FEBRUARY 28

Luke and I have plans like deer in winter have plans. The trees are bare. The moon is full. We could shelter in place. We could run.

The cabin looks out to the rocky Atlantic coast, and tonight you’d think the wind and the waves could wash the very boulders back into the sea.

I know Luke has barely seen his family since he came back from Afghanistan, where he served with the New Hampshire Army National Guard. I have seen his mother’s texts. I saw a photo she sent of Luke’s little sister in a white angel gown in front of a Christmas tree. The child has a gleeful gap-toothed grin, her little white-sleeved arms crossed over the gown’s pink inlay, and curls spiraling from beneath her tiara. She holds a sign in crayon letters. I made you pancakes do you remember me? mandy Sometimes I can hear his mother crying out from her texts—lucas, call us day or night—and I feel sad for her.

“What if we go away from here?” I say. “From the ocean.” It’s nearly midnight, but the wind gusting makes us vigilant. I look up from the edge of the bed, where I sit. Luke paces as if to ensure that he doesn’t close his eyes.

He says, “That’s most of the country.” I grin, but I begin to shake in the night chill of this bare winter rental. He stops. Kicks up the fire in the woodstove. Comes to me. Buttons my sweater against the cold. To take in each other’s eyes would break us down. His hand pauses at my hip. I touch his dark hair. We are framed by the window covered in crystals of ice.

If I go, I would leave my father. I see him outlined as simply as a boat on the horizon beside a red ball of sun. My father always says he loves to go fishing to see the red ball of sun rise out of the water.

I get out my phone, and Luke and I check Google Maps for some of the places we’ve pretended we’d go. We sit cross-legged on his squealing bed. Our foreheads touch. We make up stories about us living here, together. We have a cupboard with cereal bowls and a drawer with spoons tucked in each other.

Wherever we are, I know he’ll have the gun.

My shaking is so bad, my teeth tap against each other. I wrap the thin bedspread around us. My dog, Pilot, sleeps by the stove in a knot she’s made of my coat, which she dragged there.

“What do you have against the ocean?” Luke says. His voice is tight but unrushed. I think we are both acutely aware of everything. A flicker of light from a buoy in the distance, when Pilot circles, drops down again. Is it like the talk before soldiers go on patrol? This is a part of him I try to imagine. “You’re a fishing family,” he says. “I don’t understand.”

We’re just telling stories. Now I look at him.

I can’t see the green of his eyes. His face is an outline. I need his voice to hold on to who he really is. But I feel his calm. He always says he’s most steady in chaos. “My mother says I came out stillborn because of a curse from the Pol Pot time. But I took this big gasping breath, and all the Cambodian side of my family was there and they all breathed with me.”

My breath is shallow as I tell this. It aches to breathe.

“I don’t trust the ocean,” I say. “It knows. It’s beautiful and it calls me. It suspects I’m really a stillborn.”

Luke nods. I can make him out now. I cock my head to study his unflinching eyes. I thought this would make sense to him, since he talks to dead people he knew from the army. I touch his ribs beneath the thick yarn of his sweater. “Superstitious fisherman’s kid.” I shrug, pushing my hair off my face. Then I sit still except for my tapping teeth and let the sound of the waves fill my body. He’s lean like a wild dog. We should eat.

If I go, I’ll leave my mother. Since I met Luke, I’ve remembered a song she sang to me when I was little. She sang about a rabbit in the moon, and I became the rabbit in my child imagination, and she became the moon. Later, when I didn’t see her, I remembered her long hair, how I used to twist it in my hands as I made little words and pretended I could sing them in Khmer.

I love you more than the dark loves dawn.

You were sixteen. You sang to me.

We climb above the water while you sing your baby song.

“Couple a loonies,” Luke says over the banging in the wind of the loose cabin window.

“But you’re used to me,” I say.

“Christ help me,” he says.

I say, “Me too.”

We are dangerous. We have warned each other about this. Part of him is stillborn too. “Some things you shouldn’t know.” He often wishes this for me about what happened in his war. We’ve tried to protect each other since we met. But here we are together by the open sea.