Two days passed, and the following night was my father’s birthday party, after which I believe we went to see City Slickers II and Speed at the Skylight Drive-In. I have no recollection of those movies—I was thinking of Mrs. Abel, worried, wondering what had happened, what I could have done, what I might say, why I wasn’t saying anything. (Was it that I was afraid of being found out? If so, what would even be found out? Was it that it was a secret? How would I explain what we’d been doing, or describe our relationship, when I didn’t really understand it myself? We had swum together, I could say. At night.) I also began to realize that anything I would say would be too late to help. Whatever had happened to Mrs. Abel could not be undone. I also realized that no one had missed her. Other than me, no one was used to seeing her with any regularity. Her disappearance simply wasn’t noticed.
I stayed away from the lake, those days. I didn’t swim at all. A few times, I checked her empty house. Mostly, though, I tried to forget what had happened, to distract myself; I tried to turn that summer into past summers, to return to my old activities, my old friends.
This wasn’t easy, because by that point most of my childhood summer friends had actual jobs—in Milwaukee or Chicago or even farther away—and came up the peninsula on rare weekends, if at all. I was left to consort with the younger siblings of my friends, the little brothers and sisters. At first they were excited, honored to go out with me, but after a few nights they all knew and felt, as I did, that the arrangement was slightly pathetic. Still, it helped me to forget, for moments, as I traveled back and forth to the AC Tap, out on Highway 57, drinking Pabst and eating pickled eggs, turkey gizzards. We tossed the beanbags, played “There’s a Tear in My Beer” on the jukebox, all the things I’d done a thousand times before.
One of these nights, after last call at the Tap, I passed on an opportunity to skinny-dip with the others, down off the dock in Ephraim. I let them drop me at the top of our road, so the sound of tires on our gravel driveway wouldn’t awaken my parents.
I walked slowly through the moonlit shadows to the Red Cabin, where I opened the door slowly, to quiet the spring, and switched on the light. The first thing I saw, twisted in the corner, on the floor, were the clothes I’d stolen from the clotheslines. They’d been there for days, yet suddenly they struck me like an accusation, a kind of link or evidence that should not be discovered. I picked up the green sweatshirt, the khaki shorts, then found the shirt and pants—Mr. Abel’s, that she’d given me—and went back out into the night, under the dark trees.
I considered burying all the clothes, but I had no shovel; I began to climb a tree, but that also seemed a poor solution. Should I pile stones on top of them? Burn them? I kept walking, past the graves of our dogs Toto Tulip and Daisy Grace, then onto the road and up the slanted path along the cliff, past Mr. Zahn’s empty house.
When I reached the boat beneath the trees, I climbed up, crawled deep inside the hold where once the nets had been folded and stored. The bent wood inside the hull was smooth and cool, familiar as the faint smell of diesel, the fishiness emanating from the hull, the dampness of the lake in the past and the forest all around. I pulled the rickety hatch over the opening, closing out the stars; I curled up with the clothes beneath my head and rested there half-asleep, hardly thinking.
Eventually I was startled by branches scratching the boat’s side, by the wind high above. A storm was rising. I climbed out of the hold, over the edge, leaving the clothing behind, and as I stumbled down the path the sound of waves echoed around me, all along the cliff.
At the Red Cabin, when I touched the door, a round strip of paper fell from the doorknob. It was actually a piece of birch bark (one that I still have—flattened, taped into a notebook). Inside, I switched on the light and read what had been scratched there:
That night the wind was blowing so hard that sticks rained down from the trees and fell around me as I made my way along the path. I could see the candlelight flickering in the windows of Mrs. Abel’s cabin, but it wasn’t until I was close that I heard the piano, struggling to be heard in its conversation with the storm. Rising, swelling, receding again; the melody disappeared and then returned, coming like the black line of a gust traveling across the surface of the water.
I opened the door, stepped into the room, the music so much louder, inside. She didn’t hear, didn’t notice me as I stood behind her. Her hair was loose, snarled around her head, her hands sharp, her bent fingers on the keys. When she finally heard me, she stood and turned; the long sleeves of the oxford shirt she wore, their cuffs unbuttoned, made it seem as if she had no hands.
“I thought you were with me,” she said. “I didn’t see you, didn’t feel you.”
“I was,” I said.
“No,” she said. “You didn’t go where I went.”
She spoke so fast it was hard to understand her. Her eyes wide, she swayed slightly, on her bare feet, as if attuned to the storm.
“I swam back,” I said. “I looked, I waited as long as I could.”
“It didn’t happen to you? You didn’t go under?”
She glanced away, toward the window; the waves were crashing, spraying across the end of her pier. And then she reached out, her hand appearing suddenly from the cuff of her shirt, and touched the side of my face. Her fingertips were rough and cold. She held her hand there for a moment and then took it away.
“Are you all right?” I said.
She stood there shivering, her arms wrapped around herself until I climbed halfway up the ladder to the loft and pulled a blanket loose. I put it over her shoulders, helped her sit down on the couch.
“I was down below and there was no way back,” she said. “It happened so fast. Sit down! What are you doing, standing there looking at me?”
I sat on the couch beside her; her trembling radiated along my left side. The room around us was the same as ever: the colored beach glass, gently rattling against the window; the piano and Mr. Zahn’s table with the carved lions; the wooden bluebird perched on the wooden plane; the picture of the cabin and the forest fire, nailed to the wall.
“What day is it?” she said.
“Tuesday,” I said. “Wednesday.”
I had no idea what time it was. Somewhere between midnight and morning.
“Where was I?” She spoke this question as if she shared it, as if she wasn’t only repeating what I’d asked. She turned her head quickly, glancing around the room. “I’m trying to say. I just made it back. It’s impossible. I can’t—” Her voice trailed off.
The cabin creaked around us, trying to hold itself against the wind.
“I was alone out there,” I said. “I didn’t know what to do. I searched as long as I could.”
Without warning, she stood, crossed the room and opened the door, stumbling out into the darkness, the door slapping the wall outside again and again.
I leapt after her—across the gravel driveway, under the trees, their branches thrown all around in the storm—and caught her by the arm, slowed her down.
“What are you doing?” I said. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know!” She was shouting, tilting her face close to my ear, her hair against my cheek. “I’m trying to tell you what happened. A fish, a blue fish flew past me, it was a bird in the water. I don’t know!”
Finally I got her back to the cabin, the door closed against the wind. Then I had to go out and retrieve the blanket that she’d dropped on the driveway; when I returned, she was stretched out on the couch with her eyes closed. I spread the blanket over her; I looked down into her face, and she seemed older than she had before. And then her eyes suddenly opened, gazing up at me.
“I’m leaving soon,” she said.
“Why?”
“In a few days. Maybe sooner?”
Her eyes closed again, and there was only the sound of the waves, the candles flickering in the draft. Her chest rose and fell, a slow rhythm; I believed she’d fallen asleep when suddenly she spoke again.
“I was hardly awake,” she said, “but I wasn’t asleep. I felt myself as a girl, walking along a path in the forest. I could hear the water nearby, but I couldn’t see it; I felt myself in other times, other places, as if I were there. The bluebird swam into my hand and lay still, then flew away again.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And then I opened a door and the water rushed in and I swam up through it, to the surface, and I began swimming again.”
The windows rattled, the wind gusting around the house; the candles flickered, guttered, stayed alight, shadows leaping and falling along the walls.
“A door?” I said. “What door?”
“It’s impossible,” she said.
“You could have drowned,” I said, “and I didn’t do anything. I just swam back here and didn’t tell anyone that I lost you out there.”
“But I didn’t drown,” she said.
“Still,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” she said, closing her eyes. “I’ll be fine. And you, you will also be fine. Now I need to sleep.”
I stood there for a moment; I listened as the weather beset the cabin, the windows vibrating their own conversations. I imagined how it would be if the storm kept growing, accelerating—the shingles jerking up like black tongues, then slicing away, sharp through the air, the windows shattering.
Finally, when I could hear that Mrs. Abel was asleep, her soft breathing beneath the wind, between the crashing waves, I blew out the candles, turned down the lamp. I went out the door and started back through the woods toward the Red Cabin.
Out in the night, through the dark tree trunks, I could see the long rows of whitecaps on the lake, surging, climbing each other’s backs, spending themselves against the shore.