She yanks at the screen door, pulling down more than out to pry it loose from the frame, and calls into the house. The cool, dark wood absorbs her words. Shoes off, the wood soothes her, seems to suck the heat from her soles. She calls up the back stairs, then through the dining room and up the main stairs. No answer.
On the front porch she can hear music coming from the sloop out on its mooring. It comes small and bright across the water and up the rocks. She can almost make out the tune. No one is on deck, but she can see the open hatch of the cabin. The porch eases underfoot, rough compared to the smoothness of the planks inside. She carries her shoes in one hand, hooked on the ends of her fingers. She picks her way carefully down the path to avoid the pricking evergreens that send feelers along the ground, out into the empty sunshine and warm rocks. Down the ramp.
She stands on the float, and all the heat has rushed from her. Maybe because of the stronger breeze that makes it a few degrees cooler there, or maybe because of the hollow music that comes from her husband’s boat and seems to pollute the empty sky. Or maybe it is the ominousness of high tide that has just turned. The water feels raw, like it could catch her in its current and send her away, slide her away. A kidnapping current, the shore shrinking away faster and faster. Then it is she and the dark rocks and the black sea, or just the sea, cold and willowy at its base.
The submerged ropes mooring the float beg her to follow them as they slant down through hazy sunshine. Through murk, their silken hair, soft cobwebs of brown algae, wave in a seduction, a lying reassurance that under the water is safe and warm. The wide, drifting fronds of seaweed, like six feet of freshly processed film, brown, transparent, slick, curled at the edges, reach out to pull her in. She ignores the siren call of kelp and lets out her own call. But there is no reply, the music too loud at its source.
Little Devil sits at the end of its line off the stern of the sloop. So she must take the big dinghy, beached upside down on the float. She pulls on her shoes, wanting traction, resistance, wanting in some small way to pull herself together. She rights the dinghy, holds it at the bow, and rocks it over. The hull knocks more than necessary against the decking of the float. She wants him to hear, have him come to the deck, express that he has been napping, soothed by the waves, that he will row to her. “Stay there, I’ll come to you,” she wants to hear him say. She doesn’t want to catch, or see, anything. Still she pushes the dinghy to the edge of the float and slides it into the water. Holding the bow with both hands, the stern goes in first, dipping so close to the surface a bit of sea slips in.
She draws the boat parallel to the float with the bowline. She steps in the center with one foot and pushes off. She sits down fast to get out the oars before the breeze sends her back into the dock. She plugs in the oarlocks and draws the oars together across her lap. Once the oars are in the locks, she leans forward, dip, slice, pull. Smooth swirls and a glide out to the sailboat.
It takes eight strong pulls for her on a windless day on a weak tide. But today she goes slowly, watches the circinate fronds of each ripple. She even tilts the oars in, tucking the paddles inside the rail, allowing herself to drift, to feel the wind push the boat where it wants to go. The surface of the water feels elastic; it makes room for her but won’t allow her to pass. She tests it with the tips of her fingers, then her whole hand. The cold of it makes her bones ache. Flexing her hand and then making a fist brings back the blood. She picks up the oars again, immerses them in the water. They cut the surface, back, down, through, up. To be an oar, to have life and use, to be joined with the water and with a hand. To be both. It seems so hard to be both. To be mother and wife. To be tool and toy, to be bountiful and beautiful, to be expansive and inclusive. To cover the world and then to taste only a fraction of it. She is sweating again. She wets her hand and rubs water on the back of her neck. Reaching the sloop, she ties the dinghy down and pulls herself up—hand, knee, foot, foot.
From where she stands now in the cockpit, she can see four bare legs in the berth below, sliding like oars together and apart. And then they stop. They must see her legs, her torn Keds, wet from the row in an unbailed boat, her slim cotton trousers, black with a purple bleach stain near the cuff. She will have to confront them in her gardening outfit. The legs spring apart, four become two.
A man, not her husband, bursts up through the open cabin door. His is a face she doesn’t know, a square chin she’s never seen. But she recognizes youth when she sees it, stripped naked on the deck of a boat she swabbed, reflected in all the bright work she’s polished. He doesn’t look at her, just moves past her in long-legged leaps, all tan skin and blond ringlets, ringlets everywhere. Everywhere. He pauses to hold a line, steps over the rail, and then dives off.
He swims for the dock in strong strokes. The man—boy, really—swims for the Japanese car up the road. She watches him; he glides like a boat through the water, no splash. Then he hauls himself out up onto the float, not bothering with the swimming ladder—hand, hand, foot, foot. He drips up the ramp. He looks even younger from this perspective too. She turns back to the boat. With his arms stretched wide on the back of the bench, her husband sits in the cockpit facing the house, watching too. She sits down beside him, and they watch the young man disappear into their house to leave wet footprints across their dining room floor. They sit there together like they are watching a sunset.
“He’s a good swimmer,” she says, her hands folded in her lap. Had it been a woman, she could’ve slapped him; there are a whole set of standard responses for that situation. But she doesn’t know what to do with this. Anger will come later, she thinks, echo out over the water, out of the screen doors and single-paned windows. It will turn and rage, a winter storm. The kind that moves beaches and pulls down seawalls. But not yet.
“He’s on the national team,” her husband replies.
He brings his arms over his chest, so that even in the most innocent way he doesn’t have one around her. He leans forward, elbows on knees. The music has stopped, and they hear the channel marker ringing, tipping slow on the wake of a motorboat. She puts her feet up on the opposite bench and stares now at the bleach stain on her pant leg: How do you fix that?
“The house looks nice from here,” she says, though she isn’t looking at it. The house and the kids should go to her, she thinks; both survived because of her. Food is bought and cooked because of her. Bellies filled, forms filled, checks written.