I

Chapter One

The rowboat was a hundred yards out and going smaller when Donna Hamilton stopped hearing it.

She had been listening to the oarlocks without listening the whole way, that dry double knock she could have picked out of a room full of noise, the way you know the sound of your own stairs in the dark. Then it was not there. She looked up from her book. The oars were still going, still rising and dipping and throwing off their little coins of light, and they were making no sound at all.

Nothing else was either. The kids at the camp across the water had been at their supper hour, loud the way they were loud every night of July, and they had not faded out. They had ended. Between one breath and the next, the way a radio ends when somebody pulls the cord. No loons. No motor south of the point. No slap of water under the dock, though she could see the little waves still arriving, could watch one reach the ladder and go around it and keep on going, silent, like something on a screen with the sound broken.

The breeze that had been visiting her all day stood still.

She got up out of the chair. Her heart was doing something she had no name for yet.

"Robert," she said.

Not a shout. A test. The word came out of her mouth and dropped straight down, like a stone into a well, and made no ripple anywhere.

Far out on the gold water, her husband shipped the oars and sat looking at the thing in the lake.

That morning, the seventeenth of July, had given Donna the kind of day her guests at the Woodstock Inn paid three hundred dollars a night to borrow. Blue sky planed smooth from one ridge to the other. Water so bright it hurt to look at. A breeze that came and went like it was checking on her. She had booked this day off in April, defended it twice against the summer schedule, and now that it had arrived she intended to do absolutely nothing with it.

She carried her iced tea down to the dock a little after ten, the glass already sweating through the ring of her fingers, and settled into the low wooden chair Robert had never gotten around to sanding. Seventeen years on this water. The house behind her was small and needed paint on the north side, and it was theirs, the only home they had, lived in year round while the camps around the reservoir sat dark ten months out of twelve. In January the lake cracked and boomed under the ice like something turning over in its sleep. In July it did this. It lay there and glittered and let the loons have their say.

A pair of them were working the far shore now, near the summer camp, where the shrieks and splashes of other people's children carried across the water in bright little scraps. Donna listened a moment longer than she meant to. Then she picked up her book.

It was called The Pickled Egg, and she had bought it three nights ago the way she bought most things lately, flat on the couch with her thumb doing the shopping. The title had made her laugh out loud, and Robert had looked up from the Red Sox and asked what in the world kind of book was called The Pickled Egg, and she'd read him the description: an old woman everyone calls the Pickled Egg, and nobody, apparently including the author, was going to say why. "So it's about nothing," Robert said, and she said probably, and clicked it into the cart anyway. It had arrived in a stiff little envelope, and today, finally, was the day it got read.

It turned out to be about a seventy year old widow who woke at half past six, thanked her house for settling, and dropped her nicest teacup on the kitchen floor before her tea was even drunk. The old woman stood over the pieces, the little violets face up on the linoleum, and smiled and said well, it was clearly time she swept and mopped. Donna laughed on her dock, alone, out loud. By page seven she had decided she liked this woman enormously. By page ten she had decided she wanted to be her someday, sitting in some kitchen at seventy, certain it was going to be a good day and almost always right.

She was eleven pages in, right where the old woman backed her sensible car over the neighbor's mailbox without ever once suspecting herself, when she saw the thing in the lake.

Later, and there would be so much later, whole months of it, she could not say what made her look up. The page had been holding her fine. But her eyes lifted, the way they do when someone comes quietly into a room, and there it was, out past the drop off where the water went from tea colored to almost black.

A dome. Dull white, gray in its shadows, like weathered plastic or old bone. It sat in the water the way a ball sits when you cut it clean in half, rounded side up, maybe eight feet across, rising four feet above the surface at its center. No markings. No seam. No glint of sun on it anywhere, which she noticed without knowing she noticed, because everything else on the lake that morning threw light like a mirror, and that thing sat in the middle of all the shine and gave nothing back.

Her first thought was that it had drifted loose from somewhere. A mooring float, a piece of dock foam, somebody's ruined trampoline. The lake produced such junk every spring. But it was July, and the thing wasn't drifting. She watched it a full minute to be sure. Boats had been through earlier, a pontoon dragging kids on a tube, and their wakes still moved against the shore in long slow folds. The dome didn't ride them. The water around it lay flat in a wide ring, flat as poured glass, while the rest of the lake breathed.

"Huh," she said, out loud, to nobody.

She went back to her book. She lost her place, found it, lost it again. The old woman diagnosed the fallen mailbox with great sympathy, worried for the mailman, and resolved to bake her neighbor oatmeal raisin cookies, the comforting kind, the kind that said I am not here to cause trouble, I am here because I care. It was the funniest thing Donna had read all year, and she noticed that her laugh came out wrong on the flat water, small and quick, like a sound she'd borrowed. Eleven became fourteen became sixteen, and her eyes kept climbing over the top edge of the paperback like a swimmer checking the horizon. Still there. Never moved.

Around noon a kingfisher came up the shoreline, rattling, and cut a wide circle over the dome the way birds do over anything new in their water. It did not land. It circled twice, and then it did something Donna had never seen a bird do. It quit rattling in the middle of the sound, wheeled once more in silence, and went back the way it had come, low and fast, as if it had remembered something urgent at home.

Nothing landed on the dome all day. She would think about that later too.

She made a sandwich at one and ate it on the dock with her feet in the water, and she caught herself sitting sideways in the chair, angled so the thing stayed at the edge of her vision. She called the town office at one thirty, got Marcie, and asked if anyone had said anything about something floating in Woodward.

"Floating like what?"

"Like a buoy. A big one. White."

"Nobody's said boo to me. Fish and Wildlife, maybe?" Marcie's voice went away and came back. "Bill says it's probably a weather balloon. Bill says they come down sometimes."

"It's not a balloon," Donna said, though she could not have told anyone how she knew. It sat too heavy for that. It sat like it had been set down.

By late afternoon she had given up pretending to read and was watching it openly, the book tented over her knee, when she heard the truck in the driveway, the big diesel cough she'd have known in her sleep. Ten after five. Robert came down the lawn still in his work grays with a beer in each hand and that walk he had at the end of a route, like a man wading out of deep water.

"Hey, Donna girl." He handed her a bottle, cold, the cap already off. He smelled like a hot road and the lemon soap from the depot. "How's the day of leisure? What's the egg done?"

"Backed over her neighbor's mailbox and blamed the mailbox." Donna held up the paperback like evidence. "Then she felt sorry for the mailman and baked the neighbor cookies. She has no idea it was her. She may never know it was her."

"So it's your mother."

"It's who I want to be at seventy, is what it is." She took a pull of the beer. "Speaking of. Your mother called the house. Sunday dinner, she says, and your father found a better way to do something, she wouldn't say what, so you'll be hearing about it."

"There is no part of that sentence that's new information." Robert dropped into the other chair, stretched his legs, sighed from somewhere down around his boots. "Dad's been right since 1962. You'd think he'd want a rest." He tipped his bottle toward the lake. "Camp kids are loud tonight."

"They're loud every night. You've gone deaf on your own schedule." She let a breath go by. Then she said, careful, like it was nothing, "You see that thing out there?"

He followed her arm. She watched his face do what hers must have done at ten that morning, the easy squint, the little settling of attention, then the frown as the thing refused to be any of the objects it should have been.

"The heck is that?"

"It's been there all day. It doesn't move. Wakes go around it." She heard how that sounded and said it anyway. "Birds won't land on it."

Robert stood up. He had his hand flat over his eyes, and he was quiet a long time for Robert. "Somebody's dropped something," he said at last, without much conviction. "Septic tank. Dairy tank. Something off a truck."

"Into the middle of the lake."

"Well." He scratched the back of his neck where the sunburn never quite healed all summer. "I'm gonna row out and take a look."

Donna had known he would say it before he said it. Seventeen years. He could no more leave a strange thing alone in his lake than he could drive past a mattress in the road. And still something in her, some small cold coin of feeling she would spend the rest of her life turning over, made her say, "Or we could call somebody. Fish and Wildlife. Let it be their septic tank."

"Call somebody. It's a hundred yards off my dock." He was already moving, beer parked on the arm of the chair, up the lawn toward the shed where the rowboat lived on its rack of two by sixes.

The boat came down the grass with its old music, the hull hissing on clover, Robert grunting on the downhill side. Twelve feet of lapped cedar, oarlocks gone green, the paint inside worn to bare wood in the two places where a man's boots go. His father had built it with him the summer Robert was ten, and if you knelt at the stern seat and looked underneath, you could still find CH and RH burned side by side into the wood with the tip of a coat hanger, the letters shaky where the ten year old had done his own initials. Curt Hamilton had straightened every line the boy drew that summer, and Robert had loved the boat without complication anyway, the way you can when you're ten.

"You want the camera," Donna called, meaning her phone, meaning I want you to have it, but he was laughing.

"It's a tank, Donna. I'll knock on it and come back."

The launch was the same as five hundred other launches. Stern in, one boot on the keel line, the shove, the wobble, the settling of his weight onto the middle thwart like a bear finding a stump. He backed the oars, spun her, and set out, and Donna stood on the dock with her book hanging from one hand, watching her husband row toward the thing that gave no light back.

"I'll be here," she called. "Have a nice row."

He lifted one oar an inch off the water, his salute.

A cardinal came out of the cedars at the edge of the yard and crossed the lawn in front of her, red in that committed way cardinals are red, and lit on the shed roof where it could see the water. The old woman in the book had a red bird too, one that sang three short notes and a long one and made her feel that something was meant for her. Donna watched this one a second, absurdly pleased, and took it for a good sign. Cardinals mate for life. She'd read that somewhere.

The evening had gone gold while they talked. The light came long and low out of the west, catching the tops of the little waves so the whole lake lay in stripes, and the rowboat moved through it dark and small, growing smaller. The kids at the camp were at their supper hour now, and their noise was thinning. A motor droned somewhere south and quit. Robert rowed the way he did everything, steady, unhurried, a man with all the time in the world.

Donna sat down. She made herself open the book, and the book, for the first time all day, refused to be funny. Because under all of it, the teacup and the mailbox and the cookies, the old woman was a widow. There was a Husband in that book, capital H, gone before page one, his enormous blue robe still hanging on the door where she could wear it and feel hugged while walking. All that choosing to find the good was a thing the old woman had built, plank by plank, over the hole he left. Donna read the same paragraph four times without taking in a word of it, some cold thought forming underneath that she refused to look at directly, and gave it up, and when she looked for the boat again she was surprised how far out it had gotten. Distance was strange on the water in that light. The dome did not seem nearer to him so much as he seemed to have left the shore's world and entered its world, the flat ring, the glass.

And it was around then that the lake went quiet.

She would say it that way for the rest of her life, in kitchens and cruisers and conference rooms, to faces that believed her a little less each time. The lake went quiet. Not quieter. Quiet. There was no version of the sentence that made anyone understand the difference, and she tried all of them, and every person she said it to wrote something down, and not one of them wrote down what she meant.

She was on her feet with his name still going out of her when the rowboat slid the last length and came to rest beside the dome, tiny and dark against that dull white curve. The book went down on the arm of the chair without her deciding to put it there.

He waited. That was the part she would hold onto later, the fact that he sat there a moment first and looked at it, hands on his knees, wife's orders, the boat and the thing sitting together inside the flat ring where nothing moved. As if the waiting were something she had given him.

Then he stood, easy, one hand out for balance, a man who had stood in that boat ten thousand times, and he took up an oar, and reached out its long blade, and touched the dome.

Donna blinked.

The lake was empty.

No splash. No ripple. No slow rolling over of a swamped hull, no white sleeve in the water, no oar bobbing up, no wave spreading out from the place to say something happened here. The dome was gone. The boat was gone. Robert was gone. The gold stripes of the evening lay across the water unbroken from shore to shore, and the flat ring was gone too, and the little waves ran through the place where her husband had been as if the place had never held anything at all. The lake had healed over like skin.

Sound came back. It came back all at once, mid note, the camp kids, a loon, water knocking under the dock, the world's radio plugged in again, and all that ordinary noise poured into her ears while she stood there with her mouth open, staring at one hundred yards of bright empty water.

The book slid off the arm of the chair and landed face up. In air that held no wind at all, its pages began to turn, one at a time, unhurried, as if something were reading it.

"ROBERT."

The scream tore out of her and rolled across the water and came back off the far ridge, twice, three times, thinner each time, and nothing answered it. The loons had their say. The children laughed at their supper. The lake glittered all the way down to the dark, and it was smooth, and it was ordinary, and it was empty.

Gone.