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Frank emerged bearlike from another unsuccessful well hole he’d been digging. Julie, Naomi, and a new girl with long blond hair unfolded from seminude prayerlike crouches for weeding the garden patches. Kent came up bare-chested from tending the farm stand, and Michael unstuck his ponytail from the sweat on his back and leaned his pick against the stump he was extracting in the back field. Michèle helped Mama bring out the usual fare of soup and salad, along with Helen’s sourdough bread made with sprouted rye berries.

After lunch people practiced throwing the wooden curve of a boomerang in the back field with a visitor who was the previous year’s national boomerang champion, and relaxed in the shade of the tree as Kent practiced walking on his hands, a sheen to his brow and jaw as he moved upside down across the yard, forever trying to beat his record of twenty steps.

“Come on, Eliot, catch him,” someone called. Ever up for a challenge, Papa sprang to his hands, skinny legs twisting out of his shorts like crooked tree branches, vying to match pace beside Kent’s ramrod-straight gymnast’s form, all to the cheering and laughter of the audience. Heidi sat on the lap of the apprentice whose golden hair hung in thick sheets on either side of her face. She could have been the mother to Heidi’s fair hair and blue eyes. As Skates always said, Heidi looked like a Coleman, while with my dark hair and wide face, I took after Mama. Cheering erupted when Papa’s wiry upside-down form began to gain on Kent’s solid one, until Papa teetered sideways and snapped back to his feet with a good-natured laugh.

“Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,” Kent bragged aloud with each additional hand step.

“You gave him a run for his money,” the new blond apprentice said to Papa. He smiled, the silver in his hair catching the light as he bent toward her to lift Heidi onto his shoulders. I watched from the patio where I sat with Mama, part of me wishing I had blond hair, too.

Seeking attention of my own, I went with my fingers out in front of me to tickle Frank. “Tickle you till you cry,” I giggled. Then I ran screaming around the yard until he caught me and tickled me so hard the laughter made my stomach ache and tears leak from my eyes. Then he would try to tickle me when I was crying to make me laugh instead. Laughing and crying were opposite sides of the same coin that summer.

There was a cookout at Secret Cove, a pebbly beach accessed by an old wagon road that led across the uninhabited head of the cape. The curve of the starlit sky over the cove was edged with the swaying of fir and spruce, and the waves tap-tapped the pebbles against each other as apprentices relaxed after dinner, talking-laughing-singing in the warm evening. Having chased each other across the rocks and eaten too many berries, Heidi and I were tired and “winding down,” as Mama called it.

“It’s time to get you girls home to bed,” Mama announced, bending to put some things into her pack, her hair falling around her face in long sweeps that caught the light from the kerosene lantern. There was the sound of paper bags being crinkled up and the smell of raspberries that had become dark pulp on the rocks.

“Leave them,” Mama said. “The sea will wash them away.”

Mama shouldered her backpack, and Heidi and I followed her without dispute, pebbles grating against each other under our bare feet.

“Where’s Papa?” Mama muttered, turning on the jar-size red flashlight with the white padded knob on the top. She shone the light across the beach, its beam making monster shadows of the rocks and catching on bodies in various states of re-dressing after swimming, a bare back there, the side of a face, white butt cheeks.

My eyes narrowed on the beam of light leading the way. Laughter came from out on the water, and the beam jumped to the sound, illuminating for an instant the pale color of flesh, arms and legs entwined.

“Oh!” Mama gasped, and the tunnel of light skittered out into the emptiness of sea