The sun came out, by the late morning of the following day; the storm had cleared and the lake was almost smooth.
My mother looked up at me from where she was folding laundry. “I didn’t realize you were so friendly with Claire Abel.”
“Well, you know”—I gestured to my daughters, in their swimsuits, as I crammed towels and snacks into a canvas bag—“she mentioned it, she invited them, so now they’re obsessed.”
I followed the girls out the door, down the stone pathway to the beach, then pointed which direction to go. We hurried along the shoreline.
Mrs. Abel must have heard us coming; she appeared on the beach in front of her cabin, wearing a white robe, a towel in one hand.
“Welcome!” she said, and the girls hugged her, pulled her toward the water, the end of the pier, where two folding chairs waited.
When she untied and dropped the robe, it startled me, for a moment, that she was wearing a swimsuit—a Speedo racing suit, navy blue, her white braids swinging against the dark fabric.
She dove, and the girls leapt in after her, and then all three of them were shouting at me to join them.
“Can I wait?” I said.
“No!”
I set down the bag and pulled off my shirt; I unbuckled my sandals, then cannonballed in among them. The water was cold, colder than I expected, and I sprinted out, trying to warm myself before I doubled back to the pier. All the while I was trying to convince myself that here I was, here she was, and here were my daughters.
The girls could not stand, the water too deep, so they contrived a game under the pier. They held on to the metal posts and she and I swam back and forth under the water while they tried to touch us with their feet. I gasped, I went under—my shoulder brushed against Mrs. Abel’s leg—and surfaced again. The girls’ laughter was so loud, echoing, carrying across the water, that my parents must have heard it, all the way up the shoreline.
At last I climbed out, wrapped myself in a towel. I sat on one of the chairs, its woven plastic straps frayed, faded orange. Beneath me, the game went on; the girls splashed my feet through the slats of the pier.
After a moment, Mrs. Abel came up the ladder. The tips of her braids were wet, sharp.
The girls shouted from beside the pier, holding on to the ladder: “You’re not allowed to get out! That’s not part of the game!”
She turned to face them, pointed to the shallows. “Bring me a black stone,” she said. “The smoothest one you can find.” Wrapping a towel around herself, she sat down next to me, both of us facing the lake.
“Where did you go?” I said, after a moment. “I mean, after that summer.”
“So many places,” she said. “So many misadventures—it seems like a long time ago, that summer. Who even was I? I got married, and I could see how my life would turn out, where it would go, but then none of that happened.”
The color of her hair, the tautness of her skin had changed, but her voice sounded exactly the same as it had that summer, so familiar in my ears.
“When I got the story you sent,” I said, “I thought it was some kind of sign. I came out here, last winter, to find you, but you weren’t here.”
“Oh, I was here,” she said. “I just wasn’t staying in the cabin. Too cold.”
Behind us in the shallows, the girls began to squabble, then found some compromise. Sunlight glinted sharply off the water; I leaned forward, found my dark glasses in the canvas bag, put them on.
“Why did you do that?” I said. “I mean, why send me the story, but also the way you hid it, the first part.”
“What? When?”
“In Mr. Zahn’s house.”
“Oh, that!” Mrs. Abel laughed. “I wish I could tell you. It’s just so long ago—I must have planned to give you the second part, but then you didn’t stay in the house, and I forgot all about it. Right after that, my father became ill, then my mother. So I was tied up with that, until they passed away.” She raised her arms from their armrests, then slowly set them down again.
“But why?” I said.
“Why the story?”
“Yes. And why tear it in two?”
“I think I just wanted to surprise you, to leave something happy behind.”
“To entertain me?”
“You could think about it that way,” she said, “but it was for me, as well.”
Turning, she looked back at the girls, who were running up the pier, toward us, each carrying a black stone. She took one in each hand, exclaiming at their beauty, refusing to compare them, then set them both down beneath her chair.
“We’re hungry!”
“We’re starving!”
“And freezing!”
I wrapped the girls in their towels, distributed the snacks; they stretched out, swaddled at our feet, and began dropping pretzels and goldfish crackers between the planks of the pier. They squinted through, claiming that fish were eating the snacks, then rolled over, looking up at us.
“That’s your house?” my older daughter said, pointing.
“Yes.”
“Can we go inside?”
“It’s pretty empty,” Mrs. Abel said. “It’s been empty for a long time. Raccoons got into it and lived inside, all winter.”
“In your house?”
“Yes.”
“Are they still there?”
“No. A man put traps in my house and caught them.”
“Where do they live now?”
“The raccoons? I don’t know,” she said, “but they sure made a mess. It’s taking a lot of work to turn it back into a house for people.”
“Can we see?”
The girls were already standing, unwinding their towels.
“No,” I said.
“Go ahead,” Mrs. Abel said. “There’s really nothing much there.”
They ran from us, shouting, their bare feet slapping the pier. A silence settled, their voices fading behind us. I stretched my legs out straight, kicking an empty cracker box so it almost fell off the pier. The Reeves’ motorboat plowed along, dragging an inner tube of shrieking children; seagulls rose from the raft at the boat’s approach, settled again.
“Out on the shoal,” I said. “I’ve been wondering about that night, what happened.”
“Yes,” she said. “You wrote about that, in your letters.”
“Or maybe that was just a story, too,” I said. “To entertain me.”
“Would you be happy,” she said, after a moment, “if I said it was?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “No, probably not.”
“I’ve wondered about that night, too,” she said. “It can’t be explained so easily. One time”—she paused, squinting across the lake—“I actually went out, again, to where we were that night, where I thought we were.”
“You swam there?”
“No; I had a boat.” She pointed out toward the middle of the lake; on the horizon, against the blue sky, a colored parachute dragged behind the parasail boat; out by the island, white sails. “With a map,” she said, “and a depth detector, but I didn’t find anything, if I was even in the right place. If that kind of thing even stays in one place.”
“You were gone for days,” I said.
“Once I was under there, in those dark rooms, I guess time didn’t seem the same. It was like being half-asleep, and so wonderful, drifting in those shadows.”
“I never told anyone.”
“What could you tell them?”
“Back then, I mean, when you were gone. I didn’t tell anyone you were missing.”
“It didn’t matter,” she said. “And it was so wonderful, where I was. More like a feeling than a place. Nothing like that ever happened to me, before or since. When I searched for it, in the boat, I realized that I was actually glad not to find it, relieved that it couldn’t be located so easily.”
“You said you could breathe,” I said, “and that there were other people.”
“I felt that way,” she said. “It’s hard to describe the feelings. It wasn’t like something in this world. Sometimes I think it was a mistake to return, and I wish I could have stayed there.”
The sound of the wind in the trees behind us, the gentle waves slapping at the beach.
“Should we be worried about the girls?” she said, then.
I stood; I felt a sharp premonition. How long had they been gone?
I called their names. There was no answer.
Standing, I ran halfway up the pier, shielding my eyes, and then I saw their pale faces—suddenly framed there next to each other in the window of the cabin. I waved; I gestured for them to return to the beach. Their mouths moved, talking to each other, and then their faces suddenly dropped away, hidden again.
I turned and walked back to the end of the pier, sat down next to Mrs. Abel. I kept expecting to hear the girls’ voices, the slap of their bare feet behind us.
“What are they doing?” I said, checking over my shoulder.
Mrs. Abel smiled; she kept looking out across the lake. “Something we can’t know,” she said.
When the girls finally returned, they were shouting.
“We climbed your ladder!”
“We saw your bed!”
“What were you doing in there?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“We’re hungry. We’re starving!”
They began rummaging through the empty cracker boxes.
“Lunch,” I said. “We’ll have to go back for lunch.”
“Swim, first,” they said.
We all leapt back in, resumed our game; a shorter session, but just as loud.
Once we were out, I packed our things. Mrs. Abel walked us back along the pier to the shore.
“We should swim,” I said. “Some night.”
“Like before?” she said, smiling. “My shoulders aren’t the same, but I guess we could see how far we could go.”
“I’ve been trying to remember,” I said, “to really remember the way it felt.”
“You’re still so earnest!” She reached out, touched my shoulder, laughing at me.
I followed my daughters, back along the white stones of the beach. Halfway to our cabin, I turned and looked back; Mrs. Abel still stood on her pier, watching us go. She waved to me, and I waved back.
That afternoon, my mother drove my girls to an art camp in Fish Creek. I helped my father clear some brush. Mostly what this meant was I chain-sawed branches loose from fallen trees and he stood to one side and pointed at what could be cut next, and talked.
I was wearing a hardhat and visor, thick ear protection, so even while the chainsaw wasn’t running it was difficult to hear what he was talking about. One story was about how he worked on a railroad, how he fell through the open hatch of a freight car and cut his chest on a block of ice. Now wearing his broad-brimmed hat against the sun—holding off the melanomas—and a red bandana around his neck, he told me of how his own father was a master at felling trees, how he could lay them down anyplace he wanted. He told me about how his father always wanted my father and his brother to work with him, but actually he did all the work and they just stood to the side and watched, and listened. This reminded me of my father, and my brother and me, the different axes and hatchets that we used to carry through the woods. Now I was doing the work, and my father, after almost a whole life, had returned to standing to one side, watching.
We attempted to dismember an upended tree trunk, down on the shore, tried to knock all the stones held tight in its roots. We didn’t make much progress, and to my mind it was not a task that actually needed to be accomplished, but it was a pleasure to work on it with him, to curse and marvel at the impossibility of success.