JACK LOST HIS daughter, Sam, at the River Festival when she was six. His friends said what happened was understandable, considering his wife’s aneurysm, her lengthy hospitalization. All the stress. But he knew they were lying. It happened because he was selfish. Thinking about his dick. He’d been standing at a raffle booth near the Ferris wheel, talking with Carla Looper, who had taught school with his wife. He’d always found Carla attractive and after a few beers he’d gotten the courage to talk to her. It would be a few years before they slept together, a half dozen more before Carla moved in with him and Sam. Sam, six years old, was twenty feet away, watching people throwing baseballs at the dunking booth. She made an exaggerated pitching motion toward him and smiled—she often pretended to like baseball for his sake. Carla counted out her register and asked him how Sam was dealing with her mother’s absence. Jack told her that Sam would sometimes sit with her mother in her hospital room among the whirring machines and tell her old jokes, ones they’d enjoyed together before the aneurysm. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Carla smiled, her face open and sympathetic. And for a moment—and this is something Jack’s nearly forgotten—he had pictured a naked Carla, moving her hips on top of him, her face lit with pleasure. He’d tried to push the image away. Then he’d glanced over at the dunking booth cage and Sam had vanished.
The River Festival director made the announcements over the loudspeaker. For a moment, there was a deflated silence in the crowd and the parents seemed to glance around for their children, touch them on shoulder or head to confirm that they were real. Volunteers with flashlights combed the dusky grounds and the park beyond. Wading into the duckweed and cattails and calling for Sam along the shore, the mud sucking at his tennis shoes, Jack could see families canoeing nearby, their faces appearing here and there in the glow of flashlights. Their calm voices traveled over the water. He could hear paddles strike the surface. A female voice somewhere said that the river was an ancient seabed once. An estuary. They seemed to take part in another world.
Jack took deep breaths, shoved aside terrible images that strobed his mind, focused on his search-and-rescue training. He organized parents and some of the off-duty police who were working security at the festival. They made a makeshift grid and walked it, their flashlights flaring off parking lots and the Zilker Hillside Theater stage, where they’d just held a summer-stock play. People were still scattered here and there on blankets, drinking, talking, under the false glow of the moon tower. Sam’s name echoed from the tree-lined edges of the park.
The year before, he’d taken Sam and his wife to a spot below the Springs for a swim. This was two months before the aneurysm, before things changed so abruptly. It was just before sunset and they’d looked up from the edge of the water to see a plume of smoke and fire trailing high over their heads. A flock of grackles wheeled crazily over the water and up the banks of the creek. He remembered standing knee-deep in the current with his family, looking up at the smoldering sky, thinking it portended something. But it wasn’t clear what.
“Oh, it’s the space shuttle,” his wife said, suddenly, “coming back to Earth.”
“Why is it on fire?” Sam said.
“It only looks that way,” Jack said.
“Like in a movie,” Sam said matter-of-factly, staring up at the plume.
“The astronauts are safe and sound inside,” his wife said. “They’re looking out the windows.”
“Can they see us?” Sam asked.
“We’re too tiny,” Jack said.
“Are we like microbes?” Sam asked.
“They probably see rivers and hills,” his wife said.
“What about our house?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know. They’re pretty far up there,” Jack said.
“When you’re that far up, the ground misses you more.”
“Maybe so,” Jack said.
The grackles wheeled and cried out like rusty gates. The sky burned.
Jack’s wife turned to him, smiled. “I’m glad I’m here with you and Sam to see this,” she said. “It’s really something.”
The morning Jack’s wife was struck down by the aneurysm, she’d done something they could never explain: she’d taken a baseball bat from the hall closet and shattered the three bay windows in the den.