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Larry found little peace in the rituals of the ceremony. A voice in the back of his head kept repeating Sandy’s name, the velocity increasing until it became a scream. “Sandy!” After the burial, he and Barry searched along the roads and paths with lanterns and called out into the night, but to no avail. Where the hell was she?

Sandy liked to swim out to the islands almost, the steady pace of arms and legs moving in unison to soothe the anxieties collected in her mind over the course of the day. She swam away the strain of hard work, the fatigue of waking early to bake bread, the social tension of living so closely with a group of people. The cold water felt especially delicious in the humidity, the pulse of adrenaline warming her as she settled into the rhythm. Who knew where the time went when you were in that place? An hour later, maybe two, she stopped to get her bearings and realized she had come clear around the head of the cape from Redman’s to Ames Cove.

By the time she returned to Redman’s and stepped ashore, the sun was sinking behind the peaked edge of spruce and fir surrounding the cove, the rocks purple in the fading light. Sunset was still a couple hours away, but the light had disappeared from the deeper places of the forest.

Sandy remembered the path leaving from the top of the cove, but it wasn’t where she’d thought it should be, so she located her overalls and shoes and set out bushwhacking for it. When she hadn’t found her way after an hour, the darkness began deepening around the moss and trunks of the forest floor. She knew the head of the cape was surrounded by sea on all sides, meaning she couldn’t get too lost, so she kept forging on, the branches scraping her skin and her overalls chafing with salt. Soon she could see the silver sickle of the waning moon rising above the trees, and that served as her compass as she climbed up and down the rocky undulations of the forest.

When she began to tire, she decided to lie on the pine needles beneath a tree to rest. She shivered and hugged herself with her arms, having no protection from the surprising coolness of the night, as mosquitoes complained and trees creaked. Unable to sleep, Sandy continued to pick her way through the woods and eventually found herself on one of the old trails. She felt the way home with her feet, finally limping into the campground just before dawn, hair tangled with twigs and skin scraped by branches. Limp with relief, she crawled into her familiar rubber sleeping bag next to Larry, who woke with a lurch and furiously hugged her to him. Warming her hands with his own, blowing on them, he began to cry, his reddening eyes exposed without glasses.

“What is it?” Sandy asked.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” he said, but the words sounded hollow compared to the magnitude of his emotion. This was the woman, he knew in that moment, with whom he wanted spend the rest of his life. When he told her what had happened, Sandy felt it like a fist in her stomach—she had just the other day been trying to teach Heidi how to swim.

Come daybreak we heard that at 3:00 a.m., around the time Sandy was hoping for sleep under a tree, Jean, two weeks overdue, finally went into labor. A new child, a boy named Dagan, was born to our neighbors at 9:00 a.m. the day after we lost our own.

We drifted around the farm like shadows. We didn’t talk or feel, or, in Mama’s case, eat. Mama’s parents came up to help, camping in the blueberry field, but there was nothing they could do. Mama hardly spoke to them. I watched the light fade through the windows at the end of the day, pale sunbeams full of dust. Come night the farmhouse was quiet save for the whooshing of kerosene lanterns and Clara’s hunger cries. Helen and Scott held a memorial service in the long room at their old house, and everyone sat on the padded benches in numb silence while Helen played Mozart’s Requiem on her phonograph. Skates, silenced with shock, retreated to Carolyn Robinson’s.

By Monday