“Why not think instead of hero as a heroine cut short—as one cut off from that lengthening echo? The man lacks the extra—for the echo is what recalls a self back unto itself; thus the man seeks it in a woman.”

He had brought us to familiar ground now, and it was most irritating. What I had meant was not a disquisition on why the sexes needed each other. It had a thing or two to do with a woman not being a man, but then not being an “—ine,” either. And now, I thought, my silence has handed him the trophy. He would think he had settled the point, had finished it off nicely, so ending—and winning—the conversation.

But I misjudged him, for he did not proclaim victory in his demeanor or his actions. Instead, he had started to walk once more, plunging still farther into the ghostly woods, where, I sensed, he walked to think. And I followed, raising my eyes every so often to see where his shape tended. Again we were silent, and we walked now in single file, now in tandem as the trees made a little clearing between them, passing farther and farther backward into those woods. As we moved through the familiar places, I grew distracted by his direction and by the evident ease with which he found his way about in the center of these woods without the bordering shoreline as a guide. In here, all compasses save memory are of little avail. Yet it seemed he knew where he stepped, and the closer on we drew to my sister’s and my spot, the more agitated I became, though curious to see if he would find it.

Within an hour, we were upon the old quarry, where Father first tried to mint the rockbed beneath these woods. The granite walls of the great hole rose above the deep black water that had risen when he had cleaved the rock down too deep.

My companion stopped and looked down into the dark obscurity. I also gazed into the place. Far beneath that surface lay castoffs from childhood—some shells thrown in for wishes, a whittled stick of George’s, and an old doll of Susannah’s I had tossed in to see if it might swim. I’ll not forget how fast it sank, nor how quickly our noisy gaming became shocked silence. The memory still causes me sorrow—I would raise that doll to this day to give back to Sue, she mourned it so, and I the instant villain.

“This place is haunted, I feel it,” he spoke into the water.

I sniffed to break the spell of his romantic nonsense, telling him instead of Susannah’s doll. “She’s what haunts the place, more likely.”

His face had altered. “Poor girl,” he said.