The sky went gray, then black, and then there were stars. He was flailing, chilled through, Lori lost to him and the shore receding in every direction till there was no shore, only night. Dog paddle, backstroke, breaststroke, crawl. He gulped for air. His ears were clogged and he couldn’t see where he was going, the stars there only to mock him. He swam in circles, rested, shivered, and then, just as he was descending into the core of his being, mind and body interlocked once and forever, no sacrament now, no God, no nothing, the sky sliced open and the silhouette of the shore materialized right there in front of him. There was a concussive blast, more light, color, the rockets—Canadian rockets—arcing overhead to snuff themselves in a rain of sparks. That was the very moment he felt the bottom rise up to take hold of him, weeds grappling with his legs, the suck of the mud, and then he was heaving himself up the bank and into the night so he could shiver in his mud-stained underwear and see the death’s heads grinning all around him because Lori was dead, dead and drowned, and the sacrament was flaying the flesh from his bones.

He went toward the light, limping over the stones, and there was the dock, the path, the house, the bonfire. The first person he saw—the tallest one there, the one who stood out, who always stood out—was Ken. “Ken!” he shouted, “Ken!,” clutching at his arm now while the two women Ken was chatting up gave him big blissful smiles. “The police—we’ve got to call the police.”

Ken took a step back as if to get a better look at him. He was soaring too—they all were. “You been swimming, Fitz?” he asked, giving the women a sidelong glance. One of the women let out a short sharp bark of a laugh, the one with her hair cut close and the figure of a boy; the other one, busty and thick-limbed in a pink sundress that glowed and shimmered as if it were on fire, didn’t laugh at all, just stared. Fitz had never seen either of them before and he couldn’t understand what they were doing here or how they’d become part of this long howling interval that kept echoing and echoing inside his head.

“No, you don’t understand—”

“You’re shivering, Fitz—don’t you want a towel or something? Or here, come on”—taking him by the arm—“come closer to the fire.”

He snatched his arm away, shivering violently, and stamped in place to bring himself back to the now, to the situation.

“The police?” the boyish one echoed, tailing it with a laugh. “I didn’t know they were invited.”