Dee turns and runs hard, back toward Lulu. Her lungs are bursting with effort and the scalding air. How could she have left her like that? But Dee will make it right, she swears. She will stay by Lulu’s side and scream until someone comes. It is not too late. Events are not yet final. But she has to be fast.

Dee feels like she has been running and climbing and stumbling back toward her sister for her whole life. But eventually the undergrowth thins and the canoe-shaped rock comes into view. Dee goes even faster, taking long hare-like leaps over the shore debris. She falls more than once, skinning palms and knees and elbows. She does not notice, pushes herself up and runs on. When she comes to the rock she stops for a moment, too frightened to set foot on the rock.

“Come on, Dee Dee,” she mutters. “You baby.” She climbs over the canoe rock.

In its shadow, where Lulu should be lying, there is nothing. Water laps cold at the granite. Gnats buzz above the water, gray punctuation marks. No Lulu, alive or dead.

Maybe this isn’t the right place, Dee tells herself. But it is. On the rock she can see a slender thread of drying blood. In the water, one white flip-flop bobs. Then Dee sees that there is a footprint at the muddy edge. The heel is already filling with brown lake water. The footprint is big, much too large to be Lulu’s, or Dee’s. It could be the boy’s, maybe. But somehow Dee knows it’s not.

From nearby there comes a familiar, homely sound—it takes Dee a moment to place it in this nightmare. A car engine starts, then idles. A door slams closed.

Dee runs across the clearing where, what seems like a lifetime ago, she fooled around with the boy. She pushes through a stand of brush, and falls out onto a dirt road. Dust billows and dances in the air as if recently kicked up by tires. Dee thinks she glimpses a car bumper vanishing down the track. The roaring in Dee’s ears almost drowns the engine, her ragged screams for the driver to stop, stop, and let her sister go. But the car is gone. At Dee’s feet, in the dust, lies a deep green stone; a perfect oval shot through with veins of white.

A short distance away through the scrub, sun gleams on ranks of chrome and glass. Dee wants to shriek with laughter. They thought they were so far from everything, but they were right by the parking lot.