The Weight of Water (3 page)

“She’s OK. I’ve got my eye on her.”

I relax a bit and sit back down.

“Did you want something more?” I ask. “From Adaline, I mean.”

He shrugs.

“She’s very beautiful,” I say.

Rich nods. “I’ve always envied you,” he says. “You and Thomas.”

He puts his hand to his face to shade his eyes, and he squints in the direction of the boat.

“I don’t see anyone in the cockpit,” I say.

A few minutes later, I take a photograph of Rich and Billie and her pail of mussels. Rich is lying on the small piece of rough
beach, his knees raised, dark circles inside the wide openings of his khaki shorts. The eye is drawn to those dark circles.
His arms are spread at his sides in a posture of submission. His head has fallen into a depression in the sand, so that his
body seems to end at his neck. Billie is standing over him, perfectly bent at the waist, her arms stretched out behind her
for balance, like two tiny wings. She is talking to Rich or asking him a question. Rich seems vulnerable under her scrutiny.
Beside Billie is her green plastic pail of mussels, perhaps enough to make an appetizer for two. Up behind them both is the
Haley house, small and old, the trim neatly painted in a dull brick red.

When I look at the photographs, it is hard not to think: We had seventeen hours then, or twelve, or three.

Immediately after the photograph is taken, Rich sits up. He remembers, he tells Billie, that a pirate named Blackbeard once
buried his treasure on the island. He gets up and searches through the scrub, examining this branch and that, until he has
made two forked sticks. He sets off with Billie while I wait on the beach. After a time — fifteen minutes, twenty? — I hear
a cry from Billie. She is calling to me. I get up to look and then walk over to where she and Rich are standing together,
about two hundred feet from the beach. Billie and Rich are bent over a hole they have dug in the sand. In the hole is a treasure:
five quarters, two dollar bills, a gold-colored toothpick, a chain with a single key attached, a bracelet made of copper wire,
and a silver-colored ring. Rich pretends to read the inscription under the band of the ring. “To E from E with undying love.”

“What’s ‘E to E’ mean?” Billie asks.

“Blackbeard’s real name was Edward, which begins with
E
. And his wife’s name was Esmerelda, which also begins with E.”

Billie ponders this. Rich tells her that the silver ring belonged to Blackbeard’s fifteenth wife, whom Blackbeard himself
murdered. Billie is nearly levitating with excitement and fright.

The boundaries of the Hontvedt house — also known, before the murders, as simply “the red house” — have been marked with stakes.
The boundaries delineate an area approximately twenty feet by thirty-six feet. In this small space were two apartments, separated
by a doorless wall. The northwest side of the house had two front doors.

After the brief ride back, I step up onto the Morgan from the Zodiac, Rich catching my hand. Thomas and Adaline are sitting
opposite one another, on canvas cushions in the cockpit, seawater dripping from their bodies and making puddles on the floor.
They have been swimming, Adaline says, and Thomas seems mildly out of breath.

Adaline has her hands up behind her head, wringing out her hair. Her bathing suit is red, two vibrant wisps of fire-engine
red on glistening skin. Her stomach, a lovely, flat surface the color of toast, seems that of a young girl. Her thighs are
long and wet and have drops of seawater among the light brown hairs.

She twists her hair and smiles at me. Her face is guileless when she smiles. I am trying to reconcile the image of her smile
with the frantic, guttural sounds that emanate in the morning from the forward cabin.

I remember these moments not solely for themselves, but for the knowledge that beyond these memories lies an instant in time
that cannot be erased. Each image a stepping stone taken in innocence or, if not in innocence, then in a kind of thoughtless
oblivion.

Rich goes immediately to Adaline and puts a proprietary hand on the flat of her belly. He kisses her on the cheek. Billie,
too, takes a step forward, drawn to beauty as any of us are. I see that Billie will find a reason to drape herself across
those long legs. With effort, Thomas keeps his eyes on me and asks about our small trip. I am embarrassed for Thomas, for
the extraordinary whiteness of his skin, for his chest, which seems soft. I want to cover him with his blue shirt, which is
lying in a puddle.

On March 5, 1873, approximately sixty people lived on all the islands composing the Shoals: the lighthouse keeper’s family
on White; workmen building a hotel on Star; two families — the Laightons and the Ingerbretsons — on Appledore (formerly known
as Hog); and one family, the Hontvedts, on Smuttynose.

We run the Zodiac into Portsmouth. We are hungry and want lunch, and we don’t have much in the way of provisions. We sit in
a restaurant that has a porch and an awning. It seems as close to the water as one can get in Portsmouth, though I think there
is not much to look at beyond the tugs and the fishing boats. A sharp gust of wind catches the awning and lifts it for a second
so that the poles that anchor it come off the ground as well. The awning tears loose at one corner and spills its wind. The
canvas flaps in the breeze.

“The heavens rent themselves,”
Thomas says.

Adaline looks up at him and smiles.
“Uncovered orbs and souls.”

Thomas seems surprised.
“Mullioned waters,”
he says.

“Beveled whispers.”

“Shuttered grace.”

“Shackled sunlight.”

I think of Ping-Pong balls hit hard across a table.

Adaline pauses.
“Up-rushed sea,”
she says.

“Yes,” Thomas answers quietly.

At the restaurant, Billie eats a grilled cheese sandwich, as she almost always does. She is hard to contain in a restaurant,
an effervescence that wants to bubble up and pop out of the top of the bottle. I drink a beer called Smuttynose, which seems
to be a brand that capitalizes upon the murders. After all, why not name a beer Appledore or Londoner’s? The drink is oak
colored and heavier than I am used to, and I think I become slightly drunk. I am not sure about this. The boat itself produces
a kind of inebriation that stays with you for hours. Even when you step foot on land, you are still swaying, still feeling
the thump of water against the hull.

I read in the guidebooks that America was discovered at the Isles of Shoals, on Smuttynose, by vikings.

On Star Island, there is a cemetery known as Beebe. In it are buried the three small daughters of George Beebe who died separately
and within a few days of each other in 1863 of diphtheria.

At the restaurant I have a lobster roll. Thomas has fried clams. There is a lull in the conversation, as though the strain
of the trip into the harbor in the Zodiac has drained everyone of words. Adaline eats a salad and drinks a glass of water.
I notice that her back is straight while she eats. Rich, by contrast, is easily slouched, his legs stretched in front of him.
He pushes his chair slightly closer to Adaline’s and begins idly to stroke her arm.

Captain Samuel Haley settled on Smuttynose several years before the American Revolution. While he was building a seawall to
connect Malaga and Smuttynose, he turned over a rock and discovered four bars of silver. With this money, he completed the
breakwater and built the pier. The breakwater was destroyed in February 1978.

Edward Teach, also known as the pirate Blackbeard, spent his honeymoon with his fifteenth and last wife on the Isles of Shoals
in 1720. He is said to have buried his treasure on Smuttynose.

“Don’t tear your napkin.”

Thomas’s voice is ragged, like the bits of paper on the table.

Adaline gently removes the wad from Billie’s fist and picks up the debris around her plate.

“How did you get a name like Billie?” she asks.

“It’s Willemina,” Billie answers, the name spooling off her lips in a pleased and practiced way.

“I named her for my mother,” I say, glancing at Thomas. He drains his wineglass and puts it on the table.

“My mom calls me Billie because Willemina is too old,” she adds.

“Fashioned,” I say.

“I think Willemina is a pretty name,” Adaline says. Her hair is rolled at the sides and caught at the back with a clip. Billie
stands on her chair and tilts her head to examine the rolls and the way they seamlessly fold into the nape of Adaline’s neck.

Smuttynose is twenty-eight hundred feet east and west, and a thousand feet north and south. It consists of 27. I acres, almost
all of which is rock. The elevation of the island is thirty feet.

Thomas is thin and stretched, and seems, physically, not to have enough leverage in life. I think that Thomas will probably
be thin until he dies, stooped perhaps in the way some tall men become as they age. I know that it will be an elegant stoop.
I am sure of that.

I wonder if Thomas is as sad as I am when he awakens in the mornings and hears Adaline and Rich in the forward cabin.

We are waiting for the check to come. Billie is standing next to me, coloring on a place mat. “Were you born in Ireland?”
I ask Adaline.

“In the south of Ireland.”

The waitress brings the check. Thomas and Rich reach for it, but Thomas, distractedly, lets Rich have it.

“This assignment you’re on must be gruesome for you,” says Adaline. She begins to massage the back of Billie’s neck.

“I don’t know,” I say. “It seems so long ago. Actually, I wish I could get my hands on some old photographs.”

“You seem to have a lot of material,” Thomas says.

“It was foisted upon me,” I say, wondering why my voice contains a defensive note. “Though I must confess I find the accounts
of the murders intriguing.”

Adaline reaches up and removes a gold hair clip from the back of her head. Her hair is multihued, a wood grain that curls
slightly in the humidity, as does Billie’s. On the boat, Adaline most often wears her hair rolled at the back of her head
or at the nape of her neck in intricate knots and coils that can be loosened with a single pin. Today, when she removes the
clip, her hair falls the length of her back, swaying with the fall. The settling of all that hair, the surprising abundance
of hair springing from a knot no bigger than a peach, seems, at the time, like a trick, a sleight of hand, for our benefit.

I look over at Thomas. He is breathing slowly. His face, which normally has high color, has gone pale. He seems stunned by
the simple fall of hair from a knot-as though the image itself, or the memories it evokes, were unwanted news.

I do not have many personal photographs of Thomas. There are dozens of other pictures of him, photos of a public nature: book-jacket
portraits, for example, and formal snapshots in magazines and newspapers. But in my own collection, Thomas has almost always
managed to avert his eyes or to turn his head altogether, as if he did not want to be captured on any day at any place in
time. I have, for instance, a picture of Thomas at a party at our apartment after Billie was born: Thomas is stooped slightly,
speaking with a woman, another poet, who is also a friend. He has seen me coming with the camera, has dipped his head and
has brought a glass up to his cheek, almost entirely obscuring his profile. In another photograph, Thomas is holding Billie
on a bench in a park. Billie, perched on Thomas’s knee, seems already aware of the camera and is smiling broadly and clasping
her tiny fists together with delight at this new activity, at this strange face that her mother has put on — one with a moving
and briefly flickering eye. Thomas, however, has bent his head into Billie’s neck. Only his posture tells the viewer he is
the father of the child.

For years I thought that Thomas avoided the camera because he has a scar that runs from the corner of his left eye to his
chin — the result of a car accident when he was seventeen. It is not disfiguring, in the way some scars can be, ruining a
face so that you no longer want to look at it; instead, Thomas’s scar seems to follow the planes of his face — as though a
brush had made a quick stroke, a perfect curve. It is almost impossible not to want to touch that scar, to run a fingertip
along its bumpy ridge. But it is not the scar that makes Thomas turn his face away from the camera; it is, I think, that he
cannot bear to be examined too closely by a lens. Just as he is not able to meet his eyes for any length of time in a mirror.

I have one photograph of Thomas in which he is not turned away. I took it on the morning after we met. He is standing in front
of his apartment building in Cambridge, and he has his hands in the pockets of his trousers. He has on a wrinkled white shirt
with a button-down collar. Even in this picture, the viewer can see that Thomas wants to pull away, and that it is with the
greatest of effort that he has kept his eyes focused on the camera. He looks ageless in the photograph, and it is only because
I happen to know that he is thirty-two that I would not think he was forty-seven or twenty-five. In the picture, one can see
that Thomas’s hair, which is naturally thin and of no distinct color, has recently been cut short. I took the picture about
nine o’clock in the morning. He looks that morning like someone I have known a long time — possibly since childhood.

We met for the first time, appropriately, in a bar in Cambridge. I was twenty-four, and worked for a Boston paper, assigned
recently to Local Sports. I was on my way home from a shoot in Somerville of a high school girls’ basketball team, but I needed
a bathroom and a pay phone.

I heard his voice before I saw his face. It was low and measured, authoritative and without noticeable accent.

When he finished the reading, he turned slightly to acknowledge a nod, and I could see Thomas’s face then in the light. I
was struck by his mouth — he had a loose and generous mouth, the only extravagance in a spare face. Later, when I was sitting
with him, I saw that his eyes were set closely together, so that I did not think he was classically handsome. His irises,
however, were navy and flecked with gold, and he had large pupils, dark circles that seemed to have no protection.