Deaths Excellent Vacation

a lot of weed, the ice is thinning out and not healing yet. By the shore the level of the water goes up and down and the ice breaks. But it’s foggy, so you’re not thinking about that, just trying to find your way to the shore. Unless you know to respect the ice, and you kids don’t, you don’t fish.”
    The kids mutter in Japanese.
    He and Lan go outside, and she checks the weather report on her magic phone. “Above freezing for the next two days,” she points out.
    “You foresaw that, right? So it’s your problem.”
    “Come on. They could have a more interesting time.”
    Their boots slush through the runny snow.
    “You could do for them what you did,” she says. “You and the others. Back then.”
    “That’s what you want for your kids? Bam, pow, monster? I don’t do that anymore.”
    “They can’t even go out in this,” she says.
    “Just can’t fish.”
    “They can’t. No. I mean they don’t want to go out in this. It sets them off. Their Talents.”
    “Which are?” he says.
    “They’re shape-changers.”
    He waits for more. She doesn’t say anything.
    “You did it to them?” he prompts. He’s given her plenty of chances to talk about it. They’ve been fishing from the same ice hole for two days. She hasn’t said a word.
    She doesn’t say a word now.
    “You cursed them?”
    He doesn’t believe in personal curses.
    “None of my business, I guess,” he says finally.
    She turns away from him, looking off into the trees.
    “What do they change into? Werewolves? Bats?”
    “Various things,” she says, turning back toward him, blinking. “Shortlived things. One of them changes into a cat. She’ll live ten years.”
    Ten years is a moment.
    “I did that to them,” she says. “And I’m sorry. I want to help them.”
    “What are you looking for from me?” he says. “How not to die? That’s the kind of advice you want?”
    “How to live!” she shouts at him. “Yes!”
    “I move things. Air toward me, water and fire away from me. But I don’t know why I keep on living.”
    “Teach me how you live,” she says, “so I can teach them. And I’ll find out how you can die.”
     
     
    WHEN they get back to the cabin, the kids are gone.
    She says something under her breath and starts running down the path toward the lake, her boots wallowing in the snow. He begins to run too.
    It’s three-quarters of a mile to the lake, and the footing is horrible, slushy snow over mud over frozen earth. For years he’s made his body into an old man’s. He slips and his arms windmill as he catches up to her.
    “— foresaw this?” he pants.
    She turns back to him, furious. “Are you a Talent? Does it always work for you? I was talking to you! And if you can push fire away, why can’t you push earth and just fly?”
    “I don’t fly—”
    He is a man. Men don’t fly. He is a man, like others; he had friends; he had a wife; he was in love. He is Mr. Green, Bill Green. He is not something fallen from the sky, doomed to be alone. He doesn’t fly.
    He was mankind’s Protector once, and he is too lonely to go back to that lonely place. A Protector flies. A man doesn’t.
    He hears screaming from the lake.
    And he flies. Nothing superhero- like, rocketlike; he just pushes the force of gravity away. He’s awkward, rising, wobbling. Too far at first; he thinks he’ll be spotted and spends too much time scanning the sky for a plane. He ducks down into the trees, gets tangled and caught in a pine, flails at branches. He bullies his way through the treetops like a bear through shrubs, sticky with pine sap, whipped by branches.
    There’s light in front of him, a plain that looks like a wide white field.
    The lake is smoking with fog. He can’t see anything. He drops downward, shouting for her, for them, looking for the shore. In the fog, somewhere, they’re shouting for him.
    When he hits the ice, it tilts.
    Broken ice. Open water. He runs across them both, light as a skater. He’s never lost anyone on the ice, and he’s not going to start now. The ice bobs under his feet, and suddenly, out of the fog ahead of him, he sees the kids. They’re stupidly huddled all together by the edge of a fractured black hole, and thrashing in the water he sees two of them, the boy with the long hair and his father. Lan is already out on the ice, flattened on it, her red hair a shock in the grayness, holding her hands out to the boy. “I’ve got you,” Green shouts at her. “It’ll