Love Stories in This Town. Amanda Eyre Ward

Bill. “I don’t know.” He motioned to one of the family photos placed around the cabin in tarnished frames. “There she is,” he said.

      I peered at the photograph. Aunt Renée wore a bemused expression and a bandanna. She had her hand on the shoulder of a little boy. “Who’s that?” I said. “I thought you said they didn’t have kids.”

      “That’s me,” said Bill.

      “Oh,” I said. The boy in the picture—Bill—was smiling timidly. I wondered if our baby would be shy.

      At Day’s General Store, we bought steaks and beer. I had gained eighteen pounds, but the doctor told me to eat even more. He wasn’t really worried, he said, but he was cautiously concerned. Jocelyn, who was in my company, hadn’t gained enough pregnancy weight, and her baby was born six weeks early. Little Allan was fine, but the story was scary enough to make me choke down a bunch of beef.

      As Bill manned the grill, I sat on the deck overlooking Messalonskee Lake. Snow Island, where the camp was located, was faintly visible across the water. A green boat puttered by: a man and his young daughter. “Any luck?” called my husband, and the girl held up a fish.

      “Goddamn,” said Bill. He was in his element here, a fact I tried to forget every morning as he set his jaw and stepped on the T, uncomfortable in a suit and tie. Bill didn’t like cities in general and Boston in specific. He loathed his job raising money for the Appalachian Trail Society. I had studied dance in Burlington, Vermont, for the first few years of our marriage. We had planned on a lifetime of dreaming big and working hard. When I actually made it, we were both ecstatic, but also stunned.

      “I can’t wait to take the boat out,” said Bill.

      “Is it the same boat?” I asked. “The one Renée fell out of?”

      “What?” said Bill. “Maybe, but I doubt it.”

      I hefted myself out of the chair—my balance was completely off now—and walked across the pine needles to take a peek. It was yellow, with a bucket in the stern.

      Bill finished grilling, and we ate at a wooden picnic table. We made up two beds on the screen porch and lay in one. Bill pressed his ear to my belly, trying—but failing—to hear a heartbeat. I pulled my maternity tank top up, feeling his scratchy cheek against my skin.

      For days, we napped and cooked and swam in the lake. I worked out regularly—I was expected back in the studio six weeks after the baby was born, so there was no time for a break. In my off-time, I constructed elaborate stories about dead Renée: a doomed affair, a clandestine meeting gone disastrously wrong. I pressed Bill for details, but he claimed to know nothing. Had he been there the night she drowned? He was asleep, he said. Was she depressed? How would he know, he said. He told me not to get worked up. Each evening, the man and his daughter floated past us, holding up lines of fish. Bill had some luck, and I even went with him a few times, though I joked I would sink the boat. I loved watching my husband paddle—the movement of his strong muscles.