“Fine,” I said, and turned to leave. I’d walked halfway back up to the house when I heard her voice again, completely different this time, all high and teary.

  “Wait,” she called. “I’m sorry.”

  I turned back. She was standing in the porch light’s beam and her face was so puffed and red from crying that it looked almost soft. She was twenty-six then but I’d pegged her for older because of how bossy she was; now she looked young and scared.

  “I’m not usually this bad,” she said. “I mean, I’m not great. But I’ve had some difficult things recently, and I think it’s made me especially bad.”

  I didn’t want to feel sorry for her, and I might not have, except that she sucked so hard at playing for sympathy, like she didn’t get how people talked about their problems. Still, I didn’t move.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No, it’s fine. I’m going to be fine. It’s just—you know when someone leaves you and you realize that person was responsible for all the best parts of you, and now those parts are gone and you don’t know how to get them back?”

  I remembered Tessa, five years before, the way her long back looked the day she said it was time for her to find a husband. I was twenty-three and she was thirty-five, and she said it the way she always said things to me, kind of offhandedly, like everything that happened between us was a joke to her. I said I’d be her husband, and she looked at me with a little pity-smile and said I hadn’t been listening—she wanted kids, a house. I said I’d get her a house, we’d have two kids—we’d even picked out their names together, I said, and right then I realized she’d just been playing the whole time. She cupped my chin in her hand and said, “Oh, honey, you’ll be a wonderful father someday,” and then left as easily as if I’d never existed. I still missed the daydream of those kids—how I’d learn to braid Rebecca’s hair so Tessa could get an extra few minutes of sleep, how I’d tell Isaac I loved him every night so he’d never forget it, even after I was dead. And I missed Tessa—the way she got dressed in the morning, her hands, her straight, no-bullshit mouth. Since she’d left, all my relationships seemed to last about six months. The girl would start thinking she understood me, and I wouldn’t correct her, and then what she thought was going on between us and what I thought would get so far apart that when I broke up with her, she’d think I was proposing. It had gotten so regular that I could see all the stages before they happened. I’d meet someone and hear the clock start ticking.

  “Sure,” I said. “You and your fiancée . . .” I started, not sure how to finish.

  She shook her head. “We were never engaged. I just say that to make myself feel better. I made up this life where I ask her to marry me and she says yes, and then she gets really girly and traditional and buys all these bridal magazines and calls me a million times a day with questions about centerpieces, but none of that is true. She left in March.”

  For years after my mom died, I sometimes told people she was still alive—mostly people I didn’t know very well, but sometimes even close friends like my college roommate, who acted like I was crazy when I finally told him the truth. I wasn’t crazy. I just wanted to skip the moment when people got all quiet and awkward trying to figure out what to say. And I wanted to forget those bad last years when Mom became someone none of us knew, and then not someone at all.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Sophie gave the biggest shrug I’d ever seen. She threw her shoulders back and her face upward like she thought the sky might open and send her down an answer.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s not true. I know. I’m hard to be with.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, thinking about how she’d insulted me. She smiled a little bit, then got serious again.

  “I don’t mean I’m a bitch. I mean, that’s a problem, too, but less so, most of the time. I just mean I don’t understand other people that well, and sometimes they don’t understand me either. It leads to trouble.”

  “I can see how that could cause trouble,” I said, “but it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.”

  “Well,” she said, “I haven’t been alive all that long, but I’ve had enough breakups to know that the common element is me.”

  This last part sounded like she’d read it in a self-help book, and I had a mental image of Sophie sitting cross-legged on a bed somewhere, paging through a pink paperback with a pen in her hand, trying to figure out how normal humans had relationships.

  “Listen,” I said. “My mom was sick for a lot of her childhood and her teens, and she had a lot of surgeries and a lot of scars. When she got to college, she didn’t really know how to act with people her own age, and she was so sure nobody would ever want to date her that she didn’t know what to do when people did. And so she had a lot of bad boyfriends and boyfriends that hurt her. Then when she was twenty-five, her dad died, and she decided to stop dating and build a house on this lake and live here alone. And my dad was the guy she hired to help build the house. And when the house was done and my dad asked her to marry him, she asked him why he wanted her when he could have someone with nothing wrong with them. My dad didn’t give her a bunch of compliments or anything like that. He just said, ‘No I couldn’t. That person doesn’t exist.’”

  I didn’t tell her the rest of their story, how they married and loved each other for twenty years, and then in less than two years she went crazy and died. I didn’t think there’d be any need to tell her, because after we said good-bye the next day, I thought I’d never see her again. She was smiling now, her face still wet. I wanted to touch her, not even to kiss her necessarily but just to feel her skin, which I for some reason thought would be hot and thin and fragile like the skin of a mouse. I took a step toward her, and I could feel the heat coming off her. Then she brought her arm up between us and wiped her eyes with the afghan.

  “Why did we come here?” she asked.

  The night snapped back into focus. Frogs were singing in the woods; the moon was starting to set.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her. It was the kind of question people back in the city would ask me at parties, meaning What is our purpose in this world? But Sophie didn’t seem like the type to get existential.

  “I mean, why did you want to shoot here? I can tell you’ve been here before. What happened here?”

  Her face was dry now, and she was looking at me hard with her big eyes, sizing me up. I remembered that I barely knew her at all.

  “I used to come here when I was a kid,” I said, turning away. “I’d better get some sleep.”

  “Good night,” she said. And she put her hand on my arm, just for a second, and her skin was just like I’d imagined.

  . . .

  THE NEXT MORNING the guys were loading up the van. I put the amps and guitars on board, but when I tried to help Sophie’s crew with the lighting equipment, they gave me a look like they didn’t know who I was, so I just stood around in the driveway, staring at the trees and my feet. I was thinking maybe this weekend would be good for me. I was feeling clear and alert. When I got back to the city, maybe I’d be able to write songs again. Then I felt skinny arms wrap around me from behind.

  “Let’s not go today,” Sophie said. “Let’s stay.”

  At first I thought we wouldn’t be able to do it. When I called, the owner said it was rented to someone else starting Monday, and when I asked if there was any way they could switch, he gave me a lecture about city people and the things we needed to understand. I thought of telling him I’d come here every summer for fifteen years, but I was worried he’d tell me bad news about the house, like the new owners had torn it down and put up a big new ugly house in its place. Instead I just hung up. But when I told Sophie it was a no-go, she called him back, and within fifteen minutes he had changed his mind.

  “I just told him we needed it,” she said, blank-faced.

  And then we were alone with that whole house around us, just staring at each other. I admit that I thought we’d have sex; it seemed like the next step. But we were just standing together in the empty living room, and I had no idea how to get started. I couldn’t tell if she even expected me to do something—she was looking at me out of those eyes like a cat or a bird of prey. I was embarrassed, and I didn’t know why. Finally I went to the kitchen and got my guitar, which was still right by the door, ready to get loaded into the van.

  “Want to hear some music?” I asked her.

  She nodded and sat down on the daybed. I sat next to her, close enough for my leg to touch her a little bit but far enough that if she asked if I was hitting on her, I could deny it, maybe. I felt twelve years old. I thought I’d play something romantic, so I started in on “Walking After Midnight.” But once I finished the first verse she stopped me.

  “Will you play one of your songs?” she asked.

  “I thought you hated my songs.” I tried not to sound like I was pissed off about it, but I’m pretty sure I failed.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You did say they weren’t interesting.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I just meant the words.”

  It was true I’d never been much of a lyricist. I heard the music in my head first, and later I’d kind of match some words up to it and hope it all fit together. My favorite songs of mine, the ones that came closest to the feeling I’d had writing them, were the ones with no words at all. But I wasn’t playing those songs in public much then. People liked a story, I thought; they liked to sing along.

  So I launched into “Luella.” Like a lot of the songs I was writing then, it wasn’t really about anything in particular. It had a girl with broken hands who stays inside a lot, and people wearing blue in a white room, and some stuff about sadness. When I finished, she asked me, “Is that about your mom?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “A lot of my songs are about her, a little bit.”

  “What happened to her hands?”

  A lot of things happened to my mom’s hands. When she was born, my grandma thought she was making fists, but the fists wouldn’t open. The doctors X-rayed them and found dozens of tiny bones, all in the wrong places. I’ve seen the X-rays. For some reason my grandparents put them in her baby book, next to the first photos of her, a wide-eyed baby in a knit hat. Over the next fifteen years, she had ten surgeries to make fingers. She spent a lot of time in the hospital, and she told me things that only people who have been sick for a long time know, like that there is school in the hospital, even for kids who are going to die. My mom learned long division in the hospital. She read To Kill a Mockingbird and Jane Eyre. She told my sister that she got her first period in a hospital bed, and my sister told me that years later, when we were drunk together for the last time before she got born again and quit drinking and everything else.

  And then it was over. She was in the tenth grade, and her hands were as good as they were ever going to be. They turned out to be pretty good. She could write and draw and braid hair; she could count change and wear gloves and use chopsticks. She could even play the trumpet, and she was in the school marching band for a year until she quit, not because the fingering was hard on her new hands but because she was tone-deaf. There were only a few things she couldn’t do, like play cat’s cradle, fasten a necklace, give someone the finger.

  Once, in high school, a boy put her left hand on his erect dick while they were at the movies. My sister told me this one, too—she said he told our mom he just wanted to see if she could feel things. In college a boy told her that her hands looked like bound feet. Another called them his little meat puppets. A third gave her some expensive cashmere gloves, then asked her to keep them on during dinner with his parents. Once my mom slapped a man across the face with her right hand.

  “Did it hurt?” a friend asked her, concerned.

  “Him?” she said. “It sure looked like it.”

  My mom got a wedding ring specially sized for her little finger, since she didn’t have a ring finger on her left hand. When my sister started first grade, my mom bought her five different kinds of nail polish and let her pick a new one anytime we went to the drugstore. When we were in Little League, she couldn’t play catch with us, but she could play Ping-Pong. Her hands ached sometimes, and when they did we fought to be the one to put her special heating gloves in the microwave for her. Once her mind started to go, she forgot about her hands and started doing things that she knew were dangerous for her, like hammering nails. We came home to find ugly pictures of flowers hanging all over the living room wall and her calmly watching The Wonder Years, and after that we weren’t sure if it had ever been dangerous in the first place.

  I didn’t tell Sophie any of this. The more I thought about my mom, the more I realized what a stranger Sophie was and what a weird idea it had been for us to stay in the house together.

  “She was born with a condition that made her hands deformed,” I said. “So she had to have a lot of surgery as a kid.”

  Sophie nodded. “Did it work?”

  It was a funny question, like there was a switch somewhere, and if the doctor flipped it just right, Mom’s hands would just turn back to normal. But even though she talked about how hard the hospital was and how hard it was to get used to life when she finally got out, she was always really upbeat about the hands themselves. She was always up for answering questions about them, especially if a kid asked. She didn’t sugarcoat—I once heard her tell a boy in my sister’s class that her hands would get older faster than other people’s and that for her fiftieth birthday she was going to ask for Velcro shoes. But mostly what she ended up telling people was that even though they looked different, her hands were a lot like theirs.

  “It worked,” I said. “All things considered, it worked pretty well.”

  Sophie nodded again. “Is she dead?”

  It shouldn’t have been such a slap in the face. After years of being the only one, I’d finally gotten to the age where some other people I knew had dead parents. And it wasn’t like I’d been talking about my mom’s book club, or her golf handicap, or her retirement plans, things I sometimes did make up when talking to strangers. Still, I felt like I’d been giving Sophie the happy version of my mom, and I didn’t like getting jerked back to reality.

  “How did you know that?” I asked.

  “You talk about her the way people talk about their dead relatives,” she said, “not their living ones.”

  It bothered me that she could see through me that quickly. And that phrase “dead relatives,” like my mom was some cousin in a black-and-white photo with her name written on the back because otherwise everybody would forget her. The urge to fight came back in me. Instead I said, “Well yeah, you’re right. She’s dead.”

  I didn’t look at Sophie after I said it. I figured anything I saw on her face would make me mad. I thought of how late I would get back to the city if I left right now. I wondered what I would do when I got there all snarled up inside. I thought about calling Tessa, which I sometimes still did, even though she was married now with a daughter and a baby son. Then Sophie said, “Will you do something for me?”

  I couldn’t believe she would ask me for a favor. I looked up at her; her face was unapologetic and completely serious.

  “Will you teach me how to swim?” she asked.

  I stared. For a second I wasn’t mad anymore; I was just mystified.

  “You can’t swim?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “I never learned.”

  I remembered how her skin had felt the night before. I decided I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I wanted whatever was between us to play itself out in a way I could understand.

  “I’ll teach you,” I said.

  She didn’t have a bathing suit—she wore a pair of jean shorts and a black T-shirt. She walked ahead of me into the water until the hem of her T-shirt was wet, and then she turned around, hands on her hips.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”

  I realized then that not only had I never taught anyone how to swim before, I didn’t actually remember learning to swim myself. All I remembered was doing it—the water like liquid pine in my mouth, the way the cold tightened the flesh against my bones. I remembered being afraid of it sometimes—at night I used to think about something big and cold and ancient with no eyes and no name, slowly rising up from the bottom. But not being able to do it was as impossible to imagine as not breathing.

  “Watch me first,” I said, buying time.

  She crossed her arms. I walked to the edge of the dock and jumped in. I remembered how I used to feel as a kid in the water, like my body was smoothed out, like I was even a little bit graceful. I took a few strokes as easily as walking. When I came up, I had no better idea of what to tell her, but she was still watching.

  “So that’s what it looks like,” I said. “Want to try now?”

  She put her hands in her wet pockets. “I know what it looks like,” she said. “That’s not really the problem.”

  “So what is the problem?”

  “The problem is my feet. I don’t like to move my feet.”

  I imagined her feet planted in the lake mud. I imagined them red and raw, like her hands. “Didn’t you ever float or just paddle around, when you were a kid?”

  “No,” she said. “I was too afraid of the water.”

  “What were you afraid of?” I asked.

  She looked past me at the other side of the lake. For a second I worried she could see the old house, even though it was over in the cove, totally hidden from view.

  “Does something ever just feel bad to you?” she asked. “Like it makes your hair stand on end?”

  I thought of our dog growing up, how late one night he’d stood by the front door, every muscle in his body tense, making a sound in his throat we’d never heard before, and how even though my parents said everything was fine and called him a crazy dog, I could tell they were a little scared of whatever it was he knew that we didn’t. I wondered if Sophie could see or hear or smell things nobody else could. For a second I was afraid of the water too.