“Not so new,” Deirdre said. “It’s his sixth year. He chose Miriam’s field for this summer, to help celebrate her seventy-fifth birthday.”

Miriam Duskiewitz, who’d started as director when Deirdre and I were young, had been the first to welcome us to Silver Lake. “Some of the younger women,” Deirdre continued, “thought that if I was going to give the opening address, it would be fun if I also talked a little about what it was like in the old days, when Miriam first took over, and how much she changed things. I said I would—which is why you should come. You’re as much a part of that time as I am.”

“You know I don’t go there,” I said. She was walking behind me and couldn’t see my face. “Even if I’m around, I head out of town during the Gathering. I stayed to meet you, because you asked, but—”

“But this is different,” she said. Adding not, as I dreaded: Because I’ve been sick. Because I don’t know how many times we’ll get to see each other again, but, “Because you’d be keeping me company, coming as my friend. And lots of people you used to know will be around, to celebrate Miriam—it’s a good way for you to reconnect. And Miriam would like it.”

“Miriam,” I said. I hadn’t seen her in so long.

“And,” Deirdre said helpfully, “you could meet some of the younger crowd, maybe find some subjects for your articles about contemporary women scientists.”

WE’D BEEN THE younger crowd when we first went to Silver Lake, both of us in our early twenties. And after I cooked us dinner and we returned to the porch—candles now, and a kerosene lamp; Irish whiskey rather than tea; coyotes howling—Deirdre and I got to talking about the summer we met, in a very different place: the research institute where I’d done my postdoc, in a suburb north of Philadelphia. There’d been a party at my advisor’s house, a great stew of people, a panic caused when my sister, Bianca, had taken an elderly visiting scientist on a little jaunt and failed to return him until very late. After that party I could never pretend that Bianca and I, who’d once been so close, weren’t on utterly different paths. Deirdre, just starting her postdoc at Penn, had been there as well.

The day had been so chaotic that I barely registered meeting the young woman she was then. Deirdre remembered events more clearly. On the porch, watching bats suck insects from the sky, I said, “Who brought you there? You can’t have just shown up.”

“Dr. Athyn,” she said. “My advisor at Penn. You didn’t really know him. And then there were two guys from his lab that I hardly knew. I’d only moved there a couple of weeks earlier.”