so they were nose to nose, and spoke into its face. “Okay, missy, I guess today’s your lucky day.” At that he stepped out a few feet into deeper water, wobbling a little on the rocks; with a splash the fish was gone.

I watched him watch it go. It was just past four, a tricky hour: the sun had slid behind us, dipping the stream in shadow, while above us the dam’s sloping wall seemed to swell with captured light. The mist from the outlets washed over us in breeze-fed bursts, the air sun-warmed one minute and ice-cold the next, like a drafty old house in winter. All that water, all that stone. Around us, a thousand square miles of empty forest, a whole forgotten world of it and enough silence to let you hear the planet spin, or make you mad, if you thought too long about it. I sniffed my hand where I had touched the fish: clean, and a little salty, like blood. And then I saw I was bleeding. The hook or maybe a lucky snap of the fish’s jaw I hadn’t felt: I made a fist and a bullet of blood bubbled from the ball of flesh between my thumb and forefinger, a perfect little orb that made me think of a time, long ago, when somebody had brought a telescope up to the camp and showed me Mars.

Bill had returned to where I was standing in the moist silt at the edge of the streambed. “You cut yourself, Joe?”

I shrugged and licked it away. Just a drop, but it filled my mouth, all my senses curling around the metallic taste of blood.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “A scratch.”

Dear Joe, Lucy wrote:

I hope you’re all right, and don’t mind hearing from me like this. I wanted to tell you that your father is well. It’s a long story, and I hope that sometime I have the chance to tell you all of it. His situation at the Rogues’ was pretty bad, and I’m glad you wrote to tell me where he was. I only wish I’d gotten up there sooner. But he’s home now and finally on the mend, after a bout with pneumonia and what turned out to be a kidney infection that gave us all a scare. Please don’t worry, as I am looking after him, and Paul Kagan comes out once a week to tell him to do whatever I say and take his pills and do his best to eat.

I’ve decided to stay on at the camp through the summer, and here’s the big news-we actually managed to open! After all that’s happened, it seems almost a miracle. I’d like to take the credit, but I can’t. A few days after we got here, people just started showing up-turns out your father never canceled any of the advance reservations-and it was either open for the season or turn them away. The truth is, I was all set just to lock the gate and forget the whole thing, but here’s surprise number two: the first person to show up was none other than Harry Wainwright! (I still remember that night on the porch by cabin nine-what a shock we gave him! I still swear I told you cabin six. How long ago that all seems now.) It was Harry’s idea to open, and now the two of us are more or less running the place, or trying to. It seems a little strange, a man like Harry running around with fresh towels and handing out picnic lunches and hauling out the kitchen trash, but Harry says he doesn’t mind, far from it, and he’s even taught me a little bit about how to do the books. We’re badly in the red, by the way. According to Harry, your father pretty much ran his finances out of an old coffee can, and hasn’t paid a cent of tax to the county since about the time you left. Harry has spent most evenings the last two weeks just trying to put it all in some kind of order we can get a handle on. The general word is that with a few more bookings we may be okay by the end of the season, as long as we can get by with only a couple of part-time guides and one girl in the kitchen. Harry also has a scheme to poach a few tourists from the Lakeland Inn with a kind of daylong outing to look for moose. I can’t see that this will make much difference, but Harry says it could bring in some nice extra money.

In a way it’s a lucky turn for Harry too. I’m sure you remember that his wife was very sick, and she passed away last spring. Harry didn’t tell me this right away, but I could tell something had happened-I more or less guessed what it was-and when he finally came out with it, a lot of things suddenly fell into place in my mind. He seems very grateful to have something to do, and for now, the camp is keeping both of us plenty busy.

Well, Joe. Should I say that I miss you? I do, maybe more than ever. It’s very strange to be here without you, like I’m still feeling a part of my body that’s just not there anymore. I thought I’d gotten used to it, but I guess I really haven’t. I’m sorry about everything, especially that I disappeared the way I did. But I think it was the best thing for both of us. My parents are still furious, will barely say a word to me, though when I see my mother she always hugs me very hard, which makes me feel just terrible.

We are all glued to the television over the election, and wondering what it will mean for you. I don’t know if you know this, but the other big news down here is that eighteen-year-olds can vote. I hardly remember being eighteen. But I know I would have voted against that asshole Nixon (pardon my French!), so maybe there’s hope. Your father says McGovern’s a saint, and saints never stand a chance. Oh, well. What he means is, we all want you home. Me, too.

Take care of yourself, Joe.

All my love,

Lucy

There was a woman, of course, as Lucy guessed-not the one who made the bracelets, a widow who kept a little shop next door to one of the town’s three bad bars, but her oldest girl, Michelle: a divorced woman in her forties with hair the color of dry tobacco, a seven-year-old daughter, and a sad but warming smile. Jobs outside the plant were scarce but Michelle had a good one, working for LeMaitre’s little newspaper, laying type and editing the classifieds, which, in a town where everything was theoretically for sale if a catch was light, took up ninety percent of its pages. For some time, the better part of a year, we took care of one another, doing all the small things and exchanging all the customary comforts, and if I never told her I loved her, this seemed at the time a small thing, a minor lack. About her ex-husband, Naomi’s father, Michelle spoke not one single word in all the time I knew her.

The day I received the letter from Lucy began at 5:00 A.M., me and half a dozen other lumpers standing around the wharf in our oilskins and boots in the predawn cold, waiting for the plant crew to show and smoking first cigarettes; once the work started, it would be another three hours before any of us could smoke again. The High Chaparral was in, fifty feet of rust and stink, sitting low in the oily water, its belly fat with fish.

When the plant whistle blew, Marcel came down to where we were standing.

“The usual shares, gents,” he announced, and lit a smoke of his own. “Three dollars a thousand. Deckman gets a buck. Joe and Lewis in the hold, Larry works the jilson. Let’s be quick now, get this done by noon.”

We stepped aboard and lifted the hatch, careful not to leave it upside down-bad luck for certain-then descended the rattling aluminum ladder into the hold, a clammy alley running the length of the ship, with four pens on either side and a big one across the stern, all of it lighted only by the fretted glare of a couple of bare bulbs in metal cages. In the pens, behind pieces of plywood nailed in place, lay seventy thousand pounds of cod, blackbacks, and pollock, cocooned in ice.

Larry yelled down through the hatch when the jilson was set: “Flats first!” he said, meaning cod.

We moved to the forward pen, used an ice shaver to jimmy loose the pen boards, and ice and fish poured out. I filled my basket and hooked it to the jilson, gave it a yank.

“Yuuuuup!”

Away it went, snatched from the hold and out over the wharf, where Larry guided it into the hopper; from there it would be wheeled up to the long tables of the plant, gutted and filleted, the meat then packed again in ice and loaded on trucks to carry it to Boston or New York or Montreal. The trick was to keep the baskets coming, so that by the time Larry lowered the jilson again, another was ready to go.

For a year I’d worked the tables for wages, or else manned the loading docks. Lumping the hold was harder work, but it paid better: at three bucks for every thousand pounds of fish, split two ways plus a dollar for Larry, we’d walk away with a hundred and five dollars in our pockets, all before lunch.

“Yuuuuup!”

Lewis was Canadian, a lifer, his face red as a slab of steak. We’d worked together a year and had a rhythm down: one of us would step into a pen with a short-handled pitchfork to shovel it out, while the other loaded the jilson, the two of us trading places with every basket to keep the jilson moving.

“Yuuuuup!”

At nine we stopped to smoke. Five pens were empty, including the big one at the stern. Both of us had stripped down to our oilskins and gloves, the sweat steaming off us in the dark hold, the meaty vapors of our bodies mixing with the gunmetal smell of fish and ice. Lewis nudged me with his elbow.

“Drink?”

Lewis passed me his flask. I wiped off the spout, took a sip, and passed it back. Both of us knew not to stop long enough to light a second cigarette. We were better than half done but the last half was always the largest.

“You going out on the Bodie?” he asked me after a minute.

The Chase Bodine had come in a week before; the captain was assembling a crew for a run to the Grand Banks and had offered me a spot.

“Might. Can’t say.”

“Ford’s been hitting.” Lewis took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled, using his pinky to pluck a fleck of tobacco from his tongue. He examined it a moment, like it might be something he needed, before flicking it away. “Everyone says so. There’s at least three thousand in it this time of year. That’s good money.”

“So why don’t you go?”

He laughed out smoke. “Thirty days, a thousand miles out? Gives me the willies just thinking about it. And Ford didn’t offer, either.” He crushed out the last of his cigarette. “Back to work, Joey.”

We sent the last of the fish up to the plant a little after noon, scooped out the rest of the ice and dumped it overboard, and hosed down the hold. It was one o’clock when I walked up to the plant office. Marcel ran his enterprise with a machinelike efficiency, but his office looked like a hurricane had hit it: piles of paper everywhere, file cabinets full to bursting, invoices and shipping orders and punchcards for employees long gone stacked on every surface. One time I’d noticed, held in place between the mounds of paper, a half-full cup of coffee, tipped at a thirty-degree angle and somehow suspended at least six inches above the desktop. It hadn’t spilled a drop.

Marcel removed an envelope of cash from the top drawer and handed it to me: a hundred and five, plus ten more. I held up the extra bill.

“What’s this for?”

He smiled, pleased I’d noticed. “A little bonus. For finishing by noon.”

“We didn’t, Marcel. We only just got done five minutes ago.”

“I put ten in Lewis’s envelope too. I don’t hear him complaining.”

I deposited the envelope in the chest pocket of my slicker. “That’s because Lewis only has nine fingers to count on. You know, this is no way to run a business.”

“Maybe not, but I’ll do as I like.” He leaned back in his chair. “Listen, Joe, I heard Ford Conklin’s offered you a spot on the Bodie. You considering it?”

The truth was, I’d barely thought about it. “Might be. The money’s good. Everybody says Ford’s been doing well.”

Marcel gave a measured nod. “He has. Ford’s put more than a few dollars in my pocket, I’ll say that. But the banks are a haul, Joe. And it’s getting late in the season. I’ll tell you, if it were up to me, I’d say what the hell, go. But Abby, she’s not so hot on the idea.” He paused and looked out the window beyond his desk. It was a sunless day, the seaway and the sky above both gray as slabs of granite. Far off to the north, a pair of tankers plied the water at the crook of the horizon. Twenty thousand deadweight tons of oceangoing steel apiece, though at this distance, they looked no bigger than a couple of tin toys moving through the crosshairs in a carnival shooting gallery. “Anyway,” Marcel said, and rapped his desk, “I just thought I’d tell you. If it makes a difference, I might be having an opening for a foreman in the next couple of weeks. With you the paperwork’s a little funny, of course, but I think we could work something out. And we sure could use you.”

I’m sure my face showed my surprise. “Thanks.”

“Just keep it in mind. And the person you should thank is Abby, because this is really her idea.” He turned to one of the piles, fingering the contents, and produced an envelope. “Before I forget, this came to the house this morning.”

He handed me the letter over his desk, and at once I saw it was from Lucy. With anybody else I might have waited to read it, but not Marcel. He and Abby had taken good care of me, and if my time of exile had a bright spot, it was those two. I took a chair before his desk, its great towers of paper, and read.

“Everything all right?” Marcel asked me when I was done.

I folded the letter and tucked it into my slicker with Marcel’s envelope of money. “Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“No reason. Just, a lot of guys get letters from home, it’s not necessarily good news.” For a moment neither of us spoke. “Well, think about the other, won’t you?”

“I will,” I said, and rose to go. “Thanks, Marcel. I really will give it some thought.”

I saw Ford that night at the Breakaway. Michelle was with me; she had left her daughter, Naomi, with her mother, our custom on nights when either of us had just been paid. Like all the bars in town, the Breakaway was little more than a dirty box to drink in, the scene of so many fistfights of such chaotic brutality that the owners had long since given up replacing the glass in the front windows and just left them boarded up. We decided to spring for a couple of real drinks, good Scotch in tumblers instead of the fifty-cent beers we otherwise drank. We were drinking our second when I saw Ford come in.

In a town like LeMaitre, a fishing boat captain, particularly one who was making money, has an exalted status. As Ford moved through the bar, the crowds parted in his path, all eyes on him and measuring his progress as he approached our table.

“Joe.” He removed his cap and raked his fingers back through his pepper-gray hair; around us the crowds returned to their beer and talk. “Shelle.”

“Have a seat, Ford?”

His eyes moved over the table. “Not just now, thanks. Heard the High Chap brought in seventy thousand.”

I shook the ice in my glass. “Felt like more.”

He nodded equably. “That’s what we like to hear. Everybody making money. I don’t like to press, Joe, but I’ve got a crew to put together. Had a chance to think about my offer?”

Early that morning, talking to Lewis, I’d found myself thinking I’d go; but now I wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t Lucy’s letter, or even Marcel’s offer of a better job, that had unsettled me, but something else Marcel had said: that Abby didn’t want me to go. It felt like an omen, and I had been around the docks long enough to have picked up more than a trace of superstition. Nonsense, but there it was. On the other hand, three grand was three grand.

“A four percent share, Joe. Can’t hold your place much longer.”

“Who else is interested?”

“Lots of folks. Lewis O’Day, for one.”

“Lewis?”

“Spoke to me this afternoon. Said you could have first crack, but if you didn’t want it, he’d sign on. I’d rather have you.”

Michelle scoffed and ground out her cigarette in the ashtray we had already half filled. “That old rumhound? He’d probably fall overboard before you left the dock.”

Ford rubbed his chin thoughtfully, eyes narrowed. “No secret he drinks. But he’s been out to sea plenty in his day. I’m thinking I could rely on him well enough. And he’s clear he wants to go.”

I finished my drink and returned the empty glass to the table. The Scotch I’d drunk, or the thought of Lewis taking my place: whatever the reason, declining Ford’s offer suddenly seemed foolish, all air with nothing to push against. Abby would worry, but that was Abby. Nothing was keeping me here. A month at sea-what did I have to lose?

“Okay,” I said, and gave my glass a conclusive thump on the wood. “Count me in.”

Michelle sat up abruptly. “Joe-”

I didn’t let her finish. I looked at Ford again. “When do we leave?”

“Tuesday next. Back at the end of September.”

“All right. I’ll be there, Ford.”

He left us to go find the pay phone, and I turned my attention to Michelle. She was sitting stock-still, her spine straight against the back of the booth.

“What?”

“Why did you do that?”

“What’s the matter, Shelle? The money’s good, you know that.”

She laughed bitterly, looking away. “How can I be so goddamn stupid?”

“What are you talking about?”

As her eyes caught the light I saw a glint of tears. But her face was hard, her jaw set. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? I’ve been down this road before.”

“What road, Shelle? Are you listening? It’s just a month.”

“Foreman, Joe. That’s a good job. You didn’t even ask me.”

I reached my hand across the table to touch her arm, but she pulled away.

“Don’t,” she said, and sat back, her palms raised, her face almost in a panic. “Just… forget it, Joe. Will you? Please? Do me a favor and forget it.” Her eyes fell to the table and she shook her head again. “What the hell is wrong with me? Why am I such a fucking idiot?”

“I really don’t know what the problem is, Shelle. We’re going to the banks, that’s all.”

“Great, the banks. Have fun. Look us up when you get back, okay?”

A moment of silence passed. She lit another cigarette.

“Shelle-”

“That’s not the point, Joe.” She rose to her feet, not looking at me, and crushed out the cigarette she had only just lit, three hard stubs into the ashtray. “You asshole,” she said, and before I could answer-Michelle’s last words to me still ringing in my ears-I was sitting alone at the table with my empty glass.

We returned in October, ahead of the weather, making port on a day so bright with autumn sun that the surface of the sea seemed shattered. I’d said good-bye to no one-not Michelle, or Lewis, or even Abby and Marcel-and no one was waiting on the wharf to meet me. I wanted it that way. Michelle had seen it before I had. After that night at the bar, I knew what four years had turned me into: a man without love, on whom any kind of love was wasted. Once the hold was cleaned and tallied, I went to the weighing station with my duffel bag, took my share, and marched straight out to the loading docks behind the plant. A single refrigerated truck was parked there, the driver sitting on the running board, reading a fat paperback.

I held up my duffel bag to show him. “Mind some company?”

He lifted his broad face, squinting into the sun behind me. I hadn’t shaved or showered and had lost so much weight my pants were cinched tight at the waist with a lanyard. In my pocket, Ford’s wad of folded cash, three thousand and change, felt fat as a bar of soap.

He made no expression at all. “Don’t you want to know where I’m going?”

“Okay. Where are you going?”

He folded down a corner of the page to mark his place and closed his book. I glimpsed the title: The Godfather. “ Toronto.”

It didn’t seem far. “How about after that?”

“ Iowa.”

“ Iowa? What’s in Iowa?”

“Three vowels.” He slapped his knees and laughed like he’d been waiting his whole life to tell this joke. “Hell if I know what else.”

I thought about the border, and what might happen to me there. But I had already decided I didn’t care. “Sounds perfect,” I said, and heaved my bag up into the cab, though that was the easy part-I’d carried everything with me, and it still weighed almost nothing.

EIGHTEEN

K ate was right: I needed to go see Harry.

Still, I knew I wasn’t the reason he had come, not anymore. All that was over and done. For years and years, since the summer after Kate turned four, he’d made his annual trip, fished a little, eaten in the dining hall, even smoked a cigar or two with Joe out on the dock as the years went by. “Harry, good to see you,” we’d all say in the driveway when he pulled in, and he’d shake Joe’s hand and kiss me quickly on the cheek, and ask about the water or the weather, and although for a week the place would seem different to me, simply because Harry was in it, it was a bargain we’d all learned to live with. More than live with: I can honestly say it made me happy.

Harry made me happy.

I saw him just one other time, at Joe’s father’s funeral. This was, in fact, the only time in my life that I saw Harry Wainwright in a season not summer. The icy depths of January: Kate was still little enough to sit on my knee, big and squirmy enough that it took all my effort to keep her there. The service was held in a small, wood-framed chapel that usually closed for the winter, though it was a pretty spot, framed like a picture by tall pines with a creek off to one side and a view of Long Ridge, and when somebody in town died in the off-season, it was understood that arrangements could be made.

Joe’s father’s last couple of years had not been easy. Though he’d rebounded from the stroke, a bad cold the following winter ballooned into pneumonia again, this time landing him in the hospital on oxygen, and while he was there, the doctors diagnosed him with a fast-moving lymphoma that had already spread to the nodes around his stomach. It was supposed to take six months but in the end took three times that, and though all the doctors attributed this delay to a simple case of north-country grit-the phrase, unspoken but always understood, was “too mean to die”-I knew what he was really waiting for. In October ’75, Joe finished the last of his sentence at the federal prison camp at Fort Devens, rode the bus home to all of us, and was with his father two months later when he passed away.

It was a small group that gathered that morning, maybe thirty people, though the room was tight and seemed full. The building had no central heating, but one of the chapel’s board members had come in early to light the small woodstove, which now gave off a crackling, wooly warmth, enough to make people unzip, but not remove, their coats. My parents were there, and the few friends Joe’s dad had managed to keep over the years, and one surprise: Hank Rogue. I hadn’t laid eyes on him since the day I’d clocked him with the bourbon bottle, and I honestly couldn’t be certain he even remembered who I was. My first impression, seeing him, was pure amazement: he was one of those people who seemed to have vanished completely from my life, to such an extent that I somehow assumed he’d died. He took a pew right up front on the opposite side, holding his cap on his knees and speaking to no one, and when I looked over at him, hoping to catch his eye-a wicked impulse, I confess, to extract some acknowledgment of my victory over him that June day-I was astonished to see that his pockmarked face was streaked with tears.

Joe’s father hadn’t wanted a religious service; he hadn’t been to a church of any kind in twenty years. But to do nothing seemed desolate, and at the last minute I’d talked Joe into letting Father Molyneaux, the priest from the Catholic church over in Twining, say a few words. He was stepping up to the lectern when I felt a whisper of cold air on my neck and swiveled around to see Harry standing at the open chapel door, stamping his feet and dusting blown snow from the sleeves of his overcoat. He caught my eye and gave a little wave.

“How did he know?” I whispered to Joe.

Joe had lost a lot of weight during his time at Fort Devens, but I hadn’t really noticed how much until that moment, when I saw how loose his collar was around his neck. Like all the men in the room, he was wearing a tie beneath his parka. He answered without looking at me. “I called him.”

“You did that?”

His voice was terse; he was in no mood to talk. “My father wanted him here.”

Father Molyneaux said the usual prayers, we all sang a hymn-badly, for we had no accompaniment to help us find the right key-and then Joe stepped to the front of the room.

“Well,” he began, and nervously cleared his throat. I thought I saw him glance to the back of the chapel to find Harry. “Thank you all for coming. At least we have a nice day for this, right?” A titter of laughter floated over the room; in my lap, Kate wriggled and looked about, wondering what the joke was.

“I’m no good at this sort of thing,” Joe went on, “and it’s cold. All I want to say is, my father would have appreciated everyone being here. I’ve been away awhile, but in the last couple of months he talked a lot about this place, and how much it meant to him. He also talked a lot about the war. We’re here to remember him, and I guess the easiest way to sum up my father is to say that he was a soldier. I know that idea may seem strange to some, but I think everybody who’s here knows that’s true. On the morning he was wounded, he had served 342 days as a battlefield platoon leader, and he hated everything about it. But he loved his men, and when the war was over, he loved this place. He wasn’t always the happiest man, or the easiest to get along with, and I’m guessing some of you know that”-Joe paused as a second frisson of knowing laughter moved through the crowd-“but he also was the bravest man I ever knew. It took me a long time, maybe right up until these last couple of months, to really understand this.”

Joe stopped again, opened his mouth as if he were going to say something else, but then seemed to change his mind. “Anyway, that’s all. Like I said, it’s cold. Thank you, everyone, for coming.”

A few other people got up to speak, most to tell a story or two about a nice thing Joe Sr. had done for them, and then Father Molyneaux led us in a closing prayer. When this was done, Joe returned to the front of the room and gave the signal for the pallbearers to come forward. Six men: Joe, of course, my father, Paul Kagan, Porter Dante, a man Joe had introduced me to earlier that day as Marcel Lebeau, and, striding from the back of the church, still in his smoke-gray chesterfield overcoat and cashmere scarf, Harry. They arranged themselves around the casket, three on a side with my father and Joe at the front, and hoisted it onto their shoulders. For an awful moment I think everyone worried they might drop it-a casket is a heavy thing, no matter who’s inside-but they gave no sign of strain, and without a word they carried it straight through the church and outside to the waiting hearse. There would be no burial until spring; for now, the casket would go to the funeral home, where it would wait for the ground to thaw.

“What’s inna box?” Kate asked, too loudly, as they passed.

I gripped her mittened hands to shush her. “Your grandfather,” I whispered.

Outside, the sun was blinding bright, making the air seem somehow colder, and I scanned the lot with a hand over my eyes, Kate wedged to my hip. But I didn’t see Harry anywhere, and all the cars were ones I knew and could connect to someone inside-the rusted sedan I knew to be Paul’s, Porter’s big Ford pickup with the plough in front, my father’s old Lincoln Continental, even Hank Rogue’s filthy drilling rig, like a big grease stain on the snow. Harry’s Jag was nowhere to be seen. Joe was leaning down into the front window of the hearse, speaking with the driver; a moment later he tapped the roof and off it went. Somebody asked me if folks were going for coffee, meaning the Pine Tree Café, since that was the only place in town open in winter, and I said I guessed we were.

It wasn’t until we were in bed for the night that I asked Joe about Harry. In the odd, intervening hours, first at the restaurant and then back at the lodge as we made supper and got Kate bathed and down for the night, I had actually begun to wonder if I’d seen him at all, or had somehow imagined this. A little over three years had passed since we’d said our last good-bye, and his sudden, unannounced appearance at the church door, and his equally abrupt disappearance into the bright sun and snow, combined in my mind to give the whole thing a feeling of unreality.

“So that was really Harry,” I said.

We were lying close together but not touching, our bodies registering the fact that the two of us were still not quite used to being together again. And in a way, it felt like our first real night under the same roof as married people. I had been able to see him during his two years at the prison camp at Fort Devens, but these visits were awkward and sad, the two of us sitting across from one another at a cafeteria table under a big clock that ticked off each minute we had together, while a pair of bored MPs did their best to look like they’re weren’t listening. When Joe had finally come home, his father had been there with us all those nights, Joe and I taking shifts to tend to him and barely ever asleep in the same bed together.

Joe nodded against the pillow. “Yeah, that was Harry.”

I nestled against him and put my face close to his. “That was good of you, Joe. To call him, I mean.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” he said flatly. “Like I said, Dad asked me to.”

“Even so. I’m sure he appreciated it.”

I heard him sigh. “What’s done is done.”

Just then I heard Kate’s soft, barefooted trudge; I lifted my head to find her standing by our bed, clutching her ratty old baby blanket. She still wasn’t used to seeing anyone else in bed with me, and seemed to view Joe as a perplexing intrusion-nearly every night since Joe had gone away she had spent part or even all of her nights snuggled under the covers with me, just the two of us. My mother had scolded me for this, said it was a bad habit she would never grow out of, but I’d let Kate do it as much for me as for her.

“What is it, honey? Do you need to go?”

She rubbed her eyes and stretched her jaw in a dreamy, loose-jointed yawn that I knew meant she was still asleep, or mostly. “Come up,” she said quietly.

I drew back the covers and extended a hand to help her into bed. Without a word she rolled her weight over my chest and wedged herself down between me and Joe, pulling her baby blanket to her face and finding her mouth with her thumb. In another moment came the soft sound of her sucking, a rhythm so closely aligned with my own heart’s beating that it seemed to come from inside me. Even before she was born I had felt her as a vivid physical presence, each hiccup and poke like the tapping of a private code, as if to say: I’m here. Once, in my third trimester on a night I couldn’t sleep, I swore I heard her singing.

Joe’s voice rose into the darkness. “Luce?”

“Uh-huh?” Kate’s face was inches from my own, swarming my senses with the damp, doughy scent of her skin and hair.

“It’s all right,” Joe said, his voice so soft I could barely hear him. He reached over Kate to touch me, his fingers finding the hard bone of my elbow and resting there. “It’s all right,” he said again. “It’s all over now. Let’s go to sleep.”

August 1972. The camp had been up and running six weeks. A blur of days: I was overseeing the kitchen and taking care of the cabins and even guiding when there was no one else to do it, not that I knew a blessed thing about fishing; I just took my parties where Harry told me to go and pointed at the water. Besides the regular guests we had couples coming in from the Lakeland Inn nearly every morning to take the canoe trip down the river-Harry’s idea had turned out right as rain, a solid money maker-and as soon as breakfast was over I would load up the truck and run a group to the put-in point, racing back in time to start lunch, move a load of towels to the dryer, call the party supply company down in Portland to order the old movies we were showing in the lodge every Saturday night on a clicky old projector. I had taken up residence in one of the upstairs bedrooms-though I’d brought a few things over from my parents’ house, I was mostly still living out of the suitcase I’d taken with me to Boston, all those months ago. At night I fell into bed so bone-weary that I doubted anything short of an atomic blast would awaken me; but then as the clock inched toward five I’d find myself awake and counting cracks in the ceiling, my body twitching like a teenager’s, and before the sun was up I’d rise from bed, put on my bathing suit in the predawn cold, and spend the first thirty minutes of the morning swimming up and down the shoreline, sixty laps from dock to headland, each turn of my head showing me a patch of sky that was one shade lighter than it was before.

And as I swam each morning I thought: Lucy, you are happy. Lucy, you are alive, you are living your actual life. But then I thought of Joe, and knew this wasn’t so. I was living our life, the one we’d planned and hoped for; but I was doing this without him.

And then I thought of Harry.

To say that what transpired was a simple case of mistaken identity-me for Meredith, Harry for Joe-would not be completely wrong, and in hindsight I suppose that’s the explanation all parties involved have decided it’s easiest to live with, not that anybody’s ever said as much. But it’s also true that what happened that summer-beginning with the moment I discovered Harry on the dock and threw my arms around him, crying with relief, the hug and my tears embarrassing both of us so badly that another month would pass before we would actually touch each other again, even in passing-was a thing in its own right, a simple fact, as time and tides are facts. I did not fall in love with Harry, nor he with me, but something fell, and when it did, what remained was the two of us standing in a moment that felt as if neither past nor future had any place within it, that time was flowing all around it like a stream around a rock, and that this moment would be sealed forever, a secret life the two of us had lived together.

So I swam and cooked and slept and rose each day to start it all again, and all the while I felt my mind moving toward something, though at the time I could not say exactly what: there was pleasure in wondering what it could be, and I didn’t want to examine it too closely, so as not to scare it away.

Joe’s dad was still weak-the kidney infection had finally landed him down in Farmington for five days, when he confessed to passing blood-and Paul Kagan had instructed us not to let him do very much at all. He took his meals in the kitchen and used the rear stairs to go back and forth to his room, keeping out of sight except for the odd afternoon when I helped him down to the dock to smoke and read his paper, or Harry drove him to Paul’s office in town for a checkup. On the busiest days it was possible to forget he was there at all. I thought he’d want to help Harry with the books, but even this idea seemed not to interest him: if I hadn’t known better, I might have thought he’d simply given up. But in my heart I believed this couldn’t happen, not until Joe was finally home.

I knew the money situation was tight, but not how bad, until a Friday evening in August when Harry told me what was going on. It was past ten, everything buttoned down for the night, and the two of us were drinking a beer in the office while we went over a few invoices and computed the week’s payroll. The end of the season was in view-the birches had taken on a faded, exhausted look, and that morning I’d noticed dry leaves underfoot as I walked the trace to the cabins-and I think both of us felt the speed of its approach. What lay beyond was a mystery, for both of us. Harry’s house in New York had been sold; the buyers had asked if he’d be interested in selling the furniture, and he’d let them have that too. He still had his company, but he almost never spoke of this, and I had the feeling he almost wished he didn’t. He was mulling over a few ideas about what to do next, including reactivating his merchant mariner’s rating and going back to sea; one night he told me a story about a man he’d known during the war, a lifelong mariner who played guitar on deck at night, and how he’d heard in the notes that came from his strings the whole history of his life, a sweet sadness Harry had carried inside him ever since, and how he had always wanted to go back to sea again, to learn what was in that music. As for me, I had decided to stay at least through the winter to take care of Joe’s dad. After that, I didn’t know.

We finished up our paperwork and Harry went to the kitchen to get us each a second beer-probably not the best idea, given the hour, but it was surprisingly easy to say yes. More and more I’d found myself reluctant to go to bed no matter how tired I was, especially if Harry was up and felt like talking. When he returned we went over the week’s bookings for a while, and then I asked him about the taxes.

Harry frowned. “Well, it’s not good.”

“How much does he owe?”

“Are you ready? A little over forty thousand dollars. Forty-one something.”

The figure stopped me flat; I’d had no idea. “Jesus, Harry.”

“I know, it’s a lot. The good news is that local governments are usually slow about these things, especially in places like this. The records are a mess, a lot of people are in arrears. Sometimes it isn’t until somebody dies that the county catches on. Then the heirs have to pay up, or the county takes the property.”

“Could he borrow the money somehow?”

“He could. But he won’t. And I’m making it sound simpler than it is. The county might have already filed a lien. If so, he can’t borrow against the place, which is all he has for collateral. The business itself has a value of basically zero. He could maybe sell off a piece of land and satisfy the tax bill at settlement, assuming we could even find a buyer, but odds are it won’t pass a title search. Then the whole thing would blow up in our face.”

“How about the leases on the land on the other side?”

Harry sipped his beer. “Thought of that, too, but it won’t work. Technically, all Joe has is an easement. The way the contracts are written, he’d actually have to pay Maine Paper to break the lease. Or so my lawyers tell me. The upshot is, more money, which Joe doesn’t have.”

I sat and thought. I still had my savings account, but that came to only a few thousand dollars. My car, my clothes, every possession I had-none of it amounted to more than a couple of hundred more. Forty thousand: it was beyond imagining.

“Can we negotiate with the county?”

“Maybe. But I wouldn’t recommend it. They’d probably say no, for starters, and then we’ve tipped our hand. Once the county gets a serious look at the tax records, they could just seize the property with thirty days’ notice.”

“So there’s nothing to do but keep our mouths shut and pay.”

Harry nodded grimly. “Basically, that’s it.”

It was late; I caught myself yawning into my hand. A long day stretched ahead of us. A big party was coming in-three cabins, including number nine, which Harry had agreed to surrender for the week. Joe had offered him a room upstairs, but Harry had said no, the office couch would do just fine. He was always up so early, he said, it barely mattered where he slept.

“You’ll be all right down here?” I asked him.

From time to time that summer, at odd moments when he probably thought no one was watching, a kind of darkness crossed his face-a flitting shadow, like a bird behind a shade. When this happened he suddenly looked much older, as if all the thoughts he toted inside were simply too much to bear, the heaviest load ever carried by a man. I saw it now. But then he gave me a slow, deliberate smile, and the shadow vanished.

“Sure thing.” He looked me in the eye. “You know, you should try not to worry, Luce. This will all work out somehow.”

“I just can’t imagine this place being gone.”

“You’ll have it.” He nodded. “I promise. You and Joe.”

I thought for a moment he meant Joe Sr. But of course that wasn’t right: he meant Joe, my Joe.

“Harry-”

He cut me off, suddenly embarrassed. “It’s okay,” he said. “I know…” He stopped. “I just know, is all.”

The room had gotten very still. We were alone, and also not: Joe was there, my Joe, and also Meredith, the shadow behind Harry’s eyes, and the people we had all once been: the Lucy I was at seventeen, and the Harry I had met so long ago, standing by the dining room door he’d forgotten to close. All these people, and not just our memories of them: they hovered like ghosts, like living presences among us. I looked at Harry, wondering if he had felt it too, but he gave no sign.

Finally he cleared his throat. “So-” he began.

“Right. It’s late.” I stood, and so did Harry. “Thanks for the beer.”

“Anytime.”

What did I want to tell him? That Joe was never coming back, that I had put him aside in my heart, that whatever was going to happen in my life would happen without him? But I knew that wasn’t so, would never be so. Joe was why I’d come home, why I’d stopped being Alice. And yet here we were, Harry and I, doing just what I’d always thought I’d do with Joe: the beer and talk, the close heat of the office, the feeling, deep in my bones, of days passing into days. He had stepped into the space I had held for Joe, and I suddenly wanted to kiss him, to seal this bargain, a desire so sharp it felt like pain. The thought was so powerfully alive in my mind that for a second I thought I’d actually gone ahead and done it.

“Well, good night, Lucy.”

And all I said was good night.

The final Saturday of August: a day that began with a bang of thunder and sheets of soaking rain, though the temperature rose through the morning well into the eighties even as the rain poured down, so that it was both too hot and too wet to do anything but lie around like logs and complain about the weather. Saturday was checkout day: about half the cabins emptied by noon. In two more weeks we’d be closing down for the summer, though the season already felt over. With no one else going out on the water, and all the moose-canoers canceled, Harry took Joe’s dad into town to Porter’s for supplies, leaving me to keep the remaining guests occupied in the main room with board games and apple cobbler and pots of fresh coffee.

Just before sundown the last of the rain blew through, leaving in its wake a dome of dry air that seemed to settle in place with an audible snap. As dinner was winding down and guests were drifting out to the porch or back to their cabins, I stepped out the kitchen door and walked down to the water to take the air. All those hours cooped up in the lodge had made me antsy, and I eyed the lake hungrily, wishing I had time for a swim.

I heard the screen door slam behind me and turned to see Harry walking down the lawn. The summer had made him tanner than I’d ever seen; he was wearing khakis and an oxford cloth shirt the color of butter, wrinkled and rolled to the elbows, and for just a moment as he came and stood beside me, his hands in his pockets, I caught my mind drifting in the fan of golden hair on his ropy forearms.

“Thank God that’s over,” he said. “I thought we’d have a mutiny if the rain kept up.” He ran a hand over the back of his head and lifted his chin toward the water. “What do you say we show the movie out here? It’d be a nice treat after today.”

“On the dock, you mean?”

“Sure, why not? With this breeze the bugs won’t be too bad.”

I liked the idea, and while Harry went to see about chairs and setting up the screen, I returned to the office to find out what title the rental company had sent us. Usually I was working in the kitchen when it arrived by UPS on Thursday mornings, three dented canisters containing two cartoons and a feature, but not that week, and it had sat for two days on the office desk without my having a free moment even to peek. Most were old black-and-whites you could just as easily see on TV at three in the morning, cornball romances or tough-guy private-eye stuff, but the guests loved them, and when the cartoons were over and the kids whisked off to bed, it usually took less than five minutes for the grown-ups to break out the hard stuff, everybody getting cheerfully soused and yelling out the lines they knew or else bawling their eyes out.

I saw we were in luck: a couple of Road Runners, always a crowd-pleaser, followed by Casablanca. I’d seen it a dozen times, of course, but I still vividly remembered the first time, munching on popcorn in a friend’s finished basement while her parents slept upstairs, the two of us later sneaking cigarettes in her bedroom and trying to hold them like Bogey while blowing the smoke out an open window. I grabbed a sweater and carried the canisters down to the dock, where the guests were beginning to gather. Some of the men were carrying chairs down from the dining room; Harry was fiddling with the projector, aiming a square of light at the screen and trying to get the angle just so. A hum of anticipation: the dreary day had been rescued. Above us, the first stars were coming out.

Harry looked up from the projector and grinned. “What’s playing?”

“You’ll see,” I said, and handed him the first canister. I felt it, too; the evening was like a marvelous present, waiting to be opened. “It’s perfect. People will know every line.”

After the cartoons, we broke for thirty minutes so everyone could get the youngest children down for the night, then Harry started up the movie again and the bottles and paper cups came out. The ricocheting click of the projector and Bogey’s smoke-cured voice muttering out his sorrows; Ingrid Bergman’s enormous eyes, like pools of light floating over the water; Sam’s tinkling piano and the elusive letters of transport and the final, mad dash for the airfield and the last plane out, all debts of love and honor served: “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life…” As Rick and Louis walked away across the foggy tarmac, everybody shouted the final line and broke into applause.

Afterward the group dispersed, but no one was in the mood to sleep. Islands of conversation drifted all around the lawn and cabins, punctuated by bursts of boozy laughter. This always happened once or twice a summer: out of the blue a spontaneous party would seize the place like a fever, and nobody would make it to bed until three or four in the morning. I’d had a couple of drinks myself, Scotch with something sweet in it that someone had passed me in a paper cup. Once the chairs and projector were put away in the storage closet, I went upstairs and dressed in my suit to clear my head with a swim. Party or no, I would still be up by six to cook breakfast, even if nobody showed.

The water was cold from the rain, but I swam my laps easily, my brain still cloudy from the liquor. When I was done I lay on my back, just floating, my face lifted to a veil of stars so thick I felt I could brush them with my hand. It was almost over, my strange, happy summer, and I would have stayed that way forever if I could have, floating and looking, to freeze the feeling in my mind. Then I heard running footsteps and a splash.

“God, it’s freezing!” Harry dove beneath the surface again and reappeared a few feet in front of me, treading water. “Tell me again why you do this.”

I righted myself and took a step toward him. “You can stand here, you know.”

He bobbed on his toes. “Oh. So I see.”

He reached his hand to my face and kissed me then, or I kissed him; who kissed who I couldn’t say. We kissed each other, the taste of it mixed up with the metallic flavor of the lake and the sweetened Scotch I’d drunk and all the time in which we’d never kissed each other. When we stopped I said, “What are we doing?” And then, “I’m cold.”

“Where will you go, Lucy?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“You can come with me. We can go anywhere.”

“Anywhere is not a good idea, Harry,” I said. “If there’s one thing I know, I’m not a girl who can just go anywhere.”

“You’re shivering.”

My chin and then my whole body were trembling. I wanted him to kiss me again. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, Harry. Your eyes. There’s something about them, how blue they are. So very, very blue.”

“It’s all right, then?”

“Yes,” I said, and felt it fold around me: the feeling of a secret, and the moment of bottled time. “It’s all right. It’s all right, Harry.”

“They’ve forgotten us,” Harry was saying. “We’re like this place. Nobody knows it but us.”

We were kissing again, still kissing. “But we’ll know. That’s the thing, isn’t it? We’ll know.”

“That’s right,” he said. “We’ll always know.” Then he took my hand and said, “Come on.”

And that was how it happened.

Two weeks later, Harry was gone. He left behind three things. The first two I found in his cabin, meant for me. A check for forty-one thousand dollars, made out to the county. And the pills he’d planned to use to kill himself, the same ones he had used to help Meredith die.

In the two weeks that Harry and I were lovers, he told me about Meredith, and not just what happened at the end. He told me about how they had met, and fallen in love, and what she wore the day they married, and about the day Sam was born and seeing Hal that autumn evening in the driveway, holding his basketball: all of it. He took his time, letting the night pass as he told the story, the two of us curled like cats on the creaky cot in his cabin; when he finished the sun was rising, and together we swam in the lake that now seemed like it was only ours and went to the kitchen to warm ourselves with coffee and wait for the sounds from the dining room, the footsteps and clearing throats, that would mean another twelve hours would pass before we could be alone again. About the pills and his plans for them, he didn’t say; but when I was cleaning out his cabin the afternoon after I’d discovered that the Jag was missing from the spot where it had sat, collecting tree sap and pollen, since June, and found them in the medicine cabinet, and then saw what they were and who they were for, I knew. You saved me, the pills said to me, and in my head I answered, No, you saved me, Harry. I think we saved each other. I opened the bottle and counted them out in my palm: thirteen, shaped like tiny eggs. Thirteen ways to sleep and dream your life away. I was standing next to the open toilet; I opened my fingers and watched them fall into the water, one by one by one, knowing they were another secret I was meant to keep, and would.

Another two weeks passed. On a bright afternoon in mid-September, I took my last swim of the year. The leaves were pouring down; the water was cold as ice under a thinning autumn sun. Around the lake, the woods flamed with a thousand hues of red and orange. I did my laps quickly, my mind on nothing, and when I was done I spread a towel on the dock to give my skin a final taste of summer.

I might have slept awhile, and dreamed, or else my thoughts were simply drifting, pushed by the currents of heat that moved along my body. I thought of my first night in my apartment in Portland, and the aurora borealis I had watched from the window in March, that curtain of shimmering, angelic light; I thought of Joe, disappearing up the gangplank of the Jenny-Smith, his footsteps echoing on the cold metal, and the winter sun in the curtains of the motel room where I awoke two days later; and Harry rising from the water to kiss me. A hundred images from my life, and then a hundred more, unspooling like film in the clicky projector, the sound growing louder and louder until I knew it was my heart, clicking in my chest; and beneath it the feeling, almost beyond words, that something new was moving inside me: something was happening, something was coming near. What in the world?

I sat bolt upright, too fast. My head felt weightless, made of air. A black wave rose to my throat, and the next thing I knew was the world turned upside down as I hung my head over the edge of the dock to vomit; and what the third thing was.

NINETEEN

I made it all the way to California before I turned around. Another ocean on another coast: the buildings, the light, the sea itself, everything was strange and wrong, bleached by the light in a way that seemed dirty. I’d arrived in LA the night before on a bus from Nogales; the hour was too late to find a place to stay, so I’d slept on a hard bench in the station, then in the morning found my way on a series of city buses to the pier in Santa Monica. I was twenty pounds underweight, my jeans and T-shirt stiff with grime; my beard, flecked with equal parts red and gray, climbed halfway up my cheeks. I’d traded the duffel bag for a backpack in New Mexico, where I’d briefly worked crating artichokes, a vegetable I’d never eaten. It was March, still winter back home. The air around the Santa Monica pier smelled of flowers and the sea. On the concrete path that edged the shore, grown men and women were roller-skating, something I thought only children did. Other people were walking, so I did too, down the shore to Venice, past the weight-lifting cages and T-shirt stands and head shops, and farther still, until I found myself on a section of beach that looked like nobody ever went there, beneath the airport glide path. I slept that night under an empty lifeguard station, listening to the heavy roar of the planes that flew so low I could feel the air compress around me as they passed; in the morning I walked back north and found a little coffee shop where I ate a buttered roll and washed up in the men’s room. My face in the chipped mirror was one I hardly recognized. A feeling of finality washed over me; I’d gone as far as I could, and it wasn’t enough. “Go home,” I said to my reflection. “It’s over. Go home, Joe.” I stepped back into the restaurant and asked the counterman if he knew where the nearest freeway on-ramp was, and he told me, with an impatient wave of his hand, that I was practically standing on it. Go out the back door, he said, walk another two blocks, and that’s the 10. Take you all the way to Florida.

I arrived in town on April Fool’s Day, in the cab of a logging truck that had brought me up from Portland. The driver let me out on Main Street, near the boarded-up bulk of the Lakeland Inn, before zooming off; clenching the collar of my threadbare jean jacket against the wind, I hiked up to the pay phone to call the lodge.

I had been gone a little over four years-four years, five months, and an odd number of days-and I knew I should have felt something, joy or sadness or maybe just relief. But the truth is, all I felt was tired. There was no other place for me to go, no spot on earth for me but the one I was finally in, even if that would be taken from me soon enough. I wondered how long it would take before I was arrested, who would see me first and make the call. But even this question aroused in me little more than a passing curiosity, as if I were thinking of another person entirely, some unlucky soul I had heard about on the television news in Albuquerque or over a pitcher of beer in a taproom in Omaha. As I stood in the booth, breathing on my bare hands for warmth and listening to the phone in the lodge ringing for the twentieth, unanswered time, a VW Squareback coasted by me. The driver, a youngish woman I didn’t recognize-Shellie Wister, though I didn’t know that then-turned her head to give me a long, appraising look as she passed. For an instant I felt my stomach twist with fear, then thought how stupid this was. For all anybody could tell from the window of a moving car, I was just some vagrant, using the telephone.

The only thing to do was walk. I stepped from the booth and looked at the sky, a churning bulk of gray. The ground was bare, but that meant nothing; I had left in snow, and unless I missed my guess, I would be returning in it too.

I arrived at the camp in darkness, half frozen. For the last five miles I had walked with my fingers in my mouth. Only a single light glowed from the living room. The weather had held off, but you could taste snow in the air. I tried the front door but it was locked, so I went around back to the kitchen, where we had always hidden a key on a nail, and let myself in.

I should have been hungry, but the cold had taken my appetite away; it was all I could do to get a fire going and huddle on the sofa with a blanket around me. Eventually I slept, and awoke to a sweep of headlights across the ceiling. The sound of the front door squeaking open on its hinges, and voices murmuring in the hall: one was my father’s, the other I knew but couldn’t place. I watched from the sofa as the two men made their way into the darkened room and fumbled for the light switch.

“Joey, Jesus Christ!”

My father, backlighted in the golden glow of the lamp, stood before me. My first impression was that he had become old, an old man. His face had yellowed like newspaper; his hair was nearly gone. He stood oddly, leaning slightly to one side, supporting his weight on a silver cane, which, at the instant I saw it, he dropped with a slap on the hard plank floor. The last of his strength seemed to be leaving him at just that moment.

“Joey, Joey, my God.”

I rose and put my arms around him. “It’s all right, Dad. I’m home.”

“Joey, Joey.”

“I tried to call. I got no answer.”

“We were at the hospital.” The voice was the second man’s; I’d almost forgotten he was there. I brought the image into focus: Paul Kagan.

“The hospital.” I looked at Paul. “What’s wrong? Is he all right?”

My father shook his head. “It’s not me. It’s Lucy.”

“Lucy? What’s wrong?”

“When did you come back?” my father said. “You should have told me, Joey.”

“Dad, what are you talking about? What’s at the hospital?”

“Your daughter, Joey.” He looked me firmly in the eye. “Lucy wouldn’t tell me, but I knew. Your daughter was born last night.”

And so a family story was made: how I had returned the previous summer, unknown, under cover of darkness, to be with Lucy; and how eight months later, knowing the child we had conceived on that visit was about to be born, I had come home to claim her, and face the music of my life. A story in which I was in one way a hero, and another way not; but a story nevertheless, built foursquare on the moment when my father looked me in the eye and told me Kate was mine, and I didn’t say a word, my silence saying yes. I never learned if he knew the truth, and even in the final weeks of his life I didn’t find the courage to ask him. But my heart tells me he did not; one thing my father never could do was lie. He might have had an easier life if this had been possible, but it simply wasn’t.

We brought Lucy and Kate home two days later. Lucy had gone into labor early on the morning of the first day of her thirty-fifth week, and when my father couldn’t get Paul Kagan on the phone, he had somehow driven her down to Farmington. By the time they arrived her labor had stopped, but they admitted her anyway, and when her contractions returned the following evening, my father was there. These were the old days, when a man at a birth (except for the doctor-always a man) was as rare as a comet in a June sky, so when I say my father was present, I mean sitting just outside the room, probably hankering hard for a cigarette nobody would let him smoke. One Joe Crosby in place of another: he told me he’d been glad to do it and knew I would have been there if I could.

Lucy was very weak, and the day we brought her home the snow, which had held itself at bay, arrived: a heavy spring storm, flakes the size of pennies that fell from an absolutely windless sky, so that the only sound to be heard was just that: the sound of falling snow. The power failed the next evening, a beautiful, sudden dimming that seemed to freeze time, taking the furnace and phones with it, and then the cold slid in behind the snow, a heart-stopping plunge that set a record for the month of April when, on the second day, the temperature hit minus twenty-two. Lucy’s early labor had been caused by high blood pressure, and the drugs they’d given her to keep her from seizing left her ill and exhausted, almost unable to talk. I nailed blankets over the windows and filled the hearth with wood, and when Kate wasn’t feeding I took her with me to the big room by the fireplace, where I held her against my bare chest under piles of old quilts. I didn’t know a thing about babies, but it turned out I didn’t need to. It happened like this: She was another man’s child, and then she wasn’t. I held my little five-pound Kate against my skin, each one of my senses tuned to the little puffs of air that moved from her chest as she breathed and slept, and as the days slid by, taking all my loneliness with them, that’s what she became: my Kate.

My story should end there, and in a way it does: lying on the sofa under the blankets, I agreed to be her father, that this would be my life from now on. I married Lucy, as I had always meant to, and when my father died, the camp became ours, Lucy’s, Kate’s, and mine, and it was a life I was happy to have. But between those days of cold and Kate and everything else, there was one thing left to do.

At the end of the fourth day the power came on, and the next morning I heard the sound of chained tires outside: Porter Dante, pushing his plow. I put on my coat and boots and slogged through waist-deep snow to fetch a shovel from the shed; it was still below freezing, so the snow was dry, but it still took the rest of the morning to dig out the truck and clear a walkway to the door. After so many days inside, my body took gratefully to the work, and by the time I was through I had stripped down to a T-shirt and was still sweating like a prize-fighter. My father always kept a pack of Larks in the glove compartment of his truck; I shook one out and lit it, my first in months, and sat on the porch steps to watch the smoke from my lungs drift away into the snowy limbs. When I was done I smoked another, tossed the butts away, and returned to the house.

Lucy and Kate were sleeping. My father was sitting in the kitchen, nursing a cup of tea.

“We’re out of everything,” I said. “The roads are probably clear by now. I thought I’d go into town.”

“You smell like smoke. Didn’t think you did that anymore.”

I shrugged. “I don’t, not really. I helped myself to a couple of yours, though.”

He sighed, rising to rinse his cup. On a shelf above the sink was an old mayonnaise jar where he kept a few bills; balancing on his cane, he reached into it and handed me a twenty.

“Just be careful,” he said.

The IGA was open but the shelves were nearly bare, picked clean in the panicked hours before the storm. I took what I could find-milk, eggs, instant coffee, a package of bacon, a big bag of Oreos, some cans of beans and vegetables and a jumbo pack of diapers-and loaded it all in the truck. The sun had finally broken through the clouds, a welcome sight, and the streets were already half flooded with slushy runoff. Despite my father’s warning I wasn’t worried about being seen, not really; the storm seemed to have wiped everything, all other cares, away.

I was a mile from the county road when Darryl Tanner’s police cruiser appeared at the crest of the next hill. Too late: there was nowhere to turn, no way to pull off and let him pass without seeing me. I dropped my speed to the limit, forty-five, and prayed my beard would be enough to throw him off the trail, though of course there was no way to disguise the truck itself, a pea-green ’58 Ford with the camp name painted on the driver’s door. Tanner would know perfectly well whose truck it was and wonder who in hell was driving it, beard or no. My only hope was that the driving was slick enough that Tanner would be too busy keeping his cruiser on the road to give me a serious look. As we passed each other he lifted a finger off the steering wheel in greeting; I returned the gesture, my breath stuck in my chest. I lifted my eyes to the mirror and counted to three, each second taking Tanner’s cruiser farther away from me.

“You didn’t even see me!” I cried out, and slapped the wheel with joy. “It’s me, you asshole!”

Then I saw it: the flash of Tanner’s brake lights in my mirror, like two red eyes flaring. The gesture was pure reflex, the barest tap of the foot; it was over in a heartbeat. But in that instant I knew his body was registering what his mind had told him; that he knew just who he’d seen.

They arrived the morning of the next day, Tanner’s cruiser followed by an army jeep. I watched from a window upstairs in Lucy’s room, where she was feeding Kate. Tanner and two MPs got out and spoke a moment; from his gestures I could tell he was pointing out where the various exits were, in case I decided to make a run for it. One of the MPs split off, headed for the rear of the house.

My father appeared in the bedroom door. “Joey-”

I turned from the window as Tanner and the other MP vanished from view beneath the snow-covered porch roof below me. “It’s okay, Dad. I’ll talk to them.”

Lucy lifted Kate onto her shoulder to burp her, and looked up at the two of us from bed. “Talk to who? What’s going on?”

I kissed the top of Kate’s head. From downstairs I heard three hard pounds on the front door. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back in a minute.”

I opened the door just as Tanner had lifted his fist to bang a second time. “There’s no cause to make such a racket, Darryl. We can hear you fine.”

He looked around me through the screen. “Your father home, Joey?”

“Just me and Lucy.” The MP stood behind him, his hand on his holster. He looked like a senior in high school. “You can tell your buddy no use slogging around in the snow. I’m right here. And for god’s sake stop fooling with that gun. We’ve got a baby in the house.”

Tanner frowned. “They’re just doing it by the numbers, Joey.”

The second MP appeared at the base of the porch, clumps of snow stuck to him all the way up to his waist. He was a little out of breath. “Is that the guy?”

“Right here, in the flesh.” I pushed open the screen door. “Might as well do this inside so we don’t let all the cold air in. Mind your shoes now, everyone.”

I led them to the main room, where my father was waiting with Lucy and, swaddled to her chin, Kate.

“Well, look here.” He might have been the sheriff, ready to haul me off to jail, but Darryl was a grandfather too. Smiling broadly, he took off his hat and approached Lucy. “May I?”

She turned Kate around to show him, and Darryl bent at the neck to look. He gave a little admiring whistle.

“What do you call her?”

“Kate.”

“Well, hello, Miss Kate.” He touched her ear and shifted his eyes to me. “This have something to do with you, Joey?”

“You could say that.”

“Well, good for you. Though under the circumstances I’m afraid it doesn’t change a thing.” Darryl looked at my father then. “Joey says you’re not here. Good thing, because if you were, that would be aiding and abetting.”

My father folded his arms over his chest. “Cut the crap, Darryl. You want to arrest me, too, go right ahead.”

“Joe, if I’d wanted to arrest you, I could have done it long ago. Joey, I’m afraid you’re a different story. I’m guessing you know why these gentlemen are here.”

“Was I speeding?”

Darryl sighed impatiently. “I’ll say it to both of you, right now, and excuse me, Lucy, especially with the new baby and all. But you can just knock it the hell off. This isn’t a social call, and we’re not talking about a few mailboxes, Joey. I’ve got an outstanding warrant for you on the charge of desertion, and it’s my job to arrest you and turn you over to these nice fellows, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Is that clear to everyone?”

“Nice speech, Darryl,” I said. I looked at the two MPs. “How about it, guys, you want some coffee?”

The taller one, whom I guessed was in charge, checked his watch. His face had a bit of acne. “We don’t have to be back on base until fifteen hundred.”

Darryl frowned. “A little coffee isn’t going to solve this, Joey.”

“Didn’t say it would. Just trying to be hospitable.” I turned to Lucy. “You think my father could mind the baby a minute?”

Lucy passed Kate to my father. Tanner cleared his throat and looked at me cautiously. “No funny stuff, all right, Joey? I would hate to see you make a run for it.”

I wanted to laugh. “Christ, Darryl, where would I go?” I showed the MPs where the kitchen was. “Coffee right through there, guys, cream in the fridge, sugar over the stove. Help yourself to some cookies too. We’ll be back in a minute.”

Lucy followed me upstairs to her room and shut the door behind us. “Joe, they’re going to arrest you.”

“I know.” We sat together on the bed. “I’ll tell you something. I want them to. Not for any reason other than to have this be over. A couple of years, probably. I’ve heard of guys who’ve gotten less.”

She began to cry. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I took her hands and made her look at me. I’d never felt so certain of anything in my life. “Don’t be, because I’m not. Not anymore. I’m tired of running, Lucy. I need to come home.”

“I want you to, Joe. I think that’s all I ever wanted.”

“Good. Here’s the other thing. I’m sorry this is so fast, but it has to be. I’ll raise Kate, be her father. You can tell Harry, but not for a while, at least until we know what’s going to happen to me. I just want us to be together, a family. Agreed?”

I was prepared to tell her more, but I didn’t have to. She put her arms around me, nodding fiercely.

When we came downstairs five minutes later, everyone was waiting in the kitchen. One of the MPs was holding Kate in his lap while the other was doing itsy-bitsy spider for her. When they saw us the one who was holding her stood quickly, his face flustered with embarrassment, and handed her back to Lucy.

“Sorry, ma’am. Your father said it would be all right. She sure is a cutie. I’ve got a niece not much bigger than that.”

Lucy let the error pass. “I don’t think I got your name, soldier.”

“Samuels, ma’am. Corporal Samuels.” He tipped his head toward his companion. “That’s Hickock.”

“Well, you held her very nicely, Corporal Samuels. You ever want a job babysitting, you come by, all right?”

He nodded nervously, his face pink as a ham. “Yes, ma’am.”

Lucy and I sat at the table and told Darryl Tanner what we wanted to do. He listened to what we had to say, helping himself to Oreos from the open bag on the table as we talked.

“That’s a new one on me,” he said when we were finished, and scratched his head. “Problem is, the state of Maine says a three-day wait once you get the license. But I might be able to pull a string or two, assuming it’s all right with these fellows. What do you say, gentlemen? A little detour?”

They exchanged a look and shrugged. “As long as it’s on the way,” Hickock said. “One guy, we stopped at his mother’s house to help him move a sofa.”

Tanner went to the office to use the phone. A few minutes later he returned, rubbing his hands together.

“Well, you’re in luck. Woman who answered in the county clerk’s office knows my sister pretty well. French Catholic, so this is right up her alley. She says she can backdate the license, so long as we all keep it under our hats. The question of officiation is another issue. The county clerk is away in Florida, got stranded by the storm. But she’s looking around to see who she can scare up.”

Lucy, Kate, and I rode together in the back of Tanner’s cruiser, my father and the MPs following in the jeep. By the time we arrived in Farmington it was after two. We stopped in a diner across from the courthouse for hamburgers and Cokes while Lucy changed Kate’s diaper and the MPs phoned the stockade to tell them we were running late, and then we walked across the street, where the woman Tanner had spoken to on the phone was waiting for us in the clerk’s office. She was a woman in her fifties, round as a beachball and with hair frizzed by too many trips to the beauty parlor. When she saw the MPs she gave a startled look.

“Friends of the family,” I said.

Lucy and I filled out the paperwork, each of us holding Kate while the other one signed the license. Then we followed the woman into an empty courtroom.

“You all have a seat,” she said. “He’ll be along in just a minute.”

“Who will?” Lucy asked, bouncing Kate.

“Carl Hinkle, fellow who owns the shoe store around the corner,” she said.

A little while later the door opened and in walked a slender man wearing a parka over his brown suit, and shiny new loafers.

“Is this my happy couple?” His eyes found the MPs, then Kate, sitting in Lucy’s lap. “I see. I guess we better get a move on.”

“Is this legal?” Lucy asked.

He showed us his JP’s license, a slip of damp paper he produced from the folds of his wallet. Kate had begun to fuss, so we all waited while Lucy fed her, holding her inside her heavy coat.

“Do you want me to say a few words?” Carl asked me quietly. One of the MPs had brought a deck of cards, and the two of them and Darryl Tanner were playing a round of hearts. “Perhaps,” he offered, “given your situation, you’d like something quicker.”

“Take your time,” I said.

After the ceremony we signed some more papers and walked around the block to the shoe store, where Carl told Lucy and me to pick something out. Lucy selected a pair of black mary-janes, and little pink lace-ups for Kate. I tried on a pair of loafers, like Carl’s, but these seemed impractical given where I was headed, and I opted for a pair of steel-toed work boots instead. When we tried to pay, Carl refused.

“Comes with the service,” he explained. “Footwear is a living, but it’s the weddings that are my real calling.”

He kissed Lucy on the cheek, shook my hand and then my father’s. Outside by the jeep, Darryl Tanner officially transferred my custody to the MPs, and Hickock took out a pair of handcuffs from a compartment on his belt.

“I’m real sorry about this, Joe.”

“That’s okay. Could we do it in front?”

He shook his head. “Can’t. I’ll make ’em real loose, though.” He clicked the bracelets closed and regarded my feet. “Those are good boots,” he said.

The day was late. I looked toward the snowy sidewalk, where my father and Darryl were standing.

“You make sure my family gets home all right, Darryl. And Dad, look after my girls now. I’m counting on you.”

He nodded soberly. “You have my word, Joey.”

I kissed Lucy, then Kate, leaning against them. We were all three crying a little. It was me who stopped first, though that was only because somebody had to. Then the MPs helped me into the back of the jeep and took me away.

TWENTY

By two I’d seen neither Harry nor Hal (I’d spoken briefly with Frances as she made her way back and forth to the kitchen for sandwiches and sodas; no change, was the gist of what she said); the moose-canoers were still somewhere upstream floating our direction; Joe was still out with the lawyers at the old Zisko Dam; and I found myself with absolutely nothing to do but wait. I killed a couple of hours rebuilding the loose stair-risers to cabin three-whatever a three-stage, thirteen planetary gear system was, it drove a deckscrew like a champ-and when that was done, lubed and cleaned out a couple of the outboards, working down by the dock below Harry’s cabin. Once in a while I saw Hal step out with January, or Frances would appear to stretch and wave or head off to the kitchen or phone. Sometime after four, Lucy came down, bringing me a thermos of coffee and a bacon sandwich, and while I ate we sat together on the dock, just as we had done a thousand times before-spinning out the coming week’s details, the chores that needed to be done and who was coming in for how many days and which cabins needed to be tidied and stocked. When I’d finished my sandwich and thanked her, she rose, tucking the thermos under her elbow, and looked back at the cabin where Harry and his family were waiting out the afternoon.

“It just breaks my heart to see him like this,” she said. “You know, with everything else that’s gone on, it’s easy to forget that he’s just a human being, afraid to die like the rest of us.”

“You think he’s just trying to take his mind off it?”

“Some. Sure.” She pushed her bangs off her forehead, glazed with sweat in the afternoon heat. “He’s a proud man. You didn’t know him as a young man, but I did. One thing he was, was proud.”

The way she said this, an awful sadness stitched to her voice, made me think she’d said more than she wanted to. “Luce-”

She held up a hand. “That’s all, Jordan. I’m happy it’s you he picked. He could have picked anyone, you know.”

“I’m still not sure why me.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way. But I don’t think it’s anything you did. I think it probably has more to do with who you are.”

“That’s what Kate said.”

“Did she? Well, I think she’s right, Jordan. What you have to understand is that this is a gift he’s giving everyone, not just you. There’s a lot of history here. That’s why we can’t refuse.”

She paused, let her eyes drift from my face back to the cabin, and then turned to give me a shining, distant smile-a smile that came straight from the past.

“Well. I’ve said too much as it is. If you don’t mind my butting my nose in a little, you should know that I think my daughter has some pretty strong feelings for you. And I approve.”

“Thank you, Lucy. That means a lot.”

“And Joe does too. I don’t think I have to ask you how you feel?”

For a long, long moment we looked at one another. And then-I swear this is true-I knew. Somehow, I knew. Lucy had loved Harry once. It didn’t make sense, but it also did; it explained absolutely everything. Lucy had loved him once, maybe loved him still.

Behind us Harry’s cabin door creaked open on its hinges; we turned our heads and watched Hal emerge, squinting in the sunlight. He clomped down to the dock and stood beside Lucy, rocking on his handsome old boots.

“Afternoon.” He smoothed out his ponytail and then held a hand over his eyes against the glare streaming off the lake. “Day’s almost gone.”

“There’s time yet,” I said.

“I almost wish there weren’t. The news is, he wants to go.”

I looked at Lucy, whose face told me nothing-where had she gone, I wondered, what memory?-then back quickly to Hal.

“You’re sure about this?”

“Am I sure?” He gave a tired laugh. “Hell, Jordan, if it were up to me we’d already be in Portland. Or back in New York. Christ, we never would have left in the first place.” He shook his head and turned on his heels to go. “Get your stuff, Jordan. My father’s coming out.”

It was after five by the time we got him ready. After Hal’s announcement, I went to get the gear, which I had waiting in the office: an extra fly rod (Harry would have his own), my vest, a knapsack of miscellaneous tack and tools. Earlier in the day Lucy had made a picnic lunch and left it in the big cooler in the kitchen; I didn’t know if Harry had eaten or how long we’d be on the water, so I packed this too, tucking it in the wheelbarrow beside the floatable cushions I’d taken from the shed to make a kind of bed for Harry in the bottom of the boat. Other things: a blanket, a couple of heavy sweaters, a flashlight the size of a billy club that I could also use to brain a fish if that’s what Harry wanted. I put it all in the wheelbarrow, then had one last thought and returned to the office and opened the desk drawer where Joe kept the Scotch. I looked at the bottle and gave it a shake. Only four fingers were left, and I poured half of that into a thermos, mixed it with some reheated coffee left over from lunch and a couple of spoonfuls of sugar, and topped it off with a swirl of heavy cream. It would get cold, I knew, when the sun went down.

The day had given me the chance to make a plan, and what I had in mind for Harry was simple enough. Harry couldn’t stand, which meant we’d have to fish from the boat; because he wanted to fish the surface, the best place to lie would be the shallows on the far side of the lake where the river fed into it. There was a chance we’d get something, but not much of one. All the big insect hatches were over, and anyone who fly-fishes will tell you that casting blind on still waters may be a pleasant way to kill a couple of hours, but is as close as you get to a complete waste of time. Time, of course, was exactly what Harry didn’t have.

I trundled all my supplies down to the dock, where everyone was waiting: Hal, holding January on his hip, Lucy, and Kate, who scrambled up the path to help with the gear. Joe was still nowhere to be seen; I heard Hal ask Lucy if she’d heard anything, and she said no, she’d been trying to raise him on the radio all day. Probably he’d left it somewhere out of reach, she said, or had forgotten to turn it on.

Kate had just returned from town with a load of toilet paper and other sundries and was waiting for the newlyweds, to show them some of the cabins.

“Your first customers,” she said, nudging me with her elbow as we unloaded the wheelbarrow. “I bet they book for at least a week.”

“They seemed to like the place.”

“They were sweet. But they liked you, is what they liked.”

And then the door swung open, and Harry came out. Hal handed his daughter off to Lucy and trotted up the dock to the porch, and with Frances hovering nearby, helped him down onto the lawn. I pulled the skiff around to shore, where Kate and I nosed it up onto the grass. From the wheelbarrow I took the cushions and laid them out between the middle and rear seats and covered the edge of the bench with the blanket, so Harry could lean against it without too much pain. This wouldn’t leave much room for me, but that was the idea; sitting on the rear bench with my knees apart, Harry’s back and shoulders tucked between them, I could help him with his fly rod and maneuver the boat too.

Harry wasn’t using the walker, a good sign, and it seemed to me that he looked a little better than he had the night before. He moved slowly but not hesitantly, lifting and planting his feet with calm precision as he made his way down to us, like a skater testing the ice. In his old jeans and sweater and canvas fishing vest bulging with fly boxes, he might have been one more old guy out to bag himself a trout on a summer evening, if you didn’t look too closely-didn’t notice the unnatural slowness with which Hal and Frances seemed to move beside him, each of them cupping one of his elbows, or the box that hung from Harry’s shoulder: a gleaming cube about half the size of an automobile battery, with the sculpted curves and sterile whiteness of expensive respiratory prosthetics. A tube ran from the box to the back of Harry’s neck, reappearing as a necklace under his nose. As he approached, I heard the box making a kind of clicking noise, and beneath that, the tiny whistling of the oxygen, like a breeze through a cracked window. On his other shoulder he carried a wicker creel, a lovely old relic with brass eyelets and soft leather hinges the color of the creamed coffee. He moved down the lawn by inches. A mist of white whiskers frosted his chin and cheeks. When he reached us at the boat he studied it carefully.

“I see we’re ready,” he said.

“Yes, sir. The cushions should be comfortable, and keep you off the bottom so you’ll stay dry.”

He gave me a tight, businesslike nod and regarded the boat again. “Now, how I’m going to get in there I don’t think I know.”

“I thought Hal and I could lift you. If that’s all right.”

“Fair enough,” Harry said. He gave a short, wet cough to clear his throat. “I don’t weigh what I used to by a long shot.”

Frances took the respirator from his shoulder, and I positioned myself to one side and slightly behind him; he bent his knees, released a sigh, and in an instant all of Harry Wainwright filled my arms again, amazing me a second time with his lightness. He was right; there wasn’t much left. Hal and Kate took up positions on the far side of the boat, and together we lowered Harry Wainwright to the cushions.

He looked around cheerfully from his new position. “Like the gondolas of Venice,” Harry said. “Have you been there, Jordan?”

“No, sir, I can’t say I have.” I was pleased to hear him talk this way-to hear him talk about anything at all. “You know how much I have to do around here. I bet it’s nice, though.”

“You should go,” he said. “When all this is over, do yourself a favor and go. The Rialto, the Piazza San Marco, il Canale Grande.” He said the last with a startlingly elegant trill to his voice, then crinkled his brow when he saw my face. “Don’t look so surprised, Jordan.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “It means ‘big canal,’ right?”

He waved a finger in the air. “ Grand Canal, Jordan.”

Hal returned from the porch with Harry’s rod and laid it beside him. The respirator, clicking away, was tucked on the floor by his side, and Hal wrapped it in a garbage bag. “Pop, remember, you have to keep this thing dry. Jordan? It’s important.”

Frances bent her face close to Harry’s and brushed his hair into place with her fingers. “You do what Jordan tells you,” she said.

“This is what happens when you’re old and about to die,” Harry said. “Everybody treats you like a child. It’s the best part.”

Hal pulled me aside, lowering his voice to speak in confidence. “Get him back by sundown, okay? No matter what he says.” He glanced over my shoulder at his father, bobbing in the water. “He’s not as good as he seems. We’ve got the car packed and ready to go.”

“It’s all right, Hal. I’ll take good care of him. You have my word.”

“I want you to know, Jordan, how grateful we are to you. I don’t think I’ve told you this before. Harry truly thinks of you as one of us. You know that, but I wanted you to hear it from me.”

“I appreciate that.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I put my hand out, and we shook. “I’m glad to do it.”

I waded into the lake, where Kate and Lucy were holding the boat in two feet of water, and hoisted myself onto the rear seat, being mindful not to get the respirator wet. With Harry between my knees, it was a tight fit, but I thought we’d be able to manage, as long as Harry could bend forward at the waist to reach his rod. I pivoted to start the outboard-a neat trick, with so little room-when Harry stopped me.

“ Jordan, I was hoping we could row.”

I don’t know why this surprised me; of course that’s what he wanted. “It’ll take us an hour at least to get to the inlet.”

“Even so,” Harry said.

I glanced at Hal, who shrugged. I climbed back out of the boat and stepped back in amidships, easing myself onto the second seat. Kate went up to the shed to get a pair of oars and waded out to hand them to me. Harry and I were facing one another now.

“See?” Harry said. “It’s better this way. Now we can talk.” Kate was still holding the side of the boat, and he took her hand, folding her fingers under his. For a moment all I could hear was the sound of water lapping against the boat and the mechanical ticking of Harry’s respirator. His voice was moist and soft and far away. “It’s a crazy thing to want, isn’t it?”

“Not at all.” Kate smiled into his face. “I think it’s perfect. You should do what makes you happy, Harry.” She leaned over the boat and kissed his forehead. “For luck,” she said.

“Thank you.” Harry turned his eyes to look at Lucy, holding January at the water’s edge: Lucy, with a little girl in her arms. “Thank you, everyone.”

And so at last-all eyes upon us, the afternoon sun declining and evening coming on-we went.

TWENTY-ONE

Hickock was right: they were good boots. I wore them all two years, six months, three weeks, and six days I spent in the care of the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons, the first eight months at the Allenwood Federal Correctional Institute in the mountains of central Pennsylvania, the rest at the prison camp attached to the army psychiatric hospital at Fort Devens, just outside Boston. I was assigned to the laundry, and when a few months had passed and I had proved myself a model prisoner-silent, incurious, interested only in making my way through the small business of each day and on to the next-I got myself reassigned to an orderly detail, pushing carts of soggy food from room to room and cleaning out pans and breaking up fights over the channel changer and Ping-Pong table. It was easy time to do; it was all the time in the world, with a world of nothing in it.

I had been sentenced to thirty-six months. This in itself was a shock, but my lawyer assured me that the chances were small I’d have to do all of it, so long as I kept my nose clean. Draft resisters had become a political hot potato; almost certainly some kind of clemency was going to be granted now that the last troops had pulled out of Southeast Asia, and the fact that I had turned myself in (not quite true, but that was how we spun it, with a little help from Darryl Tanner) would count in my favor. Once this Watergate thing got really cooking, he joked, they’d be needing the cell space for half the Republican National Committee, most of the CIA, and every last asshole in the Nixon White House, right down to the wives. Twenty months max, he assured me. Probably a little less.

Of course, that wasn’t what happened, at least not soon enough for me. My lawyer’s earnest letters to the review board about my dying father (“a decorated hero of the Second World War”), the infant daughter I had barely held in my arms, my flawless record as a guest of the Federal Bureau of Prisons-all were met with stony silence. As I turned the corner on year two and looked down the long corridor of my remaining federal time, with no sign at all that I was going to get out ahead of schedule, I pulled my mind back from all thoughts of home like a turtle tucking his head into his shell. I figured I was in for the full bite, clemency or no. So when, with just six months to go, the block PO came to find me and announced that the word had come down, the troops were going home for Christmas, that I should pack my things and report to the watch commander’s office on the double because the hour of my liberty was at hand, I heard the sound of a string being pulled, and knew whose finger was upon it.

Kate, the camp itself, my final days with my father, good days of talk when at last we spoke of my mother and made our peace-it was Harry Wainwright who gave all these things to me. Many times I’ve thought I hated him for it, as any man might who feels the power of another over his life. And I’ve hated myself for this as much as I’ve hated Harry, who did nothing wrong but love a place and the people in it, so deeply that he would want to die only there. So there’s that, too: my envy of him. Not for his money, which I have never cared about; nor Kate, who might have been Harry’s the day she was made but became my own on those nights of cold and snow; or even Lucy, who thought I had given her up. None of these. I envied him the fact that it was always his, who loved it, more than it had ever been mine, who would have left it if he could.

Five o’clock, the day ticking away: back at camp, I knew, Harry had either gotten his wish, or not. My goal was to keep the lawyers on the water until six or so-enough time, I calculated, to let things run their course at home and give everybody their money’s worth. Bill and Pete had been circling each other all day like a pair of alley cats itching for a scrap, but I doubted they had anything serious in mind: these were lawyers, after all, pure paper tigers who could beat you to death with their diplomas but hadn’t thrown an actual punch since seventh grade, and a few hours in the Maine woods wasn’t going to change that. Whatever Bill knew or thought he knew-and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel for the poor son of a bitch, who, beneath all the bluster, seemed as lost as Corduroy the Bear-it would all come out in the wash, no question. But when it did, this would happen over a long table with glasses of water nobody touched and a court stenographer tapping away in a corner, and I would be long gone, not even a memory.

At least the fish were being cooperative. After the morning’s struggles, the wind had settled down to an easy breeze, and even Pete seemed to have gotten the hang of things, hauling the Atlantics and brookies in like a pro. I sat on the shore with nothing to do but watch; I even treated myself to a few casts when one or the other of them broke for beer or a sandwich and handed me his rod. Not a bad day, I thought, under the circumstances. Not a bad day at all.

Which only goes to show that you should never tempt fate like this, not when you’re miles from the nearest highway with two men who are sleeping with the same woman. It started with a shout, a hundred yards below me; I turned into the sun to see two figures, backlighted in shadow, squaring off in an awkward posture of bent elbows and tucked chins that I recognized at once: men who didn’t know how to fight, getting ready to give it a go.

Carl Jr., seated beside me on the rocks, rolled his eyes. “Now what? Those two, they’re like a couple of kids in grade school.”

But by the time we got there-Marathon Mike joined us, splashing up from the shallows-enough time had passed that the momentum toward an actual fight seemed to have abated, and it looked like we were going to get off easy, not with fists but words. Bill was bent at the waist, taking big gulps of air, his hands riding his hips; I thought for a moment he was about to be sick. Pete didn’t look a whole lot better; he was drunker than the rest of them, for starters, was working on a bad sunburn, and hadn’t had a bite of lunch, taking it from his flask instead. He was standing in a few inches of water, his rod lying half in the sand, where the reel was sure to gum up good, and his face was twisted up like he was about to cry.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked.

“Go on,” Bill said, “tell everybody what you told me. I’m sure they’ll think it’s just as hilarious as I do.”

“Shut up. Shut up, you prick.”

“Oh, I’m the prick. Listen to you.”

“Christ almighty,” Carl groaned. “Like I need this on my vacation.”

“Hear that?” Bill said to Pete. “Hear how stupid you sound?”

“I love her.”

Bill spat onto the sand and gave a hard laugh. “Sure you love her. You love her. Christ. You think I don’t know about it? I told her to do it, you little douche bag.”

“You’re fucking lying.”

“Is that right? Ask her yourself. Go fuck him, I said. You’ll get a real kick out of that itty-bitty dick of his. Make him fall in love with you while you’re at it.”

Pete looked like he was about to explode. “Shut up shut up shut up.”

“Oh, we had a good laugh about that one. You love her. My prick was in her the whole time, buddy boy. What do you say to that?”

Pete flew at him then, right on cue; with an animal growl he hurled himself forward, arms wide, nothing in him able to organize his attack into anything solid and real. I reached for his sleeve but missed, and in another instant he had his arms around Bill, the two of them grappling like prize-fighters in a corner. Only there was no corner: the momentum was Pete’s. As Bill absorbed the impact, his legs twisted under him and he went down hard, into the rocky river, all of Pete on top of him.

“Get this fucker off me!”

It took all three of us to unhook Pete and haul him to his feet, his face streaked with helpless tears and his arms uselessly flailing. Then he somehow got away from us and threw himself on Bill again. It was me who got to him this time, yanking him by the collar and hurling him away.

“You, onshore, now!”

His breath jammed in his throat. “He-”

“Now, goddamnit!”

Bill had risen to a sitting position in the water. While Mike and Carl took Pete onshore, I knelt beside him. A bit of blood was in his hair; a small cut, an inch or two, split the skin above his right ear.

“This doesn’t look too bad. How do you feel?”

He shook his head, still trying to find his breath. “Little bastard got the jump on me.”

“Wasn’t like you didn’t egg him on.”

He fingered the cut and examined the blood on his fingers. “Christ. Look at this. My fucking head is killing me.”

“It could be a concussion. We should get you to a doctor.”

Bill let his hands fall into the water, cupping his palms and letting the water drain through. “It was all bullshit, you know. About… well, all of it.”

“I had a feeling,” I said. “Looks like he bought it, though.”

“I kinda knew, but also kinda didn’t.” He looked past me then, toward shore, where Pete was still being minded by the other two men. “You smug fuck! You miserable piece of shit! When I get through with you, you’ll never work another day in your life!” He returned his eyes to me and lowered his voice again. “That ought to hold him. That’s the trick, to make the other guy think you know more than you do. Which in my case is usually zilch.”

“I doubt that.”

“You’d be surprised.” He frowned dispiritedly. “Truth is, he’s a better lawyer than I am. Probably a better lay too.”

I thought of Pete, lying at the bottom of the Hah-vahd pool; his grass hut and his girlfriend and his fucking short stories. There was no side to take here, nobody even to like when it came right down to it, and mostly I felt sorry for everyone.

“I’m sure he thinks he is.”

“Christ. He loves her.” He shook his head again, looking at nothing. “Help me up?”

I eased him to his feet. He seemed a bit unsteady, favoring one leg, and I kept a hand on his elbow as we stepped from the streambed onto the riverbank. And something else: his right eye was blinking.

“You’re a good guy, Joe. For putting up with this.”

“All in a day’s work.”

“I know you don’t mean that, but thanks.” We had exited the river a short shouting distance from where Pete and the other two still stood. Bill lifted his voice to them. “Hear that? I’m making your apologies to our host, you rude asshole!”

“Let it go,” Carl snapped. “For god’s sake, Bill, just shut up.”

“Oh, the hell with it,” Bill said to me.

I released his elbow and looked him over. Blink, blink, blink. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Nothing an aspirin and a leak won’t cure.” He gave me a hollow smile, like somebody pretending to like an awful present; where this all was headed I hadn’t a guess. “You like lawyer jokes, Joe?”

I shrugged, playing along. “Sure, why not.”

“Here’s my favorite. Why’s divorce so expensive? Give up?”

I told him I did.

“Because it’s worth it!” He laughed and shook his head. “That fucking kills me. Wait here a sec, willya?”

He headed up the path, under the shadow of the dam. I checked my watch; it was a little after six. Suddenly, the only thing I wanted was just to be home, Harry or no. I would have called Lucy to tell her so, if I hadn’t left the radio in the truck, two miles away.

“What’s he doing?”

Carl had come up beside me, holding a hand over his brow. I craned my neck upward to follow his gaze. For a moment I didn’t see a thing, just the dam wall, rising imperiously against the sky. Then I found him: Bill, crossing the narrow catwalk, eighty feet above us. He removed his vest and dropped it on the ground beside him, then drew down his suspenders.

Carl said, “I think he’s… taking a piss.”

He was. At the edge of the catwalk, Bill bunched his waders to his knees, unzipped his fly, and released a stream onto the curved wall below, making a little heart-shaped stain on the stone. Mike and Pete were with me now too, the four of us with our faces angled upward, like stargazers following a comet’s path. When Bill was done, he shook it off, redid his pants, tipped his face to the sky with what I took to be a look of satisfaction. Then he stepped backward and disappeared from view.

I turned to Pete. “I think that was for you, buddy boy.”

“No, wait a second,” Pete said. His eyes were still fixed on the dam. “The catwalk is only, what, five feet wide?”

“About that.”

“So we should be able to see him. Where the hell did he go?”

I looked again. Pete was right: Bill was nowhere to be seen. I counted off five seconds, then ten. Still nothing.

Jesus Christ, I thought. Jesus, Jesus Christ.

And then I was running up the dam.