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Ruth leaned back on her wrists, hiding her arms in the dark. He was about to ask her again when she spoke, almost inaudibly under the buzzing breath of the night.

“You’re a good dad, Mr. Harrison,” she said. “I wish you were mine.”

When he was her age, Silas imagined himself a kind of want-connoisseur, an aficionado of the ask more than the answer. But when he looked at Ruth then, the want he saw in her had nothing to do with heat or breath. It wasn’t a quickening in the gut, like the soul saw what it needed and grew hands just to reach. Her want was a long, deep hole. Where other wants swept fast and wide through the body, specific as to the outcome but flexible as to the conduit—I want that taste, that feeling; can you give it to me?—hers was focused, tailored. She was indifferent to feeling, seeking only the conduit. It was so plain in her eyes, he could tell she had never let herself want anything else. Just this one thing, a prisoner’s tunnel dug with a spoon.

Silas was almost it, this thing she wanted. But close didn’t count. He wasn’t her father; he never would be.

The present came rushing back in around him then, the black hole of the clearing and the lake and the tremor in his legs from Phil’s bike transforming from that night seventeen years ago back to this one, and he found himself overwhelmingly grateful. Somehow, finally, Silas wasn’t that age anymore. He had made it through all those wants, and all his bargaining with Philip, even though Philip never once complied. He thought for sure, back then, that a life without an answer from his brother would kill him. But it didn’t. He wasn’t a kid anymore. He didn’t need to spend so much time with his wants. He could spend time with what he already had.

He wasn’t a kid anymore, but this girl was. That was all that mattered.

“Ruth, I don’t know much about what you’ve been through, and I don’t have to. But you will always have a home here. Okay?”

When she started to cry, he put his arm around her.

“Hey,” he said, the way he did when Mickey would awake from nightmares. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m right here.”

Ruth pushed the heels of her palms into her eyeballs, tears hot on her cold skin.

“Mr. Harrison,” she said, shaking, “I need to tell you—”

But then there was a crunch from the woods behind them.

“What are you doing?”

It was Sean.

Silas jumped, let go of Ruth, and hopped to his feet a little too quickly, his vision still syrupy from the whiskey.

“Hiya, kiddo,” he said, wincing. He hadn’t called Sean “kiddo” in a very long time.

“What is going on here?”

“Ruth was just feeling a little down.”

Sean looked warily from Silas to Ruth, and then out at the water. Silas walked up to his son and put his hands on his shoulders. Sean was even taller than he had been when the summer started; Silas was sure of it. He was sturdy, his shoulders broad. As the dead cleared their fog from this space, he could see him more plainly. Yes, Sean looked like Philip. But he also looked like him.

“How about you go get Mickey, and we can all head on home?”

“What are you talking about, Dad?” Sean asked, staring out over his shoulder. “Mickey went swimming with Ruth.”

Silas turned around to face Ruth, ready for her explanation. She was exactly where he had left her, huddled up on herself, hands gripping her knees. The moonshine made her white shoulder blades rise from the dark of her towel like a creature from the deep. The kind of being that lived a whole lifetime without ever being seen. But then, as if in contradiction, a bright beam cut through the woods behind her and caught her perfectly in its center. Silas and Sean both shaded their eyes as they looked toward the source, but Ruth stayed perfectly still.

“Hiya, chickadee,” a man’s voice said. “Is it done?”

Silas turned back to Ruth just in time to see her give one small but certain nod.





LILY





ONE TIME, AS A child, Lily went diving for quarters in her uncle’s pool. She remembered the thick white sunscreen her mother slopped onto her face like mayonnaise, and the way it stung her eyes. But it didn’t matter. She was the youngest of her cousins and the only girl, and she was going to hold her breath the longest, even if it killed her.

Lily dove under the water and shot to the bottom, a submarine with a mission. She opened her eyes, ignored the burn, and reached through the fog of her blond hair for a glittering coin, managing to touch it just enough to send it scuttling deeper. But Lily didn’t panic. She used her fingers to pull herself along the porous pool bottom like a frog, the fabric of her bathing suit catching on the rough floor just enough so she could feel it resist as it let her go. When she finally grabbed the quarter, her heartbeat pounded in her ears. She closed her eyes and shot to the surface, her victorious hand outstretched. But when she came up and inhaled, she inhaled water. Her head was underneath something solid, heavy.

It was not what she had expected.

In that moment, Lily became certain that while she was underwater, something terrible had happened above. The surface had turned against her. Become inhabitable. Oxygenless. Like a balloon sucked clean of all its air. There was no longer anything between the edges. No space to breathe. No space, any longer, for her.

She flailed and churned the water. She pushed against the solid surface with both of her small hands, but it suctioned and held tight. Her thoughts seemed to scream out of her brain—Please, please, please, world, I’ll never take you for granted again, just please come back—right up until her cousins pulled off the heavy pool mat from on top of her, laughing.