The weight of water - Anita Shreve [1]
— Susan Kenney, New York Times Book Review
“Taut and chilling.… Told in exquisitely moving prose.… The sense Shreve conveys of life’s inexorability is perfectly on target.”
— Polly Paddock, Charlotte Observer
“It’s a literary voyage you don’t want to miss.… A stunningly realized portrait of love’s darker aspects.… Shreve’s plot line is a powerful current, the writing equally strong.”
— Amy Waldman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Shreve manages to keep the reader’s interest at a fever pitch.… A haunting and disturbing tale.”
— Karen Glendenning, Chattanooga Free Press
“Shreve’s writing is spare, poetic, and completely captivating.”
— Rae Francoeur, North Shore Magazine
“Enthralling.… The Weight of Water sheds light as raw as that which floods the Isles of Shoals in the dark of winter.… Shreve has written the most moving book of her career so far.”
— Rebecca Radner, San Francisco Chronicle
BY ANITA SHREVE
Testimony
Body Surfing
A Wedding in December
Light on Snow
All He Ever Wanted
Sea Glass
The Last Time They Met
Fortune’s Rocks
The Pilot’s Wife
The Weight of Water
Resistance
Where or When
Strange Fits of Passion
Eden Close
For my mother and my daughter
Author’s Note
DURING THE NIGHT of March 5, 1873, two women, Norwegian immigrants, were murdered on the Isles of Shoals, a group of islands ten miles off the New Hampshire coast. A third woman survived, hiding in a sea cave until dawn.
The passages of court testimony included in this work are taken verbatim from the transcript of The State of Maine v. Louis H.F. Wagner.
Apart from recorded historical fact, the names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in this work are either the products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
The matter of who killed Anethe and Karen Christensen was settled in a court of law, but has continued to be debated for more than a century.
I HAVE TO let this story go. It is with me all the time now, a terrible weight.
I sit in the harbor and look across to smuttynose. A pink light, a stain, makes its way across the island. I cut the engine of the small boat I have rented and put my fingers into the water, letting the shock of the cold swallow my hand. I move my hand through the seawater, and think how the ocean, this harbor, is a repository of secrets, its own elegy.
I was here before. A year ago. I took photographs of the island, of vegetation that had dug in against the weather: black sedge and bayberry and sheep sorrel and sea blite. The island is not barren, but it is sere and bleak. It is granite, and everywhere there are ragged reefs that cut. To have lived on Smuttynose would have required a particular tenacity, and I imagine the people then as dug in against the elements, their roots set into the cracks of the rocks like the plants that still survive.
The house in which the two women were murdered burned in 1885, but when I was here a year ago, I photographed the footprint of the house, the marked perimeter. I got into a boat and took pictures of the whitened ledges of Smuttynose and the black-backed gulls that swept and rose above the island in search of fish only they could see. When I was here before, there were yellow roses and blackberries.
When I was here before, something awful was being assembled, but I didn’t know it then.
I take my hand from the water and let the drops fall upon the papers in the carton, dampened already at the edges from the slosh. The pink light turns to violet.
Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.
IT IS MY job to call out if I see a shape, a rocky ledge, an island. I stand at the bow and stare into the fog. Peering intently, I begin to see things that aren’t really there. First tiny moving lights, then minutely subtle gradations of gray. Was that