But the day they celebrated was a warm Sunday, almost a year ago, and they’d followed the trampled path through the woods behind their house to the creek where all the season’s water funneled its way to wherever it went. They followed the creek, then, to where it widened and collected around mossy rocks in pools deep enough to swim in, though it was too cold for that that day. Normally a lush and shady spot in springtime—which is when they usually visited—and dotted with the upturned eager faces of the marigolds for which the spot was named, in early winter the place had been transformed, and abundant stippled sunlight fell through the thinning canopy of leaves long overdue to have fallen, their hue a gold identical to that of the springtime marigolds. The moss was greener and thicker than they had ever seen it for all the rain they’d had, and Isabelle cut a small piece of it to bring back and replant by the house.

Ruth remembers the scene in flashes: Maggie chest-deep in the frigid water, burying her nose beneath the surface and then flinging her head upward, sunlight glinting in the resulting splash; Isabelle crouched down at the water’s edge, releasing the tired goldfish she’d won at the fair the day before; Wilson supine on a mossy rock, the newspaper over his face, and then later the two of them, father and daughter, layering the glassy surface of a pool with floating golden leaves. Ruth tries to imagine herself in the scene—what was she doing?—but she cannot conjure herself there. What comes over her instead of an image is a feeling of release: her shoulders sink and her heart seems to slow its perpetual racing, and it is good.