EIGHTEEN

Lucy

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.