to her father snoring, and Layton finally putting out the fire, and the unzipping of his tent, and the rustle of his going to bed. She kept her hands between her thighs for warmth and the feeling there was sharp and aching, but she didn’t know what to do about it except lie awake, breathing, until it went away.
WHEN SHE WOKE UP, Layton was out in the river again, walking downstream and casting at the banks. It was the brightest day yet, and a mayfly hatch hovered over the water, the current dimpled with the open mouths of rising trout. Her father poured the last of the hot water into the oatmeal in her cup, and she ate standing. In her shadow on the ground, she could see her hair, three days uncombed, sticking out on one side. She smoothed it down with her hand.
On the long flat stretch to the takeout, Sam rowed for a while. Her father pointed out a kingfisher in the brush along the banks, an osprey nest perched on the top of a tall tree. When she got the boat stuck on a rock, her father didn’t say anything, but took the oars backward and pried it off. Layton and Harry stayed well ahead. It got hot, and she slipped off the raft and dropped under, feeling the cold current in her hair and clothes.
Layton didn’t look at her at the takeout. They deflated the rafts and packed up the truck with the drained-energy feeling of a trip being over, and she changed into dry shorts in the trees. Her father drove and Harry had the other window, so she was squished with Layton in the middle, his left leg pressed against her right.
They dropped her uncle and Layton at the put-in with Harry’s truck, and drove home in silence. Sam tried to keep her eyes open, but fell asleep. At the house, they unpacked the truck and hosed out the coolers, and when she gathered up her book and her river shorts, the hollow-point fell out of the pocket onto the grass.
Her father picked up the bullet, rolled it in his hand, held it between his fingers. It was copper-cased, splayed out in a blossom of dull lead where the tip had been.
“Where’d you find this?” he asked.
“I shot it.” She waited for the next question.
He said nothing, but held out the slug to her, and she took it.
He picked up one of the dry-boxes and carried it into the shed. For a while she listened to him unpacking, putting pots where they belonged, not noisily or angrily, just putting them away. Then she went into the house and filled out the final form for the scholarship to boarding school, and in the morning she put it in the mail.
She said nothing at first, and life went on as usual: she finished The Thorn Birds and saw her friends and ate dinners with her father. They talked about the weather and the cases he’d heard, and then after a week she told him that she’d accepted the scholarship.
He frowned at the table. “Oh,” he said. “Good. That’s great.”
She wanted to ask why he had left her by the campfire, but instead she said, “Orientation is the last week of August. I should get a ticket.”
“Sure,” he said. “Right.” He looked straight at her, and his eyebrows knit together. “I’ll miss you here.”
She felt a flood of warmth for him, an overwhelming feeling that it was a mistake to go away. He hadn’t meant to leave her there. He hadn’t known what would happen. He definitely hadn’t meant for it to happen. Again she wanted to ask, to make sure, but instead she took her dishes to the sink, and the moment was over.
A FEW DAYS BEFORE she went away, there was a legal brief on the kitchen counter, with the names of her uncle’s other plaintiffs but without Layton’s. When she asked about it, her father said Layton had left for a job in Reno, and had taken himself off the case. He’d decided his symptoms weren’t so bad and it wasn’t worth it. He got little rashes under his eyes and he couldn’t drink—so what? He’d needed to stop drinking anyway, he said. There wasn’t anything keeping him in Montana, and it was too much of a hassle to stay involved from Reno.
Her father drove her to the airport, and carried her bag right up to the gate before saying, for the first time, that he didn’t really want her to go. She cried all the way down the jetway, and the man in the seat beside her gave her a packet of Kleenex to stop her nose from running, and patted her shoulder when they landed in Salt Lake.
Someone from the airline told her where to change planes, and from Boston she took the bus she’d been told to take, though it seemed impossible that it could be the right one. She was red-eyed and nervous, but had decided that she didn’t know anything, and the idea of going away was to learn.
Her dorm was in a cluster of stately brick buildings surrounded by trees, set apart from the little town, and the walls of her room had been painted over and over, for generations. She read The Portrait of a Lady there, and also The Beach House and Candy. Fifteen was old at boarding school. Most of the kids’ parents didn’t want them at home, and, knowing that, the kids seemed to know everything. A girl down the hall had done Ecstasy with her boyfriend back in Maryland, and had sex for three hours straight. Sam’s roommate, Gabriela—whose last roommate got the Latin teacher fired—was surprised and impressed that Sam was a virgin.
There was a phone in the hall, and when Sam’s friends from home asked for her, Gabriela said, “They sound so western.” One of them, Kelley Timmens, had just sent Sam a letter about a boy they knew: “We didn’t have sex,” she wrote, “but imagine as sick as you can imagine—without having sex.”
Gabriela had laughed, reading the letter, and asked, “What does she mean?” Sam called home every week or two, and her father reported on people who’d asked about her, and she told him what she was doing in school. When she told him she was going to New York with Gabriela for Thanksgiving, he sounded startled. He said, “I’d get you a ticket home,” though they hadn’t talked about it before.
“I know,” she said. “But it’s two days of flying, for two days there.” That had been Gabriela’s argument.
“Where will you stay?”
“With her mom.”
There was a silence on the line, and she imagined the quiet empty house around him.
“What happened to Harry’s chemical case?” she asked.
“It got dismissed,” her father said. “They needed that guy. What was his name? On the river.”
“Layton,” she said.
“Layton,” he said. “You can’t blame him. He wasn’t really that sick.”
“And the other people?”
“They can’t work,” her father said. “They have these awful headaches, all the time, and they can’t go out.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a tough case,” he said.
He asked a few questions about school, and then they said goodbye and Sam hung up, thinking about the woman who couldn’t drive because the chemicals in everything made her forget which light meant stop and which go. She lay back on her bed under Gabriela’s Charlie Parker poster and stretched her leg up to her face so her nose touched her knee, which was something Gabriela did. She brought the leg down and stretched the other one up.
She thought about the parties there were supposed to be in New York, and the boy from Exeter Gabriela was thinking about sleeping with, and the dime bag Gabriela was trying to get. She thought about her father eating dinner alone on the dark winter nights, with no one to talk to. And her friends—Kelley Timmens and the others—laughing in the hallway of her old high school, with its rows of lockers and the fluorescent lights reflected in the shiny floors. She thought about the pink cleaning stuff the janitors used, the smell of it in the mornings when she got to school, and the shampoo dispensers on the walls of the girls’ gym showers that said “Montana Broom and Brush.” She thought about her father nodding to her, after saying goodnight by the campfire, and about the aching feeling later as she lay in her sleeping bag, and how she hadn’t understood what it meant. She smelled Gabriela’s honey soap on the back of her wrist, and