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muskies were biting, as if there’d
     been something about Tug’s farm she wanted kept secret.
    Anyway I might have been more curious than brave when I pulled on my jeans and sweatshirt
     and sandals and tiptoed from the summer porch through the musty living room into the
     kitchen,which was lit by a high-watt bulb in a frosted fixture. I took two McIntoshes from
     the cracked ceramic bowl on the cherrywood table and, feeling not only brave but also
     generous now that each of my hands could offer a horse a surefire gift, escaped through
     the roadside door.
    The lawn out there was a long stretch of crabgrass split by a path of flagstones sunken
     by rain and time and the weight of an unknowable number of horse folk, and it struck
     me that my father himself had probably walked on those stones, his actual flesh-and-bone
     feet pressing each a microscopic bit deeper, and this realization saddened me. If
     he hadn’t drowned and were still alive, I thought, he and I might be talking now,
     and I headed left, then into the woods south of the lawn.
    And in those woods I kept to the path Tug had cleared, a trail just wide enough for
     thoroughbreds. I pressed on guided by the same moonlight that had haunted me on the
     summer porch, and between the crowns of the trees on either side of me were also stars
     strong enough to not only guide you but also to get you to thinking about eternity
     and family and afterlife and anyone you really cared about, and I wondered: Is it
     through one skinny ray—from the least visible star—that dead fathers communicate with
     daughters? Or is it through sunshine?
    And I did choke up a little while wondering this, but then I told myself to focus
     on the future, on how I might be minutes from meeting horses, maybe one who’d prove
     as wild about being ridden as I was about riding. Filly, mare, colt, gelding, bay,
     roan, chestnut—no distinction would matter if this horse would love to run with me—and
     then things went black thanks to a huge boulder on my right, more of a cliff, really,
     a slice of the earth’s guts forced out past its skin by a glacier, it seemed. And
     the darkness here wasthick enough to bring to mind bears and wolves and overly aggressive mama raccoons,
     but it also made the stars directly above seem brighter—trying to connect with my
     father was only a matter of looking up—and I stopped walking, as if stillness might
     help me hear my father telling me, through the brightness of those stars, whatever
     he had to say, maybe, I imagined, something like:
I walked there, too. And, yes, I’ve long loved you.
    And I felt taller as I walked on, and then, to my right and just south of the boulder
     itself, there it was, a huge, brightly moonlit meadow with a creek angled across the
     middle of it and a birch-log fence all around.
    And compared to the darkness in the shadow of the boulder, the brightness here, on
     top of the openness, made you downright joyful, not to mention that miraculous feeling
     you get when you stand witness to something as defiant of logic as a meadow dropped
     into the middle of woods thick as hell. But then I noticed an uninhabited, shabby
     lean-to near the southernmost run of fence, and out there near the creek, where horses
     might have been drinking, there were none.
    And there were none anywhere.
    And part of the fence was missing—that section of birch logs was down. Maybe, I thought
     then, a colt had felt too penned and took his best running start and leapt and failed?
     Or tore open his coat bolting straight through? Either way I now guessed why Colleen
     had been cagey: A horse had died and she hadn’t had the heart to tell me.
    Then I thought, No. Not
every
thing ends with death. But I was glaring at the apple in my left hand as if it, rather
     than some six-foot muskie, was death itself, and I chunked it, hard, at the hole in
     the fence. My throw fell short, though it did bounce once and rollclose, and I headed back onto