The Weight of Water

by Anita Shreve

  “It’s the bilge,” Thomas says to me. “Rich says the electric is gone.”

  Thomas works intensely, silently, as if he wishes to exhaust himself.

  I hear another sound then, or rather it is the cessation of sound.

  “Shit,” I hear Rich say loudly.

  He comes down the ladder. He lifts a diving mask off his face, and I can see the crazy 8 the rubber has made. The skin around the 8 looks red and raw. “We’ve lost the engine,” he says quickly. He looks at Billie. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “She’s seasick,” I say.

  He sighs heavily and rubs his left eye with his finger. “Can you take the wheel for a minute?” he asks me. “I have to go into the engine compartment.”

  I look at Billie, who is lost in the isolation of her misery. She has her hands neatly folded at her stomach. “I could put her in with Adaline,” I say. I know that Rich would not ask for help unless he really needed it.

  “Get her settled,” he says, “and come on up, and I’ll show you what to do. The sooner the better.”

  I take Billie to the forward cabin and open the door. The berths make an upside-down V that joins in the middle, so that they form a partial double bed. Below this arrangement, there are large drawers, and to the end of each leg of the V, a hanging locker. Adaline is lying on her side in the berth to my left. She has a hand to her forehead. She glances up as I enter and raises her head an inch.

  I hold Billie on my hip. I do not want to give my daughter up. I do not want her to be with Adaline. Billie retches again.

  “She hasn’t thrown up yet,” I say, “but she feels awful. Rich needs me to take the wheel for a minute. Thomas is right here if you need him.”

  “I’m sorry, Jean,” she says.

  I turn to Billie. “I have to help Uncle Rich for a minute,” I say. “Adaline is going to take care of you. You’re going to be all right.” Billie has stopped crying, as if she were too sick to expend even the effort to weep.

  “Seasickness is awful,” I say to Adaline. “Rich and Thomas pride themselves on never getting sick. It’s supposed to be in the genes. I guess Billie didn’t get them.”

  “It’s one of the first things he told me about himself when I met him,” says Adaline.

  “Rich,” I say, wiping the sweat off Billie’s brow.

  “No, Thomas.”

  I feel it then. A billowing in of the available air.

  “When did you meet Thomas?” I ask as casually as I can.

  There are moments in your life when you know that the sentence that will come next will change your life forever, although you realize, even as you are anticipating this sentence, that your life has already changed. Changed some time ago, and you simply didn’t know it.

  I can see a momentary confusion in Adaline’s face.

  “Five months ago?” she says, trying for an off hand manner. “Actually, it was Thomas who introduced me to Rich.”

  A shout makes its way from the cockpit to the forward cabin.

  “Jean!” Rich yells. “I need you!”

  “Put Billie down here with me,” Adaline says quickly. “She’ll be fine.”

  I think about Thomas’s suggestion that we use Rich’s boat.

  I set Billie beside Adaline, between Adaline and the bulkhead, and as I do, the boat slides again. Billie whacks her head against the wall. “Ow,” she says.

  I am thinking I just want it to be all over.

  I could not have anticipated what it is like above deck, how sheltered we have been below. I did not know that a storm could be so dark, that water could appear to be so black.

  There is almost no visibility. Rich takes my arm and turns me around to face the stern and yells into the side of my hood. “This is simple,” he shouts. “Keep the seas behind you just like they are now. Whatever you have to do. I’m running with a piece of sail, but don’t bother about that right now. The main thing is that we don’t want the boat to put its side to the waves. OK?”

  “Rich, when did you meet Adaline?”

  “What?” He leans closer to me to hear.

  “When did you meet Adaline?” I shout.

  He shakes his head.

  I turn away from him. “How high are those waves?” I ask, pointing.

  “High,” he says. “You don’t want to know. OK, now, take the wheel.”

  I turn and put my hands on wooden spokes at ten and two o’clock. Immediately the wheel spins out of my control, flapping against the palms of my hands.

  “You have to hang on, Jean.”

  “I can’t do this,” I say.

  “Yes, you can.”

  I take hold of the wheel again and brace my legs against the cockpit floor. The rain bites my cheeks and eyelids.

  “Here, put this on,” he says.

  He bends toward me with a diving mask, and in the small shelter of our hoods I realize we do not have to shout. “Rich, where did you meet Adaline?” I ask.

  He looks confused. “The Poets and Prose dinner,” he says. “I thought you knew that. Thomas was there. You couldn’t go.”

  “I couldn’t get a babysitter. Why was Adaline there?”

  “Bank of Boston was a sponsor. She went as a representative.”

  Rich slips my hood from my hair, and I think it must be that gesture, the odd tenderness of that gesture, or perhaps it is the fitting of the mask, as you might do for a child, but he bends and kisses my wet mouth. Once, quickly. There is a sudden hard ache inside me.

  He lowers the mask onto my face. When I have adjusted it and opened my eyes, he already has his back to me and is headed for the cabin.

  I think it will be impossible to do as Rich has asked. I cannot control the wheel without using both hands, so I have to steer with my neck craned to see behind the stern. The boat falls into a trough, and I think the wall of water will spill upon me and swamp the boat. The swell crests at the top, then pushes the boat along with a forward zip. The boat zigzags in my inexpert hands. Several times, I mistake the direction I should turn the wheel, and overcorrect. I do not see how I will be able to keep the waves behind me. My hands become stiff with the wet and cold. The wheel shakes, and I put all my weight into my hands to keep it from spinning away from me. Less than an hour earlier I was on the beach at Smuttynose.

  A wave breaks over the railing to my left. The water sloshes into the cockpit, rises to my ankles, and quickly drains away. The water is a shock on the ankles, like ice. The boat, I see, is turning into the swells. I fight the wheel, and then, oddly, there is no resistance at all, just a spinning as if in air. To my right, lightning rises from the water. Then we are lost again in a trough, and I am once more struggling with the steering apparatus. Rich has been gone only a minute, two minutes. There is another lightning skewer, closer this time, and I begin to have a new worry.

  The jib snaps hard near the bow. It collapses and snaps again. I turn the wheel so as to head into the wind. The jib grows taut and steadies.

  Adaline emerges from the forward hatch.

  I rub the surface of the diving mask with my sleeve. The wheel gives, and I take hold of it again. I am not sure what I am seeing. There is the smoky blur of the Plexiglas hatch rising. I take the diving mask off and feel for my glasses in the pocket of my oil-skin. There is a half inch of water in the pocket. I put the glasses on, and it is as though I am looking through a prism. Objects bend and waver.

  Adaline sits on the rim of the hatch and lifts her face to the sky, as if she were in a shower. The rain darkens and flattens her hair almost at once. She slips out of the hatch entirely and closes it. She slides off the cabin roof and onto the deck. She holds herself upright with a hand on a metal stay. She comes to the rail and peers out. I yell to her.

  She has on a white blouse and a long dark skirt that soaks through immediately. I cannot see her face, but I can see the outline of her breasts and legs. I yell again. She doesn’t have a life vest on.

  I shout down to Rich, but he doesn’t hear me. Even Tho
mas cannot hear with all the roar.

  What is she doing out there? Is she crazy?

  I feel then an anger, a sudden and irrational fury, for her carelessness, this drama. I do not want this woman to have entered our lives, to have touched Thomas or Billie, to have drawn them to her, to have distracted them. I do not want this woman to be up on deck. And most of all, I do not want to have to go to her. Instead, I want to shake her for her foolishness, for the theatrical way she carries herself, for her gold cross.

  I let the wheel go, bend forward at the waist, and clutch at a stay. The wind flattens the oilskin against my body. I reach for a winch, the handholds in the teak railing. I pull myself forward. She is perhaps fifteen feet from me. My hood snaps off my head.

  Adaline leans over the teak rail. Her hair falls in sheets, then blows upward from her head. I see then that she is sick.

  I am three, four feet from where she is huddled at the railing. I shout her name.

  The boat turns itself into the swells and heels. Adaline straightens and looks at me, an expression of surprise on her face. The jib swings hard, and makes a sharp report, like a shot. She holds out her hand. It seems to float in the air, suspended between the two of us.

  I have since thought a great deal about one time when I shut a car door, gave it a push, and in the split second before it closed, I saw that Billie’s fingers were in the door, and it seemed to me in the bubble of time that it took for the door to complete its swing that I might have stopped the momentum, and that I had a chance, a choice.

  In Alfred, Maine, the jury took less than an hour to reach a verdict of murder in the first degree. Wagner was sentenced to be hanged. He was then taken to the state prison at Thomaston to await execution.

  The hanging at Thomaston was a particularly grisly affair and is said to have almost single-handedly brought about the abolition of the death penalty in Maine. An hour before Wagner and another murderer, a man named True Gordon, who had killed three members of his brother’s family with an ax, were to be hanged, Gordon attempted suicide by cutting his femoral artery and then stabbing himself in the chest with a shoemaker’s knife. Gordon was bleeding out and unconscious, and the warden of Thomaston was presented with a ghastly decision: Should they hang a man who was going to die anyway before the afternoon was out? The warrant prevailed, and Wagner and Gordon were brought to an abandoned lime quarry, where the gallows had been set up. Gordon had to be held upright for the noose to be put on. Wagner stood on his own and protested his innocence. He proclaimed, “God is good. He cannot let an innocent man suffer.”

  At noon on June 25, 1873, Louis Wagner and True Gordon were hanged.

  Adaline goes over like a young girl who has been surprised from behind by a bullying boy and pushed from the diving board, arms and legs beginning to flail before she hits the water.

  The ocean closes neatly over her head. I try to keep my eye fixed on the place where she has gone in, but the surface of the water — its landscape, its geography — twitches and shifts so that what has been there before is not there a moment later.

  The sea heaves and spills itself and sends the boat side-to-sliding down a trough. Water cascades onto the deck, pinning my legs against the railing. Adaline breaks the surface twenty yards from the place I expected her to be. I shout her name. I can see that she is struggling. Rich comes above to see what has happened to the boat. He takes the wheel immediately.

  “Jean!” he shouts. “Get away from the railing. What’s going on?”

  “Adaline’s overboard,” I shout back, but the wind is against me, and all he can make out is my lips moving soundlessly.

  “What?”

  “Adaline!” I yell as loudly as I can and point.

  Thomas comes above just then. He has put on a black knit cap, but his oilskins are off. Rich shouts the word Adaline to Thomas and gestures toward the life ring. Thomas takes hold of the life ring and pulls himself toward me.

  There are thundering voices then, the spooling out of a line, a life ring missed and bobbing in a trough. There is a flash of white, like a handkerchief flung upon the water. There are frantic and sharp commands, and Thomas then goes over. Rich, at the wheel, stands in a semi-crouch, like a wrestler, from the strain of trying to keep the boat upright.

  I think then: If I had put out my hand, might Adaline have grabbed it? Did I put out my hand, I wonder, or did a split second of anger, of righteousness, keep my hand at my side?

  I also think about this: If I hadn’t shouted to Adaline just then, she would not have stood up, and the sail would have passed over her.

  When Rich hauls Adaline over the stern, her skirt and underwear are missing. What he brings up doesn’t seem like a person we have known, but rather a body we might study. Rich bends over Adaline and hammers at her chest, and then puts his mouth to hers again and again. In the corner of the stern, against the railing, Thomas stands doubled over from the effort to rescue Adaline and to pull himself back into the boat. He wheezes and coughs for breath.

  And it isn’t me, it isn’t even me, it is Rich — angry, frustrated, exhausted, breathless — who lifts his head from Adaline’s chest, and calls out: “Where’s Billie?”

  25 September 1899

  I NOW ENCOUNTER my most difficult task of all, which is that of confronting the events of 5 March 1873, and committing them to paper, to this document, to stand as a true account made by a witness, one who was there, who saw, and who survived to tell the tale. Sometimes I cry to myself, here in the silence of my cottage, with only the candles to light my hand and the ink and the paper, that I cannot write about that day, I cannot. It is not that I do not remember the details of the events, for I do, too vividly, the colors sharp and garish, the sounds heightened and abrasive, as in a dream, a terrible dream that one has over and over again and cannot escape no matter how old one grows or how many years pass.

  It was a day of blue sky and bright sun and harsh reflections from the snow and sea and ice crystals on the rocks that hurt the eye whenever one’s gaze passed across the window panes or when I went outside to the well or to the hen house. It was a day of dry, unpleasant winds that whipped the hair into the face and made the skin feel like paper. The men had left the house early in the morning to draw their trawls, which they had set the day before, and John had said to me as he was leaving that they would be back midday to collect Karen and to have a meal before they set out for Portsmouth to sell the catch and purchase bait. I had some errands I wished him to perform, and I spoke to him about these, and it is possible I may have handed him a list on that day,

  I do not remember. Evan stumbled down the stairs, unshaven, his hair mussed, and grabbed a roll on the table for his breakfast. I urged him to stay a moment and have some coffee, as it would be raw and frigid in the boat, but he waved me off and collected his jacket and his oilskins from the entry way. Matthew was already down at the boat, making it ready, as he did nearly every morning. Indeed, I hardly ever saw Matthew, as he seemed to be on a clock different from the rest of us, rising at least an hour before me, and retiring to his bed as soon as it was dark. Karen, I remember, was in the lounge that morning, and she said to John that she would be dressed and ready to go with him after the dinner meal, and John nodded to her, and I could barely look at her, since she had had all her teeth removed, and her face had a terrible sunken appearance, as one sometimes sees on the dead. Karen, who had been with us since the end of January, had been fired from her job with the Laightons when she had said one day that she would not sweep out or make the beds in a certain room belonging to four male boarders. I suspect that Eliza Laighton had been wanting to let Karen go for some time, since Karen could now speak a rudimentary English and therefore could make her complaints and opinions known, as she had not been able to do when she first arrived. As you may imagine, I was somewhat ambivalent about Karen’s presence. Since Evan’s arrival, we had not been overly cordial with one another, and, in addition, there were many of us under that roof, under that half-r
oof I should say, since we all lived in the southwest apartment, so as to be nearer to the heat source during the long winter.

  Indeed, I can barely write about that dreadful winter when we were all closed in together for so many weeks in January and February. In the kitchen most hours of the day, there would be myself and John, Evan and Anethe, Matthew of course, and then Karen, and for days on end we would not be able to leave the house or to bathe properly so that there was a constant stale and foul odor in that room, a smell composed of shut-in human beings as well as the stink of fish that was on the oilskins and in the very floorboards themselves, and that no matter how hard I scrubbed with the brush was never able entirely to remove. Even Anethe, I noticed in the last weeks of February, had begun to lose her freshness, and I did observe that her hair, unwashed for so many days, took on a darker and more oily appearance and that her color, too, seemed to have faded in the winter.

  It was a severe trial to keep one’s temper in that fetid atmosphere. Only Evan seemed to have any enthusiasm for his lot, being content simply to remain in Anethe’s presence, though I did notice signs of strain in Anethe herself, and if ever a marriage was put to the test, it was on that island, during those winters, when small tics or habits could become nearly unbearable, and the worst in a person was almost certain to emerge. John used the hours to mend nets and repair trawls, and Matthew was his partner in this work. Matthew would often hum or sing tunes from Norway, and I do remember this as a pleasant diversion. Evan had taken on the building of a wardrobe for Anethe as a project, so that the room was filled not only with nets and hooks into which one had to be careful not to become entangled, but also with wood shavings and sawdust and nails and various sharp implements with which Evan worked. I took refuge in routine, and I will say here that more than once in my life the repetition of chores has been my salvation. Of the six of us, I was the one who went outdoors the most often, to collect wood or water or eggs from the coop. It was understood that I would keep the house in order, and I have observed that while fishermen do take seasonal rests from their labors, their womenfolk do not, and do not even when the men are too weak from old age to draw a trawl and must retire from their labors. An aging wife can never retire from her work, for if she did, how would the family, or what was left of it, eat?