AUGUST 20, 1956
On the far side of the lake there is a canoe, rowing toward the shore. Two bodies, familiar yet strange, upright, bare-shouldered, bare-armed. Four arms, rowing. A man and a woman. The body in the bow stops for a moment and drops a wrist into cool, dark water.
Hazel is by the lake with Stephen. It is afternoon and too late—she should be getting back to make dinner. Stephen is six years old, half-naked, brown-limbed. She doesn’t know where Lex is—he’s gone so often these days.
“Time to go, Stephen!” she calls out to where he is swimming, diving, but he doesn’t come.
The couple in the canoe paddle to the far side, pull the canoe up onto the shore. Strip off their clothes. Hazel cannot make out their faces or their ages from here, just the birch-white blanch of bare skin.
Leaping. They are leaping into the lake water, avoiding the muck and slime of the shore. They are swimming in loops, silently. They orbit each other, not speaking.
A sudden ache in Hazel’s chest. That silence. That swimming.
“Mother!” Stephen calls out, running toward her, lifting his fist up to her face. He opens his fingers, calling out, “Salamander!” and one squirms out of his fist and into her lap, crawls up her legs, near the hem of her dress, and then there is her hard palm across his cheek.
“Don’t,” she says, unable to stop her hand in time. “Put it back in the water.”
His eyes retreat. That stormy green, his cheek blossoming.
Oh, what treason, Hazel thinks, stomach sinking: a mother’s rage.
She wants to say she’s sorry, but her boy is walking back to the water, the salamander cupped once again in his hands.
The couple, swimming, launch themselves onto the bank, dry themselves off with their clothes, slip them back over their shoulders and hips and legs.
They climb back into the canoe. Push off. Drifting and paddling back toward where they came from, the far side of the lake she cannot see.
Hazel thinks of them, swimming in concentric circles. Thinks of Lex, no longer touching her. Rarely sleeping in her bed.
“Stephen,” she calls out, gently this time. “It’s time to go home. Get your things ready.” That wrist into dark water, those blanched bodies, birch white, unashamed of bare skin. And then her boy, her small child, running in her direction, gathering his things, walking beside her toward the car.