At midnight, rising to go to the washroom, Claire passed the guest room, saw light through the door, and, without thinking, knocked. Jocelyn sat up in bed surrounded by sheets of paper, one pencil stuck in her hair, another in her hand.
“Don't you ever stop working?”
“I couldn't sleep.” She waved for Claire to come in.
Claire sat down at the foot of the bed, on a folded quilt her mother had made. She traced the line of a square with her thumb. The pieces came from blankets, rags, and old clothes that her mother had stitched together on rainy summer days, having collected the scraps through the year in a box in the kitchen. Something to pass the time, she called it.
“What are you working on?”
“Paleontology,” Jocelyn said. She put down her pencil and stretched, her neck's tendons visible and strong. When she reached up, the sleeves of her T-shirt fell back, showing the very smooth skin at the underside of her arms. “It's a new theory of dinosaur life. Dinosaurs are very big sellers.”
“I don't know how you do it,” Claire said. “Understand all these things.”
Jocelyn rubbed her eye. “Well,” she said, and smiled, “they're still dinosaurs, right? They still disappeared.”
“I guess that's true.”
“And anyway, I don't have to completely understand it.”
“You don't?”
“Not at all. I just get it as clear as I can, then I move on to the next book.”
Claire looked at the manuscript on Jocelyn's lap. Neat penciled notations lined the margins. Suddenly she was horribly conscious of having interrupted her work. She felt herself flush. “I'm sorry for intruding,” she said, getting up and walking to the door.
Jocelyn gathered up the pages and moved them aside. “No,” she said. “You didn't.”
She practically missed the bus. In the morning she came out of her room with her bags packed, but at the last moment Claire couldn't find her. She went out the back door and saw Jocelyn crouched in a clearing behind the house, staring at a trillium, its single white flower nodding in the grass like some reminder of snow.
“Jocelyn, we really should leave.”
Jocelyn stood and turned around. The slope of her shoulders was outlined in gold by the sun as it arrowed through the pine branches. Her blue eyes looked jeweled. In the sharpness of the light Claire could see the fine down of hair on her cheek. Silence swooned between them.
“I'm sorry to go,” Jocelyn said.
Carson's book appeared the following spring. There was no preface, no page of acknowledgments. The book launched itself into being from the first page, his voice transposed into type: I begin by stating that we live in a non-equilibrial universe, and that the state of disorder we know as entropy is itself an order of the universe that we have not, up to now, been able to recognize. Claire could hear him saying it, picture his palms spread wide. In the bookstore she flipped through the pages, ran the tips of her fingers over the glossy jacket. This new model of entropy could change the way we look at the organization of the universe, the way we think about its future and ours. She turned to the back flap and touched the black-and-white picture of his face, her fingertip leaving a print behind.
Then she put the book back on the shelf, tapped it into place, and walked quickly to the front of the store, where, because, Jocelyn was waiting for her.
Edgewater
When Luz was a baby she used to be afraid of the water, but she wasn't anymore, or said she wasn't. In winter, the water in Lake St. Louis was still and pale, ice-crusted, as gray as the surface of the moon, though in summer it took on a deeper, more alive tinge that she liked better. What she didn't like, even now that she wasn't scared anymore, was how the water slapping against the rocks at the shore turned them green with algae — a slippery, scary mold, akin to pictures of plaque on teeth — and how slippery her hand felt, too, when she dipped it in. Luz had an idea of what water should be like — she'd seen a picture of an ocean once, an endless, clean, turquoise one, with a white beach and pink sunset — and Lake St. Louis was a disappointment to her because of the many ways it didn't conform to this idea.
But she was getting used to it this summer, owing to all the time she spent down by the water with Marie-Claire. Although she wasn't with Marie-Claire so much as within shouting distance of her. While Luz played down by the rocks at the water's edge, Marie-Claire wandered around the park looking for secluded places to smoke a joint. Luz knew about this. She'd seen a joint at home, inside a tin box her father kept in the bottom drawer of his nightstand, and she knew what it smelled like when he smoked it, even in the middle of the night with the windows open. One thing she didn't know was whether her father knew about Marie-Claire. She hoped he didn't, because she was liking spending the summer out here, just thinking and looking out over the lake and pretending that the dim blue land opposite wasn't the south shore of Montreal but China or Mexico or France. She liked to picture the people over there, foreigners wearing strange hats and riding bicycles through foreign streets, never knowing they were being watched. This was a lot better than spending the summer at summer school or at the YMCA or in her backyard playing “imagination games” with her dolls, which was what her last babysitter, Maureen, used to make her do. Maureen would always say, “Let's see you use your imagination,” and then she would stand back, nodding, waiting for Luz's imagination to make an appearance. “Be creative,” she'd urge. Maureen was old, older than Luz's father, and had gone back to school to get her degree in early-childhood education. While Luz played she could feel Maureen's eyes fixed on her, memorizing her every move.
Marie-Claire was calmer; she had her own imagination games to play. When Luz looked back over the grass, Marie-Claire was sitting on a rock, a small black figure (Marie-Claire wore black every day) resting her chin on her knees. They waved at each other and went back to their own business. It was early Wednesday afternoon and not many other people were around. Beyond Marie-Claire, cars went by on Lakeshore Drive, taking the curves too fast. A mom with two babies in a stroller crossed the street toward the lake. Seagulls circled and squawked. Luz turned around and concentrated on watching a couple of boats on the water, sails dipping lazy and graceful and white. She believed that to a certain, impossible-to-prove extent her watching kept the boats and the people in them safe from overturning, and she took the responsibility seriously. She didn't want the people to land in the slippery, gunky water or to have to touch any of the green slime that hovered on the rocks under the surface. You could see how polluted the water was down at the shore: by Luz's feet, scattered over the rocks, were Coke cans and beer bottles and other pieces of disintegrating trash she tried to identify by poking them with a stick. She saw a shoe. A worn-out bicycle tire. She saw Popsicle wrappers and plastic bags and lots of cigarette butts.
Later, when she thought about what she saw next, she would picture it as something small, something that could have come off one of her dolls, and she would think about putting it in her pocket and taking it home and keeping it for herself forever, secret and safe. But in reality it was much too big to fit in her pocket. It was bigger than Luz's whole arm, and it was a weird light brown, almost pink, and it was batting against the rocks like an animal trying to escape a cage: a plastic leg.
On the next block over from the park was the Edgewater Bar & Grill. Inside, there was only one window from which you could actually see the water, and only one table at that window. This was Kelly's table, and had been for ten years. She first started coming to the Edgewater when she was underage, heavily made up, treading carefully in high heels, flirting with older men before retreating to the safety of her friends at the table. By the time she was eighteen she knew the jukebox, such as it was, by heart. She celebrated her birthdays here and was tearfully consoled here after breakups, threw up in the bathroom a few times, tried cocaine in the bathroom once and then twice, came here after classes and instead of them. When she started university she also started waitressing at the Edge a few nights a week to make extra money. She told Manny, the owner, that she spent so much time there, she might as well get paid for it. Then she stopped going to school, but she didn't stop working.