In the house, the water in the kitchen came on again. Marie washing her milk glass (no intention of losing her good strong bones), washing Jack’s sandwich plate. Marie’s hands in the warm soapy water, running the pads of her fingers around the lip of the glass, along the length of the knife. Shaking the drops from her hands before toweling dry. The kitchen light went off, the hall light stayed on. Jack thudded his feet on the stair again, more faintly; he couldn’t lift his legs more than a few inches. “Mah-wee,” he called again.

He wondered if the girl at the paint store would feel bad. If she would cry when she heard the news, her hand hiding her braces in horror, and tell her friends it was “too weird.” He wondered if Michael would come home, for his mother.

The last light went out and the dark closed in on the deck again. Marie was going to bed. She must think he was in his room, asleep. She must be taking care not to wake him, walking through the house in socked feet, closing doors with a hand on the knob, without a sound. He held his wrist against his chest but no longer felt anything in it, nothing to distinguish the drained limb from the tingling ache in his whole body, radiating out from the core. They would find him in the morning and guess at what had happened. Marie spoke to failed suicides—Jesus, what would she think? She would be in her bedroom now, slipping off her socks, dressed in an old T-shirt worn silken with age. He called her name again, his voice hoarse and strange to his own ears. If there had ever been a time when he needed her to listen, needed her to hear …

He let his wrist fall away from his chest—no need to hold it if it didn’t hurt—and let his head roll back to look at the sky. Brightest stars in the whole world, up on the hi-line. Nothing between here and there: no light, no cloud. The darkness filling his head now, the steady pull—no, not pull, not consciousness draining away but numbness creeping in, taking over the space inside his skull. And Marie sliding bare legs between cool sheets, stretched out the length of the bed, all her own, and falling into sleep, to wake with the cold morning sun.

THE
ICE HARVESTER

AN ICE HARVESTER appeared at the edge of the lake, pushing his ice cart. Each of the houses on the lake had a Frigidaire or an Amana Frost-Free; one had a professional Viking with brushed stainless-steel doors in which the children could see the blurred outlines of themselves when they went for the milk. No one needed to buy ice to keep the milk cold. The ice harvester was obsolete.