“You should come every summer!” Mickey said as she patted the float blindly again, this time for Ruth’s legs. She was halfway in now. The water was cold, but she was adjusting. Ruth edged forward and pulled Mickey’s head into her lap.

“I just—I want you to know that I really do love you.”

“That’s good.”

Ruth pulled her fingers through Mickey’s wet hair, leaving touches like insects on her forehead and shoulders. Each blink felt longer than the last. She couldn’t understand how anyone could function normally under this thick of a sweater.

“I’m sorry,” Ruth said. “I’m so sorry.”

And that time, when Mickey’s eyes closed, they stayed that way.

PEYOTE

IN THE BOX WERE stacks of sixteen-millimeter film reels, each labeled with two names and a date. Cal pulled the first one out and held it up to the light, and I reached for the yellowed notebook wedged into one side. It was a financial ledger. Dates and names on the left, with initials and amounts on the right. It was meticulous, always the same blue ink.

“What are they?” I asked, even though I thought of all the General had learned at the hands of Father Michael, and I knew.

Cal flipped through a few of the reels and then closed the box. I heard a sound from the bed and looked over to see the General staring at us, one soft hand gripping the severed wires of the call button.

“You know what I thought about all those millennia in the Downstairs?” Cal said, turning back to him, ledger in hand. “Every time I refused water, even after they replaced my insides with my outsides and set fire to my throat with a blowtorch? I thought to myself, What motive would you have to lie? You must’ve known what you were talking about.”

She came to a stop in front of the bed, and the General’s eyes went as wild as a horse’s in the last corner of a barn fire.

“And as the centuries went by, I started to think maybe you were wrong, but you must’ve at least believed you were right. It’s not like you were getting anything out of those blistering days in the sun, training us.”

Cal leaned in and took his pajama top in her fist, lifting his head and shoulders clear off the pillows.

“ ‘Jonah versus Isaac, November 18, 1932,’ ” she read out loud. “ ‘C.M. Twenty-five dollars.’ ”

Cal surprised the General when she laughed, but not me.