Justine was overcome with the impulse to clap loudly so that one of them, the leader perhaps, would roll his eyes wildly and run off as fast as he could without realizing that he was enclosed on all sides by the fence; panic would make him forget everything but the attempt to flee, and all the others would follow him, out of their minds with fear, and they would thunder back and forth in the mud, completely losing all sense of direction.

Of course she didn’t do it.

Left of the ice rink, a path of electric lights began. She followed it just part way. She cut through the waterlogged fields below the apartment houses, passed the parking lot at the Maltesholm baths, and noticed that one of the windows on a trailer still hadn’t been fixed. She kept going toward the water and then ran for a while along the edge.

Four ducks waddled silently away. Although it was January, the temperatures were above freezing and it had been raining without a break for over a week, but this afternoon, the sky was bleak and white.

She drew in air through her nostrils.

Heaps of leaves lay along the slope, and the decay process appeared to have stopped. They were brown and slimy, not at all like leather.

Just like over there.

No sound, no birds, no raindrops, just the muffled thudding of her rhythmic steps as she forced her way up the slope, then echoing as she came to the boardwalk, where she almost fell. The water’s dampness had made a treacherous cover that made the Avia soles slip.

No, don’t stop, no weakness now; her lungs burned, a caustic, silent wheeze. She drove herself now, as if she were him. Nathan.

You were supposed to be proud of me, to love me.