The Weight of Water (10 page)

I imagine that moment would be felt as a small billowy shock through the body, the
whoomph
of touching a frayed cord. Not fatal in itself, perhaps, but a surprise, a jolt.

And that is how it comes to me on the dock. I can see the years that Thomas and I have had together, the fragility of that
life. The creation of a marriage, of a family, not because it has been ordained or is meant to be, but because we have simply
made it happen. We have done this thing, and then that thing, and then that thing, and I have come to think of our years together
as a tightly knotted fisherman’s net; not perfectly made perhaps, but so well knit I would have said it could never have been
unraveled.

During the hours that pass between our return from Portsmouth and dinner, we each go our separate ways. Adaline shuts the
door and reads Celia Thaxter in the forward cabin; Thomas dozes in the cockpit while Billie kneels beside him, coloring; Rich
retreats into the engine compartment to fix the bilge pump; and I sit on Billie’s berth with guidebooks and notes and the
transcript spread all around me. I open the flesh-colored box and examine the penciled translation. I know that I will read
it soon, but I am not quite ready. I feel furtive in the narrow berth, and vaguely ashamed of myself.

I tell myself that the reason for my theft is simple: I want to know how it was, to find the one underlying detail that will
make it all sensible. I want to understand the random act, the consequences of a second’s brief abandonment. I am thinking
not so much of the actions of a single night as I am of the aftermath of years — and of what there would be to remember.

In the guidebooks, I read that history has only one story to tell about John Hontvedt, Maren’s husband, at Smuttynose, apart
from all the events attending the murders on March 5, 1873. On a frigid day in 1870, three years before the murders and two
years after Hontvedt arrived in America, John left Smuttynose for fishing grounds northwest of the island. We are told it
was a particularly filthy day, ice forming on mustaches and oilskins, on lines, and even on the deck of Hontvedt’s schooner,
which remains nameless. John stood on the slippery shingle of the small beach at Smuttynose, the sleet assaulting him from
a slanting angle, trying to decide whether or not to row out to the schooner. We can only guess at what finally compelled
Hontvedt to go to sea on such a day, among the worst the Atlantic had to offer that year. Was it poverty? Or hunger? Expensive
bait that might rot if it wasn’t used? An awful kind of restlessness?

After setting sail and losing sight of Smuttynose, John was surprised by a gale that blew up, creating heavy seas and blizzard
conditions. The snow became so thick on the sea as the hours wore on that John could not have seen much beyond the boat itself.
Perhaps realizing his mistake, John did try then to turn back toward Smuttynose, but the swells were so high and the visibility
so poor that he could make no headway. He was instead forced to drift in an aimless pattern in a darkish, white blindness.
The danger of being swamped or of the schooner being gouged open on unseen rocks and ledges was very real.

A number of the islanders, chief among them a man named Ephraim Downs, who lived on Smuttynose himself, and who would later
live with his family in the Hontvedt house after the murders (the landlord refusing to clean away the bloodstains, he said,
because he could get more money from souvenir hunters than he could from a higher rent), thought John mad for having set out
that day at all, and watched for him to return. When it became apparent that Hontvedt’s schooner must be lost, Downs set out
in his own larger ship, aptly named the
White Rover,
to search for the disabled or stranded boat. Downs and his crew scanned the sea for hours until they themselves lost their
bearings in the storm. After several hours, they finally caught sight of the smaller boat with Hontvedt aboard. Looping across
fourteen-foot swells, Downs managed to collect the stranded seaman. After John was safely aboard the
White Rover,
Hontvedt’s schooner drifted away and was never seen again.

For many hours, the
White Rover
rode the waves, the men aboard her becoming frozen and covered with ice until they could no longer move. When the boat finally
beached herself — and history doesn’t tell us where — the crew, who were able to use neither their legs nor their arms properly,
hitched themselves over the prow of the boat and tumbled onto the sand. Several of the men from the
White Rover
had frozen their feet through and later had to have them amputated. John Hontvedt appears to have survived intact.

“Mommy, will you take me swimming?”

Billie tugs at my sleeve and rolls her head back and forth in the crook of my arm. I set my book down and lift her onto my
lap. A small bit of crayon wrapping is stuck to her bottom lip, and I pick it off. She smells of shellfish and of sunblock.

“I don’t know, Jean,” calls Thomas from the cockpit. “It’s awfully deep out there. I said she had to ask you. I don’t especially
want to go in again myself.”

“She’ll be all right if she wears her life jacket,” says Rich, emerging from the engine compartment. “Anyway,
I
need a swim. I’m disgusting. If we both take her, she’ll be OK.”

“Please, Mom.”

I look at Rich, whose hands are covered with grease, and then I look at Billie. “Sure,” I say “Why not?”

I am able to get over the side of the boat, but I am pretty sure they will never get me back in. Rich has left the swim ladder,
which was being repaired, in his van at the dock. Billie cannonballs into the water and bobs straight up, her hair covering
her face. I swim close to my daughter, never more than an arm’s length away, while Billie flails her arms, barely keeping
her mouth above water. The water is, at first, shockingly cold, but after a few minutes I begin to get used to it. From the
waterline, the prow of the sailboat seems massive — that of an ocean liner. In the distance, without my glasses, the islands
are indistinct shapes of gray and brown.

I give Billie a shove toward Rich, and she “swims” between her uncle and myself — a wriggly fish with no fear. Her mouth fills
with seawater. She swallows it and she seems surprised by the taste. She begs Rich for a ride on his back, and when they swim
near to me, Billie slides off and clutches me around my neck. Rich’s leg is momentarily slippery against my own, and I grab
onto his shoulder to keep from going under.

“Careful, Billie,” I say, loosening her grip around my neck. “I don’t have a life jacket on like you. You’ll sink me.”

From the bowsprit, Thomas watches us. He has a glass in his hand. I see him turn away and smile. He says something I cannot
hear — it must be to Adaline.

When I let go of Rich, he dives deep into the water. He comes up about thirty feet away from me and begins to swim hard, his
arms beating a rhythm to his kick. Billie and I paddle around each other until I see that she is tiring. Thomas reaches down,
and between us we are able to get Billie easily back into the boat. As I anticipated, however, I am not strong enough to haul
myself up and over, and there is an embarrassing and awkward pulling on arms and legs before I am able finally to flop into
the cockpit. Billie wraps herself in a towel and sits, shivering, next to Adaline. When I stand up and put my glasses on,
I see that Rich has swum all the way to Smuttynose and is sitting on the beach.

The Isles of Shoals derives its name not from the shoals surrounding the islands, but rather from the Old English word for
school.
As in schools of fish.

During the American Revolution, the Isles of Shoals were evacuated. Because the Shoalers had been trading with the British,
the colonial leaders of New Hampshire and Maine ordered all residents off the islands. On January 5, 1776, eighty houses were
dismantled, shipped to the mainland, and reconstructed all along the coast, from Massachusetts to Maine. A number of these
houses are still standing.

“Loss. Abandonment. Castration. Chauvinism…”

“But think of Tom Moore, the charm.”

“Melancholy. It’s all melancholic,” says Thomas. “Kavanaugh, Frost, MacNeice.”

“You’re forgetting Yeats. The celebration of the human imagination, the magician.”

“Donnelly. Hyde Donnelly. Do you know him?
Gray light thieving, mother’s grief I Steals by hedgerows
—”

“You’re indicting an entire race,” Adaline says lightly.

Thomas takes a long sip of scotch.

A thick, peasanty scent of fish and garlic spreads and settles over the cockpit where Adaline and Thomas and I are sitting.
Rich is holding a plate of mussels he has just steamed.

“I picked them,” Billie says, weaving through Rich’s legs. She is trying to retain her pride in the mussels, though I sense
she has been somewhat defeated in her attempts actually to like them. Just moments ago, going below to fetch the papers I
took from the Athenaeum, I saw the partly chewed remains of a mussel stuffed inside a crumpled napkin. Billie has on clothes
she particularly likes — a blue T-shirt with Pocahontas on the front and matching shorts — and I know she regards this small
gathering as something of a party. As does Thomas. Billie has brought a sandwich bag of Cheerios, so that she can nibble with
us. She comes and snuggles beside me, screwing her head up and inside my arm. Thomas and Adaline sit across from me. Within
seconds, I know, Billie will ask me for a Coke.

“
Sons are leaving,
” says Thomas.

Rich sets the mussels on a makeshift table in the center of the cockpit, perches himself on the cabin roof, and dangles his
legs over the opening. The air around us seems cleansed. Smuttynose is sharply etched and brushed with a thin wash of gold
from a low sun. From the sloop, the gulls above the island are dark check marks in the blue dust. I am thinking that it is,
possibly, the most beautiful night of the summer.

I have a photograph of the five of us in the cockpit of the Morgan the evening Rich makes the mussels and Thomas breaks the
glass. I take the picture while the light is still orange; and, as a result, all of us look unreasonably tanned and healthy.
In the photograph, Billie is sitting on Rich’s lap and has just reached over to touch a gold wrist cuff that Adaline has put
on a few minutes earlier. Rich is smiling straight at the camera, an open-mouthed smile that shows a lot of teeth, which look
salmon-colored in the light. Beside him, Adaline has shaken out her hair so that the camera has caught her with her chin slightly
raised. She has on a black sundress with thin straps and a long skirt; her cross gives off a glint of sunlight. The low sun
is shining almost painfully into everyone’s eyes, which is why Thomas is squinting and has a hand raised to his brow. The
only part of his face that is clearly identifiable is his mouth and jawline. As for me, I have engaged the timer so that I
have time to insert myself into the picture. I am sitting beside Thomas, but am slightly tilted, as though I am straining
to be part of the composition. I have smiled, but my eyes are, at that instant, closed in a blink. Thomas has attempted to
put his free arm around me, but the camera has caught him with it raised and crooked in the air.

“How exactly did you get the scar?” Adaline is asking.

“We really need to feed Billie,” I say, talking as much to myself as to anyone. It has been an exhausting day, and I haven’t
thought about Billie’s dinner at all. I know that Rich has bought lobsters for the rest of us, but Billie will not eat a lobster.

“Mommy, can I have a Coke?”

“In a car accident,” Thomas says. “When I was a kid. The driver was drunk.” Rich looks up quickly at Thomas, but Thomas turns
his head away.

“Not now, Sweetie. It’s almost time for supper.”

“We have some tunafish,” says Rich. “I’ll make her a sandwich.”

“You’ve done enough,” I say. “The least I can do is make a sandwich.” I start to get up.

“I don’t want tunafish,” Billie says. “I want a lobster.”

“Billie, I don’t think…” I start to say, but Rich stops me with a small shake of his head.

“Why don’t you give the lobster a try?” he asks Billie. “And if you don’t like it, we can make the sandwich then.”

She closes her mouth and nods. I can see that she is slightly worried now that she has won her small contest. I doubt she
really wants a lobster.

“Where are you from?” Adaline asks me. As she crosses her legs, a slit in the skirt of her black dress falls open, revealing
a long, suntanned calf. Thomas looks down at Adaline’s leg, and then away. I am wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Thomas has
a fresh shirt on, a blue shirt with a thin yellow stripe, and he has shaved.

“Indiana, originally,” I say. “My parents are dead. I was born late, when my mother was forty-eight.”

“Mommy, what do seagulls eat?”

“Fish, I think,” I say to Billie. “They dive in the ocean for fish. If you watch them closely, I’ll bet you can see them.”
Selfconsciously, I look toward Smuttynose, at the gulls that loop in the air over the ragged shoreline.

“And you do this?” Adaline asks, gesturing with her hands to include the boat, the island, the harbor.

“When I can,” I say.

“But, Mom, where do they sleep?”

“That’s a good question,” I say, turning to Thomas for help.

“Damned if I know,” Thomas says.

“They must sleep on rocks,” Adaline offers. “They put their heads under their wings, I think.”

“Have you ever seen a seagull sleep?” Billie asks her.

Adaline purses her lips. “I must have done,” she says. “But I can’t think where.”

“On the back of a garbage barge in the middle of Boston Harbor,” Rich calls out from the galley.

“The rats of the sea,” mutters Thomas.

Billie snuggles deeper into the cavity of my arm and chest and speaks into my rib cage. “Adaline is beautiful,” she says shyly,
not quite certain it is all right to say such a thing aloud.

“I know she is,” I say, looking directly at Adaline, who meets my eyes.