I was thinking about Valentine’s Day. I could count the days from when Dice put the February plaque in place. I felt that my mother was alive—it was the torment Bay had seemed to feel when he’d diverged from Dice’s story. But how did he know she had a gun? Maybe he was guessing. My mother would have known—from Isaac—that I was connected to these people. There wouldn’t have been crossfire. So this meant that Dice was lying to me about my mother’s being dead. Maybe he was lying, but because he had to teach me something. To teach me that if my mother had to die, so be it—that was what needed to be done to keep the family together. To teach me to stop thinking of the fake world as an option. I should let Isaac come to town and leave. I would not see him.

I was passing Dice’s test. Not fleeing, but recommitting.

At night I listened to my heartbeat, which sounded like a drum way down in a mine, and I wondered if this was what it meant to be one with nature, a passive and ceaseless tranquility.

Dice’s after-dinner stories took a winterly turn and struck deep into my winterly heart. At the bottom of the Earth in the center of Antarctica at Vostok, he said, the coldest place in the world, glaciologists were drilling an ice core, and they had to stop before they drilled as deep as they wanted to, because they found underneath all that thick ice a pristine lake the size of Lake Ontario that was filled with pure clear water that had been sealed below for millions of years. There was an island in the lake.

I felt Dice was seed-bombing me with ideas that would grow next season. I told myself that the family was enough. Dice was enough.

* * *

The night before Valentine’s Day I lay awake for hours. When I fell into a half sleep the breathing of my family became beating wings. I rose like the heron and fell with a jerk, like when Queen shot it, resurrecting and falling again and again. Out the window the owls were swooping in and out of the barn. I remembered my mother crying in the kitchen. “Of course you didn’t ask to be born,” she was saying. “Of course you didn’t ask to be born.” I remembered the Sacred Harp song that went, “And will the judge descend, and must the dead arise?”