They drove in silence back to the reservoir, and as they approached they could see Duncan’s body next to a police cruiser. One officer snapped pictures while the other sat sideways in the open car door, talking on the radio. Hank wished he had waited to call them, so Kay could have been with Duncan alone. She knelt by the body and pushed her husband’s hair from his forehead. Hank answered the cops’ questions, feeling awkward and angry. Yes, he had surfaced first, alone. When he found Duncan there had been no pulse, and CPR had failed. He felt the cops’ contempt for him, for letting his partner die. Finally they took Duncan away.

The sun was down when they got back to Kay’s empty cabin. Hank laid his coat on the table Duncan had made from a cable spool turned on its side, and she pulled the string that turned on the light. Kay was pale and dark-haired, with a thin face and strong hands like a man’s. Her eyes were red-rimmed, though she still hadn’t cried. Hank had never heard the cabin so quiet. The threading hole in the middle of the table was filled with Annie’s stuffed animals and toys. Hank stood there looking at the toys, and Kay stood looking at him, and then he comforted her in the only way that made sense at the time. She put her arms around his neck, and he lifted her to the tall pine log-frame bed Duncan had built, and he undressed her and held her, still feeling the calm in Duncan’s absence that seemed to ring in his ears, until she cried out and clung to him, her body wrapped around his own, and then she began to cry for real. It wasn’t the thing he would have chosen to happen, but he felt strangely relieved. They’d broken the dead space Duncan had left behind and it seemed that now things would start changing.

The funeral was in a cemetery so forgotten that it was just a field, grown over with sweetgrass and bitterroot. They’d fought the mortuary to be allowed to take Duncan there themselves, in a pine box loaded in his own pickup truck. Hank helped dig the grave, and the sky threatened rain. His wife, Demeter, was stoned. She was at her worst when she was stoned, and she’d been at her worst a lot in the days since Duncan had died.

After they got the hole dug, Hank opened the door of the VW bus and looked in at Demeter, who’d been crying. “Put your shoes on,” he said.

“I can’t.” Her hiking boots were on the floor, her socked feet tucked up on the seat. She had a hole in the toe of one gray sock.