Fog

The fog came in on the first of July, and it did not leave for two days.

She woke to it. That was the odd part: she woke to the absence of the world. Where the bay window should have shown a long blue sweep of sea there was only a vast pearly blank, soft as the inside of a shell, and the edge of the cliff dissolved into it twenty feet from the glass. No gulls. No horizon. Out of the whiteness, somewhere far below, a foghorn gave a single sonorous groan, held it, let it go, and was answered by another, farther out, like two cows calling in a field.

She lay in the quilt and listened to it with her whole body, a drowsy, cozy, shipwrecked happiness. The other side of the bed was cold. He had left before dawn, as he always did on weekdays, to catch the tide at the boatyard, and there was a note on the pillow in block capitals: RAN OUT. BACK AT TEN. WEAR THE YELLOW SLICKER. I HAVE A THING TO SHOW YOU. — E.

A thing, thought Corinne. Always a thing.

She put on the yellow slicker. It hung in the hall closet, a size small, absurdly bright, and when she turned up the collar and looked in the mirror she found it fit her exactly, as it had fit every other thing he had given her. She had stopped remarking on it. In five weeks she had come to accept that the man had an almost uncanny feeling for the dimensions of her life. It was only one of his charms. She told herself so, and went to make toast.

At ten the truck came crunching up out of the white, with its headlights burning two cones of dirty yellow, and a moment later: three raps, a pause, one tap.

“Mr. Tilden’s gone to his sister’s in Bangor until Thursday,” Emory said, when she had opened the door, by way of hello. He was wearing a blue oilskin jacket beaded with moisture, and his hair was damp, and his face had a scrubbed, eager, secret look. “The yard’s empty. I’ve got the shed to ourselves. Come on. Please. I want to show you the best thing I own.”

“The motorcycle?”

“Better.”

“Than a Bonneville?”

“Than anything.” He held out a hand. “Trust me.”

* * *

Tilden’s Boatyard sat at the head of a narrow cove two miles south of Gull Harbor, a cluster of gray sheds and rusted slipways and tilted pilings crouched at the edge of a green-black tide. In the fog, it looked like the set for a ghost story. The big sliding doors of the main shed stood open a crack, and a thread of yellow light escaped and lay on the wet gravel. Overhead, invisible, a gull complained. Somewhere below them water slapped at stone with a sound like a patient hand on a table.

“Watch the step,” Emory said. “It’s slick.”

She followed him in.

It was the smell she noticed first. Cedar, and linseed, and tar, and old paint, and the sharp sweet tang of fresh shavings, all of it hanging warm and thick in the still air under the vault of the roof. A long workbench ran down the left wall, hung with chisels and planes and clamps in neat ranks, each tool on its own painted outline. Sawdust drifted in the shafts of light from the skylights. There was a woodstove at the back, cold, with a kettle on it. And at the center of the shed, held up on a great timber cradle like an animal in a stall, glowing in a pool of electric light, lay the boat.

She stopped dead.

“Oh,” said Corinne.

It was a launch. Twenty-six feet of it, long and low and elegant, with the rakish tumblehome of a boat built before anyone had thought of fiberglass. Her planking was cedar, the color of heated honey, laid up in seams so tight she couldn’t have slid a playing card between them. A brass rail ran around the coaming, polished until it glowed. There was a little cabin forward, with a curved windshield of old glass, and a varnished mahogany transom, and, at the stern, in gold leaf, in a script so delicate she could have been looking at an invitation:

Marigold.

“She’s from 1962,” said Emory, standing beside her with his hands in his pockets. His voice was low, almost hushed, as though they were in a church. “A yard down in Friendship built the hull. A man in Camden, Mr. Orne, bought her new, kept her thirty years, and then he died, and his son let her sit in a field. She was a wreck. She had a tree growing through the cockpit.”

“A tree.”

“A maple sapling. It had come up through a rotted seam.” He touched the stem of the boat, lightly, with two fingers, like a man touching a sleeping dog. “My dad found her. The summer before — the summer I was fourteen. He bought her for four hundred dollars from the son and towed her home on a flatbed. He said, Em, we’re going to take her apart and put her back together, plank by plank, and then we’re going to go to Matinicus for lunch. He had it all planned out.” A half smile. “We got as far as taking her apart.”

Corinne said nothing. The fog pressed against the high windows. The foghorn moaned.

“After he died, Mom wanted to sell her. She said it was a lot of money to keep in a barn.” Emory shrugged. “I told her no. I was fifteen, and I’d never told her no about anything. She looked at me for a long time, and then she paid the storage. I’ve been working on her ever since. Eight years. Every weekend. Every vacation. I steamed those ribs myself. I made every one of those bronze screws. I’ve never taken a penny for her. She’s the one thing I’ve done that’s — that’s all mine.”

“And all his.”

He looked at her.

“It’s a conversation,” said Corinne softly. “Isn’t it? You and your father. Every plank. You’ve been finishing a sentence he started.”

For a second he didn’t speak. She saw a muscle jump in his jaw. Then he turned back to the boat, and said in a thick voice, “Nobody’s ever said that. In eight years. Not Mom, not anyone.” He laughed, shakily. “You’d think someone would have.”

“Why is she called Marigold?”

“It was his mother’s name. My grandmother. She died before I was born.” He ran his thumb along the gold script. “He used to say a boat should be named for a woman you were afraid of. So you’d treat her right.”

“Were you afraid of your grandmother?”

“I never met her.” A quick, shy glance. “But I’m going to be afraid of this one. She’s got a temper. Wait until you see her in a swell.”

“I’ll see her in a swell?”

“Mid-July.” The grin broke over his face like a sunrise. “Launching day. Mr. Tilden’s lending me the crane. I thought — if you’d like — I’d like you to be the first one aboard. The first person, after me. It’s an old tradition. You’re supposed to have a woman break the champagne.”

“I’m not breaking champagne. It’s a waste of champagne.”

“Then you can break a Coke.” He held out a hand. “Come on. I want to show you the cabin.”

* * *

They spent the hour like children in a treehouse.

He showed her how the ribs had been steamed and bent, a whole afternoon of boiling, cursing, and clamping, and he did it again in mime with a length of cedar, rolling his eyes and shouting hold it, hold it, HOLD IT until she was weeping with laughter. He taught her how to hold a block plane: the thumb here, the heel of the hand there, push from the hip, not the arm. She leaned over a scrap of board with his arms around her and his chin on her shoulder and drew the blade toward her, and a single translucent shaving curled up out of the throat and fell like a ribbon of amber to the floor.

“Again,” said Emory, in her ear.

“I did it wrong.”

“You did it perfectly.” He lifted the curl to the light and it glowed, thin as skin. “Look. You can see through it. That’s the whole thing. That’s what the job is. Taking something away so gently that what’s left is clearer.”

She turned her head, and he was very near.

“I think that’s the most romantic thing a person’s ever said about carpentry,” she said.

“I’ll say it again, then.”

She was scarcely aware of what she was saying until she said it: “I want to put a flower on her.”

“On Marigold?”

“I picked a rose from the ditch. On the way out. A wild one. I put it in my pocket and forgot.” She dug into the yellow slicker and produced it, crushed a little, dewed with fog, a small pink five-petaled thing with a yellow eye. “I want to tie it to her bow. For luck. Is that allowed?”

“It’s customary.”

“I need a bit of string. Or scissors. Have you got scissors?”

“Somewhere.” He glanced around, vaguely. “Check the drawers at the back. By the stove. I think there’s a pair in the blue toolbox.”

She went.

The back of the shed was a darker, quieter region, half workshop, half storeroom, hung with coils of rope and cane-backed chairs and jars of copper nails, and lit by one bare bulb on a chain. A scarred oak table stood against the wall. Under it, a row of plastic bins; above it, a long plank shelf lined with paint cans and glue and a rack of chisels. She tugged open the drawers of the blue toolbox. Wrenches. Tape. A sticky pot of epoxy. She tried a cabinet. Sandpaper. She tried another. Rags, folded, in a drift of cedar dust.

“No scissors,” she called.

“Try the shelf!”

She tilted her head back and ran her eye along the plank. And there, at the end, tucked between a coffee can of brushes and a rolled-up chart, she saw a small box.

It was the loveliest thing in the shed.

It was cedar, about the size of a breadbox, the wood dark red and silky, and every inch of its surface had been carved. Not painted; carved, in the shallow chip-work style she had seen in the museums of Oslo and Trondheim: spirals, interlacing vines, diamonds, little geometric flowers cut with a knife in tiny triangular facets, so that the whole surface glittered in the lamplight like frost on a window. The lid was edged in brass. At the front, a heavy brass padlock the size of a plum hung from a hasp.

She reached up and, without thinking, touched it.

“Don’t,” said Emory.

His voice came from just behind her, very quiet. She had not heard him cross the floor. She turned, with her hand still raised, and found him standing four feet away with a dust-colored rag in his fist, and an expression she couldn’t read: not angry, exactly, but absolutely still, like the moment before a plate hits the floor.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean — it’s beautiful. Is it Norwegian? That’s the Setesdal pattern. It’s very old.”

“It was my dad’s.”

“I thought so.”

“It’s a keepsake. He brought it back from a trip when I was nine. His father’s family were from somewhere near Stavanger, or so he claimed, though I think it was a story.” His gaze rested on the box, and his face smoothed slowly into something gentle and a little rueful. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bark. It’s just — I don’t let anybody touch it. Mom doesn’t. It’s silly. It’s got a few of his things. His watch. His fishing flies. It’s the only place I’ve got where he’s still in order.”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“I’d like to. I just don’t want to open it yet.” He turned the rag over in his hands. “It’s the way I feel about Marigold. If I opened it and it was only a watch and some flies, I think I’d — I want to keep it as a thing that might be more.”

“A box that might be more,” said Corinne.

“Exactly.”

“I understand perfectly.” She lowered her hand. She felt a prick of something that was not quite offense, not quite shame, like a pinch under the skin. And then, because she was who she was, and because the box was truly beautiful, and because she could not resist the temptation of a bit of nonsense, she smiled. “For the record, I once spent a week learning to pick locks.”

He blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“For research. There’s a Swedish thriller I translated, Nyckelmakaren, the locksmith, with a whole subplot about a burglar who works in Gothenburg. I took a class from a very dignified old man in a back room in Boston. Bobby pins and tension wrenches. I could get through a padlock like that in under a minute.” She looked at the brass plum, and tilted her head, and laughed. “Not that I’d ever. I’m only saying that if I were an unscrupulous person, that box would not stand a chance.”

For a moment he didn’t move.

Then Emory began to laugh. It was a real laugh, helpless and delighted, and he put his hand over his eyes and shook with it. “Corinne Aldermere,” he said, from behind his palm. “I’ve spent three months thinking you were a quiet woman who liked tea.”

“I contain multitudes.”

“You contain felonies.”

“Only theoretical ones.”

“Then I’ll keep the key somewhere very safe.” He dropped his hand. His eyes were bright and warm again, and he reached out and tucked a strand of damp hair behind her ear, and let his thumb rest along her jaw. “Someday I’ll open it. I’ll show you everything in it. I promise. I just want it to be on a day when I’m brave.”

“And if I picked it right now?”

“Then I’d forgive you.”

“Would you?”

“I’d forgive you anything,” said Emory. He was smiling, but his eyes were not. “That’s the problem. Whatever you did, I’d forgive you. So please don’t test it. I’d hate to find out where the edge is.”

It was a joke. It had the shape of a joke: a rueful, lopsided, sweetly self-deprecating thing, the kind of line a man delivers with a shrug. She laughed. But she remembered the quality of the stillness in him when he had said don’t, and she remembered how, in the half second before the laugh, his hand had closed on the rag so tightly the knuckles had paled.

She said, lightly, “No scissors, then.”

“I’ll find some string.”

He found string. She tied the rose to Marigold’s bow with a clumsy knot, in the electric light, and stepped back, and the small pink flower sat against the gleam of the brass like a drop of blood in snow, and she thought, there, now she’s ours.

* * *

The skiff was the idea of a man who couldn’t bear for the day to end.

“Just to the mooring,” he said. “Quarter mile. I want to check the pennant before the launch. You can sit in the bow and be a figurehead. I’ll go slow, there’s nobody out, it’s the safest morning of the year.”

“It’s a fog.”

“It’s a pea soup. But I know every rock in this cove.” He was already untying the line. “I could do it blind. Come on.”

She came. She sat in the bow of the little gray skiff in the yellow slicker with her hands clasped between her knees, while he stood in the stern and fed the outboard a pull, and the motor caught on the second go with a buzz like a hornet in a jar. The shed slid back into the fog. The gravel vanished. The water was slate-colored and glassy, utterly still, and the white came down on all sides, so thick that the end of the skiff blurred. She could see Emory only as a dark shape, with a halo of gold where his hair caught the diffuse light.

It was beautiful. It was eerie. The world had shrunk to a circle ten feet wide, afloat in silence, and the only sound was the putt of the motor and the soft chuckle of water along the hull. A bell buoy clanked, off to the left, muffled as a bell in a dream.

“Do you feel it?” Emory called softly.

“What?”

“That we’re the only ones left?”

She did. She felt it so sharply that she shivered. “It’s like being in a book,” she said. “The first page of one. Before anything has happened.”

“I like that.”

“What happens on the second page?”

“I haven’t decided.” He cut the throttle to an idle, and the skiff slowed, and rocked, and was still. “You pick.”

“I think,” said Corinne, “on the second page, a very large man in very rubber boots appears out of nowhere and —”

She never finished the sentence.

The sound came out of the fog on her left like a freight train. It wasn’t a sound so much as a pressure: a great flat roar, a diesel bellowing, and with it, from nowhere, a horn, long and raw and furious, a blast that went through her bones. She had time to turn her head. She had time to see a shape rise out of the white, huge and high and black, a bow like a cliff, a wall of green hull and curling white water and a man in orange oilskins behind the glass with his mouth open in a shout.

“Emory!”

He had already moved.

She did not see how. She felt it: the skiff slewing violently to starboard as he flung the tiller over and slammed the throttle wide, a howl from the outboard, a lurch that threw her sideways onto the floorboards with her ribs on the thwart. A wall of water went up beside her. The great hull tore past, so near she could have touched the barnacles, so near that its bow wave hit the skiff broadside and flipped it half over, and she was in the air, and then in the bilge, and then drenched, choking, flat on her back, staring up at a sky the color of pearl.

The roar dwindled. The horn died away, sullen, receding. Out in the fog a voice bellowed, hoarse with fury and terror, “EMORY WOLCOTT, YOU DAMN FOOL, I’VE GOT TRAPS OUT HERE, I COULDA CUT YOU IN HALF!”

“Sorry, Ned!” Emory shouted back. His voice cracked. “Sorry! I didn’t hear you!”

“Nobody can hear a thing in this, boy! Get that thing a damn horn!”

The engine fell away into the white.

It was quiet again. The skiff rocked, shipping a little water. Corinne lay in the bottom of it, listening to the thump of her heart, her hands curled uselessly on her chest. She tried to say something and found she’d lost the use of her tongue.

“Corinne.”

He was kneeling over her. She had not seen him cross the boat. His hands were already on her: not tenderly, but quick, expert, impersonal, the hands of a man who had done this before. They ran over her skull, her neck, down the length of each arm, pressing, probing, flexing each wrist and elbow. He pulled her eyelid back and peered into it. “Look at me. Look at my finger. Follow it. Does your neck hurt? Can you wiggle your toes? Say your name.”

“Corinne Aldermere.”

“What day is it?”

“It’s — Tuesday. Emory, I’m all right. I’m just wet.”

“Does anything hurt? Your head? Did you hit your head?”

“My ribs. A little. I hit the seat. It’s nothing, it’s bruised.”

“I need to check.” His voice was flat and rapid, with no warmth in it at all, and it frightened her more than the boat had. His fingers pressed along her ribs, one by one, over the wet slicker, and she winced. “Okay. Okay. Not broken. Nothing’s broken. You’re okay.”

“I told you I’m okay.”

“You’re okay,” he said again, as if he hadn’t heard.

And then his face crumpled.

It happened quickly, and in silence. All the professional composure went out of him at once, like air from a bag, and he gathered her up off the floorboards into his arms and pressed his face into her wet neck and held on. He was shaking, big long shudders that went through his whole frame. His breath came in ragged gulps. The skiff drifted, turning slowly, through a world with no edges.

“I’m sorry,” he said, into her collar. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry — I should never have — I can’t —”

“Hey. Hey. It’s all right.”

“I didn’t hear him. Why didn’t I hear him? I know that boat, it’s the Dolly P., it’s Ned Pratt’s, I’ve known Ned my whole life, and I should have been listening. I’m supposed to listen. It’s the one thing I’m supposed to be good at.” His fingers dug into her back so hard they hurt. “If he’d hit us. If he’d been two feet to the left. If you’d gone under that hull —”

“But he didn’t.”

“But he could have.”

“Emory.” She took his face in both hands and made him look at her. His eyes were wild, enormous, with a terrible white rim all around the iris, and his pupils had swallowed the color. He looked like a man who had been shown, for a split second, the bottom of a very deep well. “Listen to me. You moved the boat. You saw him before I did, and you moved it. It was perfect. You saved us. I’m here. I’m warm, I’m wet, I’m perfectly fine, and I am so, so grateful that I’m in a boat with someone who knows what he’s doing.”

He stared at her.

“I don’t think,” he said, hoarsely, “that I could do it. If something happened to you.”

“Nothing is going to happen to me.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know that today nothing happened to me. That’s the best any of us gets.” She tried to smile. “My mother used to say that. Every night, putting me to bed. Nothing happened today, sweetheart. That’s the best kind of day.”

“My father didn’t get one,” Emory whispered. “His last day. Something happened.”

“I know.”

“I was supposed to be with him. He asked me to come to the hardware store, and I said I had homework.” His whole body clenched. “I said I had homework.”

And there it was: the thing under the thing. She understood it all at once, in a flash of pure, aching tenderness, as plainly as if it had been written on the fog. A boy who had said I have homework on a Tuesday afternoon. A boy who had measured every day since by the one he had not spent, and had tried, with desperate, unceasing vigilance, never to look away again.

“You couldn’t have stopped it,” Corinne said softly. “The doctors said. It was his heart. You couldn’t have saved him.”

“I know.” His voice cracked. “I know.”

“Then you know I’m all right.”

“I know. I do.” He drew a long unsteady breath, and then another, and rested his forehead against hers. “I just need a minute to believe it.”

“Take two.”

He took two. They sat together in the bottom of the little boat, in the slow white swing of the tide, with her hand on the back of his head, until his breathing evened and the tremor eased. Presently he lifted his head and wiped his face with his sleeve and gave a small hiccup of laughter.

“I’m sorry. This isn’t how I pictured the second page.”

“I rather like it.”

“You like being nearly run over?”

“I like that you checked my pupils.” She kissed his wet cheekbone. “It was very thorough. You can do it again tonight.”

* * *

It was a long time before they got back to shore.

He drove them in at a crawl, with Corinne in the bow holding a flashlight pointed uselessly into the white, and a hand-held air horn that he’d dug out of the locker blasting every fifteen seconds. The shed rose out of the fog like a ship. He tied up, and handed her out, and walked her across the gravel with an arm around her waist, as if she might shatter.

Inside, he made her sit on a sawhorse and wrapped her in a horse blanket, and lit the woodstove, and boiled the kettle, and tucked her hands around a mug of something sweet and sharp that he said was cocoa and tasted heavily of rum. She drank it, shivering, laughing a little at the fuss.

“You can stop now. I’m fine.”

“I’m not done.”

“Emory.”

“Please.” He knelt in front of her and began, with great care, to take off her wet boots. “Let me. I can’t do anything else. If I don’t do something with my hands I’m going to —” He stopped. He closed his eyes. “Let me look after you.”

She let him.

He peeled off the soaked socks. He rubbed her feet between his palms until the feeling came back, and each inch of returning sensation was a small bright shock. He stripped the sodden slicker from her shoulders, and the sweater, with the businesslike tenderness of a man handling something that had nearly been lost. Then he stopped. He sat back on his heels with the damp wool in his hands, and looked at her, and she looked at him, and the whole shed went quiet except for the stove ticking.

“The cabin,” he said. “On the Marigold. There’s a berth. It’s dry. I put cushions in it, for the winter.” He swallowed. “I don’t — I’m not asking. I just want to hold you somewhere with a roof.”

“I’d like that,” said Corinne.

They climbed up the little ladder to the deck, in the glow of the electric light, and he lifted her over the brass rail as one would hand a cup to a priest, and she stepped down into the cabin.

It was small and warm and smelled of new varnish. The berth ran along one side under a curved hatch, upholstered in cream canvas, piled with wool blankets and a square of old quilt. There was a brass lamp, unlit, hanging from a hook. Through the little round portholes the fog glowed pale and soft, as if the boat floated inside a pearl. And there, in that hushed, rocking, dream-colored half-dark, with the whole world gone, he laid her down.

It was not like the rest. There was no laughter in it, and none of the bright, tumbling joy of the tent. It was slow, silent, a little desperate. He kissed her as though he were afraid she’d disappear. His hands moved over her with a kind of awed gravity, the way they had moved over the ribs of the boat, as if each part of her was a thing that he’d made, and was astonished to find still whole. When she touched his face, it was wet. She kissed the tears off his cheekbones, and he made a broken sound and buried his face against her throat.

“Don’t leave,” he whispered, again and again, in a voice she felt in her bones. “Don’t leave, don’t leave, don’t leave.”

“I’m here.”

“Say you won’t.”

“I’m here, Emory. I’m right here.”

It wasn’t an answer, and he didn’t seem to need one. He moved against her slowly, with great tenderness and terrible urgency, and she held him tight, her hands spread on the hard long back, her legs wrapped around him, as the cabin rocked and the fog pressed at the portholes and the cedar planks creaked softly all around them like a living thing breathing. The pleasure came up in her slowly, in a warm unhurried tide. She felt him shudder in her arms, felt his heartbeat slamming in his chest against hers. She heard herself cry out. She heard him say her name, over and over, like a prayer, and then something else, in a language she thought she knew.

Jeg kommer alltid til å finne deg.

She was too far gone to hear it properly. She thought she had imagined it.

* * *

Afterward, they lay in the berth under the wool blankets, and the fog horn moaned its long note at the mouth of the harbor, and the boat creaked on her cradle. His head rested on her stomach. She stroked his hair. They were both nearly asleep.

“Corinne,” he said, drowsily.

“Mm?”

“Say it’s okay. If I get — if I’m a lot. Say you’ll tell me.”

“I’ll tell you.” She smiled at the ceiling. “Rule five. I’ll say if I’m drowning.”

“And rule six.”

“Rule six?”

“If you ever say it’s finished.” His eyes were closed. His voice was soft, slurred with exhaustion and warmth. “I’d let you go. I swore. You know that.”

“I know.”

“I’d let you go,” Emory murmured. “And then I’d count the days.”

It was such an odd, tender, foolish thing to say that she laughed, quietly, and shook her head against the cushion. “That’s the most melodramatic thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Is it?”

“You’d count the days? Like a prisoner? Like a man in a tower?”

“Yes.”

“Emory, that’s absurd.”

“I know.” He was smiling, she could hear it, in his voice. “It’s a joke.”

She laughed again. The foghorn answered, long and low and mournful, at the mouth of the bay, so exactly on cue that she laughed harder. She gathered the blanket up around his shoulders and kissed the crown of his head and sank into the pillow, warm and heavy and safe, and felt the sleep come down.

She did not notice, until much later, in the gray of the late afternoon, when she woke alone with the light dwindling at the portholes and heard him moving in the shed below, humming, that she had been laughing for both of them.

That he had never laughed at all.