The weight of water - Anita Shreve [104]
I nodded. “You were lucky,” I said. “Not having a life vest.”
She looked away.
“Why did you leave her?” I asked suddenly, and perhaps there was an edge of anger in my voice.
I hadn’t planned to ask this of Adaline. I had promised myself I wouldn’t.
Her eyes filled. “Oh, Jean, I’ve gone over and over this, a thousand times. I didn’t want to be sick in front of Billie. I wanted fresh air. I’d been looking through the hatch all morning. I didn’t think. I just opened it. I just assumed she wouldn’t be able to reach it.”
“I don’t think she went out the hatch,” I said.
Adaline blew her nose. I ordered a glass of wine. But already I knew that I would not be there long enough to drink it.
“She was a wonderful girl,” I said to Adaline.
I think often of the weight of water, of the carelessness of adults.
Billie’s body has never been found. Her life jacket, with its Sesame Street motif, washed up at Cape Neddick in Maine. It is my theory that Billie had the life jacket on, but not securely. That would have been like Billie, unclipping the jacket to readjust it, to wear it slightly differently, backwards possibly, so that she could satisfy herself that some part of her independence had not been lost. It is my theory that Billie came up the companionway looking for me or for Adaline to help her refasten the waist buckle. I tell myself that my daughter was surprised by the wave. That it took her fast, before thoughts or fear could form. I have convinced myself of this. But then I wonder: Might she have called out Mom, and then Mom? The wind was against her, and I wouldn’t have heard her cry.
I did not return Maren Hontvedt’s document or its translation to the Athenaeum. I did not send in the pictures from the photo shoot, and my editor never asked for them.
This is what I have read about John Hontvedt and Evan Christensen. John Hontvedt moved to a house on Sagamore Street in Portsmouth. He remarried and had a daughter named Honora. In 1877, Evan Christensen married Valborg Moss at St. John, New Brunswick, where he had gone from Portsmouth, and where he worked as a carpenter and cabinetmaker. After his marriage, the couple moved to Boston. They had five children, two of whom died in infancy.
I think about the accommodations Evan Christensen would have had to make to marry another woman. What did he do with his memories?
Anethe and Karen Christensen are buried side by side in Portsmouth.
I sometimes think about Maren Hontvedt and why she wrote her document. It was expiative, surely, but I don’t believe she was seeking absolution. I think it was the weight of her story that compelled her — a weight she could no longer bear.
I slide the handful of papers into the water. I watch them bob and float upon the water’s twitching surface, and I think they look like sodden trash tossed overboard by an inconsiderate sailor. Before morning, before they are found, the papers will have disintegrated, and the water will have blurred the ink.
I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.
Acknowledgments
I could not have written this book without the aid of the various guidebooks to the Isles of Shoals as well as the several published accounts of the Smuttynose murders, in particular Murder at Smuttynose and Other Murders by Edmund Pearson (1938), Moonlight Murder at Smuttynose by Lyman Rutledge (1958), The Isles of Shoals: A Visual History by John Bardwell (1989), The Isles of Shoals in Lore and Legend by Lyman Rutledge (1976), “A Memorable Murder” by Celia Thaxter (1875), A Stern and Lovely Scene: A Visual History of the Isles of Shoals by the Art Galleries at the University of New Hampshire (1978), Sprays of Salt by John Downs (1944), and, of course, my much thumbed copy of Ten Miles Out: Guide Book to the Isles of Shoals by the Isles of Shoals Unitarian Association (1972). To these authors and to others who have written about this wonderful and mysterious