On July third, a day after my sixth birthday, the sun blazed unimpeded in a blue sky. I was playing in the neighbors’ backyard with their four-year-old, Indie. Short for India. She was a little young for me, but we were the only two kids in the neighborhood under ten, so we made the best of it. Her mom was watching us or was supposed to be. She’d walk out on the patio every so often, but quickly retreat into the house to watch her soaps and sip vodka from a coffee cup.

My mom was at the college, working on a paper in the media center before it closed for the holiday. Corrine had gone to the mall with a friend, and my dad was at work, so I was left with the neighbors.

Summers in upstate New York can be cool or mercilessly hot. That summer was the latter. So hot your hair stuck to your neck where sweat bees menacingly buzzed by your ears, where your skin sizzled if you forgot your sunscreen. Indie and I had been on the swing set, pumping our plump legs and soaring to the metallic music of the chains as we swung back and forth. Tiring of that, we moved to the back of the yard, where a faded plastic playhouse sat among tall weeds that Indie’s dad’s mower couldn’t reach. Something my mother often grumbled about. “He needs to get in there with a weed whacker,” she’d say. “He’s drawing ticks.”

Indie and I knew less than nothing about ticks and tromped through the thick overgrowth, picking the wildflowers that fought their way through the tangle of vegetation, looking for the sun. With a sticky handful of Queen Anne’s lace and blue daisies, I saw someone moving through the thin line of trees that ran behind the houses. At first, I stood still like a rabbit who’d spotted a hawk, but relaxed when he came from behind an oak tree.