I’d seen the couple once before, in August. They’d come to oversee the construction of their lake house, which had been built by a team of college students from Duluth. The crew spent the summer clearing brush with backhoes, arranging plywood walls, stapling shingles to the vaulted roof. The house, when it was finished, was unlike anything I’d seen in Loose River. It had split-log siding and enormous triangular windows, a broad blond deck that jutted out over the lake like the prow of some ship. From their hatchback, the father had hauled Adirondack chairs and docile cats: one black and fat, the other white and draped ornamentally over his arm. I’d seen them out on their new dock one late August afternoon, bundled head to toe in towels. Father, mother, tiny child. The child’s towel dragged on the wooden planks, and the mother and father had knelt down together, at once, arranging the folds. They were like attendants to a very small bride, doting, hovering. They seemed to be saying something very sweet to the child, who had a high, frightened voice that carried across water. That was the last I’d seen of them.
That winter day, though, they returned. I saw the father in the evening whisking away at the snow on his deck with a pink broom. Smoke drifted from their chimney. Out came the child and mother the next afternoon, waddling in their boots and snowsuits. The boy moved unsteadily across the fresh crust of snow, walking on the surface of it for a few steps before breaking through. When the mother lifted him under the armpits, he was plucked clean from his boots. As I watched, the mother dangled the poor kid helplessly aloft, unsure whether to set him down or carry him like that, suspended in socks over a universe of snow.
I thought, scornfully, what the hell had they expected? But I felt sorry for them, too. Almost nothing on the lake moved or breathed. It was the worst part of winter, a waste of white in every direction, no place for little kids or city people. Beneath a foot of ice, beneath my boots, the walleye drifted. They did not try to swim, or do anything that required effort. They hovered, waiting winter out with driftwood, barely beating their hearts.
We were prepared for another month of winter at least. Each night, I fed the cabin stove before climbing the ladder to my loft, and each black morning I scraped the embers together again and, with sluggish fingers and some cedar shavings, coaxed up a new flame. We had a cord and a half of wood stacked against the cabin that I was parceling out very slowly. We stuffed more rags in the window casings to hold in heat, kept big pots on the stove for morning meltwater. My dad had drilled a fresh fishing hole through ice that was close to eighteen inches thick.
But then, in the middle of March, the temperature shot up to fifty and miraculously stayed there. Within a couple of weeks, the south slope drifts had eroded to stalagmite pillars. A wet sheen appeared across the surface of the ice, and in the late afternoons you could hear the whole lake pop and zing. Cracks appeared. It was warm enough to gather wood from the pile without mittens, to unfreeze the latches on the dogs’ chains with the heat of your fingers. Across the lake, the family set up a telescope on their deck—long and spear-like, pointed to the heavens. Beneath the tripod was a footstool where the child sometimes stood in the evenings clasping the eyepiece to his face with two mittened hands. He wore a candy-cane scarf and a red pom-pom hat. Every time the wind started up, his pom bounced on the air like a bobber.
Sometimes his mother came out in a ski cap and readjusted the tripod, raising the tube and peering through it herself. She rested one gloved hand on the boy’s head. Then, as the evening turned its last shade, I watched them go inside again. I watched them unwind the scarves from their necks. I watched them cuddle the cats, wash their fingers in the tap, heat water in a kettle. They didn’t seem to have blinds on their enormous triangular windows. I saw their dinner like it was done just for me. I sat on the roof of our shed with my dad’s Bushnell binoculars, turning the sticky barrels, warming my hands against my neck. The kid sat in his cushioned chair on his knees, rocking. The mother barely sat at all. She went to the counter and back, she sliced things on the boy’s plate. She made wedges of green, triangles of yellow, discs of something brown. She blew on his soup. She grinned when he grinned. I could see their teeth across the lake. The father seemed to have disappeared. Where had he gone?
Early spring brought more icicles. They oozed blue-black water from the school roof. They dripped away the afternoons, synced to the ticking clock, then going as fast as my heart, which I could feel when I pressed my fingers to my clavicle. I was doing poorly in school, as always, and as the hockey players dreamed us backward toward December, and the debate kids memorized the reciprocal identities, I watched Lily Holburn get abandoned—one by one—by her friends. She’d always been Number Two in a group of four, but since the start of winter she’d become Number Five. It was hard to pinpoint what had changed. It was hard to say exactly when the rumors about her and Mr. Grierson had started. But by March, a space had been cleared around her—like a forest after a fire—and her silence no longer seemed particularly dumb. It was unsettling. Skank, her old friends sneered, under their breaths, behind her back. It was the same thing they used to say to her face when they were joking with her after class. Because of her ripped-up jeans, because of her cheap tight sweaters. Now they were strictly sweet when forced to acknowledge her. They didn’t laugh when she showed up to class without a pencil, or give her grief for forgetting her lunch. They loaned her money when she asked for it. They handed her toilet paper under the bathroom stall when she was out, whispering, “Do you need more? Is that enough?”