After years of trying for another baby, I couldn’t stop thinking about Florida’s Weeki Wachee mermaids—women undulating underwater in bright tails and fixed lipstick. My husband saw how grief had hollowed me out and told me to go. So I left our family vacation in Gulf Shores, Ala., drove six hours alone in a rented minivan to watch the show, then skipped the hotel I’d booked and drove back that same day. When it ended, all I wanted was my husband and daughter. I left looking for a miracle. Instead, I came home to the two I already had.

Sugarloaf Key, Florida, 1929  Mabel found the first dead bat in the washbasin before breakfast, folded against the porcelain as neatly as if it had meant to die with manners. At first she thought one of the guests had dropped a scrap of black silk in the sink, the sort of useless thing rich women brought south and expected other people to keep track of. Then the faucet dripped, and the creature shifted under the weight of one clear bead of water. Its wings were drawn close.

After the hurricane, a pink plastic flamingo landed in our yard, one leg snapped clean. Mama wanted to throw it away. I propped it beside the porch instead. For weeks, she kept straightening its crooked neck before work, like something ruined could still be expected to stand pretty.

When the hurricane came, I watched my childhood street rearrange itself into a map of everywhere I’d ever wanted to escape, mailboxes floating past like lost punctuation, our front porch bending into the canal as if bowing to some god I never believed in, and afterward when the water receded and the fish lay gasping in the ditches, I felt something ancient in their mouths, a secret current that whispered all our names backward, and I knew then that the ocean never really leaves you, it just waits inside the plumbing, hums beneath the drains, remembering the shape of your house, your voice, your smallest sins, and every time I run the tap I think I hear it rehearsing the moment it comes back for me.

My father loved his pool more than he loved most people. It was kidney-shaped, half in sunlight that carried salt and sunscreen, half in the shadow of pines that never stopped dropping needles. Behind the fence, a wooded lot buzzed with crickets and raccoons. Every morning smelled of pine sap and chlorine, familiar as breath. On weekends he woke early in a Guy Harvey pocket shirt and concrete-dusted boots. He carried a white bucket of bleach tablets in one hand and balanced the ski...

My daughter was delivered by emergency C-section and rushed to the NICU, where for six weeks she lay in an incubator. Wires crossed her chest and disappeared beneath her blanket. Monitors blinked and beeped urgently. I soon discovered that if I let my mind wander, it would go straight to the worst-case scenario. So I filled the hours by listening to podcasts: history, old Hollywood, horror movies, anything with a steady voice. I listened in the car to and from the hospital and while I sat beside my daughter’s incubator, my fingers resting against her skin. At night I slept with earbuds in and let strangers talk me to sleep.

I adjusted my chair; it was constantly sinking into the uneven ground. Mosquitoes bit my ears, legs, feet. In Vivaldi’s Spring, Dad made me repeat ten bars at a time—painfully slow at first, then gradually faster with each pass. I squirmed and whined. Mosquitoes hovered. I set my violin down repeatedly. “Young lady,” Dad snapped, “we’ll get home much faster today if you just keep going. Laziness never made anyone a star!” “I’m thirsty,” I said. “There’s no water left in the jug.”

They called her Opal because of the scars. Whenever she surfaced, pale streaks crossed her back in long, trembling lines that glowed almost strangely in the morning light. The marks sat on her skin like old handwriting, each one left by a boat that never slowed in time. They looked like rivers drawn by an impatient hand, the kind that lead somewhere difficult and unforgettable.

The river smells like rot. Algae baked too long in the sun. Fish scales ground into mud. Even in October the air is thick enough to drink. The path down is narrow, palmetto fronds scratching bare arms, sand soft as flour beneath our shoes. Branches snap under Dan’s boots. Ellie’s sneakers scuff faster, more urgent. Mosquitoes rise in clouds, whining, relentless. We carry our brother in a Sterilite box, twenty quarts labeled neat in black marker, a body sifted into powder.

The storm had passed by morning, but the yard still held its weight. Leaves plastered the patio. Mud streaked the sliding doors. The pool behind Mrs. Langley’s house sat black and still, as if the water waited for someone brave enough to look inside it. Mama and I walked the stone path in silence. She carried her bucket. I carried the pump. Our clothes stuck to our skin, heavy with leftover damp from the night. We worked for people who lived close to the coast. Houses with white trim and blue shutt...

The night I quit, the air clung to the toll plaza as if it wanted a ride north. Heat rose off the concrete. The fluorescent canopy washed everything pale. Bugs knocked themselves stupid against the lights and fell in a soft peppering onto the hood of the supervisor’s golf cart. In the far lanes, a semi rolled through without slowing, its diesel breath thick enough to taste. I sat in Lane 6, cash only, the booth no wider than my shoulders.

There is a specific archetype of the millennial poet, a figure of earnest conviction we recognize instantly. She is armed with a liberal arts degree, student debt, and the belief that her interior life is a subject of profound importance. She was taught in workshops that her voice matters, and she took it to heart.

The first time I heard the name Andrew, it came through a kitchen radio with the hiss turned up. I stood barefoot on cool tile, watching my aunt wrap plates in dish towels, as if glass could be persuaded by softness. Outside, Miami sat under a hard blue sky, bright enough to feel false. On television, men traced the storm with their fingers and promised it would turn. My aunt watched the map, then shut the sound off and kept wrapping. She trusted weather more than voices. “You still got that volunteer badge?” she asked.

After illness forced my father, Frank, into early retirement, our kidney-shaped pool became his occupation, hobby, religion and full-time source of financial ruin. He skimmed it. Shocked it. Tested it. Discussed chlorine like a man briefing NASA. When the pump broke, a large “Super Pump” arrived. My mother stared at it, saying, “Well, I didn’t know they made those that big.” I almost died laughing. Dad tried hard to look offended, but a mustachioed grin gave him away. When Mom told him to pose with the pump, he did. He never liked being the joke, but he liked being ours.

The news came on a Tuesday: U.S. Space Command was moving to Huntsville. The headlines said Redstone Arsenal wins the bid, but that word "wins" sat strange in my mouth. In the breakroom, someone printed the article and pinned it to the bulletin board above the coffee pot. The photo showed the gates of Redstone shining in the morning sun, a soldier standing guard beside the sign.

I return to the tracks when the heat breaks. The pines breathe the same sweet tar scent they carried when I was a child, the scent that hung over every mill town in Levy County when cedar mills and turpentine stills smoked through winter. Vines twist across the rails now. Brush crowds the right of way.  Even so, the steel remains straight and stubborn, a line the land has not managed to take back. When I lay my hand on it, the metal holds the night’s last breath.

All Ruth saw was more attention. And when the wrong kind of attention showed up, people like her paid for it. The June heat shimmered off the sidewalks, rising in waves that blurred the edges of palm trunks and lampposts. Humidity pressed against Ruth’s skin as she stepped out of the motel’s back corridor, the scent of salt from Matanzas Bay mingling with the sweetness of blooming jasmine. Her uniform clung to her back, damp before she’d even begun her rounds.