That's the best kind of losing, Oren wrote.
I lay there looking at the plastic stars. Then I wrote: There's a lot of leftover lefse. And my mom makes cardamom rolls on Christmas morning. And there's a dock here you might want to see. It's where I threw it. It's about forty minutes from the hospital if the roads are clear.
The roads are not clear, he wrote.
Oh. Right. Of course. You must be exhausted, I'm sorry, go to sleep.
The dots appeared. They stayed there a long time.
I'm in the car, he wrote. I was in the car before I asked how it went. I just didn't want to say so until I knew. Text me the address. I'm asking for it, which is new for me. I'd like to be let in.
He arrived at eight-oh-five, in a mud-colored Subaru with chains on the tires, still in his scrubs under the gray work jacket, with the orange hat on his head and two coffees in a cardboard tray on the passenger seat, one of them a peppermint mocha. My mother saw him from the kitchen window and said, "Oh, he's tall," in the voice of a woman who is going to have opinions. Liv shouted, "THE MAN WITH HIS ARM OUT," and ran to get her boots. My father went to the door and shook his hand and said, "You caught it," and Oren said, "Yes, sir. Barely," and my father looked at him for a long, considering moment the way he looks at a used piano, checking the soundboard for cracks, and then said, "Come in, there's coffee," which from my father is roughly equivalent to being knighted.
I didn't let him stay inside long. I took him down the hill to the dock, through the new snow, under the dark ponderosas with their branches bowed white. The lake was steel gray and perfectly still, and there was a mist rising off it where the water was warmer than the air, and on the far shore the hills went up into cloud. We walked out to the end of the dock, our boots squeaking, and I pointed.
"There," I said. "About there. Where the mist is thickest. That's where it is."
He looked out at the water a long time with his hands in his pockets. "It's still out there."
"It's still out there. Twenty-four years. Probably under about forty feet of water and a lot of silt."
"Do you want it back?"
"No," I said, and was surprised to find that I meant it. "I think it can stay. I think it held the spot."