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wide-set eyes. Another Emily. Imagine.
    “I’ve been seeing a shrink,” Emily admits. “This trip was all his idea.” She laughs this awful, humorless laugh. “Obviously he doesn’t know us.”
    I fumble out of the car and open her side. “Come on,” I tell her. “I’ll buy you something nice for dinner.” She gets out, looking small and baffled in the thickening dark. “This will look a hell of a lot better on a full stomach, Emily, I can promise you that. That I can promise you.” I wait for her, considering how I might frame an apology, some careful ordering of words that might cover what I’ve done without including who I am. What I have in mind requires a fragility of construction that will not appear to me in this hastening moment. Instead, I shepherd her into the motel lobby, thinking to keep my hand on her shoulder, the way I imagine a father would.

That One Autumn
     
    Marie Whitten, part-time librarian
    She figured to die in summer, then in fall, and now it is winter, a mild one, and she sees that her time has finally come. Everything takes on a pleasant fuzz, like the skin on a peach. For days now she has lain still, staring calmly at her own hands, blue and needle-scarred, folded over her favorite quilt, where her tiny dog slumbers within reach of her fingers. Ernie stays by the window, endlessly glancing back at her, believing she can’t die as long as he is watching. In these final hours she has discovered the ability to read his thoughts, and though she is sobered by the expanse of his panic, the bottomless howl he cannot express, she is touched by it, too.
    Despite the ice-white sky outside the window, it is not winters past that Marie dwells on, their muffled sense of safety, the cold stars, the hall closet straining with the wet-wool scent and weight of the tangled coats of her husband and son. Instead, it is autumn she thinks of, one autumn in particular, when for a time the days felt like these days: upside down, fraught with meaning.
    That one autumn, Marie headed up to the cabin alone. From the first, something looked wrong. She took in the familiar view: the clapboard bungalow she and Ernie had inherited from his father, the bushes and trees that had grown up over the years,the dock pulled in for the season. She sat in the idling car, reminded of those “find the mistake” puzzles James used to pore over as a child, intent on locating mittens on the water-skier, milk bottles in the parlor. Bent in a corner somewhere over the softening page, her blue-eyed boy would search for hours, convinced that after every wrong thing had been identified, more wrong things remained.
    Sunlight pooled in the dooryard. The day gleamed. The gravel turnaround seemed vaguely disarranged. Scanning the line of spruce that shielded the steep slope to the lake’s edge, Marie looked for movement. Behind the thick mesh screen of the front porch she could make out the wicker tops of the chairs. She turned off the ignition, trying to remember whether she’d taken time to straighten up the porch when she was last here, in early August, the weekend of Ernie’s birthday. He and James had had one of their fights, and it was possible that in the ensuing clamor and silence she had forgotten to straighten up the porch. It was possible.
    She got out of the car and checked around. Everything looked different after just a few weeks: the lake blacker through the part in the trees, the brown-eyed Susans gone weedy, the chairs on the porch definitely, definitely moved. Ernie had pushed a chair in frustration, she remembered. And James had responded in kind, upending the green one on his way out the door and down to the lake. They’d begun that weekend, like so many others, with such good intentions, only to discover anew how mismatched they were, parents to son. So, she had straightened the chairs—she had definitely straightened them—while outside Ernie’s angry footsteps crackled over the gravel and, farther away,