The cabin didn’t have showers, but rather two claw-foot tubs. After William went to bed that first night, I soaked in the bath downstairs, next to the kitchen, and listened to the calls of the loons float across the water—a sound so eerie, so incredible, so familiar, and yet something I had managed to not think about for years.

The first morning, Lonnie had told me to sleep as late as I liked, but I woke early, even before William. I dressed and wandered into the kitchen. I put the kettle on the stove for coffee and started soaking some steel-cut oats in a pan. The loon calls had been replaced by the chirping of other birds. When I finished making coffee I took my cup outside. I didn’t put on shoes; I just wandered barefoot over the cold ground, through the trees and down to the dock on the lake.

I had a friend once who used to live on a lake a little smaller than that one. It made me sad to think about her. Once we’d sneaked out of her house at night, stripped naked, painted each other’s bodies with Halloween face paint, and recited friendship oaths to each other in the moonlight. We’d intended to cut ourselves and press the wounds together, the way they’d warned us not to in school. We weren’t scared of diseases, we felt the perfectness, the unsulliedness of each other’s bodies, but we couldn’t find a proper weapon. We’d tried the sharp tips of pine needles and jagged rocks, but couldn’t manage to break the skin. That was before I had my pocketknife.

Behind me I heard the crunching of pine cones and turned to see Lonnie, in silly white long johns, rubber boots, and a big brown sweater. She was pushing the canoe across the grass between the garage and the lake, grinning, the whites of her teeth flashing in the small strips of sunlight. She’d obviously just bounded out of bed; her hair was unbrushed, tangled on the left side, as I’d seen it that first day of work.

“Elle!” she called to me when she reached the lip of the lake. “Get in!”

“What about William?”

“He’s still sleeping! We’ll only be out for a few minutes.”

Though I felt uneasy, I hopped off the dock and into the canoe. She heaved the boat with me in it off the shore: a troubling sensation of being grounded, and then suddenly not. The little boat rocked as she climbed in behind me and I gripped my seat. We emerged from the shadows of the trees into the morning sunlight glittering on the water.