I’d like to think I was in love at some point on Earth. I must’ve been, right? I don’t remember a thing about it. But I’ve seen people sign the craziest deals while high on that homemade drug. I had one kid who sold his soul so a girl in his tenth-grade class would ask him to a Sadie Hawkins dance. He could’ve asked for her to strip naked every time he came into the room. He could’ve asked for her to fall to her knees and beg him to let her carry his child, or whatever it is that humans in love want to hear most. But, nope. He just wanted her to ask him to a dance. When I go Downstairs, sometimes I think about that kid; if it was worth it. The romantic answer is yes, of course. Anything for a single moment of her hand in mine. But even after just one day Downstairs, no one answers like that. After just one hour, most people would serve their beloved on a silver platter, lobster forks and bibs for all. Love is all-powerful, until you learn firsthand what happens when a vegetable peeler meets the far-back surface of your tongue.

MICKEY

THE PAST COUPLE OF years of Mickey’s life, magic seemed to be going extinct. Games of make-believe, movies she could watch over and over without getting bored, all of the ways she used to explore outside her own little existence—they had all faded, cheapened, like turning the lights on in a movie theater. So as they drove down the familiar highways, she worried the New Hampshire house would also lose its magic. That it would feel different, less than. She worried about what Ruth would think. But then they arrived, and the weight of worry rose off her.

She knew it for sure when she saw Ruth’s face as they took the bend in the gravel driveway and the house came into full view for the first time. The white wooden clapboards with black shutters, the long green lawn unfurling into the lake. The battered wood of the boathouse, a dark blue gone light gray. The way the water sloshed against the concrete of the dock. Ruth saw it all exactly as Mickey saw it, as Mickey had always seen it.

Regardless of whatever happened in the outside world, magic made its home here.

“How far does your property go?” Ruth asked after she and Mickey rushed from the freezing water to the sand, sunbaked and crispy on the top. She flipped her head over and wrapped one of their worn beach towels around her hair, twisting it. Mickey fell headlong into her own outstretched towel and rolled over onto her back, sun from the sky and the sand warming her all over.