"MY NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD GRANDSON PUSHED ME INTO THE LAKE, my daughter-in-law filmed it, and my son said I needed attention — but NONE of them expected the silence that followed.

The hall clock struck four while I was standing on the linoleum in the utility room. It was a tall, walnut regulator clock that my husband, Thomas, had bought at an estate sale in Lansing back when we still had the blue station wagon with the fake wood panelling down the sides. It had a heavy brass pendulum that went tick-tock, tick-tock, slow and dry, like an old heart that didn't see any reason to hurry.

I didn't take off my wet clothes in the hallway. I stood on the small oval rug—the one I’d braided myself out of Thomas’s old flannel shirts after his funeral—and watched the water pool around my ankles. It was brown water, thick with lake mud and tiny black bits of decayed oak leaf.

Outside, the screened door rattled twice.

"Mom?"

It was Arthur. He was knocking with two knuckles, right near the frame where the mesh was pulled slightly loose from the wood.

"Mom, unlock the door. Your shoes are dripping through the floorboards into the cellar. I can hear it from the porch."

I didn't move. I reached up with both hands and unpinned the silk scarf. The pin—a small silver bar with three glass pearls that Thomas had bought me for our twentieth anniversary—was bent from where Caleb had pushed me. The pin bit into my thumb as I forced it open, but I didn't drop it. I placed it carefully on the small corner shelf next to the jar of spare house keys and the bottle of insect repellent.

"Margaret!" Brenda's voice was higher now, carrying over the top of the porch screen. "This is ridiculous! The boys have to use the bathroom! Caleb's suit is wet!"

I walked into the kitchen. My feet made a wet, heavy slapping noise against the yellow linoleum—the pattern was called Harvest Gold, installed in 1974, now worn down to the white backing near the sink where I had stood for forty years washing frying pans and scraping corn husks into the red plastic bin.

I went to the drawer beside the stove.

The top drawer held the small things: the green twist-ties from the bread loaves, three rolls of scotch tape, six ballpoint pens from the local bank with the ink dried up in the tips, and the heavy iron key ring that belonged to the house.

There were four keys on the ring. One for the front door, one for the kitchen door, one for the garage, and one—a long, flat brass key with three notch marks on the blade—that belonged to the master bedroom on the second floor.

Thomas had installed that lock in 1982 when the state road crew was widening Route 9 and twenty rough men in orange vests were sleeping in trailers down by the bridge. He wanted me to have a place where I could go if someone tried the kitchen handle while he was in town buying lime for the orchard.

I picked up the ring.

"Mom!" Arthur was at the kitchen window now. He had his palms cupped against the glass, his forehead pressed to the screen. His nose looked flat and white against the wire mesh. "Open the door! It's ninety degrees out here! The bugs are coming up off the marsh!"

I looked at him through the screen.

He was thirty-nine years old. He had a small double chin that sat inside his polo collar, and his hair was thinning at the crown, showing the red, sun-burned skin of his scalp. I could see the small mole on his left earlobe that I used to touch when I was rocking him to sleep in the green wicker chair in the nursery.

I didn't move my lips. I didn't nod.

I walked out of the kitchen, through the dining room with its dark cherry sideboard where the good china sat behind leaded glass, and went up the stairs.

The stairs were carpeted in dark brown wool that smelled faintly of old mothballs and cedar dust. Every third step had a small creak—a high whee-snap sound—that I knew by heart. I walked up slowly, one foot at a time, my wet trousers heavy around my calves.

I went into my bedroom.

The room hadn't changed since 1999. The wallpaper was a soft cream with small sprigs of lavender that had faded to gray where the afternoon sun hit the wall between the windows. The bed was a high, four-poster maple frame that Thomas's uncle had made in his shop in Alma.

I closed the oak door.

I inserted the flat brass key into the lock above the handle. It went in with a dry snick, and when I turned it to the left, the heavy iron bolt slid six inches into the oak jamb.

I walked to the closet.

I took off the wet cardigan. It dropped to the rug with a dull, wet thud. I took off the blouse, the brown trousers, the white cotton undergarments that were yellowed at the waist from twenty years of bleach and lake water.

I didn't look in the mirror over the dresser. I knew what was there: an old woman with white skin that sagged like wet dough over her ribs, two long red scars on her knees, and dark blue veins that twisted like small garden hoses around her ankles.

I opened the bottom drawer of the cedar chest.

I pulled out a clean white cotton nightgown—the heavy kind with the long sleeves and the small pearl buttons up the throat that my sister had sewn for me when I was in the hospital for my hip. It smelled of dried lavender and old newspaper.

I put it on.

I took a white bath towel from the closet, sat down on the edge of the maple bed, and began to dry my hair. I rubbed hard, until my scalp felt red and hot, until the grey strands stood up around my ears like dry corn silk.

Below me, in the yard, I heard the heavy thump of someone kicking the front door.

"Mom! This isn't funny!" Arthur was shouting now. His voice was higher, the way it sounded when he was ten and his brother took his bicycle down to the gravel pit. "We know you're in there! Unlock the door or I'm going to get the ladder from the shed!"

I stopped rubbing my hair.

I looked at the window. The window was open two inches at the bottom to let the lake breeze through the screen.

I walked over to the window. I pulled the small brass sash locks down, shut the window tight, and turned the thumb-latch until it clicked. Then I pulled the heavy green linen drapes across the glass, cutting the sun down to two thin yellow strips on the floorboards.

The room became dark and cool.

I sat back down on the bed.

I didn't lie down. I sat straight up, my back pressed against the carved maple headboard, my hands lying palms-down on the blue-and-white quilt.

Below, the sounds continued.

I heard Caleb's voice first. "Dad, is she crazy? She's acting crazy. My phone's at five percent. I need my charger from the kitchen."

"Shut up, Caleb," Brenda said. Her voice was flat now, loud enough to cut through the glass. "Arthur, kick the latch. It's just a screen door latch."

"I'm not kicking the door, Brenda," Arthur said. "It's a solid oak door. I'll break my foot."

"Then use the rock! The big gray one by the hose!"

"That's my mother's garden rock," Arthur said. "She got that from the UP."

"I don't care if she got it from the moon!" Brenda screamed. "My purse is on the dining room table! My car keys are in my purse! We're standing out here in wet bathing suits like a bunch of bums while she's inside taking a nap!"

"She's not taking a nap," Brody said. I could hear him walking around on the gravel driveway below my window. His sneakers were making a dry crunch-crunch sound. "She's looking at us through the curtains. I saw the green cloth move."

I didn't move the green cloth. My hands remained flat on the quilt.

I listened to them for forty minutes.

I listened to Arthur try three different keys from his own ring—his office key, his house key from town, the key to his boat trailer. None of them worked. The locks on the lake house had been set by a locksmith from Flint in 1976, high-grade brass tumbler locks that Thomas had paid ninety dollars apiece for when ninety dollars was three days' pay at the foundry.

At five o'clock, I heard the garage door rattle.

"It's locked too," Caleb shouted from the side yard. "The padlock is on the latch. The big silver one."

"She must have locked it this morning when she took the lawnmower out," Arthur said.

"Well, where's the spare?" Brenda demanded. "She always keeps a key under the red flowerpot on the step!"

"I checked," Arthur said. "It's not there."

It wasn't there. I had picked it up three weeks ago when I caught Brody using it to let his friends into the workshop at two in the morning to smoke those small smells-like-skunk cigarettes they bought in town.

At five-thirty, the sun began to move behind the big white pine near the well-house. The two yellow strips of light on my floorboards turned blue, then gray.

The voices outside grew tired.

"Arthur, my shoulders are burning," Brenda said. Her tone was no longer sharp; it was thin and whining, the voice she used when they went to the mall and the parking lot was full. "We've been out here two hours. I have no sunscreen on. My nose is peeling."

"I'll call a locksmith," Arthur said.

"From where? Your phone has no service out here unless you're on the dock."

"Then go to the dock!"

"I'm not going back on that dock!" Brenda shouted. "It smells like fish! And what if she comes out with something?"

"With what?" Arthur said. "She's sixty-seven years old. She can barely get out of the tub without that plastic handle I put in."

"She didn't look like she needed a handle when she walked up those steps," Brody said. His voice was lower now, almost quiet. "Did you see her face, Dad? She didn't even look at us. She looked... like she didn't know who we were."

"She knows who we are," Arthur said. But his voice lacked conviction. It floated up through the glass like a dry leaf. "She's just throwing a fit because Caleb pushed her. She'll come down at six to start the pot roast. She always starts the pot roast at six."

I sat on the maple bed.

The clock downstairs struck six. Six slow, heavy iron strokes that shook the floorboards under my heels.

I didn't get up. I didn't go to the kitchen. The beef was in the white refrigerator—four pounds of chuck roast wrapped in butcher's paper, along with six carrots, three yellow onions, and a bag of small brown potatoes I'd bought at the farm stand near the highway.

It stayed in the refrigerator.

Through the curtains, I heard the sound of footsteps moving toward the driveway.

"Where are you going?" Brenda asked.

"To the road," Arthur said. "Maybe I can flag down the mailman or someone from the marina. See if they have a pair of crowbars in their truck."

"It's Saturday, Arthur," Brenda said. "The mailman came at eleven."

A long silence followed. The wind came up off the lake, making the big white pine scrape its branches against the tin gutter—scree-scree-scree—a sound I had heard every autumn for forty years.

"Brody," Arthur said finally. "Go see if the basement window is still unlatched. The small one behind the woodpile."

I sat in the dark room and waited for Brody to go to the basement window.

I knew he wouldn't get in. I had nailed three six-inch timber spikes through the pine frame into the concrete block three years ago after the neighbor's dog kept trying to sleep near the furnace.

A minute later, I heard Brody scream from the side of the house.

It wasn't a big scream. It was a sharp, high yowp! like a puppy that got its tail caught in a screen door.

"What?" Brenda called out.

"The woodpile!" Brody yelled back, his voice high and wet. "The wood broke! A big log fell on my shin! There's nails in the side!"

"Arthur!" Brenda screamed. "He's bleeding! The wood fell on him!"

I listened to the scramble of their feet on the gravel—the heavy, uneven thud of four pairs of rubber-soled shoes running toward the north side of the house. I heard Brody sobbing, a high, wet snuffle that sounded just like Arthur used to sound when he scraped his knees on the cinder track at school.