“I stole it, okay?” Nicki turns to look behind her, checking furtively to see if anyone is watching them as she bounces from foot to foot. “I just can’t stand the thought of it being here.” Her eyes widen with that same bewildering expression, and that’s when Finn realizes it’s fear.

Out of everyone in the family, Finn had assumed Nicki would have been the one least surprised by Kate’s diagnosis – after all, she had been dealing with Kate’s lapses every day for years. But when Walter finally sat them down and explained those two words, frontotemporal dementia, Nicki lost it, cancelling all her appointments and wandering around the house in her bathrobe for days, scaring Finn so much that she stayed an extra week just to make sure Nicki didn’t drown herself in the Kam or something. But now, watching her sister stare at that barrel as if it were full of poisonous snakes, it occurs to her that for Nicki, knowing what is going to happen to their mother only makes it worse. So far, she has been able to deal with her lapses. The diagnosis means that one day she won’t.

“Then let’s get rid of it,” Finn says.

With the whisky barrel clattering and banging in the bed of the truck, they drive back towards Victor Street. When they get to the corner of Broadway and Victor, Nicki pulls the truck over to the side of the road, by the mailboxes on the shoulder next to the vacant lot, where a house and its foundations had tumbled over the bank into the river years before Nicki and Finn were even born. Nicki pulls down the gate and together they haul the barrel off the truck. It is heavier than Finn expected.

“How the hell was Mom able to carry this?” Finn groans as they each grab an end and lug it over the guardrail.

“She’s a lot stronger than she looks,” says Nicki. “Must be all those steroids.”

They stumble through the overgrown grass across the lot to the edge of the cliff a hundred feet above the Kam – just a few miles downstream from where their mother went over the falls – where the ground has crumbled away, leaving a few twisted roots and gnarled tree trunks protruding from the eroding earth. Below them, the riverbank is thick with saplings and underbrush, tangled vines and deadwood. But the view is spectacular: the sparkling river beneath them, snaking towards the mill; the Nor’Wester Mountains erupting against the southeastern skyline, flecked with the last remnants of autumn’s orange and red; the wide, manicured lawns of Riverdale rolling across the low southern riverbank.

“Okay,” says Finn. “Let’s do it.”