Michael and I lay on our stomachs at the end of the dock, arms in the water up to our elbows. It was a game we played, to see who could stay still the longest while the minnows tickled us. Michael usually won.
In early April, Principal Mathieu instituted a half-day schedule for as long as the heat lasted. He’d already canceled Easter recess and, ominously, we thought, hinted at adding Saturday classes as a way to recoup lost hours of instruction. Our school building, he wrote in the letter sent home to parents and published several days later in the village newspaper, was not constructed with such weather in mind. A few paragraphs later, he signed his name in smudged ink, and we knew then, as we’d speculated before around kitchen tables, at the village store, in homerooms and classrooms, that our lives had slid into something new.
The perceptive among us, adult and child, understood that more than stifling classrooms, the principal and his faculty and staff sought to relieve themselves of a hundred or so cranky and inattentive pupils. One could hardly blame them. In that endless heat wave, we’d spoiled into a rowdy bunch. So the duty was split: the school would have us for those torpid mornings, the hours before we roused to our fullest, and our families would deal with us at our peak agitation. The arrangement clearly benefited some parties more than others, but in the end, even the aggrieved got on with it.
“Well,” our mother had said, opening and closing the matter in a single syllable.
Michael and I spent many of those newly free afternoons on the dock with the minnows. We went back to them, too, in the evenings while we waited for our father to return from his work or his travels, those hunger-pained hours before dinner. We’d wait for him, even if that meant cold meals well after dark.
“Here, fishy fishies,” Michael whispered.
“That’s cheating,” I said.
“Is not.”
“Is so.”
“It’s not like they can hear me.”
The point was that I could, and he knew that. Our game rewarded patience and silence, not coaxing and cajoling. I pulled my arms from the water.
“There,” I said. “Congratulations.”
I sat up and dried my arms on my shirt. Michael pouted.
“No need for that,” he said.
I blew a raspberry at him.
“No need for that, either,” he said.
Michael leaned back on the dock beside me, resting on his elbows, water pooling on the planks. I dropped a leg over the dock edge and, with my toes, traced circles in the water. The lake felt colder than it had been a minute before, higher too, like it had risen again in the time we’d spent arguing. A shiver rippled up from my toes, but I kept my leg where it was. I waited for the shiver to pass, and when it did, I waited for what came after it, which was something like, but also not like, comfort.
“What do you—” Michael started to say.
I didn’t hear anything else. Later I’d imagine I missed something vital, but in that moment, in that heat still new to us, I succumbed to late-afternoon drowsiness. I let myself float off on it. It was the first of many such moments that summer when I may have fallen asleep without realizing it, even after waking or, if not waking, then coming back to myself. The heat induced in us fugues from which we soon recovered, or believed we did. As we’d discover, some of these dozes were pleasant and others less so. That day on the dock was neither. It was a pause only, neither good nor bad but interstitial. I experienced it, as I’d later experience others, as not quite the record skipping so much as the skip itself, which does not know what came before it or will come after it, does not understand that it is the abrupt replacement of sound with silence and, in a moment more, the rough resumption of the music.
“This weather, Michael,” I said after however long, my tongue lolling against the backs of my teeth.
But Michael was gone, the pools where he’d been reclining evaporated.
“This weather,” I said, now directing the words at myself.
An annoyance by my left ear demanded an immediate scratching, conveying me fully back into the world.
When I finished, I rolled onto my side and came up again to sitting. The sun, lately a violent smear, had dripped lower toward the trees that ringed the western side of the lake. How much lower I couldn’t say, having not marked its position earlier, but of course time had passed, as it does. It was later, consequentially later, I was certain of that.
Two mink caught my eye. They dashed here and there on the rocks in a game of chase. The pursuer and the pursued changed roles as the chase changed direction, turned around on itself, back on itself. They ignored me. The braver of the two, the one that shot faster over the rocks and took corners sharper and surer, feinted to its left and then dove into a crevice and disappeared from sight. Its friend followed. Neither reemerged, and after a time I stopped watching for them.
I jutted my bottom lip and, with a halfhearted puff, blew my hair from my eyes. I felt no inclination to move, not yet, though I knew I would have to sooner than later. The world was closing in, was reassembling itself just over my shoulder. Like Michael earlier, I leaned back on my elbows—we did so much lounging that year—determined to ignore what in a few seconds or a few minutes would be impossible to overlook, to look past. A fish pipped the flat surface of the lake. Then another, farther away, did the same. Trees in the stands on either side of our house, between us and our neighbors, exhaled languid moans, leaned forward and backward, pushed by the wind now kicking up. They moaned, I thought, in their confusion, just as fish rose to bite at bugs that had yet to arrive, those bites pricking the surface in small circles that lazed outward in ring after ring. The mink and the trees and the fish: the world had sped up for them, too. And like us, there was nothing they could do to make sense of it.
I heard Michael and our father on the porch then, heard a neighbor’s car start, heard the scrape of still-bare branches against each other, heard myself rise to my feet, heard those feet scratch along the rocky path to our house.