SHE WAS awake again in the middle of the night, listening to the rain on the roof, the slow cadence of her husband’s sleeping breath next to her, trying to catch a slippery thought. She knew it was something she shouldn’t, couldn’t avoid forever, but when she tried to approach it directly, it twisted away like a fish. She pictured herself reaching down into opaque water, trapping the thought between her palms. She could just touch it, feel the powerful thrash of scales beneath her curled fingers. But then it would be gone, a small submarine wave and a new roughness on her fingertips the only evidence of its passage.

She kicked the covers off her feet and tried to focus instead on the dry certainties whose meanings she did not understand, and which therefore did not elude her: her heart, a warm fist beneath her sternum. Her own lips under her fingertips. The way her hand came up to cover her mouth every time she watched the evening swirl of crows over the treetops. The rising hollow feeling in her throat that came with the passage of the 372 bus, doors opened and closed, waiting for something that didn’t come. What was that? There: a flash of gills, a glint of fin. She stared hard. Nothing.

“I don’t know what I want,” she had told her mother on the phone earlier that week.

“Yes, you do,” her mother had said. “You just don’t like it.”

But then, the women in her family were not renowned for their sense of selforientation. Her mother had famously joined a search party for herself while on a bus tour in Iceland, not recognizing the description of the approximately fivefoot-tall woman in a red sweater as herself, prior to having put on a warmer jacket. Her mother and fifty other travelers and volunteers called out a gross mispronunciation of her name until three in the morning, when it had finally occurred to her, I’m that tall, with that color hair. My name has that number of syllables. Her mother had found one of the deputies to check the spelling of the name they had written down.

“It was a foggy night, and very beautiful” was all that her mother had to contribute whenever this story was brought up. “A lovely time of year to see the Icelandic countryside.” The local papers had had more than that to say, most of it about the lengths people now go