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“I can’t imagine not loving him,” Patricia put her head against my shoulder. “Where the hell is he?”

“It was different, it was different before.”

“Before?”

“Before Fiona.”

“Oh,” Patricia said.

“He was different.”

She sat back on her heels now, asking, “How was he different?”

“He was more, it was a little more about other people, you know. He wasn’t so—”

“Insular?”

“That’s a good word.” I laughed a little bit. “I was always so afraid of him, I was always feeling he was right about to beat
me up.”

“Did he ever—”

“Oh, no,” I told Patricia, and this was the truth. “He never hit me or Eric or, or Fiona. Never. I just always thought he
was about to.” There were no stars in the sky at all. It was completely black, covered in clouds. “I just thought it was everything
he could do not to kill me.”

“He loves you,” she said. “Did he ever tell you that?”

I remembered that he had always signed my birthday cards that way. But I could never remember him saying it directly. “He
must have,” I said. “I just don’t—”

“It’s hard for him, you know,” Patricia said. She leaned forward, pushing a stick at the fire. “Probably the less he says
something, the more he means it, you know what I mean?”

“I do. I know what you mean,” I said. And I knew exactly what she meant, and I went ahead and let myself believe it, too.

Can you love someone so much that their memories are yours? Sitting by the fire, I looked at my hands and I thought
of Eric’s hands, so clean, and I remembered Fiona’s hands, how small they were, and delicate. And this was not my memory.
It was my father’s. Can love lay claim like that? Can it blur life at the edges?

It was a single moment, actually, pacing around the beach like the little prince, that I understood what had become of him.
It was probably an irrational feeling, and one that later, looking back, justified the events that followed, the way people
say they have premonitions of things but only after the fact. Our greatest theory was that he had been forced to land somewhere
in the ocean between here and the coast, and that, floating out there, he had radioed for help, and soon there would be someone
coming to rescue us. But then it became more and more clear to me what really had happened because I saw the blue of the sky
for a brief, flickering second through my father’s eyes. I saw the sky from beneath the water, looking up, bubbles rising.

“The coast guard checks for places like this routinely,” I told Patricia. “They fly over, making sure everything’s okay.”

“I’ve never seen them do that.”

“That’s what they do,” I reassured her. “I’ve read about it.”

The feeling of being stranded, really alone on a desert island, was bizarrely liberating.

My father had committed suicide, I knew this now.

He was gone, and I could say anything. I could
think
anything.

“You’re not like him,” Patricia said a few nights later. She began by kissing my neck, her face all tears and her hands all
trembling. She pulled my sweater and T-shirt over my head.

Then she sat up and pulled hers off, too.

I couldn’t speak.

She pressed herself against me. “You’re not crazy,” she said. “You aren’t crazy at all.” Patricia’s skin was against my skin,
this woman my father had been with, had loved. She was between our ages, though, and she was letting it sink in, I believe,
the realization that the man she had given up her life for, perhaps foolishly, was never coming back. She made love to me
that night, every now and then saying, “You’re nothing like him, nothing like him at all.”

What was I supposed to do? How would I push her away? Her life was over, she believed, and wanted to end it by doing something,
by participating in something that the living do. I didn’t think it was wrong. I still don’t.

And the hands I touched her with were his hands.

And I looked at her with his eyes.

And my body was his body.

Patricia and I spoke the next morning as though it had never happened, of course. And the entire next day, as well as the
day after, and the following day when we were rescued by the coast guard, the day we returned to the cottage and saw the sleeping
bags resting in the carport, and the day a couple of weeks later when I went back to New York, it was never spoken of. Like
so many things that have happened to me, this event disappeared like a frozen moment, a photograph in memory, time receding
away like a wave that never comes back.

Maybe it’s time, and not the woods, that lashes out, steals you.

She was patient, on top of me, rocking back and forth, guiding my hands—my father’s hands—to her hips. We moved like this
for more than an hour, it seemed, just tensing and relaxing, her hips like those of a woman riding out, I guess, the last
night of her life, the last time she would be in contact with the flesh of someone she had loved unconditionally
for so long—
his
flesh. Imagine how she waited for him all those years, the not knowing, the knowing only a little bit. She knew about his
children, about me and Eric. She knew about his tragedies, about Fiona, and could only wait for his plane to land in Atlanta
when she lived there, working in the airport lounge, and for him to come see her, in the years before and just after Fiona
disappeared.

All that waiting.

And I whispered to her with his voice.

Only to be left waiting at the very end. Left waiting forever. I would never blame a person for any action they had taken
on the night that kind of realization occurred. Besides, I felt, I think, the same thing my father felt for her, or would
have felt, had he known. Patricia was beautiful and womanly in ways my mother could never be. There was some bending, a melting
quality inside her, a softness.

And I saw her with his eyes.

It was a long day’s boat ride back to the mainland, and then we were taken to my father’s—to Patricia’s—cottage by van. I
was to return home to New York immediately after the trip. But we decided, then, to have the memorial service for my father
in Florida among his friends, all those
flyboys
and fishermen he liked to drink and watch sports with.

And, of course, so Patricia could be there, too.

If my father ever loved my mother—and I think he did, I
know
he did once—all that love disappeared with Fiona. It is the same love, not divided, but repeated whole again, that a man
feels for his wife and his daughter. And when he had to give up his love for Fiona, he had to give up my mother, too. Naturally,
Hannah had half-blamed him for Fiona’s disappearance. I didn’t know at the time that he had been a suspect in the case. I
didn’t know anything, to tell the truth, but one simple thing.

I had been off the medication now for seven days, and I was sane.

In the cottage the next morning Patricia asked if I wanted her to call my mother. “No,” I said. “I’ll do it.” I would wait
half the day, actually, and call Eric first and tell him that I wanted to tell her, that it should be me she heard it from.

“Why you?” Eric wanted to know.

“I was with him.” I was in the kitchen, half-expecting my father to walk in behind me at any moment and grab a beer from the
refrigerator. “I saw him last. He said his last words to me.” This was special. This was something Eric didn’t have with our
father.

“What were they?”

“He said if you wanted a good laugh, to think of him out there, flying with no pants.”

Eric didn’t respond for a moment, and then he said, “What?”

“He was kidding around.” I twisted the telephone cord in my fingers. Dad never kidded around with Eric. “And that’s what he
said.” Only with me.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“He didn’t plan it,” I said. “He must have made some last-minute decision.”

“What are you saying?” Eric had something weird and sarcastic in his voice. “Are you saying there was some kind of Bermuda
Triangle bullshit, that there was some mysterious—”

“Eric,” I said, “I’m not saying anything like that. I’m saying it was some kind of—”

“Pilot,” he said, “why would he do this?”

“He didn’t—”

“Are you taking your medication?”

“Yes,” I lied again.

“Good.” Then Eric said, “He was afraid of people finding out.”

“Yes,” I said, “about you.”

“I can’t talk about this now.” My brother hung up.

Our mother was in her chair by the window when the nurse Eric had hired—her name was Thalia—handed her the telephone. I said,
“Mom, Dad’s—”

“I know,” she said. “Fiona told me.”

“Mom,” I said again, “it’s Pilot.”

“I know,” she said, laughing. “I know who you are, you’re my own boy, aren’t you? Wouldn’t I know my—”

“He, he disappeared in his plane,” I said. “He was flying back to get some things, and he, he never made it to the mainland.
They haven’t found him.”

Was I crying?

“Your father loves to fly,” she said.

“Are you understanding this, Mom?”

“Fiona’s out in the yard,” she said. “I can hear her. Can you hear her, Pilot? She’s playing with the girls next door. They’re
about the same age.” Through the kitchen window the light was changing, clouds rushing in front of the sun. I touched my face.

Tears.

“… How is she?” I asked, giving in. “How is Fiona?”

“She comes and she goes,” Hannah said, tearful now. I could hear her voice breaking as if under the weight of something. “Sometimes
I see her, sometimes she, she whispers to me or comes into the room and puts her head on my lap, and looks up at me…”

“Mom,” I said. And then softly, “
Hannah
.”

“Sometimes I know she isn’t there…”

“Mom,” I said.

“… isn’t really there.”

“Dad’s missing.”

“I understand. Your father’s missing, I understand.”

“They’ve been searching for days,” I said, “and they think, they think that his plane went down.” I was standing in my father’s
cottage, in Patricia’s beige-and-white kitchen, tracing my finger across the strawberry-shaped magnets on the refrigerator
door. And Hannah was sobbing. My mother, our mother, Eric’s and Fiona’s and mine, she was crying. “I’m so sorry.”