The clouds were darker now, clotting towards the mountains and then disappearing them altogether. We'd only been here a day before the weather turned, our faltering phones warning of a week of featureless gray skies, humidity sticking one day to the next. Sitting on the screened-in porch with mugs of coffee, puzzles, yellowed detective novels left by previous visitors. "Nothing to stop us from our vacation," he said, and laid out our hiking boots and pants at the foot of the bed.

The fogs, though, coaxed their way between us as soon as we set foot off the property. A yellow-ribboned trail led into the woods, guiding us to the lakeside where he said we could go for a swim—no lightning, after all. My suit clung to me beneath my hiking pants, I felt encased and could not stop sweating, though it wasn't due to go over seventy. Pine needles beneath my boots, the path drifting gently side to side, and then—without noticing, really—we were separated. Calling his name, my voice swallowed away from me, no returning call. Everything felt too distant and I began to doubt even that I was on the path, though when I reached to either side my fingers brushed paper-thin bark from the trees.

Here is what a vacation should be: days stretching apart on a beach, watered-down drinks carried to us with umbrellas, a halting progression through dog-eared and sand-clogged novels, peeling shoulders and salt water-stung eyes. I turned back for him, then forward, called his name again. I would walk to the lake, I thought, swim, find him there; but nothing came in view except the gray, my feet, the path, until a familiar lawn opened for me. The gravel path brought me back to the porch where I sat, blinking into the dense air and waiting for his return. By the time he climbed the stairs I'd carried two sweating beers to the table and begun working through the bottle meant for him. "What a great swim," he said, squeezing my shoulder as he passed. "Not as cold as I'd thought. How'd you get so far ahead of me?"

I turned to watch his back as he carried mud through this rental home we would leave in one week. My suit, when I pressed my fingers beneath my shirt, was dry. The woods, path, lawn, were gone again, though I knew they must be there, some other version of me making her way with hair dripping, cool and damp, down her back.
 

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