My Friend's Salt Farm Has a Rule. DON'T Leave the GATE Open.

My hands were white to the wrists. The salt had dried in the creases of my knuckles and cracked when I flexed them on the wheel, and every time I shifted my grip it stung. My clothes smelled of brine. I'd cranked the window down an inch to get rid of it, and all that did was let the cold in.

The coastal road out of Aveiro was empty. It was that hour before the fishing trucks start, with the sky gone the color of dishwater and the pines on both sides still black. I hadn't passed a single car. I checked the mirror anyway, and then again a minute later. Nothing. Just the same wet strip of asphalt getting smaller.

I let myself think it. The weekend was over. I had a graduation to get to, and the drive was about two hours, which meant I'd get there with time to spare. I could find a shower somewhere and a clean shirt. My shoulders came down from around my ears for the first time in three days. I loosened my grip on the wheel and the salt on my palms cracked again.

Here's how I got on that road.

I'm a line cook. Twenty-odd years of it, mostly grill and sauté, and my forearms show it. I work nights, I get one weekend off a month if I'm lucky, and I had that weekend off. I'd promised my niece Inês I'd be at her graduation in Porto on Monday. She's seventeen, she's my brother's kid, and she doesn't ask for much. When she asked, she did it in a text, no emoji, just: you're coming, right? I wrote back of course, and I meant it. I'd already bought a shirt with a collar.

Then Duarte called on the Wednesday.

We go back to when we were kids working summers in a fish restaurant on the canal, scraping plates and getting yelled at. We'd drifted, the way you do. A Christmas card, a funeral once. So when his name came up on my phone I knew before I answered that it wasn't a social call.

"My father's gone into a home," he said. No hello. His voice was flat and tired, and it sounded like he was talking with his mouth half closed. "Last week. I've got the harvest to finish and I can't do it alone."

I asked him how much was left. He said a few days of raking, the store to load, the tarps. He said the last of the salt had to come off before the weather turned, which in late October can mean any day at all. Then he said, "I don't have anybody else, Tomás."

I told him I had Monday. I told him straight out, the graduation, Porto, I had to leave by Monday morning at the latest. He said that was fine, they'd be done by Sunday. I said okay. I said I'd come Friday after service.

I still don't know why I said yes so fast. Some of it was Duarte's voice. Some of it, honestly, was that I'm bad at saying no to a problem that sounds like it has an end date. Friday to Sunday. I did the arithmetic in my head and it worked, and I liked that it worked.

I got there Friday around eleven at night, after closing out my station and driving the whole way with the heater broken. Troncalhada is flat, and past a certain point the road turns to packed gravel and you can feel the ground go soft on both sides. The car's headlights caught the pans first. They lay out in a grid, hundreds of shallow rectangles, and even in the dark they had color, a grey with pink in it, like the inside of a shell. I didn't see that as a comparison then. That's just what they looked like. Water lay in some of them and in others a crust had already started, thin and white at the edges.

The guesthouse sat right beside them at the end of the gravel. It was a low, whitewashed building with a tile roof and a door painted a blue that had mostly flaked off. Duarte's family had run the holding for three generations, and the guesthouse was where they'd put the seasonal hands, or friends, or whoever. It was cold inside and smelled of damp stone and old cooking.

Duarte was waiting in the kitchen. He'd gotten thin. He was always lean, but now he was stooped, with black hair he hadn't combed and shadows under his eyes the color of a bruise. His lips were cracked from the wind. We hugged, and he felt like a coat hanger with a jacket on it.

"Thanks for coming," he said.

"You look terrible."

"It's been a week." He shrugged and looked at the floor.

I let it go. I figured a man puts his father in a home, he's entitled to look like that.

The kitchen was the best room in the place. Blue-and-white tile came halfway up the walls, chipped in spots, with a pattern of little ships that repeated all the way around. There was a big cast-iron stove against the far wall, black and heavy, with a kettle already sitting on it. A wooden table with six mismatched chairs. Copper pots hung from nails, and somebody had kept them polished, probably Joaquim, because Duarte didn't look like he'd polished anything in a month. I ran my thumb along the stove's edge. It was still warm. I liked it right away, the way I like any kitchen where the equipment's been used properly for decades.

The back door was next to the stove, a heavy plank door with an iron latch. Duarte lifted it for me and pushed it open, and the cold came in smelling of mud and salt. Outside was the walkway, raised clay banks with boards laid along the top, running out between the pans in every direction. At the end of the closest one, a pan-gate, a wooden sluice with a hand crank, controlling the water in from the channel. Past that, a few hundred yards off across the pans, I could just make out the salt-store, a long wooden shed with a pitched roof and no windows, standing on the far side of a narrow ditch. A plank bridge went over it.

"That's where we keep it," Duarte said. "The store. You'll be in and out of there."

"How many planks in the bridge?"

He looked at me like it was a strange question. "I don't know. Six? Seven?"

I don't know why I asked. Habit, maybe. I like to know what I'm walking on.

He showed me the room I'd have, a narrow bed under a slanted ceiling, one blanket, a window that looked out over the pans. His own room was down the hall. He said good night and went to it without asking me if I wanted anything to eat, which for a man who once fed me half his lunch every day for a summer told me more than I wanted to know.

I put my bag on the bed. Then I went back down to the kitchen, filled the kettle, and stood at the window over the sink with my hands flat on the cold tile, looking out at the grey-pink pans going dark under the last of the sky.

Friday to Sunday, I thought. Easy.

The kettle took a long time to come up, and I stayed at the window while it did. Fog was starting to lift off the lagoon and lie across the pans in low patches. There was a bit of moon behind the cloud, enough that the water in each rectangle held a little light and the clay banks between them showed as dark lines.

Out in the far pan, something was standing.

It was tall and thin, ankle-deep in the water, maybe sixty yards off. Its arms hung at its sides. It was streaked white from the shoulders down, crusted, the way a rake handle gets after a season. It didn't move. Not a shift of weight, not a turn of the head. Nothing on a person stands that still.

A raker, I told myself. Duarte had said he was short on help, but maybe he had somebody who checked the pans at night. Maybe that was normal out here. I've worked with people who did stranger things at midnight than stand in a puddle.

I put my hand up and waved. Felt stupid doing it. It didn't wave back.

The fog moved. A patch slid off the far end of the pan and the moon came through, and I saw the head properly. There was no face. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. It was smooth grey-white skin, drawn in toward the middle in one small puckered place, where a face should have been.

The kettle screamed. I jumped and knocked my elbow on the tap, and I got it off the heat with my other hand and never took my eyes off the window. When the noise died down, the figure was in the same spot. Same posture. I turned off the kitchen light so I could see better and so it couldn't see me, which I know is not how that works. I stood in the dark for maybe a minute.

Then I went to the back door and checked the latch. It was down in the bracket already, and I lifted it and dropped it again to hear it seat. I went up to the room under the slanted ceiling and didn't look out the window. I lay on top of the blanket with my boots on.

I barely slept. Twice I heard the house tick as it cooled and sat up both times. Around four I fell under for what felt like ten minutes, and when I woke there was grey at the edge of the curtain.

I went out the back door before I'd even had water. The cold was wet and it smelled of mud, with salt under it. I walked the boards to the end of the first bank and looked across.

The far pan had changed. Where there'd been shallow water the night before, there was a flat white plate, solid salt from bank to bank. I know how salt sets. It doesn't do that in one night, not in October, not with the water that deep. I walked over anyway, along the boards, and crouched at the edge. I pressed my thumb on the crust. Hard as a floor tile.

From the middle of the pan, prints ran out across the salt. Bare feet, long, narrow, the toes spread. They were pale and dry. Everything else out there was wet, the boards, the clay, the edges of the pans, and these were dry, as if the ground around them had refused to darken. They left the pan and went along the bank in a straight line. I followed them with my eyes, and then a little with my feet, until I could see where they were headed.

The plank bridge. The salt-store on the other side of it.

I stood up. My knees cracked. I didn't go any farther.

Duarte was in the kitchen when I came back in, sitting at the table with both hands around a cup. He wore the same rumpled shirt as the night before, and I'd have bet money he hadn't slept either. In daylight his skin was the color of dishwater, and the cracks in his lips had scabbed. The stove was lit. He'd made coffee, and there was a second cup poured and waiting at my place. That was something.

"Morning," I said.

He nodded at the cup.

I sat down. I drank some of the coffee first, because I wanted my voice to come out normal. "Who've you got working nights out there?"

"Nobody." He said it into the cup.

"There was someone in the far pan. Last night. Late." I waited. "Standing in it."

Duarte didn't look up. His thumb moved back and forth along the rim of the cup. "You saw it from here?"

"From the window. And this morning the pan's gone solid. Solid, Duarte. And there are footprints coming out of it, dry ones, going toward the store." I heard my own voice come out sharper than I meant. "So who is it?"

He shrugged. It was a small shrug, mostly shoulders, the kind you give a waiter who's asked if you want dessert.

"Duarte."

"The pans take what's left out," he said.

"Take what? Left out how?"

Another shrug. He turned the cup a quarter turn on the table. I've known him since we were twelve years old, and I know what he looks like when he's decided not to answer. He used to look exactly like this when his mother asked who broke the window.

"Is this about your father?" I asked, more quietly.

"I'm tired, Tomás."

"That's not an answer."

"I know." He pushed the chair back and stood, slowly, with a hand on the table to do it. He didn't take the cup. "Do the tarps this morning. The stack behind the store. I'll be up later."

"It's not even ten."

"It's ten," he said, and glanced at the clock over the stove, and it was, a minute or two past. He walked down the hall. I heard his door close, and then the bed take his weight.

I sat there with two cups of coffee, one of them full and cooling. The stove ticked. Through the window the far pan sat white and flat, and beside it the bank ran off toward the bridge with nothing on it now that I could see from here.

A dry footprint doesn't need an explanation from a man who won't talk. I told myself that. Then I pulled on my boots.

The tarps were stacked behind the store, six of them, blue plastic gone chalky and stiff with cold. Before I touched them I went back and looked at the prints properly.

I read ground for a living, in a way. At the stove you know what's happening by smell and color before you know it by anything else. Here the wet clay smelled of mud and something eggy underneath, and it was grey-pink. Where the prints ran, the clay had gone pale and the smell went flat and clean, like a cupboard where the salt's kept. That was the banks Duarte had dry-salted and tarped last week, and the prints followed them. The pale stretch ended at the edge of the last tarped bank. Past it the clay was wet and dark and there wasn't one mark on it. The line was so straight I crouched and put my hand on it. Salt on one side, mud on the other.

So I dragged tarps. Six of them, one at a time, from the stack to the far banks, where Duarte wanted them over the heaps. It was slow, wet work, and the walkway was too narrow to pull a folded tarp behind me. I propped the pan-gate open with a brick at the end of the walkway to get through with my arms full, went back and forth, and by two in the afternoon my shoulders were burning and I was thinking about a sandwich. I never shut it.

Duarte got up around four. He sat at the table and looked at a piece of bread without eating it. I asked him if he wanted the tarps checked and he said, "Fine, fine," and went back to bed.

I found the second set of prints the next morning, at first light, with a cup of coffee in my hand. They were the same long narrow feet, toes spread, pale and dry on the wet boards. They went one plank further than the day before. Just one. The pale ground ended at the same straight edge, one plank on, and the brick was still holding the gate open where I'd left it.

I stood there and looked at the brick.

I could have told myself I was tired, but I'm a person who checks the walk-in twice before I go home. I don't forget doors. And I'd forgotten that one because I didn't think it mattered. I pulled the brick out with my boot and it left a dent in the clay.

That night I set it up properly. I shut the gate and cranked it down until the wood was seated. Then I took a bucket of coarse salt from the store, wetted the clay across the walkway just inside the gate, and packed the salt into it in a line about a hand wide, from one edge of the bank to the other. It took me twenty minutes on my knees with the cold coming up through my jeans. I thought about Inês while I did it. She'd sent me a text that afternoon, the first since Wednesday, and it said, "mum says you're staying over Sunday night?" I'd typed "no, back Monday early" and thumbed the send button harder than I needed to.

Then I went in, turned the kitchen light off, pulled a chair to the window and sat down with a blanket and a cup of coffee that was cold by midnight. Duarte's door stayed shut. The fog came up off the lagoon at about eleven and thinned again. I watched the far pan, and then the walkway, and then the far pan again.

It came a little after one. I didn't see it arrive. The pan was empty, and then I looked at the bank and it was on the bank, walking the boards in the middle of the walkway, slow and even, arms hanging. The moon was out enough that I could see the white crust down its shoulders. It came the whole length of the walkway to the gate, and it stopped.

It stood right at the gate with its faceless head tipped down, toward the ground in front of it. Toward the line. I don't know how long. My coffee cup was shaking a little against my knee, and I put it on the sill.

It didn't cross. It didn't try to. It just stood there, and the salt line lay pale across the clay a yard and a half in front of it, and I felt something in my chest come loose, some of the tension. Good, I thought. That's a rule. I can work with a rule.

Then I thought about the brick.

The line wasn't what had stopped it, or not only. The gate was shut. If I was going to know, I had to find out. I put on my boots and went out the back door as quietly as I could. The latch seated with a small click that seemed to travel across every pan. I walked the boards with my heart doing a hard, fast beat in my throat. The gate was maybe forty feet from the door. The figure hadn't moved. It was on the far side of the wood, and I could see it through the slats, white and still, and I could smell it, a dry mineral smell like the inside of a salt cellar.

I put my hand on the crank and turned it. The gate came up, one inch, then two, then about the width of my palm.

It leaned. Its whole body tipped forward from the ankles, and one foot came up off the boards, the toes spread, pale and dry and long. The foot hung in the air over the gap.

I threw my weight on the crank the other way. The gate slammed down so hard the frame rang, and the foot came down on the far side of the wood, a second after the gate, with a small dry sound like a plate set down on a counter.

I stood with both hands on the crank. I didn't breathe. Through the slats I watched the head lift, slowly, and turn a little, as if to work out where I'd gone.

I walked back to the house. I did not run. I locked the door and put my back against it, and it was a long time before I could get my legs to bend and sit me down.

It advanced when a gate was open. That was all I had, but it was something.

The next night I ran a hose. There's a standpipe on the side of the house with a green hose coiled next to it, cracked in a couple of places, and it reached the back door with about ten feet to spare. I didn't have a plan beyond wet. Salt dissolves, and I figured a thing made of salt might not like that. I unrolled it along the boards and let it run, and the water spilled over the edges into the pans and pooled in the low spots on the walkway. Then I went in, sat at the window, and waited.

It came around one again. I'd stopped being surprised that I didn't see it arrive. It came along the bank in the middle of the boards, arms down, head tipped, and it walked straight until the wet started. Then it stopped. Its feet were a yard from the first puddle, and where the trickle ran toward them the crust on its toes went dark, and a thin steam came off, white in the moonlight. It stood there and the steam went up. It didn't try to go around, and there was nowhere to go around to.

After a while it turned and went back the way it had come. I watched it all the way to the far pan and then I watched the pan for another hour, in case.

That was two rules. Shut gate, running water. I had a feeling I'd had at work maybe a thousand times, when a sauce breaks and you figure out it's the heat and not the fat. The relief was in my arms first, and I noticed I'd been sitting with my shoulders up around my ears for two days.

In the morning the prints were there on the dry boards, but they stopped short of the wet, right where the steam had been. I turned the hose off, because Duarte would have a fit about the water bill, and then I remembered Duarte wasn't going to say anything about anything. He came out at eleven, looked at the sodden walkway, looked at me, and said nothing. I didn't push. I'd tried that.

The bridge was what worried me. The prints had been heading for it since the first morning, and the store was on the other side. I spent the afternoon in the salt-store moving bags for something to do, and in the back corner behind a stack of old rakes I found a sluice-bar. It was a flat iron bar about four feet long, pitted orange with rust, and heavy enough that I carried it with both hands. I have no idea what it was for. Some old gate, probably, the kind Duarte's grandfather would have cranked by hand. I don't know why I picked it up. I was thinking about the hose and how a hose runs out, and the bar was there.

I carried it across the bridge and laid it flat over the planks, end to end with the ditch. While I was down there I counted the planks. Seven. Duarte had guessed six or seven, so that was fine.

Then I went to bed at ten, in my clothes, which is not how I like to sleep, and set my alarm for five.

I woke before it went off. It was still dark, only gray at the curtain edge. I took my coffee out to the boards and walked to the bridge with my boots wet through, and the prints came along the bank the way they always did, pale and dry, long toes spread. They ran up to the bar. And that was it. The last print sat an inch short of the iron, and past it the planks were bare and dark and wet. Nothing on the store side. Nothing on the ditch. It looked like somebody had cut them off with a knife.

I stood there and drank my coffee and felt it, the old loose feeling, the one I get at ten forty on a Saturday when the tickets have stopped and the pass is clean. It was a station. Every station has a pattern, a way the orders come in and where the bottleneck is, and once you have it you can run it half asleep. I'd been doing that for twenty-odd years. Gate, water, iron. I could work with that.

Then I looked at the bridge again, because I had been counting things since I was a kid and I can't stop.

Six planks. There'd been seven.

The gap was the fourth one from the house side, and it wasn't rotted through or fallen in. A plank-wide slot of dark water showed where it had been, and the two planks either side were sitting exactly where they'd been. The bar lay across the gap now, more or less, and the nails on both sides were still in the crossbeams, bent flat. I got down on my stomach and looked in the ditch. Silt, water about a foot deep, a beer bottle that had been there since before I was born. No plank. I checked under the bridge and along both banks for fifty yards. I checked the store, twice, every corner, the rakes, the old sacks. I moved the tarp pile. I never found it.

I told myself Duarte had pulled it for kindling, which was stupid, because Duarte hadn't pulled a thing in a week.

I did the rest of the work that day with the plank in my head, the way you think about a knife that's gone missing on the line. Somebody's got it. It's somewhere. It's not a mystery, it's just not here yet. I loaded bags. I ran the hose again in the evening, and I put the salt line down a second time at the gate, packed harder. I called Inês around seven and got her voicemail, and left a message that sounded cheerful to me and probably didn't to her. I said Monday morning. I said I had a shirt. Then I sat in the kitchen with the lights out and the stove ticking, and waited.

Nothing came to the window that night. No steam, no figure, no prints in the dark I could see. I watched until about two, and then the chair got to me, and I put my head on my arms on the table.

The sound woke me. I don't know how long I'd been out.

It was low on the back door, near the bottom plank, a slow dry scrape. It stopped. Then it went again, longer, rasping. I didn't move. My whole face was on my forearm, and I could smell wool and stove smoke, and under it something dry and clean, a salt-cellar smell that hadn't been in the kitchen before. The scrape came a third time. It was patient. It didn't sound like it was trying to get in. It sounded like it was letting me know it was there.

I got up on legs that didn't want it and went down the hall without turning the light on. Duarte's door wasn't locked. He was on his side with the blanket up over his ear, and I could hear him breathing through his mouth, the cracked lips catching.

"Duarte." I got a hand on his shoulder and shook it. "Duarte, get up. It's at the back door."

Nothing. I shook him harder, and his head rolled on the pillow. His eyes opened about halfway and didn't find me.

"Leave it," he said, thick, to the wall. "Don't leave things out. It takes what's left out."

"What things? Duarte. What did you leave out?"

But he'd already gone under again, the breath dragging in and out, and behind me, all the way down the hall, the scraping started up again on the door.

The scraping quit while I was still standing in Duarte's doorway. I waited for it to start again. When it didn't, I went out the front, through the flaked blue door, because I wasn't opening the back one.

It was about three. I'd guess. I didn't look at my phone. There was no moon and the cold came up through my boots. I went around the side of the house to the standpipe with the torch in my teeth and got the green hose going, then dragged the second one out of the store, a black one with a split near the nozzle that sprayed sideways. I ran both along the boards, one to each side of the house, and left them open all the way.

Then I did the gates. There were eleven on the grid that mattered, counting the one at the end of the walkway, and I'd only ever thought about one of them. I went down the banks and cranked each of them down until the wood seated, and I checked each by leaning my whole weight on the frame. Two of them had rusted on the crank and I had to hit the handle with the flat of my hand. It took a long time. My palms went numb and then started to burn. Wet clay got up my sleeves, and the coarse salt I'd been handling since the evening dried white on my wrists.

I didn't hurry, and I didn't let myself look at the far pan until I'd finished the last gate. Working in the dark like that is what I do at closing. Wipe down, shut it off, check it twice, and don't think about anything that isn't on the list. It works right up until the list is finished.

When it was, I went back and stood at the corner of the house and made myself look.

The far pan was empty. The fog lay flat on the water and nothing moved in it. The walkways ran with water from both hoses, and the clay banks had gone grey-pink and slick all the way to the bridge. The iron bar still lay across the gap where the fourth plank should have been. I could just make it out from where I stood.

Nothing standing in the pan. Nothing on the boards. I stayed out there until my jaw hurt from clenching it.

At the first grey I went in through the blue door and packed. I did it fast and badly. The shirt for the graduation was still folded in its plastic sleeve on the chair, and I put it in the bag on top, and it took me three tries to work the zip because my hands wouldn't stop shaking. I told myself it was cold. I thought about Inês standing outside a school in Porto looking at the road for a car. I thought about her face when I said Monday. I didn't look in on Duarte. He was breathing when I left the hall, and I let that be enough.

I went out the front and around past the shed to where the car sat on the gravel. Frost on the windscreen, and the door handle stung. I put the bag in the back seat and had the keys in my hand.

Then I looked back at the house, and I don't know what made me. The kitchen window is at the corner, and the light was just enough to see the glass.

The frost was on the inside. Not the outside, where it belongs. The inside face of the glass was furred white, and along the frame the salt had built up, a thin crust of it, crystal on crystal, growing in from the edges. It hadn't been there when I went out.

Something stood behind the stove.

Bare feet. Pale and dry, on the tile, while the tile all around it was wet where I'd tracked in from the hoses. Tall and thin, and streaked white from the shoulders down. The head was smooth and had nothing on it. It faced the back door for a while, and then it turned, slowly, away from the door and down the hall toward Duarte's room.

My stomach dropped. It felt cold, like swallowing ice water.

I'd done everything right. Gate, water, iron. It had taken me three nights to learn those, and I'd used all of them, every one, and every one had told it the same thing: not out here, not this way. Not across the banks and not over the bridge. And there was the back door, the one I hadn't touched. I'd left it alone all night because it led into the house, because it was mine, because nobody in their right mind would think to guard the door he sleeps behind. It had gone in there. I had shut it in with him.

I don't remember getting in the car. I remember the gravel popping under the tires and the heater blowing cold, the way it had all week. I remember the road out of Aveiro running long and empty in front of me, with the pines black on both sides and not a single truck, not one set of headlights, no one I could flag and say, come, there's a thing in the kitchen. I drove maybe four minutes. My hands were white to the wrists on the wheel.

Then I pulled over on the shoulder and sat with the engine running, and I looked at the road in both directions, and it was empty both ways.

I turned the car around.

I left the car on the gravel with the door open and the engine running. The house was the wrong place to start. The bar was on the bridge, and I ran the walkways in the half-light with both hoses hissing and the water slopping into my boots. I picked it up in both hands. It was cold enough to hurt, and it weighed what it had weighed in the store. I ran back with it against my chest.

The blue door was the way I'd left it, unlatched. Inside, the hall smelled of the salt cellar, dry and clean, and under it there was cold. I didn't look toward the kitchen. I shoved Duarte's door with my shoulder and it banged the wall.

He was curled on his side with his knees up and the blanket kicked off. His lips were white. Salt had crusted in the corners of his mouth, coarse, the kind you'd pinch out of a bucket, and when I got him by the shoulders his head rolled and I heard it in his throat.

"Duarte. Up. Come on."

Nothing. His heels caught on the rug. He weighed about what a full sack weighs, and I was dragging him backward with the bar hooked under one arm, clanking on the floor.

The front door was closer. I knew that, and I still went the other way, because the front was gravel and dry and everything I'd made all night was out back.

The figure was at the end of the hall. It had come out from behind the stove and was walking, slow, one foot and then the other, the pale soles set down flat on the tile. It didn't hurry. I don't think it needed to.

I let go of Duarte and got both hands on the bar and held it out crossways in front of me. It stopped. Three feet away. The head tipped to one side, a little, and stayed there, smooth and blank, and I had the plain feeling of being looked at by something that had no way to look. It leaned toward the iron. Then back. It was working it out.

"Yeah," I said. My voice cracked. "Take your time."

I backed to the sink with the bar still up. The tap was stiff and I cranked it all the way, and the water hit the steel basin so loud it filled the room. I laid the bar across the drain. The water climbed over it and over the lip of the sink and ran down the cupboard door onto the floor, and spread across the tile between us. The figure stood at the edge of it. Its toes were an inch from the wet.

I didn't wait to see what it would do. I got Duarte under the arms again and backed us through the kitchen, past the stove, his head against my chest. I got the latch up with my elbow and kicked the back door open, and we went out onto the boards.

The light was still thin and grey. The walkway was streaming, the hoses running off both sides of the house, and the cold came up through my wet socks. Behind me the tap kept roaring. I dragged Duarte forty feet along the boards, past the last of the water, to where the gate stood at the end, shut and cranked down the way I'd left it. I laid him on the dry planks against the post. His chest went up and down. That was all I checked.

When I turned around the figure was in the back doorway.

It stood on the sill with the kitchen behind it, tall and white to the shoulders. The water off the sink was running past its feet and out the door, and it stayed where it was. It faced down the walkway at us. It didn't come on. Between us and it there were two hoses' worth of water and forty feet of boards, and for about as long as I could hold my breath, that was enough.

It wasn't going to be enough for Duarte. Whatever came off him the next time he went to sleep, I'd be in Porto, or not. I couldn't shut it in and I couldn't shut it out. Every other night I'd stood at a window and watched it, and I'd never once got rid of it.

The only thing it did was follow an open gate.

I hadn't opened one in three days. I'd made that my whole job. I stood with my hand on the crank and thought about Inês outside her school, looking up the road. Then I got my heel against the catch, kicked it off, and hauled the crank over with both hands. The board wouldn't rise fast enough, so I put my boot against it and shoved.

It went up, and the lagoon came in.

I hadn't looked at the tide. It was coming up the channel grey and quick and loud, and it took the gap in one long push, over the sill and across the clay, and over the boards around my ankles and then my shins. It was so cold my legs went numb. I grabbed Duarte's collar and hauled him up onto the bank behind the post, out of it.

The figure moved.

It came down off the sill and along the walkway toward the open gate. The hose water hissed at its feet and steam went up and it kept coming, one step and then the next, not fast. The gate was open. It didn't seem to care about anything else. I stood with my back against the post and my hand knotted in Duarte's collar and watched it walk to within ten feet of me, and I could smell it, dry salt, clean and terrible.

Then the flood reached it.

It stopped. It stood in the moving water up to the knee, and the water pulled at the salt on its legs and the salt ran off. It went in long pale strips down the current and out over the clay. The crust came off the shins and then the thighs. The head tipped down, as it had done at the salt line, to see what was happening to it. The arms stayed at its sides. The white kept coming off, shoulders, chest, and the shape thinned, and the water ran through where it had been, grey, and kept coming.

Then there was nothing on the boards but the tide.

I sat down on the wet boards with my back against the post and stayed there until the tide stopped coming in. It went out slower than it came. Duarte lay next to me with his mouth open, breathing. I checked that about every ten seconds.

I got him to the kitchen bench, took his boots off, and put the blanket from my bed over him. Then I shut off both hoses, because that was something I could do. The stove had gone out. I didn't relight it.

Duarte woke coughing at noon. It was a wet, scraping cough, and he spat salt into his hand and looked at it. Then he looked at me, at my hands, at the water tracked across the tile.

"You left," he said.

"I came back."

He nodded slowly, like that was a lot to take in. His lips had split again. I asked if he knew where he was, and he said the kitchen, don't be stupid, and that was the first thing all week that sounded like him. I made him drink a glass of water. He asked if the gate was open. I said it was. He shut his eyes and didn't say anything else.

The tanker came up the gravel about a quarter to one. It was white, with ECOMUSEU MARINHA DA TRONCALHADA stencilled on the door, and it parked crooked with the engine still going. A stocky man in a museum jacket got out, and a woman with her dark hair tied back climbed down the other side, already in rubber boots. They didn't knock. They stood at the edge of the pans a while, looking, before either of them came to the house.

"Rui Batista," the man said. "This is Carla Nogueira. Is Duarte in?"

"He's on the bench. He's awake."

"Good," Rui said. He didn't ask who I was. He looked at my hands and then at the pans, and said, "Frost."

"It wasn't frost."

"It's a salt frost," Carla said, quietly, like she was reading it off a card. "It happens this time of year. The pans set overnight and it looks worse than it is."

Rui dragged the hose off the tanker and went out along the boards, and Carla stayed. I watched him spray the far pan, which had gone white again by then, I don't know when. The crust broke up and ran off grey-pink into the channel. He did the walkways next, and the banks up to the bridge. Nobody hurried, and nobody asked me a single question. I've had health inspectors ask more.

"Look," Rui said when he came back, winding the hose. "You don't need to sign anything. No forms, no report. It'd only get confusing."

"For who?"

He shrugged, and it was Duarte's shrug, the same one. I let it go. I was too tired to argue with people who were being kind to me.

Carla went in and sat with Duarte for a few minutes. I heard her voice through the door, low and steady, and his one-word answers. When she came out she had a folder under her arm. She took a photocopy out and handed it to me on the step.

It was a page from a ledger, the copy gone grey and the handwriting slanting. A column of dates, a column of names, wages paid. Someone had put a pencil box around one entry in the margin. Nineteen seventy-nine. Armindo Faria, hired hand. Found in the pan at first light, standing, dry, not moving. Salt to the chest already.

"Standing," I said.

"That's what it says."

"Did he." I stopped. I didn't know how to end the question.

"He was thirty," Carla said. "That's in the other book." She looked at the pans. "Joaquim made a mistake this spring. That's why he's in the home. Duarte's been on his own with it since."

"He didn't tell me."

"No," she said. "He wouldn't."

I folded the page in half and then in half again, and it went in my back pocket. I don't know why I kept it. I haven't looked at it since.

Rui offered to sit up with Duarte that night, and I let him. I'd tried Inês's number from the step and it rang out, then rang out again. By then the graduation was over. I texted her anyway, one line, and watched the little word under it say delivered. She didn't answer.

Carla found me the dish soap and a nailbrush, and I stood at the kitchen sink and scrubbed. The salt had worked into the creases of my knuckles and under the nails, and the old burn scars on my forearms had gone white and tight. Cold water stung. Hot water stung worse. I did it until the skin was pink and shining and the water ran clear, and my hands still felt dry.

I slept in the chair by the dead stove with my boots on. Nothing came to the window. Once, around three, I woke and listened to the house for a long time. Only Rui was there, snoring on the bench.

In the morning Duarte was up at the table with a cup in both hands. He looked like he'd been ill for a month and was starting to come out of it. He had color in his face, not much. He didn't ask what I'd done, and I didn't tell him.

"The gate," he said. "Rui shut it."

"Good."

"You didn't have to come back."

"Yeah, I did."

He turned the cup a quarter turn, the way he had on Saturday. "Tell Inês," he said, and stopped, and I waited, but that was all he had. He walked me out to the car. The pans were flat and grey-pink under a low sky, every gate down, and a thin skin of water lay on the boards. He put a hand on the roof of the car, and I put my bag in the back, the shirt still folded on top, and I left.

It was two hours and I didn't stop. The heater still blew cold. I watched the mirror through Aveiro and past the last roundabout and out onto the motorway, and I kept watching it long after I'd stopped believing there was anything to see. There were trucks now, and a grey van with a ladder on top, and a woman in a red hatchback who overtook me and never looked over. That was all. Whatever had stood in the far pan didn't come. Nothing had crusted the inside of the glass by the time I got to Porto, and my hands on the wheel were only hands.

My brother's flat is on the fourth floor with no lift. I took the stairs slowly and rang the bell, and Inês opened the door herself. She was in jeans and a big grey jumper. Behind her on the hall table was a photo in a cardboard frame, her in the black gown with a rolled certificate, and beside her my brother and his wife, both smiling. There was an empty space on the left where somebody should have stood.

"You said Monday," she said.

"I know."

"You said 'of course.'"

"I know I did."

I held out the shirt in its plastic sleeve. I don't know what I thought she'd do with it. She looked at it, then at my hands, which I'd stuck out too far, red and cracked across the backs.

"What happened to them?"

"Work," I said. "A friend needed help. It went bad. I couldn't get out of it." All of it was true and none of it was any use.

"You could've called."

"I did. Twice."

"Yesterday," she said. "After."

She was seventeen and she didn't blink. She took the shirt out of my hand, which I hadn't expected, and held it against her chest for a second, and I thought that was it. Then she put it on the hall table next to the photo, folded, and stepped back.

"It was a really long ceremony," she said. "They read every name."

"I'm sorry."

"I know you are." She held the door with one hand. "That's not the same thing."

She didn't slam it. She closed it gently, and I heard the chain go across. I stood on the landing until the light on the timer clicked off, and I went down the four flights in the dark, one hand on the rail.

I've called her twice since. She picked up once.