“Thirty summers,” the man repeated. “Listen to that.” He rocked his head upward, bunched up his lips, and gave a short, sharp whistle of amazement. He turned to his wife. “See what I’m saying?”

“I know, I know.”

“Next year, we call well ahead,” the man said.

She rolled her pale blue eyes. “I’ll believe that when I see it,” she said, laughing.

“I’ll tell you what.” I liked these two, and wouldn’t have minded being the one to guide them. By the time we reached the put-in point, five bouncy miles upriver, we’d be like old friends, and they’d hardly remember what it was they came to see-guaranteeing that on the off chance a moose actually did cross their path, they’d remember the sight their entire lives. I was glad to see the man had a camera strapped to his belt, since moose as a rule are dumb as buckets and happy to pose.

“We’ve got some groups checking out this afternoon,” I said. “After the run, come back to the lodge and we can show you some of the cabins. You can see if they suit you. You can book right now for next summer if you want. We might even have an opening later in the week. I can look into it for you.”

“I bet they’re great,” the man said. “Right on the lake like that?” He ran a hand through his hair. “Man.”

The woman leaned a little closer to me; her cheeks were pale, and I had the sense that, if I put my hands against them, they would be cool to the touch, like bed linens. For a moment I felt the urge, and also felt, strangely, that no one would mind if I actually did this. “We drove up from Philadelphia,” she told me. “You could say it’s a total hellhole.”

“That’s a shame,” I said. “I bet it’s nice to get away. Maybe when you get back, things will seem different for you.”

She let her gaze drift past me. Beyond the lodge, the lake was shiny and solid as a ballroom floor under a full morning sun. If they hung around till nightfall, they’d see the same scene in reverse-the surface of the lake so still they’d want to walk across it, a perfect mirror image of the mountains under their feet.

“Pretty nice, isn’t it?” I said.

“Nice? Holy mackerel.” The man puffed up his cheeks and shook his head. “This must be the prettiest place in God’s whole universe.”

I watched them head off to the dining room and then went to check on Kate. I found her down by the storage shed, loading up the bed of the pickup with paddles and life preservers and the old Clorox bottles we used as bailers.

“I think we can time this okay,” she said. “Don’t you have someplace to be?”

“I think I’m stuck here awhile. This thing with Harry might not work after all.” I helped Kate hoist the first canoe up onto the rack over the truckbed. “Hal thinks he may be dying. This isn’t the leaky one, is it?”

“They all leak, Jordan. That’s half the fun.” She jumped down from the bed and pulled her hair back from her face. She was wearing sandals, jeans, a gray T-shirt; over the truck’s fender I saw the sweatshirt she’d worn the night before. I felt like none of us had gone to bed at all.

“Relax, Jordan. I’ll get these folks upstream. Everyone’s going to have a great day.”

“Two groups are in, I think. I talked to one couple. They seemed nice.”

“So, fine. I’ll take care of them. We’re on schedule.” She tilted her head and searched my face. “ Jordan?”

“Aw, I’m okay. It was hard to talk to Hal.” I found myself digging a toe into the gravel and stopped myself. “I think he made me think of my own father, a little.”

“Well, we haven’t really talked about him,” Kate said, nodding. “Maybe we should start?”

“I wish there was something to tell. The problem is, there isn’t.”

She sat down on the open tailgate, snuck a peek at her watch, and squinted up at me. “We’ve got a minute. Tell me anything. What do you remember?”

“He played the guitar. He liked lifting me in the air. His hair felt like touching a broom.” I stopped. I had never said any of these things before. They were ordinary, and all that I had, but I had never said them. “I was three.”

“What else?”

I closed my eyes and thought. “Wind.”

“Wind. You mean what it sounds like?”

“No, not exactly.” I opened my eyes. “I think he felt like wind.”

“Well, he was a pilot, so maybe that’s why. Maybe it was just something that happened one time, something you remember. It doesn’t matter which.” Her eyes, as she spoke, had never left me. Her gaze felt like a warm room I had stepped into. She stood and took my arm. “I’m glad you’re telling me this. Something else, Jordan.”

She leaned her face into mine. And I was thinking, for those moments, only of her; as if for the first time in my life I was having a single thought. Then we parted and the thought of Kate was suddenly woven like a thread through everything, all that had ever happened to me, the clean smell of the pines and the lake and the memory of my long lonely winters; the very turning world we stood on. They say that the moment your life appears before your eyes will be your last, but I’m here to say that it’s not so very different when you kiss a woman like Kate, whoever your Kate may be.

“So, a big day in more ways than one.” She peeked over my left shoulder and then my right, and dropped her voice to a whisper. “You think anyone saw?”

“We’ll know soon enough, I guess.”

“And you didn’t mind?” She peered into my face as if she were reading tiny print. “I didn’t ask, which was sort of rude.”

“God, no.” I would have given it all back, every cent, to kiss her again. “I’m glad you did.”

She let her eyes fall. Her lashes, I saw, were thick with moisture. In all the time I’d known her, I didn’t think I’d seen so much as a tear from her, and I wondered why she was crying now, what I’d done to deserve it. Then she put her hands to my chest and gently pushed me away.

“Okay,” she said, and wiped her eyes quickly with the back of her wrist. “Show’s over, folks. Now go help Harry catch his fish.”

NINE

I never saw her again, my nurse with her knitting needles. I had dreamt her, of course, or the morphine had; I knew this without being told, as I also knew not to ask. Still, I thought she might visit me again, or I hoped she would, that night by the lake when I slept but did not sleep, dreamed but did not dream, was awake every minute and also not. The final unmaking of time, all its solid, familiar order undone, so that even the rhythm of day and night has lost its meaning and one is everywhere in one’s life at once; all that night I drowned in time. And when dawn came-when the blackness of the shades began to pale, and the sky began the slow unlocking of its captured light-I was so surprised to find I was alive I assumed I actually wasn’t. I was dead, but Meredith and Sam were not; while I had slept and died the earth and its heavens had flipped like a cake from a pan, and it was they who were alive, and missing me.

“Pop?” The creak of the cabin door, and behind it, a sweeping arc of day. Morning fills the room; in the chair by my bed, my grown son, Hal. I feel these things without looking. Just lifting my eyelids seems to require an impossible effort, like lifting a piano or reciting the phone book.

“Pop, it’s Hal.”

I thought I said something. I thought I said, I dreamed I was dead, Hal. I saw your mother and brother. She was giving him his bottle in the armchair by the window, the one with the maple tree outside. The leaves were fat and green, and it was long ago.

“How’re you feeling, Pop?”

The baby began to cry; his diaper was wet. She changed him on the dresser, softly humming a song through the pins she held in her mouth. That sweet time of bottles and diapers, the smell of talcum and steam from the stove and the quiet house, and days folded into days. The taste of pins. It was a good dream, Hal.