Chapter 1
Sunday Pancakes
He woke at ten past five, the way he had woken for twenty-eight years, without an alarm and without moving.
For a few seconds Dean Whitlock lay on his back in the gray half-light with his eyes open and his breathing unchanged, taking the room one piece at a time. The ceiling fan, turning slowly. The window, open two inches, and the wet green smell of the lake coming up the hill through the screen. A floorboard in the hall that cooled and ticked. The long warm weight of his wife's shoulder against his arm. Downstairs, nothing at all.
Then, because nothing at all was the right answer, he let his body remember where it was.
Alder Falls. Birchwood Lane. A house with a crooked porch and a roof that needed doing before October. A bed that was too soft, bought by a woman who had said, you can't sleep on a plank for the rest of your life, Dean, and had been right about that, as she was right about most things. Early August. A Sunday.
He turned his head. Naomi was asleep on her side with one hand folded under her cheek like a child's, her dark hair coming out of its braid in long loose strands across the pillow. She snored very slightly. She would have denied it under oath. He watched her for a while, which was a thing he did most mornings and had never mentioned, and then he eased out from under the sheet an inch at a time, found his jeans on the chair without looking, and went out into the hall.
Ivy's door was open. It was always open, a hand's width, because she said the dark was fine but the shut dark was different. He stopped in the gap and looked in. The nightlight shaped like a crescent moon threw a pale blue shine across the bed, the heap of stuffed animals, the pile of library books on the floor, the yellow rain boots standing sentry by the wardrobe. His daughter lay on her stomach with one leg out of the blanket and her mouth slightly open and her notebook still clutched in her fist. She'd been writing in it when she fell asleep. A pencil had rolled onto the pillow.
Eleven years old, he thought. Twelve on Saturday.
It still caught him in the throat, that number. He would not have said why. He had never expected to see a child of his own reach eleven, let alone sleep in a house with her boots on. In certain rooms, a long time ago, nobody had expected him to see forty.
He went down the stairs on the outer edges of the treads, where they didn't creak, and put the coffee on.
The kitchen faced east. At that hour, at that time of year, it filled with a thin pink light that came in off the water and lay along the counters like a hand, and he never turned on the overhead lamp until he had to. He stood at the window with his arms folded and watched the day arrive.
From the top of the hill, you could see most of the town. The steeple of St. Brendan's. The grain elevator by the old rail spur. The long gray roofs of the boat sheds along the shore, and the marina behind them, where his own shed stood at the end of the middle dock under a hand-painted sign that said WHITLOCK MARINE REPAIR — OUTBOARDS, INBOARDS, & ADVICE. Beyond the sheds the lake lay perfectly flat, a sheet of dull silver with a skin of mist lifting off it in slow threads, and on the far shore the dark ragged line of the pines. Lake Ketterly was eleven miles long and four wide. In the nine years he had lived on it he had never once seen it the same color twice.
He had picked it because it was ugly, in a way. Nobody came here. Nobody put it on a calendar. It had one stoplight, two churches, a diner, a school that ran from kindergarten to eighth grade, and a hospice on the hill that was the biggest employer in the county. People waved from their trucks. People said morning to strangers. People had known one another's grandmothers. It was the kind of place that took a full year to decide whether you were a person or a tourist, and then, very slowly, without any announcement, decided you were a person.
He had been grateful for that, in the beginning, with an intensity that frightened him. He still was.
The coffee machine gurgled. He took down three mugs and then put one back, because Ivy was not allowed coffee, and then took it down again because Ivy would want her own mug anyway, the one with the cracked blue handle. He filled hers with milk and a spoonful of coffee, the way she liked it on Sundays, a secret from her mother that was not a secret. Then he stood with his hip against the counter and his own mug in his hand and let himself do the thing he always did, the thing he had done every morning for nine years, so quietly and so automatically that he no longer thought of it as a decision.
He counted the doors.
Front. Back. The cellar hatch under the pantry. The window over the sink, large enough for a man. The window over the table, not large enough. The mudroom. The porch. Seven. He had counted them the first morning, in the first week, with a rented van still full of boxes in the drive and Naomi on her knees in the front room unrolling a rug and laughing at nothing. He had never told her. He had told himself it was habit, the way some men tapped wood.
Seven, said the voice in his head. It was the same voice, dry and level and unhurried, that had once told him how many steps there were between a car and a kitchen door. Two you can see from the table. One you can't.
He drank his coffee.
"Is it pancakes?"
She stood in the doorway in her yellow boots and a long cotton nightgown printed with narwhals, with her hair standing straight up on one side and her notebook under her arm. She had her mother's wide serious mouth and his own gray eyes, and a way of standing, feet planted a little apart, as if she had been told the floor might tilt. She regarded the kitchen as a customs officer regards a bag.
"It's six o'clock," Damen said.
"Is it pancakes, though."
"Who wears boots to bed?"
"They're not to bed. They're after bed." She came in and climbed onto the stool at the counter, tucking one bare knee under her. "I got up in the night to look at the lake and my feet were cold. It's an emergency boots situation. It's practically a rule."
"Whose rule?"
"Yours."
He opened his mouth and shut it. She had him there. Years ago, in the wet October of her fourth year, he had told her never to go outside in the dark with bare feet. She had gone on to generalize it to the whole of the house.
"Pancakes," he said, and got out the pan.
She watched him make them. She always did, chin in her hands, elbows on the counter, with the focus of a girl at a magic show, and he found that he performed a little for her, though he would have denied it: the flip, the tilt, the pause before the batter hit the butter and spat. He put in the chocolate chips by hand. Ivy had never trusted a pancake with chocolate chips scattered at random. She liked them in a pattern. On Sundays it was her initials.
"Five things," she said.
He did not turn round. "It's early."
"Five things, Dad. You said we'd do it every day. You said that's what makes it work."
"Did I?"
"You always say it."
"All right." He slid the first pancake onto a plate, and she gave a tiny nod, like a surgeon accepting an instrument. "You start."
She screwed up her face and looked at the kitchen. This was the game. He had begun it when she was three, on a walk, one afternoon when she had been frightened of a barking dog. Don't look at the dog, he had said. Look at everything else. Tell me five things you notice. She had stood on the gravel road with her hand in his and her chin trembling and said, a red mailbox, a yellow leaf, a bird, a crack in the road, your boot. By the fifth thing she had stopped shaking. Since then it had grown into a ritual with rules. It had to be five. It had to be true. It couldn't be the same as yesterday. It had to be something you saw, not something you knew.
"One," said Ivy. "The sun's on the toaster. Two, there's a wet ring on the table, from Mom's glass. Three, the third drawer isn't shut. Four..." She paused, her eyes sliding along the counter to the window. "Four, Mr. Pruitt's truck is at the end of the street and he's not in it."
His hand stopped on the spatula.
It was only for a moment. It was less than a moment. The pan hissed. He kept his face exactly as it had been, and said, in the same voice, "Which truck?"
"The big white one with the ladder. The one that comes and goes. He parks it at the end where it's flat." She tilted her head. "He's not in it. He's usually in it with his thermos, listening to the radio. Today he's not."
"Maybe he's at the diner."
"Maybe." She considered it. She was an honest child. "That's not a thing I noticed, though. That's a thing I guess."
"You're right. Keep going."
"Five," said Ivy, with dignity, "is that you made the pancake wrong. It's not an I. It's a V. You made me a V."
"V is for Ivy."
"I is for Ivy."
"V is for very good."
She considered this too, and decided to allow it. He put the plate in front of her. She took her fork in her fist and attacked the middle of the V, and he stood with his back to the sink and the spatula in his hand and looked past her head, through the window, down the long slope of Birchwood Lane.
There was a white pickup at the bottom of the street, parked against the curb, with a ladder rack. Pruitt did gutters. He parked there every weekday morning because it was flat and shaded and an easy walk to the Hendersons' and the Okafors', where he did the second-floor windows. It was Sunday. There was no one in the cab. No thermos on the dash. No reason on earth he should be anywhere near it.
It was nothing. A man could leave his truck. A man could have a bad hip and a short walk and a free Sunday. Damen knew it perfectly well, and he felt his pulse settle slowly back, as it had settled ten thousand times, like a dog being told down. Then, while he was watching, the front door of the Hendersons' opened, forty yards away, and a short, round, white-haired man in coveralls came out onto the step with a plate of something under foil and a thermos under his arm, laughing at something said behind him.
Pruitt. Delivering. Of course.
Eight, said the voice, quite coldly. You didn't count the road.
"Dad?" said Ivy.
"Mm?"
"You're holding it upside down."
He looked down. The spatula was in his fist like a knife, the blade turned in toward his wrist.
He opened his hand and laid it on the counter and smiled at her, an easy, ordinary, tired father's smile that he had spent nine years learning to do properly. "Too early for me," he said. "Eat your V."
Naomi came down at half past six in his old gray sweatshirt and a pair of men's socks, with her braid over one shoulder and the lines of the pillow still printed on her cheek. She stopped on the bottom stair and looked at the two of them, the girl on the stool, the man at the stove, the plates, the milk, the cracked blue mug, with the look of a woman coming in out of rain.
"I didn't hear anyone get up," she said.
"That's the idea," said Damen.
"It's a crime, you know. A man shouldn't be able to be that quiet. It makes the rest of us feel like elephants." She crossed the kitchen, put both hands on his face, kissed him lightly on the mouth, and took the coffee out of his hand. "Thank you. Don't talk to me. Pancakes," she added to Ivy, "are the only reason I allow this family to wake before nine."
"It's a V," said Ivy, with her mouth full.
"It's a beautiful V."
"I think it's for very good."
"I think it's for vexing," said Naomi, "but we'll go with yours."
She sat at the table and drew one knee up and drank her coffee with her eyes closed, and he turned back to the pan, and for some minutes the kitchen filled with the ordinary music of a family with a lazy day ahead: the scrape of forks, the radio turned low, the argument, conducted in murmurs, over whether the lake was cold enough yet to count as a swim. He listened to it. He let it go through him. He had a vague sense, which he had never spoken, that if he held very still, the way you hold still for a bird, it might not notice him and fly away.
At ten to seven the stairs gave their small complaint, and Sofi came down.
She came in a Millbrook University sweatshirt three sizes too big, with her dark hair in a knot and her round glasses crooked and the inhaler swinging against her chest on its lanyard. She was eighteen, and she walked like a person who has been told she has somewhere to be and has not yet agreed to it. She stopped in the kitchen doorway and surveyed the room with the cool, disenchanted gaze of the newly adult.
"It's a V again," she said.
"It's very good," said Ivy.
"It's a pancake with a typo." She slid onto the stool beside her sister, stole a bite from her plate without asking, and received a fork in the wrist without comment. "I've got the seven-to-two at the Moose. Josie says if I'm late again she'll feed me to the pie case." She looked at her father. She had his gray eyes behind round lenses, and a way of tilting her head that was entirely her mother's. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The door thing. You've looked at the back door four times since I sat down."
"I was looking at the weather."
"The weather's in the window, Dad."
"Sofia," said Naomi, mildly, from the table.
"I'm only saying. He does it in church." She took a swallow of someone's juice. Then, more quietly, with the elaborate casualness of a girl about to raise a subject she has rehearsed in the shower: "Orientation's the twenty-third. At Millbrook. They need the form signed by Friday. I put it on the fridge."
The spatula paused.
"We'll talk about it," said Damen.
"You said that in March."
"I know."
"And in May."
"After Ivy's party." He turned. "Properly. I promise."
She studied him. Sofi was a quick, anxious, observant girl whose lungs betrayed her and whose mind did not, and she looked at her father with the quiet attention that he had taught her, and which, he now saw, she had learned far better than he had meant. "Why does it matter so much to you?" she said. "Port Merrin. It's forty minutes from campus. It's where I was born. What's there?"
"Nothing," said Damen.
"Then why—"
"Sofi," said Naomi, and her voice did not rise, and everything in the room moved a half inch. "Eat your breakfast."
Sofi ate. She scowled. After a while she said, gruffly, with her mouth full, "It's a good V," and Ivy nodded with her whole body, and the moment passed. He turned back to the pan. But in the window over the sink, as he lifted the spatula, he caught the faint reflection of his elder daughter's face: dark, thoughtful, unconvinced, with the flicker of a question in it that he had been dreading for nine years.
She remembers, he thought.
She remembers more than she says.
Naomi Whitlock was forty-three. She was a hospice nurse at Alder Falls Care, a long low brick building on the hill that smelled of lavender and floor polish, where she spent her days sitting beside people who were dying and her evenings telling stories about it that somehow made him laugh. She was five foot four, olive-skinned, unhurried, with a dry quick wit and a way of looking at a person as if she were counting their breaths. She had been a nurse for twenty years. She had held the hands of nearly six hundred people in their last hours, and she told him once, in the dark, that the thing she had learned from all of them was that almost nobody was afraid of death. They were afraid of dying alone, and of being forgotten, and of leaving something unsaid.
What about you? he had asked her.
I'm afraid of dishes, she had said. Nobody ever tells you about the dishes.
He had met her twenty-one years ago, in the spring of 2004, when he was twenty-nine and she was twenty-two and neither of them had yet done anything that could not be undone. He had come to Port Merrin as a marine engineer on a freighter, and taken a room in an old house on Mill Street from a ninety-year-old landlord named Arthur Peck. Arthur had died that April, in a bed at the Infirmary, with a student nurse holding his hand who had refused to leave when the visiting hour ended. Damen had come at ten at night with a bag of Arthur's slippers. She had been sitting in the dark. You must be the tenant, she had said. He talked about you. He said you were the quietest man he'd ever met, and that he'd never been so sure that someone was hiding something. And then, to his astonishment, she had laughed. Don't look like that. He said it fondly.
They were married in 2005. That autumn the shipping line went under, with a baby on the way and rent to pay, and a man with a gift for being steady in a crisis was approached on the quay by a very polite person with a very good offer. He had said yes. He had been thirty years old. For eleven years afterward he had told his wife that he was a marine engineer on contract to a freight outfit, that the jobs took him away for weeks, that the money was good. She had loved him, and waited, and never seen a gun, and never once been sure that she knew who he was.
He had told her at last on the porch of this house, in the rain, on the first night, with a rented van in the drive and boxes in the hall and two children asleep upstairs.
"I did some work," he had said. "For some people. It wasn't good work. I've stopped. I'm not going to tell you what it was, and if you decide you can't live with that I'll understand, and I'll go."
She had looked at him for a long time. Then she had said, Is it going to come to my door?
No, he had said. I made sure of it.
It was the one lie he had told her that he'd believed.
"What are we doing today?" she said now, over the rim of the mug.
"Nothing," said Ivy at once, with shining eyes. "Nothing at all."
"We have to buy balloons," said Naomi.
"No we don't."
"We have to buy balloons, and candles, and something to put the candles in, and I have to see about the cake. Mrs. Okafor said she'd bake it, but you have to ask twice, because she's very proud and she'll pretend it's a favor." She looked across at him. "And your father needs to fix the gutter."
"My father is going to the lake," said Ivy, "and so are you."
"Which is the part you'd like to do first?" said Damen.
Ivy regarded the ceiling. "The lake," she said, "and then also the cake, and then also nothing."
"Written down," said Naomi. "Signed and witnessed."
He laughed, and it came out easily, and he saw her notice it and quietly look away, as she did whenever he laughed properly, as though it were a shy animal she was afraid of startling. He turned the last pancake. And as he did, with the light very bright and the radio burbling, and the pan hissing in his hand, an unbidden picture came into his head, whole and clear: a closet door, a thread of yellow light beneath it, and a small voice counting.
He put the pancake on a plate. The picture went away.
It did that, sometimes. It had done it for nine years.
By eight they were out on the porch in the first heat of the day, with the dishes done and the screen door banging, and Ivy was explaining to a ladybug on the rail the precise rules of the lake.
He sat on the top step with his elbows on his knees and his bad forearm in the sun. It was a long scar, shiny and puckered, a hand-width wide, running from wrist to elbow on the inside of the left arm. A fire, a long time ago, in a place with no windows. Ivy called it his map. She had traced it with a finger when she was small and sat on his lap. This is a river, she would say. This is a town. He had never corrected her.
There was another, under the right collarbone, small and round and white. That one she hadn't discovered yet.
"Dad?"
"Yes."
"Are you going to put on a hat?"
"Do I need one?"
"You always get red. Mom says you've got Irish skin and nobody knows how."
"I'm told I got it from a postman."
"Sofi says it's from a Viking."
"Sofi," said Naomi from the doorway, "has never been right about anything before noon," and handed him a battered straw hat, and sat down beside him on the step. She put her head briefly on his shoulder. She smelled of coffee and lavender soap. For a minute neither of them spoke. A mower started somewhere down the hill. A screen door slapped. From the lake, a long way off, there came the flat dull note of a boat engine turning over.
"I was thinking," said Naomi, "about going away. After the party. A week at the cabin at Pike's Landing, the one Gerry offered. Just us. Ivy could fish, and you could not fix anything."
"I'd like that."
"Would you?"
"I would."
"You say that like a man agreeing to dental work."
"I say it like a man who's wondering where the catch is."
She turned her head and looked at him. It was a clear dark look, measuring and not unkind. "There's never a catch with you," she said. "That's what worries me."
He didn't answer. After a while she took her head off his shoulder and stood and went in to find sunscreen, and he sat in the heat with the straw hat in his hand and watched his daughter explain to the ladybug why it was not allowed to leave.
At the foot of the street, the white truck sat in the sun. There was no one near it. A little farther down, at the corner, where Birchwood met the county road, a vehicle he had not noticed before was parked in the shade of the Hendersons' maple. It was a gray van with a dent in the sliding door and no lettering. It had been there when he came out. He had seen it before he had seen anything else, as he always did, and he had put it away in the drawer at the back of his mind, with the others, to look at later.
He looked at it now.
There was somebody in it, he thought. Not moving. A pale oval behind the windshield, too far to make out, which seemed to be turned in the direction of the house.
Then a cloud crossed the sun, and the glass went flat and dark, and the oval was gone. The engine started. The van pulled away from the curb and went off up the county road at a perfectly ordinary speed, signaling at the corner like a good citizen, and disappeared.
It's nothing, said the dry voice. It's a van.
Seven doors, said the other voice, the quieter one, that he had not heard in years. Count them again.
"Dad!" cried Ivy. "She's going! Quick, she's going!"
He stood. He put on the hat. And he walked down the steps and across the dry August grass toward his daughter, smiling, with the sun on his neck and his hands loose at his sides, as a man does who has nothing at all to fear.