Silas put one hand under his head and one under his body—Sean was so small back then, he could fit entirely in Silas’s forearm, like a football—and he walked down to the water.

He didn’t bother to roll up his pants. When the water got to his waist, he lowered the arm that held Sean, stopping just as the sagging heels of his onesie dipped into the water. Sean was awake; he had been all afternoon. He looked at Silas, not scared, not even curious. Just present.

“I’ll do it, Phil,” he said. His eyes were burning, tears hot and so close to the edge, but he refused to blink. “I swear to God. If you don’t come back, I’ll do it.”

The pond was murky, and his sneakers suctioned to the bottom. The pond, like the sky, had been forgotten. Not black, not blue. Just nothing.

Then Silas slipped and lurched forward, and Sean hit the water. At first, nothing happened. And then, as if he remembered that his body was a part of him, Sean’s face cracked into a sob.

Silas had his fair share of demons. The thirty seconds he waited before pulling his son out of that water was one of his fiercest.

But he couldn’t help it. Not back then.

He had to wait. He had to see if his brother would come back.

—

SILAS HELD THE WHISKEY bottle’s neck between his teeth as he crossed three empty lanes to turn right onto the lake road. He could see the twinkle of a house’s lights far ahead. He couldn’t tell yet if it was his house or the Watersons’.

He thought about his kids, his home.

Lily.

He couldn’t believe Lily’s words in the kitchen. Not the falling-in-love-with-Gavin part, which had resulted in the whiskey and the late-night ride in the first place, but the part about his distance from her, his preference for the company of the dead. Silas had always loved Lily. Sure, back then he had loved Sarah too. He was seventeen, and his capacity for love was just developing; he was ignorant as of yet about the harm a wide breadth of love could cause. But in the decades that followed, Silas never once faltered in his love for his wife. It wasn’t that he chose someone gone over her, as she seemed to believe. It was that after Sarah died, followed immediately and even more devastatingly by his brother, all he could think about each time he looked at Lily was how much it would hurt when inevitably she, by either choice or design, also left. And slowly, his future grief corroded his present love like a cancer, until looking at her felt the same as losing her. So he stopped looking.

And then there was Ruth.