Adrift in a warm, salted sea. Utah, the great salt lake. Floating on her back, held in the cupped palm of July 1959. A rim of sagebrush hills, antelope blond, gathers the lake. The sky a gouache of arid, infinite blue pulled taut and matte-finished overhead; the night’s future stars a certainty behind, waiting, like spilled salt, to be tossed into the air. Already a hologram of moon, bony and blue-veined as her feet. Ted floating somewhere beside her, lake water washing between them as if it is itself an irrevocable bond. Her baby, rocking in its secret. The late sun a hand to her forehead, the smoky green water lapping her neck and the fine soft hair at her temples. The mysterious ache of new pregnancy. She closes her eyes. Happiness strokes its fingers across her face. It isn’t merely happiness; it isn’t anything so crude. She feels contained.

Her eyes are closed. She hears the faint tidal rocking in the caverns of her ears. The warm immersion, the holiness of it. She can taste it: the salt in her mouth. The wet trickle curling over her ears and down her neck. Into her pillow. The moment stills, her face washed by something unbearably pure. The salt stinging in her eyes. All at once, the vision contracts at the edges, pulling into itself. The colors, the textures intensify, grow richer, stranger, dizzy with brightness, pulling forward at great speed and bursting in a moment of light that shrinks to a pinprick and snuffs out, leaving nothing but the wet, aching darkness behind.

She’s crying. She’s been crying in her sleep, through her dreams, the tears running down the back of her throat, into her ears, wetting her hair, sorrow washing out of her in her sleep.

She lies on her back, motionless, her eyes closed, the tears brimming through her eyelashes and spilling in a seamless trickle over her cheekbones and down the curving flange of her ear. She doesn’t resist. She doesn’t even try to think. She lets it come, lying soundlessly on her bed, the back of her head saturating the pillow. She surrenders to it, the tears coming and coming, like birth.

From far off in a vague distance her children’s voices begin to materialize out of the disintegrating night. It’s not night, it’s morning—the windows pale but lucent, the sun lightly rummaging through the paint-stinking clothes she dumped last night on a chair. Her children, across the hall: they are calling for her from the other bedroom.

Even the eyelet on her nightgown is soaked. It clings to her throat. What would be left of her?—just a skin, empty, the rest gone. A cicatrix. She takes a deep breath; it clatters in her ribs. She takes another, wipes her hands across her face. She braces herself to rise.

*   *   *