Diana Olmstead closed her eyes. The sea wind blew in her gray hair. From time to time she looked out at the water, or watched the others below: Pars, Ana. The family from Brooklyn, who stood in a circle now, holding hands and singing. At that moment, with the wind in her face, she felt an enormous sense of peace despite all the death. She could explain this to no one, but ever since her sister died, she’d felt moments of inexplicable joy. It wasn’t that her sister, nearing seventy, had had bone cancer and the crash had ended her life only a bit sooner than expected. She grieved for her and all the others, for the last terrifying moments of their lives, and for those they’d left behind. But there was something else that accompanied the tragedy, a certain quickening of life she felt with the proximity of so much death. She’d observed this before: how—ironically—it took death to make one feel momentarily alive, truly present, minute to minute. And there was another thing: the outpouring of love that had surrounded her since she’d arrived in Nova Scotia. That was real, undeniable, just as the grief was real too. They were simply opposite sides of the same coin.

On the rocks, she felt it now, a tremor in the air: the souls of the dead hovering over the water. Ana Gathreaux, who was just passing below her, felt something too, a slight quaking, as if the air around her had been sucked into a vacuum. But Ana dismissed it as the cold, the wind (seawater in her middle ear); still, she had to pause. Her legs felt shaky. She leaned against a boulder and closed her eyes. Pars came from behind and asked gently if she was okay. Ana swallowed hard and said—she was fine.

The Dutch girl sat on a nearby outcropping. Ana had met her the day before in Halifax, in the lobby bathroom of the Lord Nelson Hotel (both blowing their noses at the sink). Despite the biker jacket, the black fingernail polish, the patchouli, the girl looked so vulnerable, so alone, that Ana felt instantly protective of her. She was young enough to be Ana’s own daughter.

Ana staggered up to where she sat and rested against the same outcrop.

Where’s your brother? Ana asked.

Claartija deJong gestured with her chin toward the water. A bit of black eyeliner had leaked down her right cheek. A hand-rolled cigarette sat tucked behind one ear. Pars caught Ana’s eye, then pointed toward the cigarette.

Do you have another of those? he asked.

The Dutch girl nodded and turned to Ana.

You too?

Ana hadn’t smoked since graduate school, but she shrugged and said: Why not?