He was centered on the dock, his back straight and tall, one hand on the back of his neck. My heart gave a strange small jump, because for a moment he reminded me of my mother. This was the place my mother used to go to meditate, and this was exactly the way she sat, with one hand on her neck. I remembered her fingers in her hair. I touched the window screen. I watched him for a long time, but he didn’t move. He was like my mother in that way, too—a heavy, unmovable stone with Lucas and me dancing around her in the current.

Downstairs, I let the kitchen door slam so he would know I was approaching.

His eyes were closed, his face lustrous from sweat. His body was not a body used to being in the sun. I got a sudden flash of Cole behind a desk, unhappy, bored, rolling from place to place on his office chair, his hands full of blindingly white paper. Here he was different, peaceful.

“Meditating?” I asked.

“You could call it that.” He tilted his face toward me, his eyes squinted against the afternoon sun.

“Why do you sit like that?”

“Like what?”

“With your hand on your neck.”

He dropped his hand and turned toward me completely. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess because it’s comfortable. Why do you ask?”

“It’s how my mother used to sit,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Your mother,” he said. “Do I look like her?”

“No, not at all. She was blonde. You just—remind me of her sometimes. Or remind me of someone.”

“You remind me of someone, too,” he said.

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Someone from a dream.”

I sat, letting my feet hang over the edge of the dock. Down below eel grass waved and silversides darted past. Barnacles covered the legs of the dock like gooseflesh. Cole stretched out on his back beside me. His ribs rose like the arches of some city. I didn’t know what to say to him. I reminded him of someone from a dream? What did that mean? I would have laughed a week ago, but now I didn’t feel like laughing. Instead I changed the subject.

“What did you and Lucas do this morning anyway?”

Cole pushed himself up on one elbow and shielded his eyes from the sun so he could look at me. “Lucas took me clamming. Dinner will be a feast.”

I could feel the heat radiating off his body as if his skin were saturated with sunlight. I could see light shimmering on him. I looked away.