The Annisquam River was tidal from both mouths, water flowing toward itself and away, the harbor at one end, Ipswich Bay at the other, both saltwater, an infinite exchange. The river cut the Rock from the mainland. It was what made the cape an island. Emma knew this. She was from away and so she knew, because to get here you had to cross the river. But Josiah had lived most of his life not leaving the island, not knowing where the river went. Eight years ago, when Susannah walked past him outside his father’s shop and decided against all reason and familial threat that he was the man she wanted to marry, he didn’t even know the river had a northern mouth. He was scared of the water and so had not traveled the Annisquam by boat, and he had never been shown Cape Ann on a map. But soon he found himself in Caleb Stanton’s house, wandering the map-lined halls, half lost and half evading the mystery of cocktails-on-the-terrace. Some maps showed places Caleb had conquered in his rail and timber days, others the European cities to which he’d traveled with his children, others—these under glass—exotic places like Africa and the Amazon. When Josiah first came to the map of Cape Ann it might as well have been Cape Horn—he did not recognize it as the place he lived. Other capes and islands looked like moons or squirrels or whales or hearts, but this place—though Josiah could divine a finger here, a mouth there—lacked any coherent shape. It was lumpish, and ragged. And slicing its disorder in two was the tortuous river, represented by the blackest of inks, its many dead-end tributaries obscuring its outlets. A dark, defiant vein. Josiah got stuck there, mesmerized, until Susannah found him, and laughed. She had a beautiful laugh, chimelike and knowing, and she took his arm with a certainty that soothed him even as he knew that she was the one who had caused him to feel uncertain. She was revealing the world to him like sunlight to a dark room and he felt toward her alternately grateful and petulant. He let her lead him out to the terrace, where he drank his first gin and tonic and listened to his future father-in-law talk of profits and paving stones while Josiah thought about the map’s lumps and the river and the vast woods he had glimpsed at the center of the island, and when he could get back to them unnoticed.
“Are you going through?”