Marigold

They put her in the water on the nineteenth of July, at ten minutes past noon, on a tide that Emory had been watching for six weeks.

It took the crane eleven minutes. Corinne would remember every one. She stood at the end of the boatyard’s concrete slip in a white sundress and a borrowed straw hat, hugging a bottle of Coca-Cola against her chest, and watched the long cedar hull rise slowly, slowly, swaying in its slings, up out of the dim cave of the shed and into the daylight. It was the first time the boat had seen the sun in eight years. It struck her honey-colored planking and her brass rail, and the whole length of her blazed. The gold leaf on the transom caught fire. A wild pink rose, withered now to a brown thread, still clung to the bow where Corinne had tied it.

“Oh,” said Mr. Tilden, who was seventy-one and had a face like a walnut and had not spoken more than twelve words in the previous ten minutes. “Well. Ain’t she something.”

“She is,” said Emory.

He stood beside the crane operator with his hands jammed into his back pockets, his shirtsleeves rolled, his bandaged palm half hidden. The stitches had come out a week ago. A thin pink line ran across the heel of his hand where Pip had taken them out, one at a time, humming. His hair was blowing. His face, in profile, wore an expression that Corinne had never seen on it before: a stunned, unguarded, holy look, like a man at a christening who has just heard his own name.

There were nine people on the slip. Besides Mr. Tilden and the crane man, there were two boatyard hands, a girl from the office, Ned Pratt of the Dolly P. with his orange oilskins slung over his shoulder, and a pair of old men on an upturned dory with a thermos. They had all come the way people come to a launch, drifting down out of the afternoon with their hands in their pockets, pretending to have nothing better to do. Ned Pratt had nodded to Corinne gravely when she arrived and said, “Ma’am. I’m sorry about the other week. I’d have taken my own head off if I’d hit that boy,” and she had said, “He’s very good in a boat,” and Ned had said, “He’s the best I’ve seen. That’s why it was a damn fool thing to do.”

She had been introduced as Pip Wolcott’s friend from Portland, the translator. Nobody had looked at her twice.

The hull touched the water.

There was a soft hush, a long green sigh, as the keel kissed the cove. The slings slackened. The boat settled into the swell with a gentle, shouldering motion, like a sleeper turning over, and then she was floating: free, level, perfectly proud, riding her own reflection on a surface of hammered silver. A little cheer went up. One of the old men on the dory took off his cap.

“Corinne,” Emory said.

She turned. He was holding out his hand.

“You’re supposed to break the champagne.”

“It’s a Coke.”

“It’s the principle.”

She walked down the slip in her sandals to the edge of the water, where the stern of the Marigold lay a yard from the stone. The bottle was cold and sweating in her palm. She looked at the gold script, and at the men watching, and at Emory’s face, and thought of a fifteen-year-old boy at his father’s work-bench with a plane, and a man’s voice saying go to Matinicus for lunch.

She lifted the bottle.

“I name this boat Marigold,” said Corinne, loud and clear, in the tone of a woman reading a proclamation. “May she be kind to all who sail in her, and may she never, ever be ashamed of her name. And may she carry Desmond Wolcott’s son wherever he wants to go.”

She swung. The glass shattered against the transom in a spray of brown foam.

Nobody breathed. In the sudden silence she heard, quite distinctly, a small choked sound from the man beside her.

Then the whole slip erupted. Ned Pratt gave a whoop. The old men banged their thermos on the dory. Mr. Tilden said “Well, that’s done,” with the air of a man who had been expecting rain. And Emory was walking toward her across the concrete, not quickly, with a strange stiff gait, and when he reached her he did not say a word, only took the broken neck of the bottle from her hand and put it down, and folded her into his arms in front of eleven people.

She stiffened. His arms tightened.

“Nephew’s allowed,” he said, thickly, into her hair. “Aunt Cor’s just christened my father’s boat.”

“Of course he is,” said Mr. Tilden. “Boy, she’ll want a ride. Go on, go. Take her out. The tide won’t wait.”

* * *

The Marigold ran like a dream.

She slid out of the cove at a dignified six knots, with the engine murmuring beneath her like a contented cat, and as they cleared the breakwater the swell came up under her bow and lifted her, and set her down. The breeze came up, warm and salt. The water went from green to a deep, glittering navy, and a mile off the starboard bow lay the humped dark shape of Hurricane Island with a fringe of white around its feet, and everywhere around them, to the horizon, the Atlantic glittered like a field of coins.

Corinne stood at the windshield with her hat in her hand, her hair streaming, and laughed aloud.

“She’s perfect!”

“She pulls to port a bit,” said Emory, from the helm. He was standing at the wheel with his legs braced, steering with a single hand, an old brass instrument glinting at his elbow. “I’ll have to adjust the rudder. And there’s a vibration in the shaft. I think I over-tightened the stuffing box.”

“She’s perfect.”

“She’s a work in progress.”

“So am I.” She turned to him, windblown and shining. “Let me have the wheel.”

“You’ve never —”

“Teach me.”

He taught her. He stood behind her and put his hands over hers on the spokes, and showed her how to feel the water through the rudder, a heavy, living tug, like a fish on a line. Her heart bumped in her throat. The boat answered under her fingers, turning, leaning, rising to the swell. For half a mile she steered the long cedar launch toward the open ocean, with the man she loved at her back and the whole bright world rolling away before her, and thought, with a joy so fierce it frightened her: this is what it is to be alive.

The man she loved.

The words went through her mind like a swallow through an open window. She did not catch them. She did not look at them. She only felt them pass, and knew that they had been there, perhaps for a long time.

* * *

They anchored in the lee of Hurricane Island at half past two.

It was a small, blunt, spruce-crowned hump of granite a mile from shore, with a crescent of pebble beach on its sheltered side and a cove so clear that she could see the bottom twenty feet down, every stone, every waving thread of weed. They dropped the hook in a pool of liquid emerald. They spread a blanket on the afterdeck. Emory unpacked the hamper: cold chicken, sourdough, a wedge of Vermont cheddar, a jar of pickled beets, and a bottle of the Sancerre, which he said Pip had left in his fridge “by mistake.”

“She’s an optimist,” said Corinne.

“She’s a matchmaker. She’d marry off the Pope.”

“And the Pope’s got a boyfriend.”

“The Pope’s got a surgeon,” said Emory, and they both collapsed into laughter, helpless, rolling on the warm teak, until she had to hold her sides.

They ate. The sun beat down. The boat rocked in the gentle swell. Gulls wheeled, calling, over the island, and from the spruce came the thin descant of a hermit thrush. She lay on her back on the blanket with her sunglasses on and a piece of cheese balanced on her stomach, and thought that if heaven existed, it would be exactly like this, only with fewer flies.

“Corinne.”

“Mm?”

“Will you go swimming?”

She lifted her sunglasses. He was standing at the rail in a pair of faded navy trunks, his body long and brown and wet-looking in the white light, with the sea shining behind him. He had been looking at the water, but now he was looking at her, with a faint uncertainty, a hint of the old careful boy.

“I didn’t bring a suit.”

“There’s one in the cabin.”

“There’s —”

“I bought it in Camden. A week ago.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I wasn’t sure. I thought you might want one, in case. If you don’t, it’s all right. I just — I didn’t want you to be hot.”

She stared at him. Then she got to her feet, brushed off the crumbs, and went below.

It lay folded on the berth, a plain black one-piece, with a high neck and a low back and a little skirt at the hip. It was exactly her size. She stood holding it in the cool dim cabin for a long moment, with the sunlight lying on the water outside the portholes in rippling gold, and felt the old anxious heat rise in her face.

The scar.

It would show. A one-piece would cover the abdomen, but the skirt rode high. The seam would catch the light. She knew precisely how it would look: pale, puckered, ridged like a seam on a rag doll, the mark of a body that had failed at the single thing it was meant for. She had not worn a swimsuit since the surgery. She had told Graham she’d gone off the beach.

“Take your time,” Emory called through the hatch. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She put it on. She stood in front of the little mirror over the washstand, in the green-gold light, and looked at the woman there. She was thirty-eight. She was pale from the winter, thin in the arms, fuller in the hip than she had been at twenty. Her breasts were small. Her stomach was soft. And across her lower belly, below the black fabric, ran the long white cord of the scar.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she lifted her chin, and climbed the ladder.

He was sitting on the rail with his feet dangling over the side. He turned at the sound of her steps, and she saw him look: at her face first, a quick check, and then, slowly and openly, down. Not at the scar. At all of her. At her shoulders, and the line of her collarbones, and her legs; at the whole sunlit unprotected length of her. There was no pity in his eyes, no politeness. Only a dazed and steadily growing wonder, as of a man studying a painting he had thought he knew.

“What?” she said, a little defensive.

“You’re so beautiful,” said Emory, “I forgot what I was going to say.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not.” He swung off the rail and came toward her, barefoot on the warm planks, and took her by the hands. “I’m never silly about you. You know that. I can lie about anything else in the world, but I can’t lie about that.”

She laughed, a little breathless. “You can lie very well.”

“Not about you.”

He kissed her. It was a soft, serious kiss, with nothing hurried in it. Then he drew back and said, “Come in with me,” and she nodded, and he took her hand, and they ran across the deck and leaped together off the stern into the sea.

The cold was a punch. It closed over her head, green and shocking and astonishing, and for a second there was nothing in the world but silence and bubbles and the long white flicker of his legs. Then she broke the surface, gasping, shrieking, with her hair plastered across her face, and found him treading water beside her, laughing.

“It’s freezing!”

“It’s fifty-eight degrees!”

“It’s a crime!”

“It’s Maine!”

They swam. They swam out to the rocks at the mouth of the cove and back. They floated on their backs in the swell, side by side, holding hands, staring up at a sky of unbelievable blue. The salt stung her eyes and tasted of tears. The sun lay on her face like a palm. She heard her own breath, and the slow slap of water against her ears, and the faraway cries of gulls, and she thought: I am in the ocean. I am wearing a swimsuit. I am in the ocean with a man and I’m not hiding my body.

“Corinne,” Emory said. He was floating beside her with his eyes closed. “Can I ask you something? And you can say no.”

“Of course.”

“The scar.”

She felt her whole body tense. The water lapped at her ribs.

“You don’t have to. You said, in the bed, someday. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I keep coming back to the same thing — I want to know. Not because it’s bad. Because it’s yours. It’s a part of your story and I’ve only got half.” He opened his eyes, and turned his head on the water. “I want the whole thing. Whenever you want to give it.”

She looked at the sky for a long time. A cloud like a swan slid across the blue.

“All right,” she said.

* * *

They sat on the afterdeck in the late sun, wrapped in towels, with the blanket spread beneath them and the empty hamper between. The tide had turned. The boat swung slowly on her anchor, bows to the island. Her hair dripped down her back in cold rivulets.

She told it in order. She had never told it in order before.

“I wanted children,” said Corinne, “from the time I was about nine years old. It wasn’t a decision. It was a thing about me, like my eyes. My mother was so alone, after my father left. We were a family of two. I used to lie in bed and plan the house. A big one, with a lot of stairs. A big loud table. Six kids, I decided, at nine. Then I got practical and lowered it to four.”

Emory didn’t speak. He was lying on his side, with his head propped on his hand, his eyes steady on her face.

“Graham wanted a family too. That was the main thing we had in common, at the beginning. He was thirty, and ambitious, and he’d been raised in a big noisy household in Wellesley, and he wanted to recreate it. We were married at twenty-six. We started trying that fall.”

She drew a breath.

“The first time, I was nine weeks. It was in the spring. I’d bought a little pair of yellow shoes, ridiculous, the size of my thumb. I miscarried at a dinner party. Quietly, in the bathroom, with the water running. I went back to the table and finished my soup.” She smiled, thinly. “The doctor said it was common. One in four. He said try again.”

“Corinne —”

“The second was at eleven weeks. The third at six. By then I’d gotten good at it. I knew the signs. I knew what to do with the towels.” Her voice was perfectly level. It was a voice she had used in a doctor’s office, for years. “Nobody tells you what to do with the shoes. I kept them in a drawer. I still have them.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“The fourth one was different.” She looked at the sea. “The fourth one, I got to five months. I felt it kick. I painted the room. I let myself say its name aloud, in the shower, just once, when no one could hear. And then one night I woke up, at three in the morning, and the sheets were wet and the bed was red. And I remember thinking, with this perfect, calm clarity, oh, it’s happened again. How stupid of me to have hoped.”

The wind lifted her hair.

“I woke up in the hospital. They’d done an emergency surgery. They’d had to — there’d been a rupture, and the scarring was extensive, and the surgeon, a very kind man, with a gray mustache, he sat down on the edge of my bed, and he said, Mrs. Lowell, I’m afraid I have to tell you that your uterus has been damaged beyond repair. You will not be able to carry another pregnancy. He said it kindly. He said it just like that. You will not be able to carry.”

She stopped.

For a long time, there was only the lap of water against the hull.

“And Graham?” Emory said, very low.

“Graham came the next day. He sat in the chair by the window and looked at his phone. He was very calm. He said, I think we should take some time. And then, after a while — I remember this, because it’s the only thing I remember from that week — he said, quite gently, as if he were trying to console me, You know, it’s not your fault. It’s just that I always wanted to be a father. And I think, if I’m honest, I knew from the start that something was wrong with you.”

Emory made a sound.

It was not a word. It was a low sharp breath through the teeth, and it was so quiet, and so thoroughly without any human warmth, that she looked around. His face had not changed. He was lying quite still on the blanket with his chin on his hand. But his eyes had taken on an odd flat sheen, like water in a well, and the hand that lay at his side, on the towel, had curled slowly into a fist.

“Something was wrong with you,” he repeated softly.

“That’s what he said.”

“He said that. To you. In the hospital.”

“He was in shock. Everybody says things.” She tried to smile. “He apologized, afterward. In a way. He sent flowers.”

“He sent flowers.”

“Emory.”

“I’m sorry.” He closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were calm again. The fist had opened. His voice was gentle, and slow, and very even, like a hand passing across a bruise. “I’m sorry. I just — I would have liked to have been in that room. That’s all.”

“You would’ve been twenty.”

“I would have known. I’d have known what to say.”

“What would you have said?”

He thought about it. Gulls cried over the island. The light changed on the water, from silver to gold.

“I’d have said that there was nothing wrong with you,” said Emory. “I’d have said that there never had been. That you were a woman who’d been brave four times, with her whole heart, and the world hadn’t been kind enough to deserve it. I’d have said it was Graham who was broken. Not a hole in your body. A hole in him.” He reached for her hand. “And I’d have held you till morning, and I wouldn’t have looked at my phone.”

She was crying. She had thought she was past it. She laughed, and wiped her face on the towel, and the sun came through her tears in a thousand bright points.

“You’re a very good man,” she said.

“I’m trying.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.” He turned her hand over and pressed it to his cheek. “Can I ask you one more thing? And this is the real one.”

“Go on.”

“Do you want a child?”

The question fell into the sunlit silence like a stone into a pond.

She looked at him. He had asked it very simply. His face was open, almost blank, as in prayer; yet she felt in him a stillness so absolute that the very air seemed to hold its breath. A strand of wet dark hair lay across his forehead. His fingers around hers were trembling, just slightly, like the leaf of a poplar in a windless afternoon.

“Not ‘did,’” he said. “Not ‘would have.’ I mean now. If you could. If the world turned over and gave it back. Do you want one?”

“Emory, it’s not possible.”

“I know. I’m asking if you want.”

She opened her mouth to say something light. I’m thirty-eight. I’ve made my peace. I have a translation to finish. Every one of the sentences was ready, polished, as familiar as her own signature.

What came out was, “More than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life.”

He closed his eyes.

“I don’t tell people. I don’t say it. It’s — it’s a grief that never goes anywhere. It’s just there. I see a woman in the grocery store with a child on her hip and I have to leave the aisle. I hear someone call Mommy in a park and my whole body turns. After eleven years I thought it would stop. It doesn’t. It gets quieter. It never stops.” She laughed, a small, painful sound. “I have a drawer of shoes. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

“It isn’t.”

“It is a bit.”

“It isn’t ridiculous. It’s the least ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” His voice was thick. He opened his eyes, and they were wet. “I’m so glad you told me. I’m so glad you said it.”

“You asked.”

“I did.”

“Why did you?”

“Because I wanted to know who you were.” He drew her hand to his mouth and kissed the palm. “All of you. Even the part you keep in a drawer.”

He did not say anything else. He did not offer comfort she had not asked for, or an easy absolution. He only held her hand against his face, and the late sun came across the water and lay golden on the two of them, and in his silence was something she took for tenderness, because she wanted to, and because it looked, from where she sat, exactly like it.

* * *

They went home at sunset.

The wind had dropped. The sea was a sheet of copper, hammered smooth, and the western sky was a long banner of crimson and gold. The Marigold purred across it with her wake unrolling behind her like a silk scarf. Corinne sat on the cushioned bench in the stern with a blanket around her shoulders and her head against his arm, watching the shore come up out of the haze: the dark ragged line of pines, the glimmer of windows, and far to the north, small and white against the dusk, Fennimore Light.

Her phone buzzed in her bag.

She fished it out. The screen was bright, and faintly blue, and in the center of it, in a calm small font, were the words:

System update complete. Your device has been restarted. Thank you for your patience.

She frowned. “I didn’t update.”

“Hm?”

“The phone. It says it’s updated itself. I didn’t do anything.” She held up the screen. “It did it while I was swimming. How rude. It’s like a servant rearranging the furniture.”

Emory glanced at it. He did not take his hand from the wheel.

“They do that now,” he said. “It’s some security thing. You’ll see. They’ll all be doing it in a year. Nothing to worry about.” He smiled, and nudged her gently. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who thinks her phone’s listening.”

“No. I’m one of those people who thinks her phone is rude.”

“That’s a perfectly reasonable position.”

She put it away. She leaned back against his arm, and the day settled around her, warm and gold and aching, and she let her eyes drift shut.

The Marigold rounded the point. The mouth of the cove opened ahead, and the little town beyond it with its dim lights coming on, one by one, like stars. Behind her, in the stern, a wake spread, and widened, and smoothed itself back into the sea.

“Corinne?” he said.

“Mm.”

“I meant it. What I said. I’d have held you till morning.”

“I know you would.”

“I’d hold you now.”

“You are holding me.”

“I mean always,” said Emory. And the engine hummed, and the water whispered, and she heard in his voice something that was quiet and glad and strange, the sound of a man who has been shown, at last, the exact shape of the thing he was looking for.

She smiled in the dusk. She kept her eyes closed.

It was the happiest evening of her life.