The Ferryman

by Justin Cronin

The waiter returned to take our order. We picked something. Food, I think it was. I couldn’t have cared less, caught as I was in the spell of her.

that linked Peoria to Palau, Boise to Bangkok—failed

who we are to one another isn’t so easy to categorize after all: that fathers can be sons, and lovers friends, and daughters mothers, and that such words as these tell only half the story, maybe not even half.

We are, each of us, born a sparkling soul, clothed only in our newness; it is life that makes us what we are.

In college she’d worked summers as a mountain guide in Idaho, leading groups of high schoolers into the wilderness,