“Real to her? Isn’t that the definition of insanity?”

He turns away from the darkness and returns to his chair, giving me a slight smile. “Perhaps. Do you think Pearl is insane?”

“It’s something I’ve thought about at times.” I pause, gather myself, take a breath. “Maybe not insane. Not quite that. But ever since she was little, she’s been very different. Brilliant in some ways. In other ways . . . just different. For a few years, she would run off almost every day. I tried meeting her outside her school so that she couldn’t leave without me, but she’d find some other exit. So I started coming to her room at the end of the day, with permission from the principal, and she’d have already gone to the bathroom or for a drink or slipped out the window. Out the window, Tom. Eventually, I let her do it. I let her run off. In the city.” I shake my head.

“She sounds like a clever girl,” Tom said.

I look down at the chair I’m sitting in. The cushions are burnt orange. I look up. There are stars in the sky, far away, their light coming at us from a thousand years ago.

“You’ve done well for yourself here, Tom. I guess I should have been a psychiatrist too.”

He laughs. It’s the first laugh I’ve heard from him, and it takes me back forty years. That is the Tom I knew, that Tom in the midst of laughter. Tears rise to my eyes, because at the sound of that laugh I am reminded of everything he has lost with Shirley’s death. I think about her laugh, the way she would come up behind him and give him a bear hug, refusing to let him escape, and the way she’d peek around him and smile at me from that safe spot, wink, and laugh again.

“I’m so sorry for your loss, Tom,” I say.

“Grief is hard and good. It is the disease and the medicine, all at once.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve grieved Mary,” I admit. “I moved on long ago. Here I am.”

“You must throw yourself in. There is no other way,” he says in a far-off voice.

“What?” I ask, confused.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and when he shakes his head it’s like he’s coming back from somewhere far away. “It’s a line from one of the books your granddaughter is reading.”

“I think I’d like to go over to the cabin tomorrow,” I say, and something in my chest flutters uncomfortably.

“We could take the boat over,” Tom suggests.

“I’m sure Pearl would enjoy that. She’s fascinated by the water.”

I wish I hadn’t said that, because I know that now we’re both thinking about the afternoon when Mary left us.

“The man we saw at the diner said some strange things,” I venture.

“Gerald?”

“Yeah, that’s his name.”

“What did he say?”

“That Nysa went through a strange time right after I left, in 1979. He said something about drownings, that we should stay away from the lake. Junior said the same thing out at the gas station.”