“I’m sure that’s an exaggeration.” Chelsea’s smile was bland and shallow.

“Don’t be gross,” Vienna told Abigail. I could see she wanted to hear more about the dog as much as I did, but if we showed any interest Abigail would never be quiet again.

My grandfather dawdled the boat into a small cove and stopped us there, while I scrambled down on deck to help him hoist the anchor over the sides. The water was dark, a vanishing blue-green. Vienna and I wriggled out of our pants, and Abigail finally ditched her cover-up.

Vienna went first, bending and arching her back, examining the water as if creating a door in it, and then diving. Her body was smooth and quick as an arrow. I hurled myself after her.

We abandoned ourselves to this safer lake for a while. Splashing, throwing our bodies here and there. We competed to see who could bring up the most interesting things from the deep bottom, fistfuls of gravel, little stones and larger stones, bits of sticks and plant matter, like we were God looking for enough material to make the world.

There was a thrill to it every time Vienna went down, when her blond hair puddled against the surface like the hair of a corpse, and then all of her disappearing into the dark, and then the long moment when I steadied myself against the metal flank of the boat, against the possibility that she would not surface again. I would have to go under, have to catch her limp body around the waist, drag her heavily up toward the light. Or I would go after her and she would be gone.

When we tired ourselves out, we joined Abigail on the hunk of granite that jutted out from the shore, which could fit all three of us, like lions sunning ourselves. Vienna crawled up to the top, curled herself around the peak. Below us, Abigail picked bits of mud and gravel off her feet, out from between her toes, the flesh of her soles like dead fish. “Do you think there are leeches in the lake?” Vienna asked her, and she paused and looked up with a timidity mostly outweighed by excitement.

“The biggest leech I ever saw was in a tank and bigger than my thumb,” she informed us. “It looked like someone coughed up blood.”

I leaned back, tilting my shoulders Vienna’s way, laughed loud. “You’re so weird, Abby!”

Abigail nodded primly. She pointed at a tree on the shore that was yellowing where it was not supposed to, the pallor of dead pine boughs. “That’s because of a beetle. It’s killing all the trees around here. That’s why the fire alert is higher this year, because most of the trees are dead.”

Was it really like this? The pine beetles the same year as the algal bloom the same year as Abigail’s hacking cough and my grandfather barely able to breathe on the sofa? Everything around us starting to die, but only in a removed way, only in the background. There was a forest fire in August that took out half the mountain, missing our cabin by two miles. A drowning in the lake we were swimming in before we went home, a drunk tourist who tipped off his motorboat, the extra beats Vienna’s grandmother took before saying names that heralded the beginning of her Alzheimer’s. But I didn’t know that then.