The weight of water - Anita Shreve [72]
“Earlier. I did. I don’t know why.”
I look up toward the sloop I cannot see. My horizon of beach and rocks and water is a dull watercolor blur.
“What do you think is going on out there?” I ask.
Rich turns away from me. “Jean, don’t do this to yourself.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“It’s painful to watch.”
I stand up abruptly and walk away from the water. I walk fast, meaning to shake Rich, to shake them all. I want refuge — from the cold, from the island, most of all from the sight of the sloop in the harbor. I walk toward the Hontvedt house. From where I have so recently come.
But Rich is right behind me. He follows me over the rocks, through the thick brush. When I stop, he stands beside me.
“This is where the women were murdered,” I say quickly. Jean.
“It’s so small. They lived here in the winter. I don’t know how they did it. I look at this island, and I try to imagine it. The confinement, the claustrophobia. I keep trying to imagine the murders.”
“Listen—”
“There aren’t even any trees here. Did you know that until recently children who were raised on the island never saw a tree or a car until they were teenagers?”
“Jean, stop.”
“I love Thomas.”
“I know you do.”
“But it’s been hard.”
“He makes you worry.”
I look at Rich, surprised at this insight. “Yes, he does. He makes me worry. Why did you shave your hair?”
He smiles and rubs his head.
“Do you love Adaline?” I ask.
Rich looks out toward the boat. I think that he, too, is wondering.
“It’s a sexual thing?” I ask.
He tilts his head, considering. “She’s very attractive,” he says. “But it’s a bit more than that. She’s… Intriguing.”
“And we’re not intriguing,” I say. “We’re just good.”
“We’re not that good,” he says, and he smiles. He has perfect teeth.
I put my hand on his arm.
He is stunned. I can feel that, the small jolt through the body. But he does not pull away.
“Jean,” he says.
I lean forward and put my mouth on the skin of his arm. Did I misread the trickle of sand on the backs of my legs?
When I look up, I can see that Rich is bewildered. I realize this is the first time I have ever seen him lose his composure.
“Why?” he asks.
I study him. I shake my head. Deliberately, I could say. Or, To do it before Thomas does it to me. Or, Before I have absolute proof he has done it to me. Or, simply, Because I want this, and it’s wrong.
Without touching me with his hands, he bends to kiss me. The kiss is frightening — both foreign and familiar.
I lift my sweatshirt up over my head. Oddly, I am no longer cold, and I have long since stopped shivering.
I can hear his breathing, controlled breathing, as if he had been running.
I feel the top of his head, that smooth map.
He kisses my neck. Around us, gulls and crabs swoop and scurry in confusion, alarmed by this disturbance in the natural order of the universe. I taste his shoulder. I put my teeth there lightly.
He holds me at my waist, and I can feel his hands trembling.
“I can’t do this,” he says into the side of my head. “I want to.” He traces a circle on my back. “I want to,” he repeats, “but I can t.
And as suddenly as it opened, a door shuts. For good. I lean my head against his chest and sigh.
“I don’t know what came over me,” I say.
He holds me tightly. “Shhhh,” he says.
We stand in that posture, the clouds moving fast overhead. There is, I think, an intimacy between us, an intimacy I will not know again. A perfect, terrible intimacy — without guilt, without worry, without a future.
Calvin L. Hayes, a member of the coroner’s jury who participated in the inquest held over the bodies of Anethe Christensen and Karen Christensen, took the stand for the prosecution and explained in some detail what he had observed: “We arrived on the island between