“She’s too young.” Mother sent Lis out of harm’s way and the girls went off to play until lunch was ready.

While Portia sat in a cove of grass and picked flowers, Lis noticed a motion from the state park nearby and stepped closer to explore. A boy of about eighteen stood with a girl several years younger. She was backed against a tree and he was clutching the bark on either side of her shoulders. He would ease forward and kiss her then back away quickly as she wrinkled her nose in mock disgust. He reached suddenly for her chest. Lis was alarmed, thinking that a wasp or bee had landed on her and he was trying to pick it off. She felt an urge to call out to him to leave it alone. They sting when they’re scared, she nearly shouted, astonished that a high-school boy wouldn’t know this plain fact of nature.

It wasn’t of course a bee he was after but the button of her shirt. He undid it and slipped his fingers inside. The girl crinkled her face again and slapped his knuckles. He withdrew his fingers reluctantly, laughed then kissed her again. The hand crawled back inside and this time she didn’t stop him. Their tongues met outside their mouths and they kissed hard.

An eerie radiation of warmth consumed Lis. She couldn’t tell from which portion of her body it arose. Maybe her knees. Drawing some vague conclusions about the spectacle of the two lovers, Lis cautiously lifted her own hand to her blouse, beneath which was her swimsuit. She undid buttons, mimicking the young man, and eased her fingers under her suit as if his hand directed hers. She probed, with no discernible results at first. Then as she fumbled the heat seemed to rise from her legs and center somewhere in her belly.

“Lisbonne!” her father called harshly.

Gasping, she jumped.

“Lisbonne, what are you doing? I told you not to wander far!” He was nearby though apparently he hadn’t seen her crime-if a crime it was. Her heart quivering madly, she began to cry and dropped to her knees. “Looking for Indian bones,” she called in a shaking voice.

“How horrible,” her mother shouted. “Stop that this minute! Come wash your hands.”

“You should respect the remains of the dead, young lady! When you’re dead and laid out, how’d you like someone to molest your grave?”

The girls returned to the picnic blanket, washed and sat down to the meal, while Father talked about the paste that astronauts would have to eat on extended space flights. He tried, without success, to explain to Portia what zero gravity meant. Lis was unable to get down more than a few bites of anything. When they finished she hurried back to the cleft in the bushes on the pretense of looking for a dropped comb. The couple was no longer there.

Then came the part of the day that Lis had been dreading. Father took her down to the dark water. He removed his shirt and slacks, beneath which he wore his burgundy trunks. He had a dense body-not strong but with fat distributed evenly, in approximation of muscles.

Her shirt came off, then her culottes, revealing the plain red swimsuit. A thin woman now, Lis was a thinner girl then, but she pulled in her stomach vehemently-not in shame at a belly but hoping, futilely, that it might inflate her chest.

They strode into the cold lake. A championship swimmer in college, Andrew L’Auberget was, he’d told his daughter on a number of occasions, troubled by her fear of the water. He never missed an opportunity to get her into a pool or river or ocean. “It’s dangerous, yes. It’s far too easy to drown. That’s why you must learn to swim, and swim like a fish.”

Nervously she flexed her knees, feeling the gracious bed of mud beneath her arched toes. Father made a stern show of these lessons. When he noticed that she was resisting putting her head under water he ordered her to take a breath and pushed her face beneath the waves. Panic finally sent her scrambling upright. As she sputtered and shivered he laughed and told her, “See, that wasn’t so bad. Again, for ten seconds. I can do it for two minutes. Two whole minutes without a breath!”

“No, I don’t want to!”

“You take that tone, you’ll go under for twenty seconds.”

She practiced her strokes, beating the water with splayed fingers, which he forced closed into paddles. He supported her and held her buoyant while she swam in place.

“Calm down, girl! Water won’t kill you. Calm down!”

She rested on his palm, trying to coordinate her legs and arms. Just as she struck a rhythm that approximated a breaststroke, a wave rolled in and lifted her from his hand. For a moment she was actually swimming on her own. Then the crest passed and lowered her once more. But when she drifted back down, she’d moved forward a foot or so and she came to rest with her groin on his fingers. For a tense moment neither father nor daughter moved and-compelled by an urge she understood no better today than then-Lis pressed her legs together, capturing his hand in that spot.

And then she smiled.

Lisbonne L’Auberget looked at her father and gave him a slight smile-not one of seduction or power or pride. Least of all physical pleasure. No, just a smile that sprang spontaneously to her cold, blue lips.

And it was for this transgression, Lis later speculated, rather than the fluke contact of bodies, that she was so ruthlessly punished. The next thing she recalled was being dragged from the water, her arm almost popping from its socket, and being flung to the hard ground, where she lay on her belly, as her father’s hand-the same hand that had moments before cradled the most enigmatic part of her body-now rose and fell viciously upon another.

“Don’t you ever!” he roared, unwilling to give a name to the offense. “Don’t you ever! Don’t you ever!” The raw words kept time with the loud slap of his palm upon her wet buttocks. She felt little sting from the powerful blows-her skin was numb from the cold-but the greater pain was in her soul anyway. She cried of course and she cried hardest when she saw her mother start toward her then hesitate. The woman refused to look then turned away, leading her sister from the shore. Portia looked back once with an expression of cold curiosity. They disappeared toward the house.

Nearly thirty years ago. Lis remembered those few minutes perfectly. This very spot. Except for the level of the water and the height of the trees, the place was unchanged. Even the darkness of night was somehow reminiscent of that June. For though the picnic had been at lunchtime, she had no memory of sunlight; she recalled the whole beach being shrouded, as murky as the water in which her father had dunked her.

Tonight, Lis finally managed to push the memory aside and walked forward slowly over the gray sand of the beach to the dam. The lake was already pouring over a low portion of it-a cracked corner on the side nearest the house. Some of this spillage made its way into the runoff and the creek beyond but much of it was gathering in the culvert that led to the house. She leapt over this flood and walked to the wheel, set into the middle of the dam.

It was a piece of iron two feet in diameter, its spokes in graceful curves like wisteria vines, the foundry name prominently forged in some Gothic typeface. The wheel operated a gate, two by three feet, now closed, over which flowed the water that gushed into the spillway. Opening it all the way would presumably lower the lake by several feet.

Lis took the wheel in both hands and tried to twist it. Rose breeders develop good muscles-from twenty-five-pound bags of loam and manure if not the plants themselves-and Lis strained hard. But the whole mechanism was frozen solid with rust.

She found a rock and pounded on the shaft dully, chipping paint and sending a few sparks flying like miniature meteorites. She tried the wheel again without success then drew back and hammered the mechanism once more, hard. But the rock dipped into the spume of water and was ripped from her hand. It bent back her fingers as it catapulted deep into the culvert. She cried out in pain.