‘I know,’ I said, in a voice barely over a whisper.
And I did know. And maybe that was everything I needed to know about him-that he was the type of person and would always be the type of person who would save a bottle out of the East River if I wanted it. And I would save it for him, too.
I placed my hand over his. It was cold, and my hand was probably cold, too. It felt like his hand always had, large and rough, each finger strong and sure. I grabbed on to his thumb and squeezed, and I saw him smile, just a little.
Neither of us had any way of rescuing the bottle, so we simply watched it bob gently down the river. It floated under the Brooklyn Bridge and passed the Sea Streak ferry and a garbage barge. The cars on the FDR streaked past toward the Bronx, the cars on the BQE lumbered into Brooklyn. We watched the bottle until it was a tiny green dot, and then until it was nothing.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to those who read the early drafts of All The Things We Didn’t Say: Susan Choi, Michael Cunningham, Carey Harrison, Ernesto Mestre-Reed. And my extreme gratitude to the readers of later versions - which also meant much longer versions: Lauren Acampora, Colleen McGarry, Sandy Peterson, and Emma Wunsch. Belated thanks to the Vermont Studio Center, for giving me time and space. I couldn’t do without my sister, Ali Shepard, for her fondness for the whale in front of Key Food, my father, Bob ‘Shep’ Shepard, for advising me how coal mines look and work, and my alwayswonderful husband, Joel Wilkens, for rescuing all those dogs in Tucson, sometimes two dogs a day. To the patient, forthright and intuitive people at William Morris: Shana Kelly, Andy McNicol, Jennifer Rudolph-Walsh, and Cathryn Summerhayes, who tirelessly worked to get this book out into the world. And I am forever beholden to everyone at Harper UK, especially my editor, Clare Hey, for caring so much about this story and offering so many brilliant suggestions to make it even better.
And most of all, a bottomless well of thanks to my mom, Mindy Shepard, for all those years of workbooks and sixty-four boxes of Crayola crayons and suffering through Ali and I talking in high-pitched voices in the back seat of the car for five hours straight.
For reading this book countless times through, for loving it when I was so uncertain, for giving it a beating heart. Wearer of peasant blouses, crooner to dogs, a link in the human chain out to the ice, Stella Rogers incarnate, only younger. This book is for you.