The doctor hands a tissue across the desk and watches Cheri intently. When finally she looks away, Cheri turns to Sarah and touches her arm. Sarah sits up, takes the tissue, and presses it into her face.

Don’t cry, it’s okay, Cheri hears herself saying. I had to go sometime.

The doctor doesn’t disagree, which seems heartless, but also doesn’t hurry them along, which seems kind. They collect referrals and then make their way through the waiting room and to the door, Sarah crying still, gently leading her mother. When they step outside into the dull afternoon light, Cheri is overcome with a feeling of weightlessness and vertigo. She’s Fay Wray nestled in the monster’s palm as he scales the skyscraper.

Fifth-grade skating party at Ames Pond. She can see Billy Mayfield’s bare hand holding her mittened one as he pulls her along, her own feet in their pompommed ice skates scissoring beneath her as she keeps up. Crack the whip with a line of sweaty kids, and Cheri’s at the end of it. Scenery whirls past—trash barrels, sparse evergreens, snow hut with faces grouped around a heater, the striped tail of her own stocking cap—and then the whip cracks and she’s flung, hurtling across the ice on her back, turning once in slow motion as the clouds revolve, and then a sickening crunch. Through the ice and under, she plunges down in the dark water, skates sticking in the muddy bottom for an instant, and then rises slowly, spinning, until her head bumps on the underside of the ice. For one long surreal moment, before an arm reaches in, grasps the hood of her coat, and hauls her out, she is suspended under the warped ceiling of ice. Inside the roaring silence of the water, she looks up and sees the skates of the excited children congregating above her.

The flashbacks have begun now, coming to her when she’s distracted in her kitchen, washing cups or staring into the fridge. Yesterday she was placing a flower in a vase—a lone iris, the color of grape soda—and suddenly saw a row of people yelling and shaking their fists at her. It bothers her for hours, until she finally figures out it was from back in her cheerleading days. The Ames Pond memory had been suppressed for thirty-six years until tonight. It rose unbidden, like a genie, as she eased the cork from a bottle of wine. What she had chosen to remember all these years was actually an addendum to the memory: Billy Mayfield returning her blue mitten the next day at school, the one she was wearing when she’d rocketed out of his grasp. He’d handed it to her in a brown paper lunch sack with Cheri’s name written on it in blue ballpoint, a mother’s spidery script.