The weight of water - Anita Shreve [93]
I think then: If I had put out my hand, might Adaline have grabbed it? Did I put out my hand, I wonder, or did a split second of anger, of righteousness, keep my hand at my side?
I also think about this: If I hadn’t shouted to Adaline just then, she would not have stood up, and the sail would have passed over her.
When Rich hauls Adaline over the stern, her skirt and underwear are missing. What he brings up doesn’t seem like a person we have known, but rather a body we might study. Rich bends over Adaline and hammers at her chest, and then puts his mouth to hers again and again. In the corner of the stern, against the railing, Thomas stands doubled over from the effort to rescue Adaline and to pull himself back into the boat. He wheezes and coughs for breath.
And it isn’t me, it isn’t even me, it is Rich — angry, frustrated, exhausted, breathless — who lifts his head from Adaline’s chest, and calls out: “Where’s Billie?”
25 September 1899
I NOW ENCOUNTER my most difficult task of all, which is that of confronting the events of 5 March 1873, and committing them to paper, to this document, to stand as a true account made by a witness, one who was there, who saw, and who survived to tell the tale. Sometimes I cry to myself, here in the silence of my cottage, with only the candles to light my hand and the ink and the paper, that I cannot write about that day, I cannot. It is not that I do not remember the details of the events, for I do, too vividly, the colors sharp and garish, the sounds heightened and abrasive, as in a dream, a terrible dream that one has over and over again and cannot escape no matter how old one grows or how many years pass.
It was a day of blue sky and bright sun and harsh reflections from the snow and sea and ice crystals on the rocks that hurt the eye whenever one’s gaze passed across the window panes or when I went outside to the well or to the hen house. It was a day of dry, unpleasant winds that whipped the hair into the face and made the skin feel like paper. The men had left the house early in the morning to draw their trawls, which they had set the day before, and John had said to me as he was leaving that they would be back midday to collect Karen and to have a meal before they set out for Portsmouth to sell the catch and purchase bait. I had some errands I wished him to perform, and I spoke to him about these, and it is possible I may have handed him a list on that day,
I do not remember. Evan stumbled down the stairs, unshaven, his hair mussed, and grabbed a roll on the table for his breakfast. I urged him to stay a moment and have some coffee, as it would be raw and frigid in the boat, but he waved me off and collected his jacket and his oilskins from the entry way. Matthew was already down at the boat, making it ready, as he did nearly every morning. Indeed, I hardly ever saw Matthew, as he seemed to be on a clock different from the rest of us, rising at least an hour before me, and retiring to his bed as soon as it was dark. Karen, I remember, was in the lounge that morning, and she said to John that she would be dressed and ready to go with him after the dinner meal, and John nodded to her, and I could barely look at her, since she had had all her teeth removed, and her face had a terrible sunken appearance, as one sometimes sees on the dead. Karen, who had been with us since the end of January, had been fired from her job with the Laightons when she had said one day that she would not sweep out or make the beds in a certain room belonging to four male boarders. I suspect that Eliza Laighton had been wanting to let Karen go for some time, since Karen could now speak a rudimentary English and therefore could make her complaints and opinions known, as she had not been able to do when she first arrived. As you may imagine, I was somewhat ambivalent about Karen’s presence. Since Evan’s arrival, we had not been overly cordial with one another, and, in addition, there were many of us under that roof, under that half-roof