We went once to see our father in Crawford, that spring he’d been hired to paint the church steeple. We told our mother we were taking a long bike ride around the lake and maybe we’d stop for a swim. “We’ll be back for dinner,” Sonia said, as the screen door banged shut behind us.

Summer’s heat had come early that year. The last of the lake ice melted before the end of March. On April 17, Sonia’s birthday, the temperature reached 100 degrees. The four of us stood sweating in the hallway when it was time for our father to mark Sonia’s height on the wall. 

“I’m getting too old for this, Dad,” she told him. 

“Nonsense,” he said. 

He ignored her huffing and set her shoulders square against the wall.

“Now,” he said, “chin up.”

He smudged a mark some six inches above the previous year’s. 

He called us all over to marvel at the difference. 

“Would you look at that,” he said, tapping the pencil against an open palm. “Would you just.”

The day we went to Crawford was more oppressive. As we rode into town and then out of it, Sonia teased me about the dark patch spreading across the back of my shirt, the heavy rings under my arms.

“Dad’ll smell you before he sees you,” she said.

For weeks, our father had been moving through our lives like a shadow. Up and gone before us, home after we’d gone to bed. Our mother tutted when we asked about him, asked her when we’d see him. Even weekends kept him away. We all, in our ways, understood what it meant for us when he had work and what it meant when he didn’t. But his absence was gnawing and the spare hours we did get with him were precious. 

After about a mile, I stopped and pulled off my shirt. I wanted so badly for it to look effortless, but my head got stuck in the neck opening and my right shoulder got hooked in the sodden cotton, and, in the end, I had to wrestle it off. Sonia smirked and splashed me with water from the bottle she’d been wise enough to bring along.

“Gotcha,” she said. 

“C’mon, Sunny.”

She blew a raspberry at me. 

“Act your age,” I said.

“And not, what? My shoe size?”

“Something like that.”

She splashed me a second time. “Grow up, little brother.”

She pushed her bike back onto the road and took off as fast as she could manage, the rusted bike clanging and creaking, my sister disappearing.

“Wait up! Wait up!” I shouted, but she’d crested the rise by the McGinleys’ farm and was gone. 

A pickup roared by, one of those cowboys, as our mother called them. The parched road erupted in the truck’s wake, dust and dirt eddying, sticking to my arms and chest. I spat out a mouthful of muck, and already I could feel the sun burning my shoulders.

He’d told us not to visit him, our father had. “Too dangerous,” he’d said one Sunday night a few weeks before, one of the few nights we spent together that summer. “Too high. Only room for one on that scaffolding, and even then, I don’t much trust it.” But he’d also spent those moments before our bedtime telling stories: how he could watch the weather roll in from miles off, how some days he could see clear into Quebec, how the air sounded different and felt different. 

“That’s enough now,” our mother had said, shooing our father from the room and closing the door behind them.

We listened to them go back downstairs, waited for the hallway light to go out. 

He told us not to go, Sonia said as we were falling asleep, but he hadn’t quite forbidden it.

We saw the steeple well before we reached town. But we didn’t see any sign of our father until we walked around to the rear of the church where it hugged a low ridge. The sun hurt our eyes as we strained to look up.

Sonia held a side door open. “C’mon,” she said.

Inside, the church reeked of incense. Dank and accumulated, the weight of it set my head spinning. 

“Sit for a sec?” I asked. 

“Not a chance,” Sonia said. 

The church could fit maybe fifty people and had barely enough wall space for the Stations of the Cross. Empty, though, it felt huge, growing larger by the second, running away in all directions. I grabbed the pew in front of me. 

“Michael,” Sonia hissed, “come see this.” 

I thought for sure that I was going to be sick, but just as suddenly as it had arrived, the spinning stopped. I loosened my fingers and pulled my shirt back on and went after her.

Behind the altar, she’d found a storage room. Candles and vestments and silver cups stood on a table on one side. Brooms and mops against the wall on the other. Beside the door was a ladder, and at its foot were empty cans of white paint. 

“Here we go,” she said.

Sonia shot up the ladder, the rat-a-tat of her hands and feet on the rungs sounding as if she were running. Again, I chased after her. Light came up from the storage room and down through a door propped open where the ladder let out to a small landing. In the middle, it was ink dark, the light washed out entirely, and I understood then in my panic how scared I was of heights, and probably always had been. 

I crawled off the ladder and onto the landing, pressing my cheek into the rough wood. I was relieved not to have to climb anymore and relieved, too, that it was no longer dark. Sonia sat beside me, her legs dangling over the edge, and a finger to her lips.

“Not a sound,” she whispered.

Wind whistled beyond the door, and below the whine, I heard our father humming and the rasp of his paint brush. Sonia tussled my hair and stepped into the sunshine. 

She moved and so did the light, rushing in and rushing out and shining for an instant on a water jug with two cups and two lunch pails beside. There had been room for us, I thought then, betrayal flushing through me and setting my head spinning again.

I remember what followed, but only in fragments: our father shouting at Sonia, Sonia’s eyes red from crying as she sat beside me in a pew, and the three of us on the drive home, our bikes in the bed of our father’s truck. 

There was this, too: 

A splinter had broken off into my thumb as I hurried back down the ladder. My thumb throbbed, and the pain ran out in waves. I stopped in that lightless middle, and I pulled the splinter out with my teeth. I put my thumb in my mouth and sucked on it until the bleeding stopped and felt ashamed that so small an injury could cause me such pain.

The backs of our thighs stuck to the truck’s vinyl bench, and our father tuned the radio to a bluegrass station he knew Sonia liked. She wasn’t crying anymore, and tucked up against him, they sang the song our father had been humming out on the scaffolding. 

When we got home, he told our mother he’d spotted me and Sonia on his way through town and wanted all of us back early for dinner.

“We’re starving,” he said.

“Lucky for you, I’d say. Dinner’ll be ready in fifteen.”

“Perfect timing,” he said, his arm now around our mother’s shoulders, pulling her close.

She pushed him away with a sharpness that seemed unnecessary but familiar to both of them. 

“Best clean off that mess first,” she said.

I hadn’t noticed the white paint that speckled his boots, and under his chin, stubble pushing through a thick brush stroke. Paint striped his knuckles as well, caked around his fingernails. He went into the bathroom and, in too short a time, came out with his face clean and wearing his bathing suit.

“We going swimming?” Sonia asked.

“If you two hurry we are,” he said.

He was already twenty-five yards out when Sonia and I jumped in. On the surface, the water felt as hot, as cloying as the air, but just below it, the remnants of winter’s deep freeze lingered, biting at our bodies as we dove.

“Wait!” Sonia called to him when she came up for air. “Wait!”

But our father kept racing ahead, and we thrashed at the lake in pursuit.

He kept receipts, our father did. Invoices received, invoices paid, expenses, contracts for the jobs that had them, scribbled notes for the jobs that didn’t, profit and loss tables. He was organized, too. Folders upon folders in boxes upon boxes. I’d not known this part of him, not really, and discovered it only after he’d died and his affairs were left for me to resolve. Not that he had affairs, so much as possessions to be cleared from the house by the lake, where he’d lived alone after our mother left. Sonia was absent then, long gone to Alaska, by way of Texas and then Idaho, her meander across the continent. She’d been at sea when our father passed. It was two weeks before she returned my call.

“Did you know about this stuff?” I asked her.

The connection crackled, but I made out that she didn’t.

“—thing interesting?” I heard come through.

On the table in front of me, I’d spread out the contents of the folder I wanted to ask about. I rubbed the puckered scar on my thumb.

“Remember Crawford?” I asked. “When he painted the steeple?”

The line hissed. 

“We went to see him,” I said, “even though he’d told us not to.”

She’d vanish again in a minute, maybe just a few seconds. I could sense that coming clear across the thousands of miles between us.

“I remem—” 

“There’s a picture,” I said. “I almost didn’t recognize him.”

More static.

“And there’s a name on the back,” I said. “‘Georges,’ I think. And a phone number, or what looks like a phone number. It’s all too faded to read.”

“—didn’t know?”

The line cut, but I kept on speaking into the dial tone, telling her what I’d worked out, what she’d not bothered to share.

“No, Sonia, I didn’t know. I never made it past the landing.”

We eventually caught up to our father. The three of us turned to float on our backs, admiring the sunlight coming through the treetops and the shadows it threw onto the lake. We were a hundred yards or so out, and we stayed there, still and silent, until our mother called us in for dinner. Our father rolled onto his stomach and in a burst of strokes and kicks had nearly reached the dock before Sonia and I even made a start. He stood on the dock, backlit and dripping. When we got close enough, he held out a hand for each of us and pulled us out in one motion. Midair and the water streaming off our bodies, each of us grasping as tightly as we could.