FRIDAY
Summer has come on like the hot breath of Cerberus crossing the river Styx, except the river isn’t Styx, it’s the mouth of Plum Island Sound, and the smell isn’t dog breath, it’s fish rotting on the beach. The children were up early, arguing, so Justine sent them back to bed. They complained but complied, and the quiet has been a relief from the unexplained fish kill littering the sand across the street with reeking bodies the lone Osprey, wheeling overhead, refuses to touch. Only the neighbor’s pregnant dog is interested in them. She keeps running off to roll in the stench.

Justine stands in the hall between the doors to the children’s rooms and shouts,
“Time’s up. Let this day begin again.”

Slowly, the boy, who just turned thirteen, emerges with his nose in his smart
phone. He shambles past her. The girl, a tall twelve-year-old, follows, a sly smile
creasing her face. She doesn’t roll her eyes until she’s well past. She has the makings of a beauty. Perfect skin that tans gold, yellow brown cat’s eyes, broad shoulders and long legs; such a contrast to her wiry brother. Recently the girl has grown taller than he is, which has been a curse for him, a blessing for Justine, since, although they still snipe at each other, he keeps his distance from her to avoid comparisons.

The fish kill has created all kinds of controversy. Less concerned environmentalists say it’s the result of a toxic algae bloom that has come and gone in cycles since the beginning of time. Alarmists claim it’s the fault of global warming.

Justine splits a pair of English muffins and pops them into the toaster oven before
she sets a pan on the stove and drops a lump of butter in. She cracks half a dozen eggs, whisks them to a froth and tips them into the pan.

“Grab a couple of plates,” she tells the kids.

They are sitting at opposite ends of the kitchen island, glum, until, as though
through some sort of magical sibling bond, they both look out longingly at the water.

“So awful,” Justine says. “No hanging out on the beach this week.”

The girl groans.

“Behave and maybe you can talk your father into driving you over to the pond.”

The boy brightens. He loves to fish.

The thought of her ex taking them fishing makes her smile. He once told her he’d
watch Antiques Roadshow before he’d sit in a skiff all day waiting for a bite from a fish he have to unhook and throw back. The toaster dings and Justine plates the muffins and the eggs. She garnishes them with a dollop of sour cream and a sprinkling of capers. The boy attacks the food. The girl looks at it like she’s been served a dead rat on a plate. She begins to pick it apart, removing the garnish, caper by caper.

“I don’t get why you can’t just make regular eggs like everyone else.”

“Eat,” Justine says. “You’ll thank me when you’re older and can appreciate
having more refined tastes than ‘everyone else’.”

“No way I’m going to a slimy pond to sit in a dumb boat and fish,” she says,
sulking.

The boy wolfs down his food and is back on his phone. Sometimes Justine wishes
she could lock them in their rooms until they’re full-grown. Irish twins. Inseparable when they were little. Now they are always at each other’s throats. Her ex says it’s a phase. Teenage hormones. Easy for him to laugh off their animus for each other, he only has to put up with them one weekend a month and Wednesday nights at their favorite pizza place. The thought of them with him, smiling, the good daddy, galls her. Still, whenever he arrives to pick them up, the curl of his mouth when he smiles, and the hardened physique under his t-shirt arouses her. He used to be softer. Muscle is something he’s acquired since they split. And he’s sober. She doesn’t like to think about the implication in that. But who is she to complain? She threw him out. To his credit, the alimony and child support checks arrive on time.

On the beach a young woman in a red bikini and knee high rubber boots, is
picking her way through the mass of dead fish. She steps gingerly, like she’s walking a tightrope. She’s carrying a clipboard and stops now and then to poke at the pile with a stick and make notations. It’s been four days since they washed ashore and still no cleanup. The smell this morning is worse than the day before.

Justine heads to her bedroom to dress. She strips out of her pajamas and stands
naked, staring into her closet. It’s tempting to put on something slinky to try to lure him when he comes to get the children, to make him wonder about what he’s been missing since she cut him loose. Not that she wants him back. Not yet.

A glance at the mirror on the closet door confirms the results of her gluten free
diet and yoga.

“Your body is a temple,” her instructor says at the beginning of each session. He
steeples his hands and chants Namaste at the end.

Justine pulls on shorts and a camisole top. She adds a sheer cotton blouse, a
flowery print that ties at the neck with a silky cord. She closes her eyes and holds the ends to her face. The softness makes her want to feel the touch of someone else’s skin.

When she looks out again, the bikini clad girl is still on the beach, holding a jar up
to the sun. Dead fish flesh? The girl looks young, too far away to tell if she’s pretty or plain. From that far she has a decent body, and Justine can’t help wondering who her ex is fucking, now that he’s honed himself back into shape. She’s thought about fucking her yoga instructor but the competition for his attention in the class is steep.

That night when her ex comes to pick the children up they make nice. He
compliments the flowers on the living room coffee table. He picked that table out of
someone’s trash right after they bought the house. The flowers are from her neglected garden. Day lilies, chive flowers and hosta leaves. The garden was better off when he was around, always amending the soil, watering, pinching back, never her thing.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” he tells the children, who are already at the door
with their backpacks slung over their arms.

“Giddyup,” the boy says and opens the door.

Her ex lingers before he grabs her, hugs her tight, and hisses, “I never really loved
you. If you hadn’t been pregnant with him… Good Christ it’s hot in here,” he says, and releases her. “How can you stand that smell?” And he’s out the door.

She’s gob-smacked by his anger. Is it true? He never loved her. Or was he trying
to hurt her, the way she hurt him? It felt good at first when he hugged her, until his arms tightened and she was afraid he might break her in two. Such a bold move for him, or maybe not, maybe that is who he was all along, under who he was when he was drunk and stoned.

He’s right. It’s hot as hell and the house stinks. She closes all the windows, walks
into the bedroom, shuts the door and turns on the air conditioner. It’s the only one in the house. It takes a while before the room cools off. She strips naked, stretches out on the bed that used to be their bed, until the canned cold raises goose bumps on her arms and she pulls the coverlet over her so she can sleep.

SATURDAY
The chop-chop of a helicopter and a commotion on the beach wake her. She gets up and pulls on a t-shirt and panties before she walks over to the window. Three news vans are parked across the street. The helicopter hovers above the beach. A front loader has been brought in. It’s scooping the dead fish up and dumping them into a truck. It takes a bit before she realizes there’s something else in addition to the fish, even longer to get her head around what it is, seals, piled on top of the dead fish, some still alive. Teams of rescuers carry slings and water buckets, dousing the live ones as they lift them onto the slings. A boat idles in the surf, ready to ferry them to deeper water. It’s happened before, but just a few swept in on a high tide. This is different. This is carnage.

Justine is reluctant to leave the cool bedroom where she feels insulated from the
calamity outside. Thank God the children are gone. Her phone starts to sing, God Save the Queen, her friend Shirley’s ringtone. She picks it up and before she can say hello, Shirley says, “Seals? It’s all over the TV.”

Justine checks the time. It’s only 7:30. She has a tight knot of a headache.

“I’m headed your way as soon the damned dog takes a shit,” Shirley says.

“Don’t,” Justine says, “The smell will make you puke. Meet me downtown for
breakfast. The Pancake House. In forty-five minutes.”

Justine throws on the clothes she wore the night before and braces for the heat and
the smell. When she emerges from the bedroom, the smell isn’t too bad. It’s the heat that hits her. The air in the closed up house is stuffy and as dead still as the bodies on the beach. When she opens the front door the smell makes her gag. She runs to the car, jumps in, pushes the button that turns it on and sweats until the AC cools it. Curious neighbors are braving the smell to see what’s going on. Several wave as she drives by. Some are wearing dust masks or bandannas around their faces.

Justine lives on what would be an island if not for the ribbon of road through the
marsh, which eventually curves up through a tree-lined neighborhood onto Route1A, which wends through the town. She passes the gas station, Dunkin’ Donuts, the supermarket, several fried clam places, a Mexican restaurant, a liquor store and an ice cream stand, before getting to The Pancake House.

Shirley is already there. They bump heads when they hug.

“Your hair smells like dead fish?” she says.

Justine sniffs a strand.

“Order me coffee and the Number 1, poached with dry toast,” she says and heads
for the restroom.

She pumps soap from the dispenser, lathers her hands, washes her face, and wets
her hair, dries it with paper towels, then wets and dries it again. She sniffs her shirt. It smells, too. She remembers the flacon of perfume in her purse, a Mall giveaway. She searches to find it, and spritzes some on.

By the time she walks into the dining room, Shirley is talking to a couple at
another table about the situation at the beach.

“Here she is,” Shirley says, “Justine lives right across the street.”

Mercifully, their waitress walks in with the food. Justine knows it’s rude but she
takes the seat opposite Shirley that places her back to the couple at the other table. She just hasn’t the heart to talk about it.

The eggs are perfectly poached. The yolks ooze over the whites and soak the
toast. But her appetite has fled. She’s never been big on perfume. The fragrance, which might be pleasant in a smaller dose, is overpowering. Shirley is kind enough to ignore the smell. Justine sips her coffee as Shirley demolishes an omelet, three strips of bacon, home fries and a couple of slices of rye toast. The sight of the egg yolks congealing on her plate makes Justine queasy. She pushes it away and is relieved when the waitress comes to take it.

“Everything okay?” the pretty young waitress says. Her hair is pulled up into a
ponytail and her white shirt is tucked in tight to her short black skirt.

“It was fine. I just don’t have much of an appetite,” Justine says.

“Separate checks,” Shirley says.

The girl shoulders the tray away and returns with their checks.

Shirley looks hers over. “All that food for $6.99. I love this place.”

She pays with a credit card. Justine pays cash.

“What are you up to now?” Shirley says. “You can come over to my house.”

“Thanks, but I think I should go see what’s washed up since I left.”

She doesn’t invite Shirley to follow. Breakfast listening to Shirley drone on about
her son is all Justine can take. He just broke up with a girlfriend who snuck over to his apartment and slashed his tires. Justine’s headache pounds at the memory of the day her husband moved out. She drove off to give him some space to pack without her lurking. The children were at school. When she returned, he was gone. She’d steeled herself for the missing things she expected him to take, but it was as though he’d never been there. Nothing personal, no furniture, none of the artwork or antiques they’d collected together. She assumed he’d taken some pots and pans and cutlery but didn’t bother to check, so what she found in the bedroom was that much more shocking; their wedding picture, the one she used to keep on the dresser, but had put away in her underwear drawer, lay on her pillow, smashed, the photo torn to pieces, shards of glass from the frame scattered around like something you’d see in a TV movie, bloodless evidence, thank God. She didn’t try to
clean it up. Instead she stripped the bed, tied the corners of the bedding around the mess, balled the whole thing up and shoved it into a trash bag. She hauled the bag out to the garage, dragged the mattress to the basement door, hoisted it up, gave it a push and watched it cartwheel down the stairs. Same Day Mattress was true to their ads. The new mattress was in place before the children got home. She splurged on one topped with memory foam.

She says goodbye to Shirley. All she wants to do now is go home and jump into
the shower, but back at the house the crowd of onlookers has grown. There’s a police detail directing traffic. A newscaster is interviewing her neighbor with the pregnant dog. Justine pulls into her driveway and walks next door. Their houses look down over the beach. The crowd is clustered on the other side of the road, in front of the news trucks.

“What’s going on now?” Justine asks.

The smell has turned sickly sweet since she left. Only part of the beach has been
cleared. The front loader sits idle. Everyone is eyeballing the water.

“Oh, my God,” Justine says when she sees what’s drawing everyone’s attention.

Just off shore the water is churning with black fins. At the waters edge, some of
the sharks have come in close and are trying to hurl themselves onshore. The bikini girl and a group of men are in wet suits, trying to zap them back into the water with what looks to Justine like cattle prods. Already, some lay dead on top of the rotting fish and decaying seals. Gulls scream overhead.

The newscaster turns from her neighbor, who has a wet bandana around her face
to counteract the smell. The neighbor is in her sixties. She’s wearing a cowboy hat. She looks like a robber out of a western movie. Her dog is yipping in the house. The
newscaster is fully made up, wearing a stylish suit jacket and pearls above jeans and flipflops. Her makeup has caked and turned glossy in the heat. She shoves her microphone in Justine’s face.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” she asks.

“We’ve had fish kills out here, and the occasional orphaned seal, but never anything of this magnitude,” Justine says.

Her neighbor shakes her head and sighs, “What next?”

“A giant octopus maybe. Or a couple of monster squid.” Justine says, deadpan.

The newscaster looks serious.

“I don’t think this their habitat,” she says.

“She was just joking,” the neighbor says, her voice muffled by the bandanna.

“Let’s hope so,” Justine says, looking out across the open ocean where another
row of black fins has just emerged.

“Holy shit,” the newscaster says.

SUNDAY
This morning it isn’t an octopus or a squid or more of the sharks circling, it’s a whale, big and black and shiny. Just one. Gasping for breath on the beach, it’s huge sides, heaving. It looks like the whales Justine took the children to SeaWorld to see when they were small, when she, and everyone else, didn’t know any better. There is a flotilla of small boats clustered off shore, poised to try for a rescue. The sharks that didn’t strand have moved on. The bikini girl is out of her wetsuit. Today her bathing suit is blue. She and a couple of men in olive drab shorts and shirts stand on the sand in a huddle. A camera crew is set up at the other end of the suffering animal. A truck with a New England Aquarium logo has joined the line up of news station vehicles. A fire truck has been brought in to spray the poor whale. It’s all over the news. Only residents and authorized personnel are allowed to enter the street. Her phone rings. It’s her ex.

“What the fuck is going on out there?” he says.

“Maritime Armageddon. Go buy a couple of gas masks. The kids are going to need them.”

She’s soaked an old chiffon scarf with cologne and tied it over her nose.

“If it’s that bad, I can keep them,” he says.

She can hear the children in the background, the boy shouting, “Right on!” The
girl yelling, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” As far as she’s concerned, under the circumstances, and
maybe under any circumstances, he can keep them.

Years ago Justine worked for a newspaper on the Cape. One of the writers wrote a
book about strandings. It was illustrated with archival photos. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a stranding was a bonanza. Up and down the coast, townspeople would bludgeon live seals to death and carry them away to strip their skins for the fur. There are pictures of smiling children, leaning on wooden clubs with dead baby seals at their feet. A whale stranding was an even bigger deal, money in the bank, all that quivering baleen, oil and the teeth. They prized the teeth.

But this is a much larger whale, an Orca she thinks. Those other whales were pilot
whales, smaller, driven crazy by some inner ear disease that drove them to ground. How a whale as big as the one on the beach navigated such shallow waters is puzzling.

She ties the cologne soaked scarf tighter around her face and walks closer to the
street. Her neighbor waves to her. She’s got the dog with her. It’s straining the leash. She keeps yelling at her to sit. The dog’s belly is bulging with unborn pups. Her pink teats stick out straight. The children keep begging Justine for one, but she doesn’t want the responsibility. The dog is an unlovely mutt and she’s whiny; if the puppies look anything like her, definitely not.

The front loader starts up again and clears the beach around the whale. The driver
is wearing a gas mask. The bikini girl and her colleagues (now at least ten) are masked and dragging a contraption towards the whale. It’s an enormous black elastic tube with chains attached to one end. The whale’s huge eye blinks each time a plume of water from the fire hose showers it. They stretch the tube as wide as they can and wrestle it over the whale’s tale. The animal doesn’t resist. Once it’s in place they walk, holding the ends of the chains together, to the waiting boat. The boatman fastens the loop to the stern, inches forward, dragging the whale off the beach, into the water until the beleaguered beast is buoyant and they putter off, around the point, out into the open Atlantic. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief.

When the children were small it was a pleasure to walk them across the street, to
watch them pick up hermit crabs in the tide pools, to splash each other with glee. She wonders if, even after the cleanup, she’ll ever be able to set foot on that sand again. She watches until the front loader finishes scraping the beach, until the bikini girl and the others have packed up and gone, until the last truck full of carrion drives off and the smell has mostly dissipated. There’s just a whiff of it left in the air.

Now that she doesn’t need it, the scarf covering her face is suffocating. She unties
it. Her phone vibrates in the pocket of her shorts.

It’s a text – from him. “What’s the deal?” it says. “Should I keep them?”

She types, “You can bring them back. The coast is clear, literally.”

It’s 8 o’clock by the time he brings them home. The light has gone gray. The smell
is no worse than it normally is at low tide. She meets them at the door. He could have just dropped them off, but it’s obvious after the children run past her, with barely a hello, that he expects to be invited in. She blocks the doorway and talks to him through the screen.

“That was fast,” he says.

“I wish they were that fast at helping around the house.”

“I was referring to the beach,” he says. “The clean up. You can hardly tell what
went on here.”

“You should have been around earlier,” Justine says. “It was a madhouse.”

He turns away from her to look out over the pristine sand.

“I lied about not loving you,” he says quietly and presses his palm to the screen.

She raises her hand and fits it to his.

“You’d better come in,” she says.

MONDAY
The children climb the hill toward the intersection where the camp bus will pick them up. The boy runs ahead, rough-housing with a friend he met up with along the way. The girl takes her time. She was up early, fussing with her hair and changing outfits. From her confident posture, Justine assumes she liked what she saw in her last glance at the mirror before she left the house.

This morning Justine loves her children again. She’s happy to have them back.
After her ex came in, they all sat in the kitchen and talked, full of concern about the
beach strandings.

“Heartbroken,” the girl said, about the loss of so many sea creatures.

“Relieved,” the boy chimed in, that they were able to rescue the whale.

“Fearful,” they both said, that it could happen again.

Justine hoped she had the right answer for that, “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

After the children went to bed it was tempting to let her ex stay, to let him back
into their bed. In the end, they closed out the evening at the door with nothing more exciting than a chaste kiss.

She stands on the doorstep with a watering can in hand. The mint her ex planted
in a big terra cotta pot so it wouldn’t take over the garden has begun to wilt in the heat. The beach is empty except for a woman standing at the water’s edge. Justine watches her wade in, thigh deep. She’s wearing the same khaki shorts and shirt the men were wearing the other day. Justine waters the plant, puts the can down, walks to the edge of the lawn and crosses the street. There is a layer of boulders between her and the sand. She steps up onto one of them. The woman in the water is dipping what looks like a giant thermometer in. Justine calls out.

“Excuse me,” and then louder, “Excuse me.”

The woman turns. It’s bikini girl. A woven lanyard hangs around her neck. A
laminated card dangles from it. She raises her free hand, holding up her index finger, a sign Justine interprets as: Just a minute. Justine waits while bikini girl inspects the glass tube before she walks out of the water and towards her. Justine is glad to see she’s not barefoot; she’s wearing scuba booties.

“I live across the street,” Justine says. “So awful. Any idea why?”

Bikini girl shakes her head. “The water is a bit warmer than normal for this time
of year, but not stratospheric. It makes sense that a few seals might follow the fish kill. But why so many? And it kind of makes sense that the seals would attract sharks. But in those numbers? And willing to kamikaze themselves? That’s unprecedented.”

“And the whale?” Justine says.

“God only knows. Maybe just curiosity. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong
with him. After he was released he swam alongside the boat for a while, splashing it, before he took off and disappeared. They’re smart that species. We’ve begun to see more and more of them up here.”

She’s close enough that Justine can read the name on the card hanging from her
neck. There’s a “Dr.” in front of it. She’s older than she looked from afar. The sun is so bright Justine wishes she’d worn sunglasses and the heat is oppressive. Not a cloud in the sky. She shields her eyes with her hand.

“We’re cordoning off this section of beach for a couple of days,” Dr. Bikini says.

“The sun and high tide will sanitize it. So far, we can still count on Mother Nature to do that.”

Last night, after Justine made her “wait and see” comment to the children, her ex
corralled her when they were out of earshot, “You couldn’t come up with something more reassuring?” he said.

“Like what?”

“Like sometimes nature is inscrutable, but there’s a reason for everything. That
what might seem wrong to us, may actually be right in the overall scheme of things.”

“Since when did you become so philosophical?”

“Since I got clean,” he said.

A long minute passed in which Justine had to restrain herself. She wanted to trace
the contours of his mouth, to kiss his eyelids, to beg him to come home.

“The jury’s out,” Dr, Bikini says. “None of us really know what’s going on. We study. And then we study our studies. And still. Who knows? We’ll just have to wait and
see.”

Justine laughs at that as she walks back up to the house. She opens the refrigerator
and lets the cold air cool her down before she takes out the pitcher of iced tea. She pours a glass and drinks long and deep, so refreshing after the days of dead fish. She stands at the window and watches two guys arrive in a truck filled with metal stakes and crime scene tape. One pounds in the stakes and strings the tape along the street and down to the water line on both ends. The other one affixes No Trespassing signs to every other stake.

TUESDAY
It’s trash day. The basket is brim full. When she drops in a handful of orange peels, the smell of rotting vegetables repels her, a reminder that everything organic eventually decays. Fish. Seals. Sharks. Whales. And she asks herself.

Why are the children so much harder to love?

Why is she so disconcerted that she loves her ex again?

She doesn’t trust him. That’s why. If she takes him back, how long will it be
before their relationship decays?

But why does she have to trust him to sleep with him again?

Because they’re not kids anymore. They’re parents.

Of course she has to trust him. She has to believe in him again. That will take
time. Maybe more time than she wants to take, time that might delay restarting her life with some other man, as selfish as that sounds to her as the thoughts snake through her head. The truth, she thinks, as she holds her breath when she ties the plastic bag closed and carries it and the recyclables out to the curb, is all the incessant talk about Save the Planet is a farce. The yellow crime scene tape that cordons off the beach screams, CAUTION, CAUTION, CAUTION, in bold black letters. Justine takes a deep breath. The air smells fresh again. Clean. Surprising how fast the smell has dissipated. Maybe, if time really is running out, the planet will be just fine without fish, or seals, or sharks – without whales, without her or her ex or the children. Barring a meteor strike blowing the hurtling ball of rock apart, the planet will survive, regardless of global warming, regardless of her overheated heart.

Sophie Costello sat alone at the lunch counter in Albany’s Union Station, waiting for a cup of coffee. She heard a clock somewhere strike five. Around her people rushed—a train to Buffalo was departing and she saw a large man in a coat, weighed down by a heavy suitcase in his right hand, running lopsidedly toward the platform. Behind the counter, the waiter stood leaning on his elbows, talking to another customer while he waited for Sophie’s coffee to perk. She glanced out the window and saw Joe Brownschidle.

Before she could think about it, she found herself out on the street, threading her
way through the evening crush towards Joe. She could see him ahead of her, tall but slight as he’d always been, but she couldn’t catch up to him through the crowd outside the station.

It was amazing, really, that she had recognized Joe so easily. She had neither seen nor spoken to him in nine years—not since 1919, the year that the dam on the Herne River had been completed and the town of Willards Mill flooded. The year that she and Joe had been seventeen. Yet for all those intervening years, she had known Joe instantly and without doubt. Perhaps, she thought, nothing in the world changed as much or as quickly as you thought it did.

It gave her a queer feeling, seeing Joe Brownschidle in Albany, a town that still
existed. She understood—of course she understood!—that everyone she had known in Willards Mill lived in other places now, and led other lives. She could imagine those lives for her siblings and the friends with whom she kept in touch, but not for the others, those connections that had been broken when the town was evacuated. She knew there was a lake now where the town had been, and in her mind her old friends walked the watery streets and resided in their familiar flooded homes, as if they had never left Willards Mill and now conducted mysterious, subaqueous lives among the buildings that still stood under Herne Lake. As if she were the strange one, the one who had moved away and turned her back on the town.

She looked around her at the men with briefcases and the office girls stepping along in their high-heeled shoes. Wearing her sensible travelling suit, she felt dull and dowdy among these nicely dressed girls. There was Joe, waiting at the corner. She called his name, but the light changed and he walked on across the street, Sophie’s voice lost in the noises around them: automobile traffic and people chatting as they walked and the ringing of a telephone from the open door of a bakery.

The Willards Mill school had been in a whitewashed building on Clinton Street, near
the river. Yes, she could see it now, with its steeply pitched roof and the fenced schoolyard of packed dirt beside it. The boys had played baseball there. And Joe? He had sat at the front of the classroom, tall and quiet. She remembered that much for sure, but she couldn’t recall what exactly had made her decide to become friends with him. For that was how it had happened—she had decided one day that they would be friends, and then worked to make it true.

How had Joe seemed before she knew him? Impossible to know—she couldn’t work
backward in that way. Once she got to know him, she found that he was utterly unlike herself; he was deferential, careful, obedient, whereas her mother always told her she was too wild a girl by half. Would she have sought his friendship if she had known those things about him? Perhaps not. But by the time she learned them it was too late. Affection had come in uninvited and would not be budged.

The fall of 1917. In the time before the courts had ruled, when people were still
fighting against the dam, fighting for more money, fighting the state of New York. She would have been…. She calculated: fifteen. Yes, fifteen was right. And Joe the same age. That was when she had started working on him. There had been an exam and she had done poorly. As the students filed out of that little whitewashed building and into the hard schoolyard, she had turned to Joe and said, “That Mr. Dubois—Goddamn him!” She didn’t care so much about the exam; it was Joe’s look of open-mouthed shock she had been after. She had gotten it too—so precisely the look she had imagined that she couldn’t help but laugh. And what had she said to him then? Ribbed him, most likely; she had always ribbed him. “Oh come on, Joe! You ought to get out of that hotel every once in a while!” Something like that. That was how she had talked to him, in those early days when they were both fifteen.

Sophie’s breath grew short as she hurried after Joe up the State Street Hill. She didn’t want to call out again. The crowd on the sidewalk was thinning somewhat but there were still many people around them, people who had turned and looked at her the last time she called Joe’s name. She felt she was making a fool of herself. She thought of the cup of coffee that would by now have been delivered to her empty spot at the lunch counter, and then poured out or consumed by the waiter or served to the next customer who had sat down and asked for a cup. For a moment she regretted leaping up to follow Joe. It would have been lovely to have that quiet coffee alone, after the train and before the bus ride through the city to her sister Barbara’s place. Now she would still have to find a bus that would take
her to Barbara’s, she would have to be fussed over by Barbara, she would have to fuss in turn over her nieces and infant nephew, and on top of it all she would have to invent a story about how the train had been late.

It was unlike her to be running about like this, following a man through the streets of an unfamiliar city. As soon as that thought entered her mind, she realized it was not quite right. It was unlike her now, but it was very like the girl she had been when she was friends with Joe Brownschidle. Now she was an adult, an unmarried woman who lived alone and had to be careful with her money. She cared for someone else’s children; she mended her dresses; she made herself cups of tea on the gas ring in her room. When she had time off, she took trains to the places where her siblings lived, wearing the tweed suit she had on right now. She enjoyed those visits. She was, she thought, reasonably content.

But she had once been a girl in Willards Mill. Strange—shocking, almost—to try to
recognize herself in what she remembered of that girl. She was like an entirely different person. Perhaps that girl too was still in Willards Mill, drowned with the town, living under the lake with the rest of Sophie’s lost connections. She ran through the flood, said what she pleased to anyone, went out alone in the underwater night. She got herself and underwater Joe into trouble and then talked the both of them right back out, just as she had done when the town was above water. Of course she was still there. Where else could the lost girl have gone? How else explain how she had disappeared so completely? All that she had done she
was doing still, while Sophie in the world above had grown up, changed, learned to worry about what others might think of her. Sophie had not thought of that girl, perhaps, for even longer than she had not thought of Joe Brownschidle.

There was so much and it was all so jumbled. Her memory was blurred and seamed,
full of things that could never be confirmed, places that could never be gone back to. Had it been in the early weeks of 1918 that Joe had come bounding out of the hotel, had flung himself down the steps just as she passed? That had been the first time they really talked—not just her bantering and needling him, but talking, really talking, the way they would come to talk so much. She couldn’t remember exactly when it had happened or precisely what they had talked about, but she remembered gangly young Joe flying down those stairs, and how startled she had been—as though a great bird had flown at her.

Themes had emerged as they talked to each other, refrains that came back again and again. She would not have imagined, before knowing Joe, that it could be harder to live as part of a little family—four quiet people in a big hotel, with a father prosperous enough to own a big hotel—than it was to live as she did, eight Costellos crammed into a two-room house next to the shell of the old lumber mill, older sisters always pushing her to the edge of the mattress at night, older brothers coming home tired and irritable after the work they did in dairy barns and cider presses. Yet Joe struggled with his family in a way that she did not with hers—his parents had expectations; he chafed under them; he talked to her about all the things he couldn’t talk about to them. Somehow, it seemed that the differences in their lives were the thing that made it possible for them to confide in each other. He didn’t know what it was like to be able to hear every word spoken in the house by every member of a family, so she told him. She didn’t know that it was possible to feel trapped in a building with 37 rooms; he tried to explain it to her. They talked about everything, and when the news of the dam arrived in town they talked endlessly about that, and the changes that would come, their uncertainty about the shapes their lives would take and their desire to determine those shapes for themselves.

They had walked as they talked, through all the streets of Willards Mill, along the
Herne in summer and fall, through the fields and hills outside of town in the spring. They were seen walking together—of course they were. “He’s my friend! Just my friend!” Sophie recalled saying to her mother. It had been hot in the kitchen on the day she said it. She remembered heat pouring from the stove, her damp hair falling across her forehead. Baking bread in midsummer, maybe. And her mother had not answered her, had just smiled a little knowing smile while her sister Mary Alice had giggled. Sophie’s friends were the same, joking with her about having landed such a catch, their voices softly teasing, their eyes hard with envy.

Sophie did not know—had not known even then—whether Joe was also teased
about her. His parents would not have been delighted to see their promising young man ensnared by a girl who lived in a shack with five siblings and his friends would have teased him much differently than hers did, but if they did he shielded her from it. For all that they talked to each other, they had never talked to each other about the way the rest of the town saw them.

Sophie watched as Joe, ahead of her, turned right off of State Street onto a block of
tall brownstones. She followed. Windows were lit in some of the houses, and as she passed by she caught glimpses of the lives inside: the corner of a bookshelf; a mantel with a mirror hung above it; a woman in a brown shirt, carrying a baby wrapped in white. She wondered if Joe was going home to a house like one of these, where the door would open onto warmth and the smell of supper in the oven. She imagined him being greeted by a wife as tall as he was, and children that clustered and cried, “Papa!” when he arrived. If she caught up to him, would he invite her into the warmth, the familial scene?

Perhaps he was not married, and was walking now to a bachelor’s apartment,
something dim and small, not quite clean because the woman only came once a week and that had been on Tuesday. Perhaps he would be too embarrassed to show it to her and would offer to buy her a coffee instead so they could catch up. That would be fine too; that would be fine.

A man came down the sidewalk the opposite way, wheeling a handcart loaded with a chest of drawers. First Joe then Sophie had to step sideways out of his way. As they did she waved, just a little, thinking she might catch Joe’s eye. She should have called—he would have heard, there wasn’t too much distance between them now—but her voice stayed in her throat. The man with the handcart passed on, taking his chest of drawers who knew where. Joe was already at the next corner; Sophie had fallen behind.

But no, she could still see him—it was all right. As she watched Joe half a block
ahead of her, Sophie tried to remember when she had last heard from him. She couldn’t recall a date, or even the year. There was no event to pin the memory to. There had been letters after they left Willards Mill, she knew that. She could see them, lying and waiting for her on the little table in the hallway of the rooming house in Philadelphia where she had moved with Mary Alice. The Lewis County postmarks had jumped out at her, and then she had run upstairs to open the letters alone in her room. She had written to him too, but it hadn’t been the same. The things she would have described to him died when she tried to put them on the page. They had written to each other regularly right up until they stopped writing to each other. They hadn’t argued, or lost one another’s addresses, or decided it was better to stop writing; they had simply stopped and never started again.

Sophie was surprised to find, as she made her way down the unfamiliar street, that
she couldn’t remember whether it had hurt to lose Joe. Had she felt grief when it became clear there would be no more letters? Had she felt guilt or betrayal? Perhaps, she thought, she hadn’t felt anything like that at all. Perhaps she had just stopped thinking about him. There had been so much else to think about in those years when she was young and building her life.

There was an afternoon that she remembered with perfect clarity. A day in early
spring, near the end. Seventeen years old, she and Joe had been talking about the flood, the future, about leaving. It was all they talked about—it was all anyone in Willards Mill talked about at that time. Joe had interrupted her suddenly and asked if she had ever seen the dam. Neither of them had. “I think we should,” he said. “We can take the trap.”

He had harnessed the horse and driven them briskly westward through the
narrowing valley, the river rushing along to their right. Sophie remembered being cold as the wind picked up, wishing she had thought to bring a blanket from the hotel to put over her knees. And then they could see it. They got down from the trap and climbed a little rise above the river. Sophie had thought so much about the dam, but for some reason had never thought to imagine what it looked like. She was shocked by its size and by the blankness of its wall. It towered over the valley, a brute and curving expanse of concrete. Workers swarmed about the base of the dam and along its top, but the wind carried away their voices and the sounds of their work; to Sophie and Joe the scene was silent, the dam faceless and voiceless and powerful.

They stood silently side by side, and Sophie felt a chill as the wind reached out like a hand and lifted her hair from the back of her neck. The wind, the raw spring day, the terrible mass of the dam—she felt a tautness, a charge in the atmosphere. And then without warning she felt things change. The tautness concentrated itself in the inch and a half of cold air between the skin of her forearm and the skin of Joe’s.

The hairs on her arm bristled; she felt that she was breathing electrified air.
They stood beside each other, not touching and not speaking, until Joe turned to her and said, with tenderness, “I’ll have to go with them, you know. We’ll be leaving each other.” He meant his family, and yes, she did know, had always known that he would go with them. But now, now that he had said it out loud, unprompted, on this hill by the dam—now she also knew that whatever she had felt in that inch and half of air, he had felt it too.

The light faded around Sophie and she wondered what exactly she was doing. She
had been trying to catch up to an old friend and say hello, but that was no longer it. She and Joe were alone now—the only walkers left on this leafy residential block. She could have called his name, but she stayed quietly behind, following him. It came to her that this walk was a distorted reflection of all the walks they had taken together in Willards Mill—no longer walking together, but silently following each other as the shadows grew long.

A door opened across the street and Sophie watched as a woman came out and
hurried away, her shoes tapping against the sidewalk. She had been friends with Joe
Brownschidle for only two years. Such a tiny fraction of her life! There was no one she talked to now the way she had once talked to him: daily, minutely, charting every fluctuation of each other’s thoughts. She had her friends, of course—the girls in the rooming house she ate supper and gossiped with in the evenings, the neighbor she greeted every day when they left for work at the same time. She had her sisters and brothers, with whom she exchanged letters and visits and the occasional chat on the telephone. But there were things she once would have told to Joe that she now kept to herself. She had not noticed that difference until
now.

The fading light, the coming of darkness—they worked on Sophie. There had been
another time, one last time, after that visit to the dam that had changed things between her and Joe. In fading light, she and Joe had stood on a bridge over the Herne. He had told her he needed to get home, and she had said no. The hotel was all packed up; he and his family were leaving in two days. So she had told him that he wasn’t going home yet, and, with darkness coming on, they had walked across the river to the empty stretch of land that had once been the Cranfield apple orchard. The trees had been dug up for their rootstock, but the sheds and cider press still clustered by the riverbank. They walked along the Herne and looked across the water at Willards Mill, until night closed down around them.

They sat down in the long grass by the entrance to the former cool room, and soon
after that Sophie lay down on her back and looked up at the sky. Joe surprised her by lying down too and together they watched the grey ghost-outlines of clouds as they passed in front of the stars and went on. In the darkness, the old orchard felt private, hidden, as though they had passed through a door and into a secret room.

“What are you thinking about?” Joe asked after a while.

“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing important.”

“Hmm,” he said. “I’m thinking about going away.”

“Oh Joe! Don’t think about that!” And, as naturally as her next in-drawn breath, she
turned her body against his so that her head and her hand lay on his chest. His arm came up and curled around her shoulder.

After a moment, Joe began to speak. It was all what they had talked about so many
times before: his family, their expectations, his own doubts and uncertainties. Sophie could feel his voice, a steady rumble in his body. She listened to the rumble, not to his words. She felt as though her body might melt into his, right there on the ground. Eventually he fell silent.

Sophie waited. The clouds moved overhead. The moment fell open before them.

“I know you want me to kiss you,” Joe said. “I can’t. I can’t. Don’t you see why I
can’t?”

And she had said nothing, had stayed still just where she was, clinging to him
without moving, until the two of them got up and walked quietly back across the bridge to town.

Under a streetlight on a quiet corner, half an hour after leaving the train station,
Sophie decided she was being ridiculous. She ran the few steps it took to catch up to Joe and took hold of his elbow. “Joe,” she said as he turned around.

It wasn’t him. She knew it the moment she saw the man’s face. She had seen that
face through the window of the train station and it had been Joe’s face. But here, in the dark on this strange street, it was the face of a stranger. She looked at him, and the lights began to blink out—the varied lights of possibility that had been kindled in her by the sight of Joe Brownschidle.

The man said, “I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong person.” His voice was polite,
higher and lighter in timbre than Joe’s.

She dropped his arm and took a step back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t— I thought—” She
stopped to collect herself. “I didn’t mean to bother you.” Her voice sounded loud in the quiet.

“No bother.” The man tipped his hat and turned away again, continuing towards
home.

Sophie Costello stood in the street. She felt near tears. All this, she thought. All this,
all this. All this to have to find her own way back, all this to take a bus to Barbara’s house and play with Barbara’s children. All this to go upstairs and lie alone in the narrow guest bed. All this to be left alone in the dark.

The cat, an orange tabby, showed up one cool foggy morning in late spring. By noon
Belle had given it a name, Bianca Rose, on account of the rose-shaped white patch on its scrawny little neck. At first the animal kept to itself at yard’s edge, hunkered down in the lilacs under the goldfinch feeder, which Clay had mounted on a tall iron rod to discourage scavenging squirrels and possums. At one point the cat ventured onto the front porch only to skitter back into the bushes when Clay opened the door shouting Shoo now! and Scat!

“Leave her be,” Belle scolded from the kitchen. “You’ll frighten her to death.” Later
Belle opened a can of Chunk Light tuna and set it out on an old bath towel with a bowl of fresh water. “This should do the trick.” A long hour passed before Bianca Rose finally crept up to the porch in slow careful steps and accepted her offerings.

The next morning Clay rose early to place a call. Thoughts of the stray had niggled at him all night, but now he had a plan. Hanging up he pushed through the screen door saying, “Shelter opens at ten. That old raccoon trap should suffice as a carrier. I’ll drive it in, no problem.”

Belle, still dressed in her nightgown and slippers, was sitting on the porch rocker
studying the orange tabby nestled at her feet. Close up the cat was all bones and bug-infested, rust-colored fur, green eyes like dusty marbles wobbling in their sockets, a torn left ear. “She’s starving, poor thing,” Belle said. “On her own all winter, is my guess.”

Clay, fully prepared to wrestle the trap down from the shed rafters all by himself,
understood now what he was up against. “You know we can’t keep it,” he pleaded.
“Why not?” Belle drew her slender fingers along the cat’s bony spine, a slow serpentine wave.

“You want it mucking up your flower beds?”

“They’ll survive.”

“Those goldfinches won’t come within a mile of the feeder.”

“We move the feeder.”

“Belle….”

“Go make yourself busy, dear.”

*

A week passed and sure enough the orange tabby settled in, occupied the front porch like it had lived there forever. With Belle’s constant feeding it started to look more cat-like—more meat and fat filling out those bones. One day Belle lifted the trusting animal into her lap, brushed out the knots and burrs. As a rule Clay kept a safe distance, his thoughts on the matter quite clear and true as far as he was concerned: Belle could insist on sheltering the cat (for the time being at least), but she could not require him to like it. Nor would he make special allowances, go out of his way, or bend one inch to accommodate. And yet it was Clay who offered later that week to stop by the store and buy cat food. Belle had asked for a twenty-pound bag. Knowing better, Clay bought ten.

Belle called the cat Bianca Rose and bristled whenever Clay referred to it as the animal or that thing. Every evening at sundown she stepped outside and called her name, “Bianca Rose!,” into the deepening dusk, standing there with the porch door wide open letting in warm air and bugs. Sometimes it took a while for the cat to return and Clay, watching his programs in the other room, could only shake his head and sigh. Then Belle’s triumphant cooing—good kitty kitty—and the screen door banging shut behind her. “She’s back home, on the porch, safe and sound,” Belle would say, as if she expected him to find comfort in those words.

“You’re always going on about mice,” Belle argued one night. “With Bianca Rose
around you won’t have to worry so much.”

Clay disagreed. “Plenty of snap traps in the cellar. Besides, with summer nearly here I’m not seeing any mice, are you?”

But the point seemed lost on Belle.

He tried on occasion to get along, made an effort. One gray morning, for instance, the cat pattered up to the side of the house where Clay was working a piece of loose siding with a hammer and a fistful of nails. He bent at the waist and made a sound, a kind of high-pitched whirring, by placing the tip of his tongue behind his two front teeth. A cat-friendly sound, he figured, but it must have come out wrong because the animal jumped back, bushy orange tail snapping high in the air.

That afternoon, setting off for the mailbox, Clay opened the porch door and nearly
tripped. Bianca Rose, roused from her nap on the welcome mat, sprang up and dashed into the yard, glancing back with a sleepy, accusatory look that made Clay madder still. “Belle!” he shouted back into the house. “I bust a knee on account of that thing, you’ll be sorry.” There was no reply, but the next morning he went outside to find the cat curled up inside a beat-up laundry basket stuffed with old flannel work shirts. His shirts. Fuming, Clay stormed into the kitchen where Belle was drawing a wet rag over the counters. “What were you thinking?”

“Go on,” she said. “You haven’t worn them in years.”

“That’s not the point.”

But it was no use, he could tell from the look in her eye.

*

One night Clay had a dream. In the dream Belle was young again, her hair long like it was now but darker. She sat in a chair by the window looking out, blackened panes behind her reflecting a swirl of familiar faces, as if someone had taken a hedge trimmer to the family photo album and tossed the bits into the air like confetti. Clay woke from the dream with tears in his eyes, heart pounding, and yet for the life of him he could not recall what had upset him so. The boys were there, in the dream’s murky background, vrooming toy trucks back and forth on the
pinewood floor. And the dog—that beagle mix they’d given up the year Dylan got sick, the dog’s name escaping him, but lying there in the dark Clay recalled the way Belle shut down, wouldn’t talk for two days straight when that dog went away.

When Belle stirred the next morning Clay turned toward her hoping to share his dream, but nothing doing. Belle mumbled a gruff “Good morning” then stepped into the bathroom, still irked no doubt by what he’d said the night before. About the cat, of course. Pigheaded, she’d called him, refusing to hear him out. Foolish and short-sighted, was his take on her. There was a time when it would’ve been different, thought Clay, lacing up his boots—a time when that cat would’ve been long gone by now, caged up at the shelter or maybe bagged up with a big rock at the bottom of the pond. The way they used to do it. Quick and painless. No questions asked. No
cute names, no ten-dollar bags of cat chow either.

Outside Clay squinted against the early morning sun, pulled his cap down tight over his eyes. It was late June but today’s heat felt more like mid-July. The trees covered in new leaves gathered in tall bunches against a hazy white sky. What was it his father used to say? A man on a muggy day could better feel the world taking shape around him. From his toolbox in the shed he pulled a screwdriver and a can of oil wrapped in a rusty rag then made his way across the yard to the barn, the troubled side door of which was number one on today’s list. He tightened and oiled the upper hinge and gave it a try. The heavy old door moaned like a calving cow then came to rest where he’d found it, a good three inches off frame. Just then a whole slew of emotions broke loose, only some of which had anything to do with the goddamn door.

Belle was doing dishes, hands swimming in soapy water, when Clay stepped inside. He felt ready now—to speak his mind, make things right—but the stony expression on his wife’s face stopped him cold, set his teeth on edge.

“Brace yourself,” she said. “You’re not going to like this.”

*

There were four in all, each no bigger than a full-grown chipmunk. Two orange and one gray tabby and a fourth mostly white with orange spots that Belle had already named Sunrise. Hands tingling at his sides, Clay did not catch all of what Belle was saying. Her words, like the boisterous first flies of spring, kept darting away, escaping his grasp. He caught enough to understand that she had theories about the tom, about its size and facial coloring. “Because look,” Belle said, leaning over the whicker basket. “Those two are the spitting image, but the gray one and Sunrise? Go figure.”

“I don’t know,” Clay said, gesturing at the squirmy mass knotted up in his old work
shirts. “Right there, I just don’t know.” He pulled the oily rag from his back pocket and wiped it across his brow. “This isn’t right, Belle, and you know it. That grown one there’s bad enough.”

Belle made slow business of responding, hands braced on hips as she turned and planted herself between Clay and the basket. “You’re thinking too much, getting all worked up. Don’t you have anything better to do? That yard needs a mow. Maybe now’s a good time.”

“Now is not a good time. Now’s a good time to take care of this situation.”

“Situation?”

“I could do it myself, no problem.”

Belle took a moment to consider his words then said, “No you couldn’t. And no you
won’t. So stop the crazy talk and go make yourself busy. Besides, how could you? Just look at them.”

How could he? With a potato sack, a foot length of jute twine, and a heavy rock. That’s how. These were Clay’s thoughts as he marched off to the tool shed then back again with a brick in one hand, ball of twine in the other. Belle, who’d been staring lovingly at the kittens, glanced up. “What now?”

“An old pillow case would suffice.”

Belle was silent.

“For the kittens, yes.”

*

The next day Belle moved the laundry basket—Bianca Rose, kittens and all—to the back porch. For more privacy, she announced.

“Where next?” Clay said. “The bedroom?”

“If you’d prefer,” taunting him.

They didn’t talk all day and that night Clay was trying to read in bed but his thoughts kept getting the best of him. Belle was in the bathroom, humming. “Could you hush please?” he said. “I’m reading.”

“There’s another way to look at this,” Belle said, working her way under the covers, hair loose around her shoulders. In the soft lamplight Belle’s eyes were shiny pools of blue. “Bianca Rose could have gone anywhere to have those kittens. But she didn’t. She came here, Clay. To our house. She chose us.”

Clay snapped the book shut. “Came here because you fed it. Simple as that.”

Belle stretched out with a sigh, looked up at the ceiling. “I’ll find a home for those
kittens, one way or the other. So you don’t have to fret so much about that. And please stop acting like the world’s dumped a load of horseshit on your head. I like having something to care for. Is that too much to ask?”

Clay pretended to read for a moment then said, “Your mothering days are over, Belle. Get used to it.”

He’d been cruel and he knew it, so early the next morning Clay got busy making amends. He dried and put away the dishes without being asked. He pulled the laundry off the line and stood at his wife’s side in the living room folding it. He took it upon himself to place one more call to the shelter, and yes, they would take the kittens at six weeks. But when he gave Belle the good news she surprised him: “I said I’d take care of it, and I will.”

A week later, driving back from the hardware store, Clay spotted Belle on the front porch in spirited conversation with two younger women. He waved and both women waved back but not Belle. He recognized one of the women from Belle’s book circle. After both had driven away, Belle explained that Karen, the familiar one, was head over heels for the orange pair while Mary would take the gray one and Sunrise. Clay had just poured a can of tomato soup into a saucepan. It was Friday, his turn to make dinner. “They’ll be back later this month to pick them
up,” Belle said, sniffing the air.

Clay pulled a spoon from the drawer, started stirring. “You must be pleased.”

“That the kittens are going to good, loving homes? Yes, Clay, I’m pleased. And I called Dr. Henley. He can do the spay next week. We’ll need a ride into town, if not too much trouble.”

“Happy to help,” Clay said. “Any takers on that one?”

Two turns of the spoon before Belle said, “My mothering days may be over, old man, but Bianca Rose stays.”

*

Tess and Tyler had come and gone by the time the cat disappeared.

The visit had gone well, by Clay’s estimation. Tess and Belle entertained themselves with long walks through the bottom woods gathering flowers and hunting for wild ginseng. Clay kept Tyler busy with truck rides through town and out by the old canal. The young sweethearts, together through high school, were touring colleges in the state, and Clay listened in earnest, sometimes weighed in, as the soft-spoken young man explained the pros and cons of this one and that. It was Tess’s idea to drive into the city one morning to visit her uncle’s grave. They left some fresh flowers and on the way home stopped for lunch at the Roadway Diner north of town. Tess—whose gem-like eyes and high cheek bones reminded Clay so much of Belle at that age it almost hurt—asked for stories about her father and uncle growing up. Happy to oblige, Clay told his favorite about the time Robbie took a spill on some broken glass (five stitches for that one) then chronicled the general mischief the two boys got into down by the railroad tracks. At one point he nudged Belle for a detail, but she just shook her head and stared into her coffee like she
was off somewhere else. The morning after the kids left Clay came downstairs, a fresh to-do list tucked into his front right pocket. He looked for Belle in the kitchen, found her rocking on the front porch.

“She’s gone,” Belle said, the words squeezed from the end of an exhale. “Bianca Rose.”

“Gone? How so?”

“Since yesterday. I don’t know.”

Clay nodded, felt tired all of a sudden, and here it was just seven o’clock. He sat down next to Belle. “Cats do that,” he said, gazing out over the yard. “Come and go like that.” And then wondering if she’d understood his meaning, “She’ll turn up.”

“You think so?”

“I do,” Clay said, then after a pause, “A cat isn’t likely to bond, is the problem. A wonder they stick around at all.”

*

By late summer a quiet had settled on the house that made Clay forget all about the cat. Heat melted the air, so Clay could not fathom why Belle decided one morning to venture into the attic. He’d come downstairs to find his scrambled eggs getting cold on the kitchen table. As he ate he listened to sounds of shuffling and scraping overhead. Through the racket he called up to her, wanted to know what she was up to, but Belle assured him she was fine. After breakfast he climbed the ladder and poked his head into the stifling heat. Belle was kneeling over an open box, hair tied back in a ponytail. Tiny sweat beads dotted her forehead. Cheeks the color of
sanded cedar. Watching her, Clay got the odd impression that he was responsible somehow for all this exertion.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” she said, waving him off.

Belle descended twenty minutes later holding a lumpy plastic bag in one hand, a black binder with a cracked spine in the other.

“Must be over a hundred degrees up there,” Clay said.

“Tess is writing a paper,” Belle said, catching her breath. “On family. A research paper for her psychology class.”

“First I’ve heard.”

“When I mentioned Dylan’s journal, she got so excited. I figure if she can make good
use….” Belle dropped the bloated bag at Clay’s feet. “Cleared out a few things while I was up there. Nothing you won’t miss. To the dumpster, if you don’t mind.”

It was later that day when Clay found it. The sun had settled behind the barn, bringing some relief from the August swelter. Despite the heat Belle had shooed him outside to keep his boots off the freshly mopped floors, so Clay passed a slow hour clearing wild grapevine off the back fence, tidying up for fall. He didn’t find much really—just a mess of bones, a good portion of skin and meat already picked clean, the rest scattered about under the fence. What gave it away, what made Clay certain it was Bianca Rose and not some random possum or raccoon, was
the tuft of dirty orange clinging to the base of the spine.

Coyotes, he decided, or maybe that scrappy Knoll dog wandering too far from home. While he thought about it—imagining the fierce struggle that must have ensued when one animal happened upon the other—a strange feeling took hold, the base of his own spine tingling as he pulled back the grassy undergrowth to take a closer look. Weeks of exposure had mellowed the scene, which good thing if Belle were to come out later and see for herself. He would have to tell her, of course, but in his mind Clay had already drafted the conversation. That’s the trouble with
strays, he might say in an effort to console her. Seems like a good idea at first, but then they disappoint, every time.

Or something like that. The words sounded fine in his head, but setting off for the house Clay knew full well that Belle would find her own path to consolation, her own way through. You’re not married to someone forty-plus years without knowing how they operate and why. All the same, Clay took his time getting back to the house. He glanced at the list he’d made that morning, made a mental note to scratch off two items. Not bad for a hot day like today. Not bad at all, considering.

“I’d never ski on river ice. Never.”

It was that second “never” that got under Fling’s skin. What the hell was it to that
old man if Fling skied out on the Penobscot? What the hell! But there he stood, all
seventy years of him, and every one of those years spent in the north Maine woods,
except for his hiatus in World War Two, where Earl liked to say he took the last German bullet of the war—right in the ass. But it was all that time in the woods that gave Earl his permanent tan, like parchment, or rawhide, his face so dewlapped that it looked like it was about to fall off his skull. And then there was that toothpick which had permanent residence in the corner of his mouth. What the hell!

Fling darkened, but didn’t say a word. He just pulled his skis and poles together in
the dooryard and then squatted to lace up his boots while Earl hovered, looking out over the river and twirling that toothpick with a free hand. “I’d never,” he said, but under his breath now.

Didn’t Earl sense that there were times when Fling just liked to be left alone?
Actually, Fling usually liked to be left alone. Except for Deb, of course. They had been married only a few years, and she was still the white hot star he circled. But aside from her he had never felt a real need for people. He wasn’t antisocial or anything like that.

He’d just never felt a real need.

Earl stood firmly on the snowy bank as Fling slipped down onto the river. It was
perfect: just an inch or so of crystal snow over the thick ice. The skis slid along without hitch or resistance, the cold air filling Fling’s lungs as he cut long, languid loops around the channel that ran between the bank and the strip island about a hundred yards offshore, carefully avoiding the notorious thin areas where the river boiled up. Every so often Fling glanced back toward the house. Earl was still there, looking on with palpaple disapproval, the breath steaming from his nostrils. When, after a half hour, Fling returned to shore, Earl looked nothing short of relieved.

The thing was, Earl had always been good to Fling and Deb. In his quietly
intrusive way. Once, just after they had moved into the fixer upper they had bought for a song—but right on the river!—Fling was out in the overgrown backyard, wondering where on earth to start to clear the forest of knotweed that seemed to be growing right before his eyes. Earl called it bamboo. Or more precisely, “damned bamboo.” Fling’s property sloped gently down to the river, so that there was no clear border between what Fling wanted to control and what the river was entitled to. “That damned bamboo’d creep right up to the house and knock on the door,” said Earl. “Come in for a cup of coffee if you let it.”

“I’m going to build a retaining wall,” said Fling with a determined nod. “Get
some clean fill and square off the yard. Raise the bank.” He took off his ballcap and his straight, dark hair fell over his eyes like a curtain. He brushed it back and redonned his cap. “But I’m gonna need some railroad ties.”

Earl said nothing. He just continued to observe the situation with Fling. But the
next morning, when Fling bounded out of the house with the alacrity of a young man bent on taking on the world, there it was, in his driveway—a big heap of railroad ties, sticking out every which way like a breastwork. When he asked Earl if he knew where they had come from, Earl’s eyes sparkled mischievously but he wouldn’t look at the younger man. “Oh,” he said, “some truck probably hit a bump and it was too much trouble to gather the things up again.”

And then there was the time Fling had put his canoe into the river during spring
runoff. A stupid thing to do, he realized now. There were still slabs of ice fluming down from the north woods, so Fling had to maneuver deftly around them in the swift current. But a floe slammed into him, and the canoe went over about ten feet from shore. Fling felt the life being sucked right out of him in the frigid water as he flailed and watched his canoe float steadily away. Then a pole precipitated before his eyes. He grabbed it and held on in desperate gratitude. Earl pulled the shivering man ashore and helped him off with his boots. “Well, I saw you froggin’ around out there and thought I’d better come over,” was all he said. He was out of earshot before Fling could muster so much as a “thank you” through chattering teeth.

That was the thing with Earl. He could be so exasperating in the way he would
give unsolicited advice; but his acts of kindness were unremitting, and so, yes, Fling
called him friend. And then there was Earl’s wife, Ines—whom Earl referred to as “her” —bent and crippled up with her walker and Earl uncomplaining about it all. Well, shoot, Fling knew he should count his blessings.

Eventually, the knotweed was cleared, a new roof put on the house—with Earl’s
help—and a small garage was built for Fling’s “projects,” as Deb called them. They
scraped and repainted the clapboards and it finally looked like people lived there. People who cared. People who wanted to stay put for the long haul. Maybe have a couple or three kids. And then there was the river. Fling still couldn’t get over it. They had lived in the house for two years and Fling was still struck by the wonder of it all. Every morning, before he got in the pick-up and headed out on his carpentry jobs, he stood for a few long moments at the edge of his retaining wall and looked out over the Penobscot. In early spring the runoff was a sight to behold—ice rushing down from the north, sounding like a clatter of wine glasses. In the summer the river was a silver ribbon meandering along, but sometimes as still as a lake. In the fall the birches and maples studding the banks caught fire—reds and golds and who knows how many colors in between. God it was beautiful…

But in Fling’s mind the winter was the most arresting season as far as the river
was concerned. As he lay in bed close to Deb on those chill nights, there were sounds, and each of them fired his imagination. One was the chinking of the woodstove as its joints expanded. Another was Deb’s breathing and sometimes her low moaning when he had his hands on her trying to get her going. But the other sounds were the ones that Fling was most captured by because they were the newest to his experience. They came from the river. A thundering crack, like rifle fire. Dull, echoing thuds as the plates of ice grew heavy and then collapsed. And the subtlest sound of all: the crinkling of broad, flat, glass fingers feeling their way up the bank. “It’s making ice,” he’d whisper. And Deb in her half-sleep would echo, “Ice?”

“The river,” said Fling. “It’s making ice. That’s what they call it. Deb, why does it
bring tears to my eyes?”

And Deb would prop herself up on her elbow and gaze dreamily into Fling’s face.
“I don’t know,” she’d say. “You’ve never told me.”

“I don’t know either,” said Fling as he lay there with his hands knotted behind his
head. “But I read somewhere that rivers are alive. Do you believe that, Deb? Do you
think that when it freezes and swells up like that, it’s reaching out for us? And that some day that really thin ice along the bank is going to make it? And it will come in and that’s what death is?”

That’s when Deb grabbed his face and turned it toward her. “It’s too late for that
kind of talk,” she said. “And we’re too young.” And then she pulled herself up tight
against his bare chest and legs. “But why do I get so damn hot when you get in these moods? Can you answer that one?”

Fling couldn’t, and he was soon overcome with his own heat for this woman who
he once said was his only reason for living, moving into her with practiced ease, the
sound of their love-making providing counterpoint to the sounds of the river making ice. Crack. Thud. Sigh. Moan. Through the night.

Finally, in January, the river quieted. Fling went out onto the ice with his hand
auger and drilled down to running water. “Eighteen inches,” he said to himself as he
wiped his nose on his glove and drew his measuring rod out of the hole. When he got back to shore, Earl was standing there, his hands in the pockets of his black-and-red checked lumberjack coat, steam pouring from the nostrils of his great rubbery nose in the frigid air, an icicle of snot hanging from the tip. “Gives a man pause to see you out on that ice,” he said as Fling came by him.

“Earl,” said Fling, “that ice is eighteen inches thick. It could hold a Sherman tank.”

Earl wasn’t much for argument. But he did know ice, having cut and hauled it in
the old days. Had stacked it in the ice houses and covered it with sawdust, where it lasted the year through. Yes, Earl knew ice. “The thing is,” he said, “you got that double ice here and there. A layer on top, then an air pocket, then the layer on top of the water. Back in ’39 I was out there cutting. I was all of seventeen and on top of the world. But the ice don’t care. Didn’t make a sound. No warning at all. The world just fell out from under me. I dropped two feet but it might have been a mile for the panic I felt. I thought it was the end. Fell so fast I didn’t have time to scream for my mother. And then my boots hit ice again. The fellas ran over and hauled me out. I don’t mind tellin’ you now that I shit my pants. I don’t go out on river ice no more.”

“I’ll be careful,” said Fling dismissively as he headed for the house.

“Careful has nothing to do with it,” said Earl without turning his gaze from the
slate gray river ice. Fling heard him, but continued up to the house. And Earl, for his part, returned to Ines.

Fling came to understand Earl’s fear of a frozen river. If he had fallen through as
a kid, it would have made an impression on him too. But eighteen inches! Science was on his side. It took only four to hold a man with no worry at all. Eighteen could hold an army. If he had the least doubt about this, he’d never take Deb out on the ice. She’d shown some hesitation at first, but Fling’s hand was an irresistible lure, and before long they were taking daily walks out on the river. Once, in the middle of their walk, the softest snow began to fall. The flakes adorned Deb’s chestnut hair like stars in a crown. Fling held her at arm’s length. The beauty of that sight took his breath away. When he was finally able to speak, all he could say was, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” in the barest whisper.

Then the sharp crack that split the air. Deb pulled herself close to him. “The ice!”
she screamed. “Fling!”

But Fling knew better. He knew the river by now. “No,” he said. “It stopped making ice a couple of weeks back. That was a gun.”

Deb pulled back a bit and stared into his face. “So we’re safe?”

“Yeah,” said Fling with all the reassurance he could muster. “Just an idiot in the
woods hunting outside of season. Still looking for that deer.” As if to reinforce his point, at that very moment a doe peeked out from the woods on the strip island. She cast her large, curious eyes upon the couple, then flicked up her tail and bounded off. “There,” said Fling as he kneaded Deb’s arms. “The one that got away.” Then, after a moment’s consideration, he added, “It’s a stupid thing,” and Deb threw him a quizzical look. “The deer’s job is to get away, but when it hears danger—like a hunter, for instance—it flicks up that snow-white tail like a flag that says, ‘Here I am! Shoot!’ It’s dumb.”

Deb forced a smile. She didn’t even like to think about hunting. “I’d rather set
food out on the ice, to help them through the winter,” she said by way of protest.
Fling took a glove off and pressed his warm palm against her cheek. “I know you
would,” he said. “I know.”

The winter wore on, unusually frigid this year, so that Fling let the faucets drip at
night to keep the pipes from freezing. He loaded up the wood stove before bed, but by morning the cast iron was stone cold again. But then there were those in-between generic pharmacy drug days when the temperature bounded upwards and the world lost its hard, cold, flinty edge. This happened toward the end of January. A thaw came that saw Fling working in shirtsleeves. The snow on the roof melted and rained down from the eaves throughout those few days and nights of relative warmth.

One day, Fling went out onto the river with his wood sled and chainsaw to cut some windfalls over by the strip island. A few days of warmth didn’t make much of a
difference in the general ice thickness, although the first inch or two had turned to slush. And around some large rocks, and an old timber crib, the ice had let go and the river was bubbling up, pure and cold. Fling was surprised at how close he could come to these openings without so much as a crinkling of the ice. It was like walking to the edge of a cliff and looking down into a gorge. Perfectly safe. Then he backed off and continued after those windfalls.

Fling reached the shore of the island and immediately spotted several trees that
had come down, either from age, affliction, erosion, or the work of beavers. He put on his hearing and eye protection and hoisted the chainsaw out of the sled. He had just had the Huskie overhauled, so it took only two good yanks on the pull before it roared to life. Then he waved it forward and set its teeth down along a beautiful length of birch. The saw cut cleanly and without protest, spewing out a shower of wood chips. Birch burned rather quickly, but it was a sweet-smelling wood and it kept the house warm.

The minutes passed. Fling’s mind started to wander, but only to pleasant things.
The house, having plenty of work, Deb… He thought of the old saying that wood warms you twice: when you cut it and when you burn it. And it was true. The air had grown chill, but he felt warm and snug as he handled the Huskie, pausing every so often to gather up the lengths and chuck them into the wood sled.

When Fling finally paused, the first thing he did was look up at the sky. It was low, gray, and unbroken. So cold up there, the clouds looked frozen in place. He turned
to look back toward the house and was pleasantly surprised to see Deb tripping over the ice in his direction, holding her arms out to keep her balance. Now, why isn’t she wearing her mittens? he thought. But gloves or not, the sight of her, with her fur-edged hood drawn over her lovely head, and her delicate step, made his heart race. He knew then and there that without her he would die. Literally. For him there were no other fish in the sea. What was that other saying he had heard? That other mothers had more beautiful daughters? Well, not in this case. He had gotten the pick of the litter.

“Fling,” was all she said when she had reached him. He threw his arms around her
as if he had caught a falling star. “Where are your mittens?” he demanded as he took her hands and cupped them before his mouth and blew warm air over them.
Deb reached into her pockets and felt around. “Funny. I didn’t even notice I
wasn’t wearing any. Well, I’ve got them here.”

“Well, put ‘em on,” said Fling, playfully. “And stand back while I cut these last
couple of lengths.” And having said that, he turned to his work. Deb put on her white wool mittens and tramped through the snow up the low bank of the island, from where she could look down at Fling.

She stood there in the naked woods, the gray birches leaning out over the river, the old oaks and maples gnarled and dark, looking almost sick as they struggled for life in the poor, sandy soil of the island. But then there were the pines, robust and lovely, their green needles offering the eyes blessed relief in the monotony of the winter landscape.

Fling paused from his work and looked around, wanting to set his eyes on Deb
again. And there she was, on high ground overlooking the river, in her tan parka against the green of the pines. Fling lifted a hand and waved to her. Deb smiled and lifted a snow white mitten to return the gesture.

Then Fling heard the harsh and sudden sound right through his hearing protection.
“The river’s making ice again,” he said to himself. But on consideration, he knew it
couldn’t be. The season was too far advanced. He had told Deb this very thing the last time they were on the river together. Deb had panicked upon hearing that crack, and Fling had said, “No, it stopped making ice a couple of weeks back. That was a gun.”

Fling watched as a plume of red spread itself out from the left side of Deb’s chest.
Her expression turned from one of pure joy to non-comprehension and then, finally, hopelessness, as she collapsed.

Fling dropped the Huskie and threw off his headphones. “No, no, no, no, no…”
he repeated, like a mantra, like something one says to ward off evil. He scrambled madly up the bank, through the thicket, through the snow, stumbling wildly until he arrived at the still mass. He turned Deb over and beheld the static face of a porcelain doll.

At that moment Fling was set free in time. He didn’t know how long he had
squatted there with the body in his arms. He didn’t feel the cold, or the wind, or for that matter, anything at all. He was at the very edge, hoping that whatever nightmare he had blundered into was something he was just glimpsing, like looking over a high wall. He was waiting for the moment when he could let go of the wall and fall back down again, turn to Deb, and say, “Don’t look. You don’t want to see what’s over there. Let’s go on being happy and loving and planning our life.”

The shadow that fell over him put Fling back in the moment. Earl stood there,
looking down, puffing out his cheeks. “I saw it from the house,” he said. “The cops and ambulance are on the way.”

Ambulance? thought Fling. What a curious thing. Even when death was
indisputable, an ambulance came. Maybe it was just an opportunity for them to say they tried. Or that maybe there was hope. Fling, still cradling Deb, could sense how uneasy the older man was for having crossed the ice, and what he had sacrificed of himself in doing so. Fling just continued to sit there in the snow, looking like a little boy. Earl reached down and ran his hand slowly through Fling’s hair, pushing his knit cap off. “I didn’t see the shooter,” he said. “But the cops are looking. He probably got off island on the north end, where you can get into town on the low rocks.”

Fling almost smiled as he listened to these details, as he listened to Earl trying to
make sense of the world. “Thanks, Earl,” he managed, and he was both amazed and
ashamed of himself for those two words.

•

A man who has been accustomed to a life working with his hands, who is self-employed, who had never discriminated between work days and the weekend, cannot not continue to work. Fling knew that he had to keep moving, that if he stopped, the weight of remembrance would crush him. The only way to stay out from under it was to keep moving.

But nothing would rend the silence of the man. He had become encapsulated by
his grief, barely able to ask for what he wanted in the store, barely able to say “coffee.” Earl did his best to keep Fling company, although Earl was a poor conversationalist and, having never been comforted in his life, had never learned to comfort others. For Earl it was like bowling—every so often he’d hurl a comment at Fling, who didn’t know whether to be grateful for the old man’s attention or throw him out of the house and tell him never to come back. But Earl was not a stupid or insensitive man. He knew enough to not say anything about the healing power of time or that Fling should be grateful for the years he had had with Deb or that God wanted another flower for his garden. And he certainly knew enough to clam up about the danger of going out on the ice. Earl’s relative silence, but physical presence, Fling realized, was something. That, and the kindness of his housebound wife, Ines, who sent over, once a week, some small dish she was able to prepare with her gnarled, arthritic hands.

“I’d like to go back to carpentry myself,” said Earl as he sat by the wood stove
one day with Fling. “And I would, too, if it wasn’t for her.”

Fling tried to grunt, to make some sound to let Earl know he wasn’t ignoring him.
But he was so frustrated with himself for what he saw himself becoming, for the inertia that had seized his life, or what was left of it. It had been two months already since Deb. Two whole months. God almighty, was this the way he was going to die? Weak, beaten down, depressed? Weakening, beating down, and depressing everyone around him?

As the two men sat by the fire, rolling mugs of coffee between their hands, the ice
continued to disappear from the roof. The melt-off dripped, dripped, dripped outside the windows, the sun illuminating every fat drop, making them sparkle. Spring had arrived. Officially at least. The shift of seasons meant that Deb now had a place in time. She was no longer now, but then. Fling had to acknowledge that Deb had died “back in the winter.” Back. Long ago. As that point continued to recede in time, would she eventually disappear from heart and mind? And would Fling, like a little child who had experienced loss, come to forget what she had looked like if he couldn’t muster the courage to look at her pictures? A chill shook his body. Coffee sloshed from his cup and onto the floor.

“You okay, Fling?” inquired Earl.

Fling raised his head. “Yeah,” he said. “I-I’m okay.” And Fling realized that this was true. He was feeling okay, and he felt not a stick of guilt about it.

“You seem more cheerful today,” ventured Earl. But the word Earl might have used, had he been familiar with it, was “resigned.”

“I think I’m just learning to appreciate you more,” said Fling, and for the first time since Deb, he smiled.

Earl, for his part, not accustomed to dealing with sentiment, gazed into his mug of
coffee. Finally, when the hour was late, he rose to go. “I’d better get back to her,” he said. “She gets these flare-ups. The stove helps. She likes to sit by the fire. I have a blanket for her.”

Fling nodded. “Goodbye Earl,” he said as the old man continued to the door. Earl
didn’t say goodbye, because he knew, at some level, that he was not the one leaving.

That night the world hardened. A frigid Arctic blast from Canada swept into Maine. Ice reformed on the roof. The snow piles lining the road regained some of their
integrity, and the slush in the road froze into irregular, rutted masses. But in the morning the sun was brilliant. Fling woke into winter’s second wind and didn’t shave, shower or eat breakfast. He put on his rag wool sweater, his flannel-lined wool pants, his ski boots, and a ballcap to keep the sun out of his eyes. He took his skis down to the river bank, where he bent down beneath the pendulous, still-bare branches of a swamp maple. He clicked the toes of his boots into the clamps of the skis, stood up, wound the straps of the ski poles’ grips about his wrists, and pushed off onto the river.

In the meantime, Earl was standing at the window of his workshop. Ines called to
him from the bedroom. “So cold!” she moaned. “So cold…” But he didn’t budge.
Instead, he watched as the graceful, angular figure of a young man glided over the
thinning ice in a beautiful rhythm of ski and pole, ski and pole. As Earl watched, Fling skied in ever widening circles, like a pilot lost over the ocean in heavy fog, trying to find his ship. Finally, and without a sound, Fling dropped and Earl immediately knew that there was no double ice this time. Under the ice, the river must have been running strong, because there wasn’t a pole, or a hand, or a head, or the least disturbance. A man could last five minutes in that cold only if his head were above water. But under the ice?

Ines called again. “So cold!” she managed in her thin, reedy voice. “So cold…”
She needed him. Earl called 911. But he wouldn’t go out on the ice again. He had learned that lesson long ago. Instead, he did what he knew he was still good for. He went into the bedroom to tend to her.