ladder in the shed. The snow at the base of the eaves was at least a yard deep; he pushed the base of the ladder into it, then stepped on the lowest exposed rung and ascended, crowbar in hand. Amy watched from the ground with the baby in her arms as he banged away at the ice that had backed up over the gutters. Chips flew everywhere, diamondlike bits that gleamed in the sun. He made his way across the front of the lodge, hammering off the ice in chunks, then took a shovel up to the roof to push off the snow.
“Be careful, Joe.”
The roof was steeply pitched, but in the soggy snow he found his footing. Whole areas of shingling had rotted away. Here and there someone had covered the worst of it with a tarp, but even this was nearly gone, frayed and ruined from exposure.
“It’s a mess up here,” he called down. “The whole thing will probably have to be reshingled.”
“Please, just leave it, Joe. You’ll break your neck up there.”
It was almost funny: after all that had happened, she was worried he’d fall off a roof. He climbed to the apex, where he dared to stand upright, one foot positioned on either side of the roof’s crest for balance. The frozen lake stretched away from him like a huge china platter, the sunlight blazing so brightly off its surface he could barely absorb it; on the far shore, dense woods marched up the hillsides and away, into ice and nothingness, the very top of the world. The cloudless sky was the color of cobalt, so blue he felt he could suck the whole thing into his lungs, breathe it in and out and become a part of it.
“Joe, for god’s sake. Get down from there.”
“It’s spectacular!” he cried out. “Unbelievable!”
“Never mind that, just get down.”
At last he inched down the roof on his backside and descended the ladder, breathless.
“We’ll need to call somebody to fix this. Or at least get the worst of the holes covered.” He was so energized he could barely contain the sensation. Of course he would try to reshingle the roof himself. The hammer in his fist, the tool belt at his waist weighed down with nails, the hours of intensely focused labor: each sensation was as precisely drawn in his mind as if it had already happened. Fixing a roof: how hard could it be?
“Amy, you’ve got to see the view,” he said.
“Are you crazy? I’m not going up there.”
He thought a moment. “Maybe there’s another way.” He took the baby from her arms. “Come on.”
He led her into the house and upstairs to the staff quarters, which they had not yet explored. Five tiny bedrooms tucked under the eaves: he selected a door on the north side, facing the lake, and opened it. The room was a disaster. Some small animal, a squirrel or chipmunk or even something the size of a raccoon, had gotten in, leaving tufts of fur and debris scattered everywhere. On the bureau sat an empty whiskey bottle, and beside it, an ashtray full of butts. The mattress was bare and stained. It was the same room where Joe had slept the summer before law school, when he had worked at the camp as a dishwasher.
“What a mess,” Amy said, and wrinkled her nose. A look of alarm crossed her face and she quickly took the baby from him and backed out the door. “Do you think it’s still in here?”
He pointed to the ceiling, where scraps of wood had been nailed over the hole that led, Joe knew, to a crawl space, and above it, the threadbare roof. “I doubt it. Whatever it was, it’s long gone.”
He stepped inside, ducking his head under the narrow eaves of sagging plaster, and over to the room’s only window. Outside was a broad overhang, like a terrace; he had passed countless summer nights there, sitting and smoking, alone or with other employees of the camp, young men like him on a lark between college and whatever came next, talking about girls or their plans for the future or even, as some believed, the coming war. He had even kissed a girl up there once, a waitress at the camp; for a languid hour they had listened to the loons and kissed one another under the stars, like a scene in a movie, but she had a boyfriend in town, and that was as far as things had