Ma Mère dies days later saying it herself. Her mouth slightly open, the “will” sound stuck in her throat that we swear we hear released when she’s lifted from her chair and taken away by the ambulance. Our mother holds her hand, insists on it, has the coroner unzip the black bag slightly so she can slip her hand in there and hold onto Ma Mère as if Ma Mère were not altogether dead, just injured somehow and our mother was a comfort on the ride to the hospital.

Our mother and brother having left with the ambulance, my sisters and I head down to the lake. We can hear the mother of eleven. She is singing now, a song we can’t quite make out, just a “Jesus” here and there.

It is night but the moon is bright and we climb in our sinking boat and push off from shore. In the middle of the lake we drift. The mother of eleven still sings. We bail for a while, then we tire and quit and let the water come above our chests. “We’re going down,” Louisa says and as she does our arms float from the sides of the boat and the boat comes away like a skirt we let fall from our hips. We tread water. The mother of eleven still sings. I say I’m diving down. Don’t, they say, think of all the things down there. But I take a breath anyway and dive just to say I did. For a moment I can still hear the mother’s song. But then there’s only a swishing sound, all the fish going by, their tails and fins waving, the opening and closing of their gills, the eyes of the turtle slowly moving to and fro, the eel slipping past, the grazing barb of a catfish touching muddy bottom. Down deeper I go, to where I can hear only the beating of my heart and it sounds caged and angry, my ribs metal bars it can’t squeeze between or saw through, and I wonder if it knows how close it is to breaking my bones and setting itself free.

When I come back up, my sisters are gone. They have swum to the other shore and are calling for me. I meet them there. We wring out our summer tees. Amazing, they say, the song of the mother of eleven sounding louder here, as if this is where she wanted her voice to reach.

The other shore is no different from our shore. The same skinny maples grow, the same skunk cabbage. Maybe this isn’t the other shore. Maybe we are where we were all along, we think. We walk a little ways. Into the thick of trees. But then we stop. This is too scary, we think. The moonlight blocked by thick pine boughs and what if everything was the same on this side of the lake as on the other side? What if we walked and found the same cabin we were staying in, the same family of eleven, the same family of us? We turn and run back to the lake. We dive in and swim back to our shore. On the pier, we see someone standing. In the water we stop and clutch each other. Then we see who it is, we can tell by the pointed ears, and we call to her. She jumps in with a loud splash and we float on our backs, offer her a place to grab us by the collars of our summer tees and we let her do what she loves to do best, save us. One by one we are rescued, towed to our shore in the moonlight where our silver faces are licked back to life.

“Is this enough?” our mother says.

“Enough of what?” we ask.

“The lake, the cabin, all the fucking R & R,” she says. We nod, our heads still wet, our hair still smelling of the lake. We are ready to go home.

Back in the city, we can taste it in the tap water, the sinking boat we sailed and let fall to the bottom of the lake. Louisa has done research. She has brushed up on her watersheds, knows where New York gets its crystal-clear supply. This is from there, she says, meaning the water she holds in a glass. We drink our water down and I think how what I’m tasting tastes like all of it, the fish, the turtles, the eels, the catfish, myself, my summer T, and the words that the mother of eleven sang that rippled on the surface.

School has started up again, so many weeks now our notebooks are old, the paper ripping from the spiral spines and the covers worn and thickly doodled.

Rena’s father moved her family. He found a house in Queens where the carpets were plush and the squirrels in the neighborhood healthier looking than here, that was the deciding factor, he had said, their glossy fur.

We tell our mother that it’s spring when it’s supposed to come upon her, this wild urge to clean. The barrel with the dull-bladed ice skates and the old wax-stained sweaters is dropped in a box at Goodwill.

“That’s a shame,” she says, “that’s what’s wrong with this country. Spring is for flowers, not cleaning,” she says.

“That’s what’s wrong with this country,” she says it again the day I get my period. She has taken us all out to a restaurant to celebrate. People don’t celebrate that kind of stuff, we tell her. “Oh, pooh,” she says, “damn this country, anyway,” and she orders me champagne. “To being a woman,” she says.

“Here, here,” my brother and my sisters say and I am given presents and kisses on my cheeks. Then our brother gets up and leaves. He has a job now, playing mandolin and guitar in an Irish band. He’ll come home late. When we get home our mother sends the elevator down for him so he won’t have to walk up the five flights of stairs with his instruments when he gets back. She opens up the door and pulls the cable inside the elevator, then she steps back and the elevator travels down in the dark by itself. But then our dog comes running through the hallway. Her eyes not so good now, maybe she thinks when she runs past our mother’s legs and steps down into the air that the elevator is still there, that there’s a possibility we will take her on a walk. But the elevator isn’t there and our dog falls down the shaft. She hits the top of the elevator where there’s a little trap door. She falls through the door and the elevator automatically stops between floors. We run downstairs and we hear her whimpering. We call her name.

We can’t move the elevator and finally the fire department has to come. It isn’t until morning that they are able to pull her out. She is stiff and dead, but the fur at her neck is still soft. We all feel it and say our goodbyes and then her fur becomes wet with our tears and our mother says “Merde” and I say “Fuck” and we all say how she was a good dog, the best dog. We have nowhere to bury her and so we find a huge cardboard box, a box for refrigerators that our neighbor had. We lift our dog into the box and leave her on the corner by a city wastebasket and we call the sanitation department and wait for them to come. When they come they put the box into the garbage truck and the back of it starts going around and around, and our dog in her refrigerator box starts to do circles in the truck and get smashed and made small.

There are a few more trips to where our father now lives alone in the country, but we don’t let the visits last long. Maybe we are all afraid of the transfer effect, of us turning into him or him taking what is good inside us for himself. We leave. We stand on the steps of the train and look down to where he stands, noticing new blotches, the toll the summer sun has taken on his bald head, and we wonder if years later we will always have this bird’s-eye view of him. As we grow taller will his shoulders stoop more with age, more with life? Will shapes of unknown lakes and oceans start appearing on his head as if we are seeing a satellite’s photograph, the faraway image sent back to us here on Earth? When the time comes, will we carry him from his chair to his bed, from his bed to the grave? Will we stand by, mourners who have already mourned for him long ago when he was still alive? Done with our mourning, will what we notice on that day only be the hillside he is buried in, the wildflowers in bloom, the color of the sky that ordinary unlike any other day? Will we walk back arm-linked, my brother and sisters and I, down the grassy hillside, our legs falling into a stumbling run, a flying off almost to home? Our mother waiting there in her chair, drink topped off, and up her sleeve a gaming plan. Five-card draw, with peanut shells to serve as chips and cards held close to chests. We’ll burn the hours, deny the night its darkening hold. What could ever hold us now? What would ever dare? Our bags of garbage are fortress walls, the lolling cats our lions barely tamed, the empty lot out back our moat of sorts. Our mother splays out her colored pairs, cackling, delighted with her win, spit dappling her kings and queens and the splintered table where we play. Beneath the wood, our knees together, the royal bones we share.