The Woman at The Gaff

Raina finds you first, because of course she does.

You've climbed halfway up the granite to the base of the lighthouse with the coat bundled under one arm when you hear an engine on the shore road, and then her truck door, and then her voice, high and cracked in a way you haven't heard since the night you two broke up.

"Ethan!"

She comes over the rocks in her harbormaster jacket with her black hair whipping loose from its clip, and she doesn't slow down. She hits you so hard you both nearly go back down the slope. Her arms lock around your neck. She smells like coffee and diesel and the vanilla stuff she puts in her hair.

"You absolute," she says into your shoulder. "You stupid, stubborn, absolute."

"Hi, Raina."

"Don't you hi me." She pulls back and holds your face in both hands and looks at you the way she used to, and then she remembers she isn't allowed to anymore and drops her hands. Her eyes are red. "The Coast Guard's had a helicopter up since midnight. Ruel got out of bed and tried to take his cousin's boat out in the dark. I had to sit on him."

"Is he okay?"

"He's furious. He thinks you're dead." She takes in the cove, the lighthouse, the bundle under your arm. "How are you here? The Fair Return's on the Sisters. She's aground on the second ledge with her rail in the water. I saw her at first light. You're a mile and a half from her. In a squall. In October."

"I swam."

"Nobody swims that."

You know. You don't say anything.

Her eyes drop to the coat. "What's that?"

"Something off the boat," you lie, and you hear how bad it is. Raina was always the one who could tell. She gives you a long look. Then the helicopter comes beating low over Gull Rock, and she grabs the radio off her belt, and the moment goes.

The next six hours are a blur of people being kind to you in loud voices.

The Coast Guard asks the same questions four different ways. A medic shines a light in your eyes and says concussion and lucky and hypothermia in an order that suggests he's not sure which one he's more surprised by. Your body temperature, apparently, is normal. He takes it twice.

Ruel shows up at the clinic in pajama pants and a parka with a fever of a hundred and one and picks you up off the exam table in a bear hug, which the medic objects to. Ruel is six-four and built like a woodstove, and when he cries, which is rarely, he does it without any shame at all.

"I should've been on the boat," he says.

"Then we'd both be on the bottom."

"You're not on the bottom." He sets you down and wipes his face with his sleeve. "Why aren't you on the bottom?"

"Everybody keeps asking me that."

The coat is in the cab of your truck, under a tarp, under a box of old rope. You put it there yourself while Raina was talking to the Coast Guard, and you're not sure why. You only know you don't want anyone else touching it. Twice during the afternoon you go out to the parking lot just to check that it's still there. The second time you lift the edge of the tarp and put your hand on the fur, and it's cool and soft and faintly damp, like it never dries. Your hand stays there longer than it should.

The Fair Return can be pulled off the ledge at the next big low tide, they say, if the weather holds. Hull's holed, but not badly. Engine's drowned. Traps are gone.

You'll be paying for this one until spring. You don't care. Your father's boat is still above the water, and so are you, and someone wrote a question in the sand that you can't stop hearing.

You don't tell anyone about the singing.

By dark you're at The Gaff, because where else would you be.

The Gaff sits at the head of the wharf with its back to the harbor and its front to the only road, low and shingled, a ship's bell over the door that Sadie Tibbets rings herself when somebody comes in from a bad day on the water. She rings it for you tonight. She rings it so long that the whole bar turns around and claps, which is the most Gullhaven thing that has ever happened to you.

"Sit," Sadie says, and puts a whiskey in front of you. "That's on the house. The next one isn't."

"Thanks, Sadie."

"Don't thank me. Your father drank on credit for nine years." She leans on the bar, silver braid over one shoulder, reading glasses hanging on their cord. She's sixty-three and has run this bar since before you were born, and her grandmother kept the Gull Rock light back when it was lit. There's nothing that's happened on this island in a hundred years she doesn't have an opinion about. "They're saying you swam a mile and a half in a squall."

"They're saying a lot."

"Mm." Her eyes are sharp behind the dangling glasses. "You hear anything out there, honey? On the water?"

You put the whiskey down.

"Like what?"

Sadie opens her mouth to answer.

The ship's bell rings. Nobody touched it. It rings once, clear and soft, the way it does when somebody opens the door, except you didn't hear the door.

And the bar goes silent.

Not quiet. Silent. Twenty-odd fishermen and their wives and the ferry crew and old men who haven't stopped talking since 1987 all stop at once, mid-word, mid-laugh, like a radio switched off. Pool cues hang in midair. Someone's beer overflows onto the bar and he doesn't notice.

You turn around.

She's standing just inside the door.

She's barefoot. It's October in Maine and the floor of The Gaff is old pine and sawdust and she's barefoot on it, in a plain dark dress that's soaked through and clinging, as if she walked straight up out of the harbor. Her hair is long and almost black and wet, hanging past her shoulders in heavy ropes. Her skin is pale and luminous in the yellow bar light, like there's a lamp lit somewhere under it. Her face is the kind you'd see once in your life, across a ferry deck or a city street, and spend twenty years wondering about. Every man in the room is staring at her like she's the last fire in the world.

She doesn't look at any of them.

She looks at you.

Her eyes are gray-green, the exact color of the water over the Sisters on a clear day, and they're fixed on you with an expression you can't name. Not desire. Not curiosity. Something closer to the look a person gives a ghost.

She crosses the room. Men move out of her way without seeming to know they're doing it. She reaches the bar and climbs onto the stool beside yours with a careful, deliberate motion, like she's never sat on a stool before. Water drips from the ends of her hair onto Sadie's bar.

Sadie hasn't moved. Sadie, who has never in your life been lost for words, is holding a glass and a rag and staring.

The woman leans toward you. Up close she smells like cold air and salt, like the coat in your truck. Her voice, when it comes, is low and a little rough, and it goes straight through you, and you know it. You know you know it.

"I sang to you," she says, so quietly that only you can hear. "Men don't wake up after that. Not ever. Not one, in all the years there have been men." She tilts her head. "So I want to know, Ethan. Why did you?"