The waves rolled in to the concrete beach painted the color of sand. Small children rode the water to the shore, and there among the heads was Gaétan. My son’s face, wide-eyed and afraid. The water pushed him to where he could touch the bottom and he stood, laughing. He raised his fists in the air and shouted, like a man who wins a boxing match, tired and happy. He ran back into the waves. I breathed again. There was still the feeling in my lungs, stopping the air to my chest, but it was melting.

The dog had grown stiff in my arms. I looked for my daughter and saw her run across the painted beach into the water, her young body in a black bathing suit shining with wet. I leaned my head against the green glass, the warm dog still against my chest. I said thank you for my children and listened to the rushing of the waves that did not stop but came and came again.

THE RIVER

SOMETHING IS WRONG with Jo and I don’t know what it is.

I wake in the screenhouse to the sound of Mack trucks going seventy down the road outside the fence. The trucks carry uranium tailings from the Superfund site in the valley north of us. It’s Saturday and I’m home from the Forest Service, and Jo’s home, too. I turn over slowly in my sleeping bag, trying not to disturb her with my rustling, and find her tucked in with her head on her pillow, looking at me.

“Been awake long?” I ask her.

“No,” she says. “Just now.” She smiles like she always does in the morning when she really wakes up, after her open-eyed but unrecognizing first moments. Morning is the only time Jo’s smiles seem unsolicited; the rest of the time she’s so quiet and serious that when something makes her smile, even she looks surprised.

She turns to see if Inger is awake: our houseguest on the screenhouse floor. She’s not, so Jo settles back in, her hair sticking in staticky strands to the nylon sleeping bag. Her skin is too yellow, except around her eyes, where it’s too white. She’s thinner than she used to be, without trying; at thirty-two she has the body of a girl. All the hair on her arms and legs has disappeared. She claims the wind blew it off while she was watching birds, but she’s dry inside and out. I frown at her and she knows what I’m thinking.

“Fitz, I’m fine,” she says. “It’s the wind and the heat.”