English,” he says.
“There’s a translation.”
“This is an original document,” he says with some surprise. “I’m amazed they let you have it.”
There is a silence.
“They didn’t,” I say. I push my hair behind my ears.
“They didn’t,” he repeats.
“I knew they wouldn’t give it to me, so I took it. I’ll give it back.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a memoir. By Maren Hontvedt.”
“Who is?”
“The woman who survived the murders.”
“It’s dated 1899”
“I know.”
He hands the papers back to me, and I look up at him for the first time. His hair has been combed off his forehead with his fingers and lies in thinning rows, an already harvested crop. His eyes are bloodshot, and his skin, in the harsh, flat light, looks blotchy.
“You don’t need this stuff for your assignment,” he says.
“No.”
He is about to turn and go back down to the galley, but he hesitates a moment on the steps. “What’s going on with you?” he asks.
I shade my brow with my hand. “What’s going on with you?” I ask.
At the Shoals, men have always fished for haddock and for hake, for porgies and for shad. In 1614, Captain John Smith first mapped the islands and called them Smythe’s Isles, and he wrote that they were “a heape together.”
Halyards slap against the mast, an insistent beat we can hear at the double bed-cum-dining table in the center of the cabin. Thomas and Billie have made pancakes — kidney shaped, oil glistened, and piled high upon a white platter. There is also bacon, which Adaline declines. She chooses toast and orange juice instead. I watch her, nearly naked, lift her mug of decaffeinated coffee to her lips and blow across the rim. I am not sure that I could now sit at a breakfast table in my bathing suit, though I must have done so as a younger woman.
Are we, as we age, I wonder, repaid for all our thoughtless gestures?
Billie, next to me, still has on her Red Sox pajamas. She smells of sleep. She is proud of her misshapen pancakes, and eats six of them. I think it is the one certain way to get Billie — any child? — to eat a meal. Have her cook it herself.
I have on my robe. Rich his bathing suit. Thomas the shirt he slept in. Is it our dishabille that creates the tension — a tension so pronounced I find it hard to swallow? Rich wears the weather report on his face, and we seem excessively focused on the food and on Billie, in the manner of adults who have not found an easy entrée into the conversation. Or who are suddenly wary of conversation: “These are wonderful, Billie. I can see the bear now.” “What kind of coffee is this? It has an almond flavor.” “I love bacon. Honestly, is there anything better on a camping trip than a bacon sandwich?”
Sometimes I watch the way that Thomas watches me. And if he catches me at this, he slips his eyes away so gracefully that I am not sure he has seen me. Is this simply the familiarity of bodies? I wonder. I no longer know with any certainty what he is thinking.
“Do you keep a journal?” Adaline asks Thomas.
I am surprised by the question. Will she dare a reprise of Pearse?
Thomas shakes his head. “Who has so many words that he can afford to spend them on letters and journals?” he asks.
Rich nods. “Tom’s a terrible letter writer.”
I haven’t heard the nickname in years.
“His literary executor will have it easy,” Rich adds. “There won’t be anything there.”
“Except the work,” I say quietly. “There’s a lot of the work.”
“a lot of false starts,” says Thomas. “Especially lately.”
I look over at Thomas, and I wonder if what I see is the same face I knew fifteen years ago. Does it seem the same to me? Is the skin the same? Or is the expression now so different than it was then that the muscles have become realigned, the face itself unrecognizable?
“Is it definite that man did it?”
Adaline’s question startles all of us. It takes me a second to catch up. “Louis Wagner?” I ask.
“Do they know for sure?”
“Some think yes,” I answer slowly, “and some think no. At the time, Wagner protested his innocence. But the crime created a tremendous amount of hysteria. There were riots and lynch mobs, and they had to hurry the trial.”
Adaline nods.
“Even now, there are doubts,” I add. “He hadn’t much of a motive for the murders themselves, for example, and