From the outside, nothing about Lily had changed. Her clothes were still gaudy and bright: clingy sweaters with unraveling seams over fraying, faded, ripped-up jeans. She still showed too much cleavage. She still walked too much on her toes, like a ground-feeding bird. Lily had always been everybody’s pet. Her one fervent goal had been to please everyone. Now people turned away when she passed, wouldn’t look at her. Even Lars Solvin, her boyfriend since sixth grade, turned bright red under his blond beard when he saw her coming down the hall. He was six feet tall, a second-string forward on the hockey team. But he found an ingenious way to shrink, to slouch against a nearby locker and examine his sports watch. His buddies closed around him as she approached, touching the bills on their caps, hitching up their jeans. All of them kept their eyes down—far, far, far from Lily’s cleavage—but the unlucky one closest to the classroom door felt obliged to turn the handle for her.
“Thank you,” she said, not smiling, but not not smiling either.
I followed her into Life Science, opening the door for myself.
For years I’d sat near her in class: Furston wasn’t far from Holburn on the register. For years I’d felt vaguely protective and vaguely resentful of Lily, who lived in a trailer three lakes north, who was loved by everybody, whose dad collapsed each Saturday somewhere on Gooseneck Highway and had to be collected up before church. Now I scooted my chair desk a little closer to hers. I watched the green threads on her sweater sleeve quiver as she opened her notebook. She wasn’t taking notes, I noticed, on the short expendable lives of protozoa. She wasn’t working on a diagram of the essential role of bacteria as the decomposer link in the food chain. She was making slow, snaking spirals with her pen, then filling in the linked loops with dozens, with hundreds of smiley faces.
3
WHO’S WATCHING WHO? I wondered, when I went out to the dogs one morning and saw the telescope across the lake aimed straight at my parents’ cabin. It was pointed like an arrow right into the cabin’s heart, into our one window with its rags in the casings. A mold-stained tarp flapped over our front door. I felt my scalp prickle.
I looked up. Above me, a pale yellow leaf drifted in a breeze. Higher, then lower, without fully descending. I plucked the leaf from the air with a little jump. Then with one hand I slid the skin over the dogs’ skulls—breathing, as I did, on their latches to unfreeze them. Ha, I puffed, making the dogs wiggle and spin, freeing them one by one. Go, I told them. I set Abe and Doctor and Quiet and Jasper loose in the woods. For a moment, I listened to their panting breaths as they loped through old snow. Then, as the rising sun bleached the treetops, I listened to the whole frozen lake groaning under their paws. It wouldn’t hold out for long I knew.
It didn’t. When the last of the ice was drifting ashore in jagged chunks, when the last of the snow lay in dunes on the north slopes, I saw him again, the kid from across the lake, crouching on the roadside not far from my house. It was the kind of day you could leave your jacket unzipped, and as I walked home from the bus stop, I was reading a book. I don’t remember what. At that point I was into anything with maps and charts. Great Rescues of the Old Northwest, Build Your Own Kayak. I was almost to the sumac trail when I saw him. A bike was overturned on the gravel shoulder, balanced upside down on handlebars. It took a moment before I saw a girl folded over it, fumbling with the chain. As I approached, both girl and child looked up. They had the same dark eyes, I noticed, the same orange-blond hair.
I thought of deer lifting their heads in that coordinated movement they have. I thought of anything running. But they didn’t go anywhere.
“Hi!” the boy said, enthusiastic-preoccupied, turning back to his task on the ground.
“That’s her there,” he said, sidelong, to the girl.
“That’s who there?” the girl replied. “I don’t think we’ve met,” she said to me.
Like the boy, she was friendly but distracted. “We’ve gotten ourselves a bit tangled up, I guess.” She laughed easily, set a greasy hand on the boy’s head. “I’m a whiz, as you can see, with vehicles. My husband wouldn’t even trust me with the car, seriously. And he’s not a patriarch or anything. That’s not what I mean.”
“Patriarch,” the boy said, without looking up.
“A man who is in charge of things, unfairly.” She looked at me for confirmation. “Right?”
“Okay,” he said, still busy. He seemed to be stuffing snowflattened leaves into a black pouch.
“Like, I drove the car off the road the first day we arrived, right into a snowbank. Wham. So I said, I’ll stick with the bike. It’s better right?” She seemed to want me to agree with her. She was much smaller than I thought she’d be from watching her all those nights through the window—more skinny limbs than body. She was tiny now that I could measure her against myself. She wore a maroon U of C sweatshirt with sleeves shoved to the elbows. “You’re our neighbor from across the lake, right?” she went on. “Did I say hi yet?” She turned to the kid. “Did I already say hi to her? I’ve forgotten what it is to talk to people.”
The boy stood up. “It goes like this. How do you do!” He rushed forward, holding out a massive black hand for me to shake. The thing was bloated, weirdly twisted—fingers splayed at improbable angles.
I shuffled a few steps back.
“It’s my Thirdhand Man,” he said. “For survival.” It took me a moment to realize the kid had stuffed a man’s leather glove with leaves, and that he was now thwacking it hard against a pine trunk. After a few blows he sat down again, panting. Spent.