So here she was slicing her way through the water, towards Mazie’s empty canoe.

Twenty-two years had already gone by since Milly’s last swim, twenty-three since her last boat ride. She’d been her own version of Ernst, then, testing independence and shrugging off her parents’ invitations to go out on the family lobster boat. And so she wasn’t with them when the February storm hit and the water became too much for their vessel and the cold seeped inside them and refused to give up its hold. She was sent to the farm where her mother had grown up, where two of her mother’s siblings still lived. Though only twenty miles up the coast, it smelled foreign. Looked too confined, contained. Penned in. Jones Pond sat just at the farm’s feet—a misnomer, really, more of a lake—but it wasn’t the ocean. Besides, Milly had come to fear water, its false placidity. Over the years she had learned to fear the outside, too. Preferred the farm’s fences and demarcated property lines. And so she’d married Dan, a man ten years her senior from just up the street. Another form of staying put, of treading water.

Milly’s energy was flagging, the initial adrenaline rush rinsed away. Cold collected along her edges. A familiar sensation. The temperature of loss. She hadn’t been this cold as a child, bundled up on the lobster boat, tucked under the protection of the pilothouse, watching her dad rescue the ropes, hand-over-hand, until the traps burst to the surface. She’d wait for the crouching, mottled lobsters inside, delight in how they looked so new and just-discovered. Her father’s gloved hands plucked them from the traps’ parlors, then surrendered the wooden cages back to the deep.

It was how she’d pull Mazie back to the surface.

Her stomach was cramping, but not from the exertion, the push to get to where the canoe waited, hunched. It was because she was bleeding. Again.

She’d discovered the blood just that morning. Had suspected it would be there when an ache in her stomach woke her before the sun did. She hadn’t been able to get up off of the toilet after slipping her underwear to her knees. After seeing the peony bursts of red that stained the soft blue fabric like rings of washed out tie-dye. Even now, after years of bleeding—month after month, her body refusing to swell—she still deflated at the sight of her own blood. Still cursed herself for the hope she’d been carrying. She’d been almost a week late, and she’d let the hope take shape, imagined it soft and squirming, with rose petal lips.

She’d been able to hear Uncle Hank and Aunt Bernice through the wall. Uncle Hank’s quiet murmur, his flexible, stretching vowels. They’d undone her even more. She hadn’t known a man’s tenderness in some time, Dan’s own soft edges having worn down to something splintered and sharp. Her uncle’s voice was soft enough to lean on. And, not for the first time, Milly wondered how it was that her uncle had never married, had never found someone he wanted to take or who wanted to take him.

Aunt Bernice’s drawl had been just outside too, her R’s so soft even Milly noticed their absence. Bernice was kind but cutting. Perhaps because her husband had died so young and she’d had to come back to the family farm. Perhaps because honesty was a side effect of farm life, where life and death all happened in a day. Perhaps because she thought speaking truths was a kind of favor. And she did only speak truths. Abrupt ones.

Milly was tired of truths. At least tired of her own.

She tried to imagine that she’d left her truths back at shore, next to her dress. That each stroke took her farther away from all of those pieces of herself that weren’t working.

She tried to focus on Mazie. Not on Dan, though he kept surfacing, breaking the water of her thoughts. Where was he right now? Off with the horses? Fixing the fence in the pasture? Bowing his head under a spray of cold water? Whatever he was doing, Milly knew he was not worrying about her. Not wondering if her monthlies had come. Not looking for her in the kitchen, the hen house, the garden. And even if he had looked for her in these places, he would merely scowl at her disappearance, grumble about taking breaks and how life on a farm was hard, how that just had to be expected. Worry wouldn’t bloom in his stomach or pester him until nightfall.

She and Dan met in the morning and at night now. The scrape of their coffee mugs against the vinyl tablecloth sounded an awful lot like the rustle of their sheets when they turned away from each other at night, the parting synchronized and somehow comfortable in its reciprocity. Dan, satisfied and empty, grunted into sleep. Milly pressed her legs together in prayer, willing it, this time, to work. Had there been a time when they’d faced each other, when she’d slept tucked into the curve of his body? She could no longer remember.

The afternoon was starting to wear out. She could tell each time she turned her head to the side. The way the angled light skipped off the water like a small, flat stone. Forcing her to close her eyes, as she’d done that morning after slamming her way through the kitchen door. She’d had to dip her head in deference to the sun’s brazen intensity. She’d forgotten about light in the curtained shadows of the bathroom, how life can be bathed in yellow and coaxed out of hiding by the sun’s simple act of unveiling.

Distraction on the farm often came in the form of gossip, and that’s all Milly had wanted then. Someone else’s story to worry over while she paced rows of carrots and potatoes, yanking weeds and watering by the clumsy weight of ten-gallon milk buckets. She’d find solace in whatever her aunt and uncle were talking about.