I rolled onto my stomach and Jack ran his hand up and down my spine. His dampness was squashed against me, his legs giving off a lazy kind of heat. It’s true that men literally empty themselves out. I felt emptied out too. With my free eye I could see the line of silver through the trees, fringed by my lashes. Night took a long time to fall here. The water held on to the light. My eye slowly closed and slowly opened, giving me the silver line again. Where would that line go? Where would the lacy trees between me and the line go? Where would the moss go that was in so much shadow now you couldn’t see it, you just had to know it was there? What about every idea I’d ever had about the lake? Everything that had ever happened to me at the lake? Where would that go? I could feel the answer like some sorry thing circling around and around itself, unable ever to lie down and rest, and the answer was: Nowhere. The lake would still be there. But my lake wouldn’t be there. Whatever I felt, thought, saw, heard was sealed up and attached to me and only to me, and it would go wherever I went.

I pulled the sheet up and tried to keep the sadness from taking over. If I let it take me over, then sadness was all I would ever have. I unrolled my length beside him. It was a miracle, when you thought about it. If Miss Sedge hadn’t put us together for the campaign, I would not be here in the lake house bedroom with Jack. I would not know what it was like to lie next to a perfectly warm body that was naked just for me, and feel the ripples from his hand fanning out.

“Jack?”

“What?”

“I love this place.”

I made him keep stroking my back and listen to every last detail of every story I could think of about the lake. The year my cousins and I rescued dragonflies trapped in the spiderwebs under the dock. We picked the sticky stuff off with tweezers. If their wings weren’t too damaged, they flew away. The first time I swam across, with Mom and Grandma alongside in the canoe. Singing on the dock before a storm. Picking blueberries at the air force base. It was my job to remove the hard green ones and the leaves and twigs that got mixed in. My grandfather’s birdhouses, walks down the glen, the perfect silence in the woods when it snowed.

“There,” I said.

“There what?”

“Let’s get up.”