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hand leaves the steering wheel. She reaches toward me like she’s going to touch my arm, stops, lets her hand drop to the seat, keeps driving with her left hand at the top of the wheel.
     
    i look back at her scribbles. “i don’t get the line about silver eyes. Your grandmother’s eyes were ‘silver in the sunlight’?”
     
    She flushes again, pushes her hair back out of her face with her free hand. “That line must be about the salmon.”
     
    “That’s some freaky fish.” My eyes are gray. Silver is pushing it.
     
    She snatches the bag from the seat and stuffs it in her pocket.
     
    Leesie drives through the Coeur d’Alene reservation past plywood shanties with CIGS painted in red across the front, empty fireworks stands, and stacks of dead trees at a sawmill. It gets warm in the cab of the pickup, and her leather and tropical fruit smell fills me up. i actually doze—the first real rest I’ve had in a while. i wake when the pickup bumps onto a dirt lane that switches back and forth, down through a forest to the lake. She rolls down her window.
     
    “Smell the pines.” She inhales, deep. Some of her pines are orange and dead looking. The pickup brushes by a fat green branch overhanging the road. i close my eyes and breathe. The fresh clean of it washes through me.
     
    She parks the pickup on a strip of grass. “There’s a toilet in the shed. You have to dump a bucket of water down it to make it flush.” That reminds me of the heads on the first live-aboard we tried. Mom was ready to leave after day one. Dad and i teased her the whole week, but she stuck it out. Always did. No matter how hard we pushed her. That sad, paralyzing feeling engulfs me again.
     
    “This way.” Leesie scrambles down a bluff about six feet high to a narrow strip of sand fifty feet long. “How do you like our beach? This is the only stretch of sand on all of Windy Bay.” i mime impressed.
     
    “It washes away in the winter, but Dad hauls up a fresh load every spring.”
     
    i stand on her sand and stare at her lake. Midnight blue. Calling me.
     
    “Pretty, huh?”
     
    i don’t answer—can’t answer. i bend down and touch the water. Maybe 40 degrees F. Way too cold—even with my seven mil.
     
    Leesie leaves, returns with an armload of dry driftwood. “Still lukewarm? You—not the lake. Coeur d’Alene never warms up.”
     
    The wood clatters when she drops it. i don’t look around. i’m entranced by the soft, pulsing water. “So what do you do here?”
     
    She walks over to me. “You up for marshmallows?”
     
    i shake my head.
     
    She squats down and digs a flat rock out of the sand. “We used to have a sailboat, but Dad sold it a couple of years ago to fix the tractor.”
     
    “Swim much?”
     
    “Not anymore. I used to be a fish.” She brushes the sand off the rock and hands it to me. “My baby sister, Stephie, is like that now. Totally fearless. When I was eight, I got tangled up in a bunch of seaweed—”
     
    “This is a lake.”
     
    “Lakeweed, then. I couldn’t get free. Kicked. Thrashed. I swear something pulled me under. I couldn’t get back to the surface. Dad got me out. I had this nasty rash on my legs. I canoe these days. Anything touches me in the water and I kind of lose it.”
     
    “That’s too bad.” i chuck the stone. It doesn’t skip. “Anything to see down there? Wrecks? Cool fish?”
     
    She laughs. “There’s a healthy crop of lakeweed.” She stands, walks to the end of their cement dock, and leans against a piling. Her hair catches the setting sun. “We lost some fishing poles last summer. It drops off just past the dock. Gets deep fast.”
     
    i join her, stare at the space between two log pilings where they used to tie up their sailboat. “How deep is it here?”
     
    “Comes up to about—” She rotates to face me, draws a line across my chest with the side of her hand. She lets the edge of her hand rest on my chest a few seconds longer than she