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I woke up in the sky, on a stretcher, wearing a mask. The oxygen tasted bitter and dried my throat, and through a window I spotted the North Star. The uniformed man bending over me explained that both of my passengers had escaped the car but that I’d been in the lake for fifteen minutes, which normally would have been long enough to kill me. What had saved me, he said, was the freezing water, which sent my body into hibernation. He asked me if I felt lucky. I thought: Not yet.

They let me sit up as we hovered over the hospital. I could see all the Minneapolis skyscrapers, some of their floors lit up and others dark, as well as the antennas on their roofs that transmitted our radio stations and TV ball games. I could see the western horizon, where I’d come from, and a dogleg of snowy river crossed by bridges sparkling with late-night traffic. The landscape looked whole in a way it never had before; I could see how it fit together. My parents had lied. They’d taught me we lived in the best place in the world, but I could see now that the world was really one place and that comparing its parts did not make sense or gain our town any advantage over others.

Moments later, we landed. My stretcher jolted. As we waited for the helicopter’s blades to slow, the medic said I would be home in a few days, not understanding that this was not the comfort it would have been had I never left the ground. He wheeled me out onto the roof under the moon, which had risen some since I’d seen it from the car. I lifted the oxygen mask so I could speak and asked how long we’d been flying. Just thirty minutes. To reach a city I’d thought of as remote, halfway across the state, a foreign capital.

I told the man I was feeling lucky now.

Tonight, in Salt Lake, I’m feeling lucky again, and not just because I escaped the swinging Pinters. Three hours and thirty-five minutes, door-to-door, across the Great Basin to my sister’s mansion in the foothills along the Wasatch Front. I slept, I woke, I hailed a cab, I’m here. Don’t tell me this isn’t an age of miracles. Don’t tell me we can’t be everywhere at once.

Getting out of the cab and walking up the driveway, I set off a series of motion-detecting floodlights. The yard goes from dark to a Hollywood premiere. Wheels of mist surround the sprinkler heads buried in the fresh-mown lawn and their droplets splatter a trio of campaign signs for local Republicans. Otherwise, it’s quiet. My nephews’ mountain bikes lean against a wall of the three-bay, cedar-shake garage. This is Utah, the state of early bedtimes, and Jake and Edward are probably asleep now, dreaming of good grades and science fairs.

The peephole in the front door is faintly blue; someone, deep in the house, is watching TV. That would be Julie. Asif disdains pop culture. He came here from Pakistan to work and save, and the purity of his will is undiminished. Our family felt vaguely shamed by him at first, intimidated by his priestly poise and engineer’s exactitude of spirit, but that was our own unworthiness at work. He’s tough on himself, but he spoils his sons like princes, for which they’re none the worse, amazingly. If anything, they’re embarrassed by his lavishness and out to prove that they too can rise unaided, taking on extra science work at school and pitching in on chores like little sailors. I fully expect that by the time I’m old this branch of my family will be a minor dynasty, and I’m flattered that Asif has mixed his blood with ours. Except for my mother, we all are. She’s still cautious. She can’t believe this wealth is honest, somehow, and hoards savings bonds for her grandkids, just in case.

I open the door and set down my bag and case in the darkened hall. I smell a recent meal—encouraging. As a strict vegetarian in beefy Utah, Asif has had to learn to cook.

“Hello?”

“Down here,” Julie whispers. “Everyone’s sacked out.”

She’s dragged a couple of cushions off the couch and is sitting on them like a yogi, legs crossed, spine straight, watching an old Road Runner cartoon on a children’s cable channel. Beside her is a plate of cheese and bread and a tall glass of juice, but this looks staged. She hasn’t been eating. Her cheeks are two dirty ashtrays, gray concavities, and her hair, whose fluffiness tells me that it’s clean, doesn’t reflect the TV glow the way it ought to. The silk pajamas she’s wearing must be Kara’s. The top is bunched and wrinkled—it’s buttoned wrong—and the bottoms, they just look empty.

After I kiss her, I ask her, “Did you rest?”

“I tried,” she says. “I’m still buzzing from the drive. My van’s so big and shaky. Bad shocks or something. Nice jacket—out of a catalogue? It fits you. Must be nice to be shaped like people in catalogues. The wedding’s just going to be suits, no formal wear. Mom’s grumpy about it, but men look weird in tuxes—the kind you can rent in Minnesota, anyway. Those bands around the waist, they look like trusses, like something to hold in a hernia. Ryan?”

“Yes?”

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