Eventually he’ll go down into the kitchen and sit with her as she eats a cookie and sips her milk and describes her adventures at sea camp, using the new words she has learned, coming about, in irons, tacking, and talking about how she shot arrows into the hay targets—holding her breath for control —what it’s like to unfurl a spinnaker (it’s like, like this giant shell that explodes with the wind), and how, eventually, in a few days, they’re going to be tested on their knowledge so that they can graduate to the sloop and take the larger boats out, with the counselors, of course, far into the sea, beyond sight of land. Listening attentively, he’ll put his hand on her wrist, on the spot where she was stung two evenings ago, while he was barbecuing; dashing out into the yard, she was windmilling her arms and making evasive zigzag maneuvers between the pine trees, falling to the ground and clutching her wrist. He’ll say to her,—You’re better now, aren’t you? and she’ll nod and rub her fingers across the spot, and he’ll imagine her on the bow of a training sloop, firm-footed and able to translate the heave of the boat into a sure stance, legs slightly apart. Years have passed since that walk on the wall in Spain. Years remove them from the love that once held them tight. Thinking this, he’ll hold her wrist a beat too long and remember what it was like to be a surgeon on an aircraft carrier during peacetime, when the only real duty was to appear presentable in Naples, and he’ll think of the little Alpine Sunbeam he bought for Lydia, and how she drove it down from Rome to meet him in port, and how he bribed the quartermaster to allow the car on board, hefting it up and over with the crane, lowering it safely into the hold. And she’ll pull her hand away from his and say,—Dad, Dad, are you okay? You’re acting weird, softly, in a deepening voice, and he’ll ignore her and reach up and brush the stray bit of salt-stiff hair from her brow and clear her forehead just so he can look at it, and he’ll see that exposure to the sun has deepened the freckles in her face, and that her eyes have taken on a deeper blue, with shards of white, and that they seem, at least for the moment, strikingly beautiful.

MICHIGAN DEATH TRIP

HIGHWAY

A narcoleptic fit of a road: two lanes stretching east from South Haven, running past defunct blueberry farms, weather-beaten homes. Always a couple named Judy and Jack, stoned in the backseat, unaware, embracing softly until the moment the car violates the meridian line and confronts a tractor trailer, hauling crated cherries out of Traverse City. Then there’s an abundance of fruit and blood and sparks spread out across the dark road.

GUY WIRES

Some kid we knew, taking daredevil jumps on the back trails up in Muskegon, roaring turns, throwing fans of snow skyward—safe and sound until twilight fell and the edge of the trees became ensconced in blue and the rest of the world was impossible to see, including the telephone pole guy wire, which decapitated swiftly, neatly, leaving his head floating in the air (or so we imagined), against the tree line. (We had to wonder how long his head contained and held thought, how long—if at all—those eyes captured the snowscape before the shade slid down.) These snowmobile beheadings were once-a-year deaths that came assuredly out of the shift of the seasons.