The yellow blanket arrives again, not by mail this time but by exhumation: out of a cardboard box, out of the basement’s throat. It comes up creased like a shoreline and also like a palm, like something that has been holding on all this time. Their grown son snaps it once and a small weather lifts off: attic-moth, paper-dander, the faint mineral sting of crumbling tape. He laughs at his father’s plaid pants, his mother’s disco blouse—bright ghosts of fabric—until she raises the blanket and his laughter swivels away, alert, like a dog catching a sound too far to place. The color is dune grass in late fall, lake-light gone pale. It had come wrapped and mailed from her mother in the months when every day felt like a horizon you could walk into without falling off the world. Lake Michigan in spring. She remembers the box on the porch, remembers the paper giving way, remembers the yellow unfolding like a small flag for a country not yet built. There is no clean hinge for what came after. The blanket was folded into a box and into a drawer, nested like an unfinished dream. Years passed wearing their ordinary masks. In memory the lake kept moving even when it froze, all muscle underneath. She learned the vocabulary of pull: moon-belly, tide, near-side bulge, gravity’s hand at the back of the world. She learned how absence has weight, how it presses like a thumbprint. Now their son asks, whose blanket is this? and the question opens a door in the air, a trapdoor, and April drops through. Water-smell. Iron-taste. Wind that needles the face into aliveness. The tiny kick. The sudden quiet. The whole lake inhales. Nothing is still, not even nothing; nothing has an undertow, nothing keeps tugging at the ankle of the living. Their son wants to keep the blanket. To him it is only soft, only beautiful. He holds it like a new pet. He folds the yellow over his forearm and it makes a brief, wrong sun in the basement. When he drapes it over his shoulders, the room tilts imperceptibly: a shift in pressure, a shift in wave, a thin tidal adjustment in the blood. For a moment the blanket is water pretending to be cloth, a dusk-lake trying on a human shape. For a moment there are three bodies in it: his living heat, their watching, and the small weight the fibers held onto. It pulls once—moon-tug—and the dust in the air rearranges into something like a blessing and something like a warning. Beneath the skin of yellow, tugging, tugging, gentle as fabric, their son smiles, doesn’t let go.