“I think about that, about the boy I was and my drowned mother. What did I know, really? Her love for me was deep and frantic. And the desperation of her dying the way she did was keen, sharp like the blade she left behind, like the loon’s black bill. I was not able to put my thoughts together right then, not for years, that the ice had closed in on my mother long before she went out onto Bright Lake.”