The weight of water - Anita Shreve [103]
The girl comes early in the morning and opens the curtains for me, and once again, as I did each day as a child, I look out onto Laurvig Bay, the bay constantly changing, each morning different from the one before or indeed any morning that has ever come before that. When the girl arrives, I am always in need of the medicine, and after she has given it to me, I watch from the chair as she changes the filthy sheets, and goes about the cottage, tidying up, making the thin soup that until recently I was able to drink, speaking to me occasionally, not happy with her lot, but not selfish either. And in this way, she very much reminds me of myself when I was at the Johannsen farm, though in this case, she will have to watch me die, will have to sit beside me in this room and watch the life leave me, unless she is fortunate enough to have me go in the night, and I hope, for her sake, that it will be an easy passage, without drama and without agony.
26 September 1899, Maren Christensen Hontvedt.
I SIT IN the small boat in the harbor and watch the light begin to fade on Smuttynose. I hold in my hand papers from the cardboard carton.
Not long ago, I had lunch with Adaline in a restaurant in Boston. I hadn’t been in a restaurant since the previous summer, and I was at first disoriented by the space — the tall ceilings, the intricately carved moldings, the mauve banquettes. On each table was a marble vase filled with peonies. Adaline was waiting for me, a glass of wine by her right hand. She had cut her hair and wore it in a sleek flip. I could see more clearly now how it might be that she was an officer with Bank of Boston. She was wearing a black suit with a gray silk shell, but she still had on the cross.
Our conversation was difficult and strained. She asked me how I was, and I had trouble finding suitable words to answer her. She spoke briefly about her job. She told me she was getting married. I asked to whom, and she said it was to someone at the bank. I wished her well.
“Have you seen Thomas?” I asked her.
“Yes. I go down there… well, less now.”
She meant Hull, Thomas’s family home, where he lived with Rich, who looked after him.
“He’s writing?”
“No, not that any of us can see. Rich is gone a lot. But he says that Thomas just sits at the desk, or walks along the beach.”
I was privately amazed that Thomas could bear to look at water.
“He blames himself,” said Adaline.
“I blame myself.”
“It was an accident.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“He’s drinking.”
“I imagine.”
“You haven’t seen him since…?”
She was unable to say the words. To define the event.
“Since the accident,” I said for her. “We were together afterwards. It was excruciating. I suppose I will eventually go down to see him. In time.”
“Sometimes a couple, after a tragedy, they find comfort in each other.”
“I don’t think that would be the case with me and Thomas,” I said carefully.
During the hours following the discovery that Billie was missing, Thomas and I had said words to each other that could never be taken back, could never be forgotten. In the space of time it takes for a wave to wash over a boat deck, a once tightly knotted fisherman’s net had frayed and come unraveled. I could not now imagine taking on the burden of Thomas’s anguish as well as my own. I simply didn’t have the strength.
“You’re all right, then?” she asked. “In your place?”
“The apartment? Yes. As fine as can be.”
“You’re working?”
“Some.”
“You know,” she said, “I’ve always been concerned…” She fingered the gold cross. “Well, it doesn’t seem very important now. But I’ve always been concerned you thought Thomas and I…”
“Were having an affair. No, I know you weren’t. Thomas told me.”
“He held me once in the cockpit when I was telling him about my daughter.”
“I know. He told me that, too.” I picked up a heavy silver spoon and set it down. All around me were animated women and men in suits.
“And there’s another thing,” she said. “Thomas indicated