Gavin laughed and shifted his baseball cap on his head, lifted his face to the sun. “There is no place on this earth as beautiful as the rivers and marshes of our land. You know that, don’t you?” He asked this with his eyes closed so the siblings didn’t know to whom the question was directed. They all answered in the affirmative.

“It is the scend of the sea for us now.” Gavin leaned forward in the johnboat, upsetting the delicate balance. Each sister grabbed the side of the boat.

“The what?” Hallie asked.

“The scend,” Gavin insisted. “You know, I’ve told you this before.” His voice rose with the recent, increasingly frequent frustration of dementia sneaking in like fog in the night.

Colleen touched her dad’s shoulder, squeezed it. “Remind us.”

“Not send but scend.” He spelled the different words. “The surge behind the boat—the surge behind our life. When the tide and the wind and the wave are all pushing us forward. That is now.”

“Yes,” Colleen said. “That is now.” She understood he meant more than the wind and wave behind the boat, but of life’s current toward something they could not stop, a momentum beyond their control.

Slowly Shane eased the bright silver johnboat into the larger river channel, where sandbars appeared and disappeared twice a day; where the shrimp weren’t visible until you threw the net and lifted it with a great heave; where the water teemed with unseen life and slapped against the docks and shoreline with equal disregard. The humming motor and the swish-slap of river water on the hull lulled them all to silence. Colleen wondered what her dad and siblings were thinking, each with his or her own river of thought pulsing in different directions as complicated as the estuaries and creeks that spread from the main river, some reaching a dead end and others rejoining where they’d started.

Taking Dad out in the boat like this had been part of a well-laid plan. The night before, the three siblings had sat in the kitchen, playing an Ella Fitzgerald LP, and decided that the only way to understand the odd gap in Dad’s timeline was to ask him. To gently ask him in a place that felt utterly familiar and wholly belonging to him.

The river.

The last couple of days had been rough on all of them—Dad getting worse not by the hour but almost by the minute. His spatial sense seemed to be deteriorating; he tripped over stairs and stumbled over his own feet. He time traveled at least once a day—asking when Lena would be home from ballet or when his wife would return from her afternoon bridge game with the ladies.