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She said, “I know this sounds so, so stupid—but, Mr. Dam, I—I want to help people. I hope there can be world peace and I want to do my part.”

“Then you will,” Artie said. He gestured for her to sit down, and she did. He sat across from her.

“How do you know I will, Mr. Dam? I’m me—I’m different.” She looked straight at him as she said this.

“You are you, Rhonda. You are authentically you. To be different can be hard, but it’s a wonderful thing to find someone as authentic as you are.”

She was looking at him with great seriousness, and for just a moment she appeared older to him. “So you think I can help people?”

He watched her with his arms folded. “Do I think it? I know it.” Then he unfolded his arms, and, sitting forward, he said, “Listen to me, Rhonda. You’re honest, and you’re real. You will have a good future.”

She kept looking at him with that seriousness; her mouth was closed, and her small eyes, through her glasses, stared at him. And then she stood up and said, “Thank you very much.” She walked away, then turned back and said, “Thank you, Mr. Dam. You’ve really helped me by telling me that.”

“Rhonda.”

She stopped and looked at him, her glasses askew on her face.

Artie said, “You may not understand this yet, but you’ve also helped me.”

“How?”

“You give me hope.”

And then she became Rhonda Lazarre again, her mouth staying open, her cheeks blushing as she swiped at her hair. “Uhm—okay. Goodbye,” she said.

And yet Artie still felt a lingering sense of shame: He had lied to his students. They could not bring about world peace. No one could.

—

“Oh for God’s sake,” said Evie that night after he told her about Rhonda and how he was feeling guilty over his remarks to the class on world peace. “Of course you should lie to them. What are you supposed to do, leave them without any hope at all?”

Artie said nothing.

And Evie had one of her thoughts: God, that man is so soft.

The next weekend, Artie had his boat pulled out of the water for the winter, and he stood leaning against the railing that led to the office in the marina, looking around at all the boats. The wind was swirling past him—it was not a particularly cold wind—and the leaves blew in different directions around him, swooping up and back; the sun was still out but it was on its way down. The water sparkled near the islands; up closer it was a dark blue. Soon his boat would be sealed up in white plastic alongside all the other boats that were now sealed up that way, with the white plastic tightly and smoothly wrapped around them. Artie whistled softly; there was a sense of accomplishment to this.

As he was about to turn to go down the steps, a woman came out of the office, and she looked so much like Maria that he almost uttered a sound. This woman had more money and more confidence than Maria would have had, but her face, as she glanced up at Artie with a quick impersonal smile and moved past him, could almost have been Maria’s face, with her big blue eyes and light brown hair, had Maria lived to be older. Artie watched the woman walk down the wooden steps and wave to a man who approached her; together they got into a car and drove away.

Maria.

To think of his sister having lived long enough to become this woman who had just passed him—Artie shook his head and walked slowly down the stairs to his car. Maria, who had wanted their father’s genes passed onward. Why she should have had the childhood she had, only to die with her stillborn baby?—Artie knew that there were no answers to this, but he thought about it often.

The fact that he himself had not died that day in the water continued to surprise him, and the fact that he had wanted to die surprised him even more. He could not find that feeling within himself these days at all.

Incomprehensible world! Unbelievable world—

—

And then—and this was odd—as Artie drove away from the marina a sudden clear image of Rob materialized in his mind. It was unsettling, he did not know what it meant, or why he had had it. In the image, the boy’s face was turned partly away. Something was not right.

That night, as Artie got into bed, he said to Evie, “Have you heard from Rob at all?”

“Not recently, why?”

“Just wondered how he was doing. You know, with Rachel and Francesca.” He pulled the covers up and reached for his book. Artie was now reading again, his desire to die having left him, along with those terrible programs he had watched online about people who murdered others.

Evie finished with her face cream, twirled the top of the little jar on, and joined Artie, pulling back the covers. “I just cannot believe you are reading that book,” she said.