Her husband, Richard, has joined the other family on their boat. He looks tired, face yellow, resin-stiff. He stands, a hand on the shoulder of the man they met just hours ago. The man’s removed his sunglasses, his captain’s cap. He holds his wife’s hand. Their daughter’s face is hidden in her mother’s lap. The daughter and the mother cry. For an hour they’ve cried while the men watch the water, saying nothing.
Lisa lowers the binoculars. Their strap is cool on her neck.
She should have gone to the hospital with Michael and Diane, but she feels needed here. There are stories of children gone under, recovered twenty, thirty minutes later, then revived. Not miracles, biology. If the conditions are right. If the water is cold. If one stands onshore and watches long enough.
But, if she’s being honest, they’re only looking for a body now.
She starts up the hill to the house.
The house is small and old. Distinguished, Richard would say. Not old, and neither am I. Oh, but they’re getting up there. Lisa is sixty. Soon her husband will be seventy. The lake house is older than Lisa’s children, a ’70s-model double-wide converted in the ’80s to a house. She and Richard bought the place on impulse not long after Michael’s birth. Their marriage was rocky. Twice they’d separated, then come to an arrangement: No more maybes. They would stay married, for better or worse. The summer home was the handshake on the deal.
And what a home it had been, years ago. Long and low to the ground, the house lolled at the top of the hill like an errant fire truck, white-shuttered, cedar siding painted red. A porch, low-banistered in the style of those old Sears Roebuck build-’em-yourself bungalows, wrapped the house, the back screened. A quilted hammock hung in the yard between two trees. A sprinkler system set to a timer kept the lawn green while they were away, and a detached two-car garage became a place to store research when their offices in Ithaca filled up.
Then came the storms of ’86 and ’90, the blizzard of ’93, the tornado—a near miss—of 2011. And don’t even get her started on the great ant invasion of 2017. They tried to keep up, but maintaining a summer home was work, and they had work already, Richard teaching at Cornell, Lisa conducting research in the labs, both of them publishing. Summers were for resting, not repairs. So they’d let the house go a little. Okay, a lot.
These days, the porch sags. The siding is gray and mildew-stained. The roof is missing shingles, and what shingles remain hang furred with moss. And is it Lisa’s imagination, or does the whole house kind of lean a little? The hammock in the yard has long since rotted away, and the lawn is a patchwork of grass and dead places, of anthills and weeds.
Last month, during negotiations, Lisa and Richard made so many concessions to the inspector’s damage report that they stood to lose tens of thousands. “Hold off,” their Realtor cautioned. “Fix up the place. The market’s only getting better. In a year, you might make twenty thousand more.”
But what’s the point? The concessions are a way to tank the asking price, nothing more. Even pristine, the house, sold, would greet a wrecking ball. The lake is changing, investors coming in. In the end, it’s not the house that she and Richard are selling. It’s the land.
Unless Lisa calls off the sale. Closing is a week away. Barring a lawsuit, it’s not too late. Keep or sell, stay or go, Richard won’t fight her. Because they had a deal. And Richard broke the deal, forgot what marriage meant. The handshake—the house—it has to go. This isn’t punishment. It’s more that the equation must be balanced. To stay together, they must start over. To start over, they must sell the house. That much, to Lisa, seems clear. And just because Richard doesn’t know she knows, that’s no reason to go on as though nothing’s happened. Is it?
She isn’t sure.
She’s sure of this: The choice is hers. Richard already made his choice. Richard gave up his right to have a say.
Up the hill. Up the porch steps. The staircase gasps underfoot. Beneath it, where her children used to play, ivy’s taken over, a hiding place for snakes. She skips the fifth step, run through with rot. The railing shakes. The wood is soft as cork, the kind left too long in the bottle that crumbles at the corkscrew’s kiss.
On the top step, she turns and once more brings the binoculars to her face. She focuses, and the mother is there. Lisa should be with her on the boat. But, being on the boat, she would become the mother, and she has already been the mother. She will not touch the hem of that particular misery again.
And why is this happening now, their last week at the lake? Why rob her of the beauty of this time with her family?
But these thoughts are evil. For a moment, she can’t stand herself.
The other mother is Wendy. In the water, she gave her name, and Lisa thought of Peter Pan, not the play or Disney movie, but the book, a favorite of Lisa’s mother, whom Lisa lost three summers ago. Cancer, parents—the indignities of growing distinguished.
God, Wendy’s face when those inflatables bobbed into view.
Who was watching the boy? Who was supposed to be watching him? Not Michael, who saw and dove and rose beneath a boat.
Poor Michael. Poor Wendy. Wendy is ruined. Wendy will never forgive herself.
And where do they go? Lisa wonders not for the first time, not for anything like the first time in her life. Where have they gone, Wendy’s son and Lisa’s firstborn, all the souls of children gone too soon?
If heaven exists, it has received them. They’re children, after all. If not innocent, then innocent enough. Lisa imagines a Neverland for them, a place the ghosts of children go to wait, to fly, until their parents come for them.
She hopes for this. She prays.
Some days, all that keeps her going is this thought: If God is love, she’ll see her girl again.
3.
Jake showers, and Thad leans against the sink. Thad still can’t be sure how it happened—the boy, the boat, his brother’s head. He searches the bathroom mirror for answers, but all he finds is his pale, unshaven face. The mirror fogs, and he wipes the condensation away. His eyebrows need trimming.
From the bay, they swam ashore and ran uphill. His mother made the call while Thad tried to convince his brother he needed an ambulance, Michael insisting he was fine, that he could drive, while Diane cried and pressed a blood-soaked washcloth to her husband’s head. When the ambulance arrived, Michael reluctantly got in, Diane with him, and Thad’s mother stationed herself at the edge of the lake. When at last Thad thought to check on his boyfriend, he found him in the bathroom.
“Are you still there?” Jake says, steam from the shower filling the room.
“I’m here,” Thad says.
And who is this boy he’s been with the past two years? Jake is twenty-six, four years younger than Thad, though there are times the gap feels wider, days Jake acts sixteen. They’ve reached the point they should get serious, commit or go their separate ways. That Jake might not recognize this makes Thad sad.
“Can I have some privacy?” Jake asks.
Thad wants to believe he’s misheard. He pulls the shower curtain aside. Jake stands beneath the water. He’s small and lithe, with acne on his chest. There’s lather in his hands, and he’s erect.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”