The red door opened again and Grant returned to the Chevy and got the dog halfway into his arms and the boy came around to collect the remaining half, and when they were free of the truck Grant said to put her down but hold her up, and the dog looked around in confusion until he told her to do her business, at which signal and without the appearance of another thought she lowered her haunches and released a long hissing stream into the snow.

They carried her into the house and placed her on the bed of blankets Maria had prepared on the tiled entrance, and Maria squatted to stroke her head. Then she stood again and all three looked down at the dog. They were still standing there when the girl arrived from somewhere in the house, sock-footed and carrying a large backpack in one hand and a cell phone in the other. With the barest of glances at the two men she dropped the pack and sat on her heels before the bandaged dog and began to pet her.

“What happened to her?”

The dog sniffed at the girl’s bare knee. Licked it.

“We’re not sure,” Grant said. “She might’ve got herself kicked.”

“By what?” She looked up—she looked from Grant to the boy, and back. She seemed about to say something else but didn’t say it. She turned to the dog again, stroking her ears.

“Poor Lola,” said the girl, “poor Lo.”

The boy looked at his father, then at the girl again. “You know this dog?”

She glanced up, her brow furrowed, as though there must be something wrong with him. “Of course I know her.”

“She goes over there some Saturdays,” Maria explained. “To help with those horses.”

They were all silent but the girl, who went on soothing the dog with her hands and her voice.

Grant said he’d come by later with food for the dog and to take her out, and Maria handed him the key and he slipped it into his pocket. He said he’d find someone who could take the dog in for a longer time but she told him not to worry about that, that they would see how this went, and the girl said with finality, “We’ll take care of her.”

Maria went to the kitchen to find a water bowl, and the girl stood and with a tug at her skirt turned and put her dark eyes on the boy. “I’m Carmen.”

“I know.” He said his name and the girl said, “I know. I just didn’t think you knew mine.”

“You were in my history class,” he said.

“Briefly,” she said. “A brief history.”

At their feet the dog showed her old fangs in a great yawn.

The girl checked her phone, then turned and opened a closet door and withdrew a red woolen jacket and got into it. She dipped her white-socked feet into suede boots of a plush, primitive style, and bent once more to rub the dog’s ears. She hoisted the pack from the floor and called, “I’m outta here, Mom,” and Maria called back, “Okay, tesoro. Be careful on the snow, I love you.”

“Love you too.”

She gave Grant and the boy her smile, and then she stepped around the dog and opened the red door and for a bright instant as the morning sun found her she blazed in a red pirouette and was gone.

WHEN HE AWOKE AGAIN the room was sun-swamped and hot and he lay staring at the large yellow blister directly overhead. Empty smooth eggshell of plaster shaped by a leakage long since moved on to some other course or else hunted down and stopped at its source. He listened for the sound again, the dog or the ghost of the dog restored to her foxhole beneath the floorboards. But when the sound came again it came distinctly through the pine door. Through the two pine doors shut to each other across the narrow hall.

He got up and opened one door, waited, and carefully opened the other.

This room on the western side would not see daylight until the afternoon and his father lay on the bed in the chill gloom, facing him. The blanket drawn over his ribs but his shoulder and arm exposed, bare and white, the arm hooked over a pillow as a child holds a stuffed animal. As a man holds a wife. When he spoke he seemed to be speaking to the boy, his voice as plain and clear as if he were asking the time. But his eyes, or the eye that was visible, was shut. The face slack.

“What?” said the boy.

“Where is she,” said the sleeping man.

“Where’s who?” He took a step forward and the cold floor cracked and he stood still.

“Where is she,” said his father, and he looked more closely. The curvature of eyelid trembling and rolling with the restless ball it held.

He drew the blanket up over the bare shoulder.

“She’s fine,” he said. “She’s safe.”

He got into his jeans and T-shirt and stepped onto the porch barefooted and stood where there was no snow and lit the cigarette and sucked in the smoke and leaned against the post and blew the smoke out. Almost at once, across the way, an answering white cloud sallied from the porch of the house. He brought his cigarette to his lips and squinted. The old man would sit there in his rocker in the mornings with his hands clamped around a smoking mug. But the old man did not have brown hair hooked behind his ears and he did not leave the house T-shirted and barefooted even on the warmest of days and he did not smoke.

The two smokers regarded each other across the way. They took another drag each, exhaled, and as the smoke tattered away in the cold the young man on the far porch raised his cigarette in a mannered way—princely, pontifical—

and lowered it again.

The boy raised his in answer.

42

Spring comes, even there. Or perhaps false spring.

Snowmelt dripping from the shedroof and ringing faintly on the floors of tiny wells in the snow, frail airholes to the earth. Note upon hollow note. Th e shingled roof, bared to the sun, flexes and cracks like something coming awake. When she puts her nose to the peephole in the wood over the window, she can smell the heated sap of the pines beyond the glass and she aches with the feeling of spring after the long Wisconsin winter. Th e cinder track rising through the snow like a hot, primordial ring. She listens for the sound of water running, of snowmelt finding its way in thin cascadings, meeting, gaining mass and speed, churning for the far valleys, for the great rivers to the sea. But which sea?

He is staying away longer. Days, sometimes. Th e food runs out. Th e wood runs out. She hoards her water. In the dull little mirror is the shape of her skull. No one is there.

SHE KEEPS AT HER work, her diminished body pitched against the length of chain, milling halfway around and then back again, listening to what the links are telling her. On the surface of the steel plate, spanning the two thick welds of the ringbolt, lays a tiny field of dull glitter, winking and changing visibly every few passes with the addition of some new and sizable granule of steel or rust. Th e largest of them fall at the moment when the mated crooks of the bottom link and the ringbolt grind and fight and give way in a sudden twangy jump that makes her heart jump too with the momentary loss of resistance and the feeling, as on that long ago swing set, that the link has broken and she is about to go sailing, free, into space. Again and again, that deception.

After one such twang so profound she must take a hop for balance, she stands in dismay when she finds the chain still taut, still unbroken at the ringbolt. Something breaks within her then and she begins to haul wildly at the chain, and it’s her own noise, she understands later, the torrent of curses upon the tormented chain, that causes her to miss the sound of footsteps outside in the crusted snow.

Th e first she hears of him is his voice.

Hello? he calls, freezing her.