Lake

That last night above the town, with the tower blinking its patient light below and Eli's breathing gone bad behind her and everything she had crossed the world for lying a morning away and maybe empty, she did a thing she almost never let herself do, which was to take out a good memory and hold it in the open, all the way out, and let it be as bright as it wanted to be.

It was the lake. There had been a lake, high in these same mountains or mountains like them, a long green day of a lake, and all of them had been there, every one, the whole of the family that the world had since taken apart and scattered into the ground and the sky. She must have been eight. Henry was the baby, a fat serious baby her mother wore on her front in a sling. And they had all gone up together, the old truck loaded past sense, Papa driving and Grandma Kate riding shotgun arguing with him about the road, and her mother and father in the back seat with Laura between them and the baby, the two of them, Annie and Daniel, doing the thing they did that Laura had thought was normal and later understood was rare, which was to be delighted by each other, still, after everything, to keep up a low running joke that only the two of them were in on.