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“Heidi’s fallen in the pond!”

Sometime after Mama’s scream, I remember the silhouette of a woman coming over the rise from the garden. A few minutes later? An hour?

“There you are,” she said. Was it Bess? Nancy? Michèle? She bent down to put her hands on my shoulders. Her eyes were not right, too bright.

“Come with me,” she said. “Let’s go into the farmhouse.” She took my hand and pulled me up the patio and through the screen door. It slammed behind us. The house was hotter than outside, the cookstove still burning low.

“Come sit here and let’s read a book,” she said.

“Where’s Mama?”

“She’s down at the pond.”

“Where’s Papa?”

“He’s down there, too.”

“Where’s Heidi?”

“Down at the pond.”

She began to read one of the books. It was a kid’s book, Heidi’s now, but I didn’t care, I could never get free of books. When their pages opened they pulled me in, even if I’d heard the story a hundred times. The apprentice’s voice sounded funny. I looked up to find she was crying as she read, tears rolling down her cheeks. One splattered on the page, and she stopped reading. Sniffled.

“I want to go,” I said.

“No, you have to stay here,” she said.

“I want to go check on Heidi.”

“No, that’s not a good idea. You should stay here.”

“I’ll go down to the pond by the long way, so by the time I get there she will be okay,” I said.

“No,” she said. But after a while, it seems I was alone.

I slipped out of the farmhouse and onto the path to the spring. It was cooler in the woods, but the indent of the path was sweaty. Down a little ways was a turnoff to the tree house, and then another turn toward the pond. I walked slowly. “By the time I get there, everything will be okay,” I repeated to myself. The light came into the woods from the clearing of the pond. I peeked around a bush, the moss spongy beneath my bare feet.

The pale shape of Heidi’s body lay on the ground by the edge of the water, a circle of people around her. “What are you doing?” I cried. They all looked up at me. Someone grabbed my hand and pulled me away through the gardens to the farm stand. Other apprentices were standing around, talking in hushed voices.

“She threw up water,” someone said. “That’s a good sign.”

Mumbles. Sighs. The sun bright on the gardens. Lettuces wilting in the farm stand. Then I was stumbling along a path in the woods with Mama to call the ambulance from Jean and Keith’s phone. Mama wailed Heidi’s name into the forest, and my toes clenched from the sound as I scrambled to keep up. Then I was behind the woodshed with Papa in the dusk of late afternoon. He was holding a blanketed shape in his arms as the afternoon sun burned the tops of the pointed trees around the clearing. Rocking back and forth, crying in a way I’d never seen before.

“But Papa,” I said, “but Papa, you’ve got to uncover her face. She can’t breathe.”

“Lissie,” he said. “Heidi is dead.”

The lines of Papa’s face were blurred with tears, the curve of his steel hair gone flat. He rocked her in that tight embrace. His body didn’t understand such pain, the arch of his back was fetal. Up though the path in the woods came the sound of Mama wailing Heidi’s name. But Heidi had to be okay, she had to wake up, I didn’t mean it when I said she would die. She had to be okay so I could help her up the ladder next time. But around the farm the light began to fade, and the daylilies closed up into fleshy clothespins that looked like the fingers of praying hands.

“You’re not taking her,” is what Paul remembers Papa saying to the EMTs, responding with fury when the ambulance finally arrived and they tried to put her on board. He wasn’t going to let an undertaker touch her, pump her full of chemicals. That’s when the ambulance driver radioed the police. And that’s when Papa slipped Bruce and Paul a piece of yellow-lined legal paper with handwritten instructions on where and how to dig a grave in the woods.

“Whatever happens,” the note said in Papa’s distinct scrawl, “just keep digging.”

Pam, Paul, Barry, and Larry were all there with shovels in the graveyard where the Colson child had been