Emma walks me down to the water, and we wait for the boatman to appear out of the dark, small reflectors at our feet outlining the dock. She and Kathy had gone to a performance sponsored by the hotel during the afternoon, but there had been something off when they told me about it. The whirling dervishes, the bright costumes, lots of bells and beads, neither of them looking at each other or at me when they describe it, their voices careful, so that it seemed frightening somehow. Like speeded-up film in a horror movie, the helpless spinning person possessed by a sirocco. They did say they liked it, though.

“It was a floor show,” Emma tells me in a low voice. “Literally. People were expected to sit on the floor! And so of course it was just…”

She trails off but I can see it. The cloud of dust whirling in its white sheet, the marble floor covered in cushions, like back in group therapy, the women grasping wrists to cradle and rock the afflicted. Emma and me, waiting for the boatman, the palace aglow behind us and the lights twinkling on the far shore, and in between just us and the black lake.

She wasn’t then, but then she was. For a whole long summer she couldn’t get upstate to her place down the road from me, alongside a different lake, green and brackish, but the house had a brightly painted front door and a key behind a broken piece of lattice under the deck. Me checking on it every few weeks, all the things she had unwillingly abandoned—the tall brass wading bird standing next to the stone fireplace, the nice sofa and chaise on loan from Emma, draped in sheets, the plastic cat bowls for the cats who died accommodatingly, one and then the other, right before she did, the dark family-heirloom painting that mysteriously disappeared later, along with her car, a late-model black Audi bought right before her legs stopped working. Every couple of weeks, wandering through and around, down to the lake where two summers before we had seen a bright blue frog, squashed flat on the path, and I claimed it had to be a mangled rubber toy from the dime store, because how could it be bright blue.

“I saw it before, when it was alive,” she had insisted, following behind on the path to the lake, where she dived in and paddled around, continuing our conversation. A neighbor appeared with his tiny twins and lowered them off the dock into the green water, where they bobbed, splashing their inflated arms, squealing. Kathy swam out of reach and then floated.

“They instantly peed,” she called to their father, who shrugged.

What painting? the family said after having casually confirmed earlier that it was at the lake house. It went the way of the bright blue frog, which couldn’t have existed, could it? Even if somebody saw it.