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of the log chute for balance.

    THE NEXT MORNING , when I woke, my mother was sitting in her chair by the stove, rocking slowly, staring at the fingers of flame that showed through the gaps in the metal. I dressed slowly for church, waiting for her to pin back her hair, to put on her gray Sunday dress. But she stayed in the chair.
    After a little while she looked up at me. “Go on, then.”
    I thought about taking Communion, the wafer melting in my mouth like a chip of ice, the wine, diluted by Father Hugo, more water than blood. Then, instead of going to the church, I walked down to the river, the ice and snow screeching under my boots. In the sun, the winter felt like it had flown away, and I began to sweat during the short walk.
    I knelt down above them, waiting to see them move. I put my hand on the ice above my father’s fingers. I wondered if Marie had known how close my father’s hands had been to hers. I waited for something to happen, for my father to reach out and bridge the gap separating him from Marie, but neither of them moved. Finally, as I heard the first yells of the other children rushing down to the river after church, I rose and returned to the house.
    My mother had not moved from her chair by the stove. She kept shivering, even with the blankets wrapped around her, even with the surprising heat of the day, so I fed more logs into the fire. And then, as the screams and laughter drifted up from the river, the slaps of sticks on ice, my mother startled with every sound. My skates hung from their laces on a rusty nail half driven into the corner post of the mill, and I thought of taking them down to the river, of skating over my father and Marie, of carving the ice above them, but I did not want my mother to ask me where I was going.

    I WOKE IN THE MIDDLE of the night, thinking I heard Marie calling me. Out the window, something looked wrong, as if the entire world were underwater with my father and Marie, and I realized that thin sheets of rain were falling from the sky, icing the trees, turning all of Sawgamet into a frozen river. I went to check the fire in the stove, remembering my mother’s shivering, and I saw that the ax no longer hung above the door.
    The steps beside the log chute were slick, and the mist was star-bright, neither water nor ice—diamonds falling from the sky. When I reached the river, my mother was swinging the ax. The ice shone below her, as if the river had swallowed the moon, and the sound of the ax hitting the ice was ringing and clear, like metal on metal.
    I walked closer to my mother and almost expected the river to shatter under the sharp, oiled blade, the ice to cleave beneath our feet. The river would take us and freeze us alongside myfather and Marie. Or my father would step from the open ice himself, pulling Marie behind him, holding her hand, the four of us walking to the house, where we could sit in front of the fire and he could tell us stories about fish made of ice.
    My mother kept swinging the ax, and between the pings of the blade skittering off the surface of the ice, I heard her crying. She stopped when she saw me and fell to her knees, shaking. I knelt beside her. The ice was still smooth and clean, as if she had never been here with the ax, and when I put my hand flat on the ice it was warm against my palm, like bread cooling from the oven. Then the light beneath the river disappeared, leaving us on the ice, the film of rain covering us.
    In the house, my mother covered me with my blanket and kissed me on my forehead. “I’m sorry,” she said, so quietly that I was unsure whether she had really spoken or I had only imagined it.
    I lay in bed, falling asleep listening to her sharpen the ax, the rhythmic grind of metal on stone.
    The next morning, when Mrs. Gasseur, who was, as usual, the first to morning prayers, found Father Hugo frozen on the bench outside the church, she did not realize right away that he was dead.
    “I asked him if he had been well