But Caitlyn’s pale uncertain face had closed some, chastened, unsure again, alone.

      Now, out on the raft, Anabella’s caramel-colored hair fell across her face, the skin on the backs of her thighs glowing like honeyed satin. She seemed to be asleep, though it was hard to tell.

      And it was that, the sight of all that healthy skin shiny in the afternoon light, that made Margot remember sunscreen. Because of course her own sunbathing days were long gone. Adam was already stepping onto the dock, and she could tell the moment he saw the almost-naked girl because he suddenly became very interested in examining the rope that tied the canoe to the cleats, and in that moment she saw again his high school self, awkward and antisocial, in those days hunched over insects and knots and boats and tensile strengths. She let her eyes linger on the curve of his spine, the frame that was boyish again, thinner but bent, then turned and headed up to fetch the sunscreen. The bunkhouse was just a stone’s throw from the dock, the whole place having been built before codes.

      Later she tried to remember how long she was actually inside. Two minutes, she felt, tops. She tried to remember if she’d stopped by the toilet, but really she knew she had not. But by the time she stepped outside everything had changed. The girl was still on the raft but she’d opened her legs—a lot—almost 90 degrees, her butt tilted up, her lower back arched, her bikini-clad crotch re-oriented exactly in Adam’s direction.

      The word that came into Margot’s mind was “generational.” That and the fact that all the poses that would have been sexy thirty years ago apparently were no longer eye-catching enough. The other word that came into her head was “Pornhub.” And maybe she should have named the thing right then and there. (Hey, Anabella, we don’t need to see quite so much of you, love.) But Adam was conspicuously watching the other end of the lake, as if waiting for a bus. And Margot barely knew the girl. And what good would it do to embarrass her, to embarrass them all? Instead she held up the sunscreen and spoke over-loudly.       “Got it!”

      Adam turned and gave her a panicked look—as in, why in hell did you leave me out here by myself?—eyes wide, eyebrows and lashes darker than before the chemo. And by the time Margot glanced at the raft again, the girl had closed her legs, her body back to its original position.

      Margot and Adam swam, taking pains to keep the dock between themselves and Anabella. Afterward they pulled their bodies up onto the other raft and lay side by side, the water pooling beneath them, Margot’s back pressed against the too-prominent bones of Adam’s chest, his arms wrapped around her, the girl behind them.

§

      Anabella would tell you it’s not her fault. Vale, it’s the 21st century, and she has the right to dress the way that makes her feel good. Makes her feel strong. It’s not her fault if the uncle, Adam, chose to look. And he did look. Of course he did, and he will look again, she knows. He won’t be able to help himself because he is married to a gordita, thick and loud.

      But mira, the uncle is pasty and oh-so-skinny with wiry gray hairs on his old-man chest, the old-man shorts hanging below his knees like a dress. He barely counts.

      Her own uncle is young and fat. The counselor at social services uses the word predator. She says it has to do with holding power over others. The predator waits until he’s alone with the other person. Then he crosses the line, this is the expression the counselor uses. The predator does a little small thing he can deny later if he has to. It’s called plausible deniability. He brushes your breast when he hugs you hello. An accident. Or he lets his leg touch your leg under the table. Whoops. Or he just looks at you too hungrily, because, vale, what is looking? The counselor says when her uncle or any other predator crosses the line, Anabella is supposed to call them on it. Something loud and clear. Look them in the eye. Don’t do that. The counselor says that if you can, you should name it. Don’t touch my breasts. “Because, Anna, if you don’t say anything they will have even more power over you. And they will keep doing it. Because they know you’re keeping their secret. Because now it’s your secret too.”

       But Anabella doesn’t want to think about naming anything. When she does, she starts to disappear. It is worse in this moment ahorrita when everyone is gone. Her roommate Hannah has wrapped herself alone in the hammock and drifted away to sleep. The other uncles are busy. The tall one with the madras shirt talked this morning for an hour about the list of all the important things he has to do. The one with the floppy hat now is on his phone in the barn. The two hot cousins are somewhere doing something with machines. The little girl cousins that exclaim at her clothes and squeal (“squeal?”) when she helps them make up their faces, they are all still at the day camp. And the handsome oldest cousin—she can’t believe it—he is engaged to an ecologista with a face as rough as the moon who will not meet her eye and pulls him always to the opposite end of the long dinner table. Her case worker is “reassigned.” Her counselor is on vacation in Italy, her grandfather so worried about his banks that he refuses to leave Caracas. Her father has been gone since she was a kid and hasn’t seen her in, pues, seven years, and her mother, her mother never sees her at all. Right now, the only ones are Uncle Adam with his old man pants and Aunt Margot with her broken red capilares. And already they have turned their backs, their faces looking always into their own secret bougie world, their very important jobs, their pious mimado untouchable egoista two-person North-American life.

      They could never love a person like her.

      She disappears a little bit more.

      It wasn’t always this way. When she was a little girl, her grandfather used to give her stacks of bright colored papers, smooth like glass to touch. That first time Abuelo showed her how to peel the top page, paisley pink, folding it into a triangle, then folding it seventeen more times, pressing his gnarled fingers against the creases, Anabella copying each fold on her own purple-striped page until on the eighteenth fold the flat papers had transformed themselves, asi: two elegant three-dimensional cranes. De pronto. She and her grandfather made two more, and two more after that, Anabella memorizing the eighteen steps, her small young hands quicker and more precise than her abuelito’s. By the end of the rainy season there were hundreds of bright-colored cranes hanging from doorways and lamps and sconces, so many that her grandfather started calling her grullita, little crane. Sometimes even now he says, “Every time I find one, I am seeing you, grullita. Anabella and her one hundred colors.”

      Sometimes she imagines her soul that way too, a papery fluttery thing, all her time and energy spent trying to prevent it from sinking, to keep it en alto. “Aloft” is the word in English. Or alight. Or maybe it is afloat.

      Behind her, on the open lake, a motorboat powers past. Out of habit she attends to the engine, the voices. She knows well the sound of a car or a boat slowing behind her, the conversational pause that happens when they see her, the men allowing themselves a long look, the women assessing her and finding no fault. But on this particular occasion the voices do not stop, do not change, and the engine does not slow, and in seconds the waves are hammering against the aluminum dock.

      The raft rocks, and Anabella feels her lightest airiest thing fold over itself, collapse, and go flat. The vinyl is rough against her stomach, and the water soaks through her skin, obliterating her. It fills her muscles and her organs. It fills her heart. The fear comes back primitivo, an airless oblivion that opens its watery mouth, its long tongue searching out that delicate crane. The bird goes sodden, and the void curls itself around the formless wad, ingests it, pulls it down al abismo and swallows it whole.

§

      That evening, in the lamplit bunkhouse, Margot and Adam will argue. She will have to hiss so as not to be overheard by the rest of the family. “That display was explicitly aimed at you, you know. There was nobody else out there.”

      Adam’s mouth will hang open the way it does when he’s surprised, confusion playing across his features. It will be seconds before he asks, “What for? There’s no way that girl cares about attracting my attention.” Then he will do the thing he instinctively does whenever someone has angered his wife: defend. Diffuse.

       He says, “I’m sure it was unintentional.” He says, “She’s a kid. I bet she didn’t even know I was there.”

      Margot almost snorts. “Of course she knew you were there! She waited until the two of you were alone. Then she crossed the line.”

      He appears to consider the idea, then shakes his head. His hair has come back the color of stainless steel. “That’s not logical. “Why would a girl like that make a play for someone my age? Especially in light of her past.”

      “Maybe it’s because of her past.”

      Adam pats her thigh. There’s tenderness in that touch, but also rebuke.           “Honey, I’m surprised you’re being so harsh. Especially to someone in her position.”

      And Margot is suddenly furious, furious and amazed at her own fury. How she’s become the villain in the story. And worse. She sees it now: how she’s already done the same exact thing to Caitlyn. Left her hanging. In her mind, the girl’s face is cautious, testing Margot out (was she seeing what Caitlyn was seeing?) but later her expression is chastised, abandoned, in retreat.

Why had Margot pretended she didn’t know what Caitlyn was talking about? Why had she refused to even name it? Tomorrow she must find a way to make it right.

      Adam searches her face, as if the cause for her anger might be some visible thing he can find there. Then in a very gentle voice he delivers the final blow. “Honey, I think you need to consider the possibility that you might just be a tiny bit jealous.”

      Margot closes her mouth, rolls over, and gives him her back. And she will. She will. Consider the possibility. She will consider it long and hard in the days and weeks to come, several times during the year of Adam’s remission, and at least once later, at the funeral, at which Anabella teeters like a crane in a pair of stalk-thin heels, her face hidden in an actual fishnet veil. At which Caitlyn holds her hand and does not will not let it go.