Sorry I have gone quiet. I have been busy and also taking time to think. This is a complicated situation for everyone, ¿no estás de acuerdo? If you still want to keep writing I guess I am okay with it for now. I will try to answer any questions you have.

Antonio

Eve

11

Norma reached up to tighten her ponytail and I thought she shuddered a little in the heat. I’d ended up telling her the story of the snake without exactly deciding to.

“I told Maddy when she was old enough.”

“What did she make of it?”

“Oh, even as a child, Maddy liked the . . . Gothic, shall we say. She never shied away from frightening things. She wanted to know what was out there, I guess.”

“Is she still like that?”

I steepled my fingers. “Oh, yes.”

“Mine are scaredy-cats,” said Norma. “Maybe they’ll toughen up when they’re teenagers. Isn’t that when kids get into horror movies and gore and whatnot?”

“I guess so,” I said. “It’s strange. I haven’t thought about that snake in years.”

I could not read Norma’s silence, so I pointed out the family of ducks that every day made their way from the peninsula to the fallen tree on the lot next door. They proceeded with a mechanical, jaunty confidence, as if protection of the young is a matter of getting everyone in the correct position. We followed the ducks’ progress until they disappeared one at a time through the gap under the trunk.

“Do we actually hear those ducks swimming,” I said, “or do we only think we hear them?” Sound or imagined sound: the distinction is not as great as one might think. What I imagine is also part of the world.

Norma cocked her head. “I don’t think I can hear them.”

I considered this a very cryptic reply. “Even if they’re too far away to hear, we invent the sounds.” Nearby, in the shadows of the overhanging branches, bronze shafts of light plummeted down. “Maddy tells me there are three worlds in a lake. The surface texture. The mud, weeds, and rocks underneath. And the reflection. The trick, she says, is to hold all three worlds in your mind at once.”

Norma nodded in an encouraging way that made me suspicious. Why had she stayed this long, gamely listening to my nonsense about lakes, snakes, and turtles? She laced her fingers and straightened her arms, palms out, a gesture often accompanied by a yawn. Any minute she would stand and make her excuses, lower herself into the kayak as clumsily as she had disembarked, and paddle back to her life.

The dock trembled underfoot. I turned. Robin was standing by the moored boat.

“I’ve got to go,” said Norma, rising from her chair.