Swim.

Brent’s boat sends a surf of water up to meet me, and I fall down under its weight, tumbling. The underside clips my shoulder, missing my head by inches.

Underneath the water, sound becomes vibration: a shudder, a distant boom that makes the whole reservoir shiver. I open my eyes. The floodlights have cut their way down into the depths. A peaceful place to die. Green with old growth. Weedy and silent. There are letters embedded in the silt, large white letters, a hieroglyph I understand intuitively, a message that fills me with a strange joy.

I have learned how to see.

—

“Abby. Abby. Can you hear me? Abby.”

A whirl of lights and color. Fireworks. Explosions of sound.

“Just hang on, okay? You’re going to be okay. I’m right here with you.”

A web of branches above me.

I’m a child again, bundled in a white sheet, rocking.

“Keep the oxygen coming.”

“Radio the bus to come down Pike Road, it’ll be quicker.”

My mouth is made of plastic. My breath mists inside of it.

“She’s trying to say something. She’s trying to speak.”

A stranger touches my face. She looses my mouth from its plastic cage.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” the stranger says, “you’re going to be just fine.” She has a smile that reminds me of my mother’s.

It takes a second to work out what my tongue is, how to move it in the right direction.

“I found her,” I whisper.

“What’d she say?” I know that voice. Condor. “Abby, what’s the matter?”

She frowns. “Found who, sweetheart?”

“Kaycee.” I close my eyes again. I see the letters written at the bottom of the lake: the white of her bones, so clean, so fine, almost glowing. “She’s been waiting for us to find her. She’s been waiting for us in the reservoir.”

Epilogue

It’s September before I finally pack my car with my suitcase and my duffel bag, my mother’s jewelry box, and a cardboard box of my dad’s belongings I’ve decided, after all, to save.

Why not? The past is just a story we tell. And all stories depend on the ending.

And for the first time in my life, I truly believe that the ending is going to be just fine.

Hannah gives me a sheath of drawings bound up in a three-ring binder: a superhero named Astrid who wears a purple cape and a pair of leather boots and goes around rescuing kids drowning in ocean waves or stranded by mounting floods on the roofs of their houses.

“I tried to make her look like you,” she tells me shyly, before briefly squeezing me into a hug and then darting off.

“You didn’t say good-bye,” Condor calls after her, but she’s already vanished, disappearing inside the house.

“That’s okay,” I say. “I don’t like good-byes, either.”

It’s a bright day, full of classic Indiana colors: gold and green and blue. The month of August seemed determined to make up for the drought, as if twelve months’ worth of rain had just been piling up waiting to spoil everyone’s last bit of summer. But when the storms passed, they left fields wild and lush. The reservoir is approaching normal levels again, though it’s still testing too high for lead and other contaminants, and the people of Barrens are still drinking and washing in bottled water trucked to town by the state and various charitable organizations. Protesters even set up camp in the playground that, ironically, still welcomes visitors with an Optimal Cares! sign. (Though after a recent graffiti modification, it now reads Optimal Scares.)