By Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop

Tomorrow, the boat goes in. All it needs is a final coat of paint on its underside, which, if Porter gets it on right now, should be dry by tomorrow’s noon high tide, the start of summer. He stands on the lawn, a can of paint dangling from one hand, a paintbrush in the other, gazing at the boat, which rests upside down on sawhorses in the shade of the crabapple tree. He has stripped down to his boxer shorts, nothing else; for Memorial Day weekend, it is hot, and he has ruined too many pairs of pants, too many shirts in the months he’s been working on his boat. Above him, the house looms high on its rocky foundations, its shingles weathered, its windows like so many sad eyes, peering curiously down.

It is one of Lily’s hairs. If it were one of his hairs, or if it were hair from Louis, the cat, he’d probably hardly register its presence. But this is different. Ever since Lily’s cancer last fall, Porter has found himself fastidious about things he’s never bothered with before, things that with the threat of death have taken on curious meaning. Even though she is well now, the cancer in remission, he finds himself still wiping Lily’s fingerprints from the mirror of the medicine cabinet, and tossing the tissues she leaves crumpled on her nightstand, considering these things not as the commonplace things they are, but as the awful reminders they might have been.

It began with the seatbelt, just after the biopsy had come back and the diagnosis had been made: lobular invasive carcinoma. They had emerged from the hospital into the late September sunlight and quietly crossed the parking lot to the car. He numbly got into the driver’s seat, and when he pulled the seat belt across his chest, the scent of Lily’s perfume on the nylon was like a kick in the gut, swift and breath-catching. It was nothing new — Porter always found himself wearing a faint trace of jasmine after riding in the car, and in fact had always found it comforting — but in that moment it made his heart go cold. What if her scent lasted longer than she did? Her hairs in the shower drain? Her emery boards lost between the cushions of the couch? He began to see these things through the lens of death; he finds it hard, still, not to.

Porter looks at the hair, a barely visible green line curving for about ten inches along the side of his boat, and he fights the urge to scrape it off, picturing the look on Lily’s face lately as she watches him absently clean the residue from her reading glasses or lets the last of her Diet Coke glug down the drain. It is a puzzled look, but one tinged with recognition; she understands what he is doing.

There is a soft thud in the grass beside him: a crabapple fallen from the tree. Porter stands up and gazes out at the bay. It is empty save for a solitary lobsterboat motoring toward the harbor. Gulls swoop and caw for scraps in its wake. Porter watches as it makes its way toward the channel and disappears around the point, and then it is all very still, the sky and sea both quiet shades of grey so similar he can hardly distinguish where one ends and the other begins. The tide is running out, and the red nun tilts in the current. Tomorrow, he thinks, he will be part of that view, and it cheers him somewhat to imagine himself and Lily out there, in a boat of their own, rowing past the round red nun, the rocky point, the sandpipers scuttling longlegged on the bar.

But first, he thinks, looking again at his boat, first, he needs to paint.

*   *   *

When Porter comes from outside into the kitchen, he finds Lily at the counter, slicing tomatoes into thin disks. She hasn’t heard the screen door open, and it hasn’t snapped shut behind him; he keeps meaning to replace the spring. He leans against the doorframe and scratches at a mosquito bite on his left ankle with his big right toe.

The kitchen window is open; the breeze blows through in small gusts. The string from the bulb in the ceiling grazes Lily’s hair as it swings, but she does not seem to notice. She cuts rhythmically, holding the knife above the tomato before bringing it swiftly down. Her shoulderblade lifts and falls with every slice, her movement steady and efficient. Suddenly, Porter feels self-conscious, uncertain as to how to alert his wife to his presence after having stood there watching. His unseen observation feels almost like a violation, and he has the urge to silently leave the kitchen and then come back in noisily, as if entering for the first time.

But Lily has heard him after all, or has sensed his presence.

“A package came,” she says, without turning. “I left it on the hall table.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Lily takes a breath, as if she is about to speak, but she says nothing.

“What?” Porter asks.

“I just wish you’d fix that door,” she says. “I’ve been asking for weeks.”

“I know,” he says. “I will.” He crosses to the table, where four ears of corn lay in their husks. Beside the corn, the swirled flesh of fresh swordfish marinates in a dish, the thick silver skin along its edges reminding Porter too much of the swimming thing it used to be. “Should I shuck?”

“I don’t know how good it’ll be. It’s early for corn. I got it anyways, for summer, since I was at the farm stand. And I made a Jell-O pudding for summer, too.”

Porter pulls out a chair and sets an empty paper bag on the floor at his feet. He takes an ear of corn and begins to yank away the husks, the cornsilk stickying his palms. Red paint from the boat bottom stains his knuckles; he was out of turpentine.

Lily watches him.

“Do you know,” she says, “that there is one strand of silk for each kernel? If a bug gets to a strand, that strand’s kernel dies.” She tucks her hair behind her ear. “I heard that on the radio today, getting the fish.” She turns and opens the cabinet, takes out oil, vinegar, mustard.

Porter sets a clean shucked ear of corn onto the table. He glances up at Lily, who is whisking mustard in with the vinegar and oil, a task so familiar it makes Porter’s heart lurch. The oddest things do this to him now: the way the sun can sometimes make her sneeze, or the crooked bend of her pinky, things he might not have remembered to miss if things had turned out differently.

He starts to shuck another ear of corn. “I thought I’d launch the boat tomorrow,” he says. “I found a place in town that will rent me a trailer for the day to get it down to the landing. I can pick it up first thing.”

“It’s done? You’re finished?”

“Pretty much. I just have to step the mast, but I’ll do that later, once it’s in the water.”

Lily rummages through a cabinet. There is a long rattle of pots and pans before she stands with a pot large enough for corn. “What will you do with yourself now?” she asks, carrying the pot to the sink. The noisy spatter of water against aluminum leaves no room for an answer. Lily stands with her back to Porter, letting the water run into the pot. Steam rises from the sink before her; from where Porter sits, it looks as if she herself is steaming. He listens to the rising glug of water as the pot fills.

“I thought we could row it over to the beach tomorrow,” he ventures, when Lily has turned the water off. She raises an eyebrow at him as she carries the pot to the stove. “A maiden voyage.” Lily turns around, her arms crossed. Porter hesitates. “Should I shuck all four?” he asks.

 “You may as well.” She leans back against the stove and regards him. “Across the channel?” she asks.

“Yeah.” Porter starts on the third piece of corn. He can feel Lily’s gaze upon him, but he doesn’t dare look up. She has never much liked boats, or being out on the water, but they have never had a boat of their own before, and Porter figures it’s a bit like dogs. You might not be a dog person in general, but you can’t help but love your own.

Lily sighs. “The only time I’ve ever been in a boat with you,” she says, “we ended up floating backwards five miles down the Colorado River. And straight into rapids.”

“That was a canoe.”

“And this is a rowboat,” she says, straightening up. “I’m going to take a bath.” She pauses briefly on her way out of the room to bend down and give Porter a quick kiss. “I brought the grill up from the garage,” she says. “When you finish the corn, will you get the coals ready to go?” She calls this over her shoulder as she disappears through the doorway. She doesn’t wait for an answer.

Part Two

As he was out on the lawn below working on the boat this afternoon, Lily was evidently out here on the rocks, planting the small garden they normally plant together at the start of every summer. Porter stands on the terrace, surveying her work. Lobelia and Zinnia sprout from the crevices between the large boulders that slope down from the terrace like a hard grey lawn, and the hose lies in an uncoiled heap. Off to the side, empty soil and fertilizer bags are held down by the foot of a lawn chair. He frowns; he’d have helped if he’d known.

He studies the grill, which is filthy from last summer. He takes the metal brush hanging from the side of the grill and scrapes at the black crust on the grate. It occurs to him that the grill has not been used since the night last September just before everything changed. Mary and Ted Devine were there for dinner, old friends whose rare presence always occasioned one last bottle of wine, and one last after that. Indian summer, the flagstones were still warm beneath his bare feet at midnight when Porter came out from the kitchen with one last one last to find that Mary and Ted were getting ready to go.

“You can stay,” Lily said, and she worried aloud whether they were okay to drive back to their hotel. But the Devines insisted, and after Porter and Lily had finished waving at their receding taillights, they returned to the terrace, at first just to gather the glasses to bring to the kitchen, but then Lily suggested that they sit for a while, have another glass of wine since it was already uncorked.

They stretched out on reclining lawn chairs. Porter balanced his wine glass on the mound of his belly, laid his fingers across the base. It was a new moon, and the stars were bright. Lily pointed out the various constellations she knew and had pointed out many times before but that Porter could never find on his own; to him, the stars always look like so many random points of light.

They talked, as they always seemed to, about their children. They talked about Calen, who Lily worried about, because he didn’t seem to have a passion. He hadn’t yet figured out what he wanted out of life, she said. He didn’t trust himself enough. They talked about Sophie, who was going to have a baby in March.

Then they were quiet. They did not talk about the shadow her doctor had discovered on Lily’s mammogram that day; Porter didn’t know about it yet, wouldn’t until Lily softly told him late the next morning.

They could hear the low keening of the foghorn in the distance, and the tolling of the bellbouy off the point. They could see the arm of light from the lighthouse sweeping across the bay, a solid beam reliable as time. Porter counted its revolutions.

He was somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, his eyes open, but heavy, and the strange images that precede dreams (a man on a unicycle, Lily in scuba gear) had begun to materialize in between sluggish blinks of the eye, when the feel of Lily’s hand on his own drew him back into the present moment. He turned his hand over and gripped hers, and, in the way that they did, though not often anymore, they came together. This is what it always felt like, to Porter; that they came together, like magnets or pieces of a puzzle, unspeaking and understood, Lily’s body so deeply familiar that Porter always felt a powerful, strangely devastating pang.

He frowns, remembering. That had been the last time. He wonders now what Lily had been thinking, what it had been like for her, knowing what she knew, and what he did not.

The grill’s grate is mostly clean, now, last year’s remnants scraped away. Porter hangs the brush back on its hook and wipes an eye with the back of his wrist. He opens the bag of coals Lily has left out and lets them tumble blackly into the waiting basin. 

*   *   *

Porter showers in the bathroom Sophie and Calen used to share while Lily is in the bath in their own bathroom. He dries off quickly and wraps a towel around his waist, goes down the hall to their bedroom to dress.

He pulls on a fresh pair of shorts and takes from the closet his favorite summer shirt, a short-sleeved blue button-down printed with tiny alligators that he got, what, twenty or so years ago on a trip they took to Haiti. He’s amazed it’s lasted this long. The door to the bathroom is partway open, and as he works the buttons of his shirt he listens to the sounds of Lily in the bath, the gentle drips and splashes as she brings a washcloth to her face, or refastens her hair in the loose bun she always wears when she’s soaking. He pauses before going downstairs, and stands close to the bathroom door.

“Lil,” he says through the crack. He doesn’t push the door open, though there was once a time when he might have, when he might have sat on the lowered toilet lid and kept her company.

“Mmmm?”

“Should I light the coals?”

“Sure,” she says. “I’m getting out.”

He can picture her long fingers draped over the curved edge of the clawfooted tub, the islands of her knees. He can picture the flat field of her chest, the purple lines where her breasts used to be.

“The garden looks good,” he says. He can see the fringe of the carpet on the bathroom floor, and the pile of Lily’s clothes beside it. “You didn’t tell me you were doing it today.”

Water sloshes, the sound of Lily pulling herself upright. “Memorial Day weekend, Porter,” she says. Her tone is weary. “It’s when we always do the garden.”

This is true, but it is usually discussed, a plan made. Porter frowns. Usually they go to the farm stand together and choose trays of flowers to plant. They flatten the backseat of the old station wagon and load it up with flowers and soil and fertilizer. When had Lily done all this? he wonders. How had he not noticed? He thinks of the tomatoes they’ll have with dinner, the too early corn, putting Lily’s day together in his mind.

Water starts to gurgle down the drain.

“And we talked about it last weekend.”

Porter swallows. “I don’t remember.”

“I guess you were too focused on the dagger board trunk.”

He hears her stand, the water cascading off her body.

“Well,” he says. “It looks good. I would have helped.”

Lily doesn’t respond; he imagines her lightly toweling off.

“I’ll go light the coals,” he says, turning before she can come out.

Downstairs, in the hallway, the package Lily has left out for him on the hall table catches his eye; he had forgotten. It is addressed to him in their daughter’s careful hand. He takes the box to the kitchen to find a knife to cut through the mailing tape.

Inside the box, wrapped in tissue paper, Porter finds an old captain’s hat. A waving red flag with a white star is stitched into the front, the logo of the White Star Line. A note from Sophie reads: “For Captain Porter, with love.”

Porter puts the hat on. It is a little small, and sits more atop his head than actually around it, but he is filled with an aching gratitude. More than Calen and Lily, who don’t quite seem to understand, Sophie has taken an interest in Porter’s boat, asking him about it whenever she calls, inquiring into details. When she and her husband, Evan, were here for Christmas, she would come and sit with Porter in the basement as he worked, handing him tools and holding nails and writing down measurements like she might have when she was a girl. This was during Lily’s period of radiation treatments, several weeks after her surgery. Lily was exhausted, and while she slept upstairs Porter and Sophie took refuge underground, quietly measuring lengths of wood, or fitting gritty paper onto sandpaper blocks.

Sophie was six months pregnant at the time, and one day she confided to Porter her fear that somehow she’d traded this unborn baby for her mother, that she’d unwittingly made some kind of bargain. She and Evan had had to try for years, she said, and she was afraid that in her desperation she’d made an agreement with God that somehow led to this. She cried. She didn’t even believe in God, she said. Porter was shied by the intimacy, and surprised by her admission; Sophie was normally so level-headed. At the same time, he deeply understood. He could recognize himself in his daughter; Lily’s illness had shaken them both, rattled the fundamental structure of their worlds.

Porter isn’t sure that his has quite yet settled into place again.

He wears the hat outside to light the coals. He soaks them thoroughly in lighter fluid before tossing a match; sudden flames lick the air. Porter steps away from the heat and looks out at the sun, which is an oval disc resisting the horizon. It strikes Porter how greatly the view from here changes from hour to hour, day to day. Earlier, everything was a still and silvery grey hinging from a vague horizon; now the bay is a deep blue, the sky a glowing salmon streaked with silver feathers of clouds, the two divided by a horizon line so strong it seems impassable by the setting sun, seems to be bending it out of shape.

He can remember exactly how the view looked the morning last September when Lily told him her news. There was a hurricane twisting offshore whose longest limbs threatened to lash New England in the next day or so; for now, it was only grey, and a strong wind churned the waves into foaming peaks. The clouds were low and moving; if you looked closely you could see the pattern of their swirling.

He’d been watching a sloop with a dark blue hull that had come aground on the sandbar being battered by the waves when Lily appeared beside him. Her hair was wet from the shower, and she wore one of Porter’s oldest sweaters, a red one, with maroon patches on the elbows.

“So how did the seminar go?” she asked him. The day before he’d had to fill in for a colleague, a class on Alexander Pope.

He looked at Lily in surprise; yesterday already seemed so far away. It was the weekend, now. But then it occurred to him that by the time they’d both gotten home yesterday afternoon, the Devines were arriving in less than an hour, and they had showers to take, dinner to cook, drinks to make. They hadn’t had time to rehash the day, to take the score as they usually did over dinner when it was just the two of them.

“Oh,” he said. “It was fine. Uneventful. How was your sister?”

“She’s fine. Neurotic as ever, but.”

He didn’t ask about her appointment. Had he forgotten? Or had he just assumed it would be fine? They weren’t old, yet; it was Lily.

“I have to go back to the doctor next week,” Lily said next. “There may have been something on the mammogram. Maybe not, but they want to be sure.”

Porter’s body went cold, and his pulse began to tick violently against his neck, and the first shameful thought to come into his mind was that he wanted it all over with. The year telescoped terrifyingly away through illness, pain, and death; he didn’t know if he could bear it. He didn’t want this experience; he didn’t want to bear witness to Lily’s death. If it was going to happen, he wanted it over with.

It makes his chest constrict with guilt, that he had ever let that sort of thought occur to him, if only for an instant.

Lily sensed his panic. She put a hand on his arm. “It may be nothing,” she said. “It might be a shadow, nothing at all.”

Part Three

“Look at the sun!” Porter hears now, looking at the same view some eight months later. He turns. Lily is coming around the corner of the terrace from the kitchen, carrying the dish with the swordfish. She is wearing a loose linen shirt over a pair of shorts, and her feet are bare. She sets the swordfish on the table by the grill and comes up to stand beside him; she smells like jasmine and powder. Porter finds himself surprised by the strength of her presence in a way he can’t quite explain. It is almost as if she occupies some fourth dimension. He has the urge to reach out and touch her, to feel her shoulder beneath his hand, the bone, the flesh, the warm substance.

He watches her watch the sun.

“Going, going, gone,” she says slowly, her face glowing in the light. Then she turns to him. “Nice hat,” she says.

“Sophie sent it. It’s a White Star Line hat.”

Lily pulls her mouth into a pucker, looking vaguely amused. “Wasn’t the Titanic a White Star ship?” she asks.

Porter takes the hat from his head and sets it onto Lily’s. “And so was the Majestic,” he says. “And it crossed the Atlantic in record time.”

*   *   *

By the time the colors of the sky have faded away and Lily has gone inside to set the table, the coals are ready.

Porter skewers the fish and lowers it onto the grill. The juices drip and sizzle on the embers. He looks at his watch to check the time, always careful to give the fish no less than six minutes per side, no more than eight.

On the lawn below the terrace, he can make out the shape of his boat resting across its sawhorses. It’s hard to see in this light; it’s what Porter thinks of as the dimming hour, where everything seems a shade of blue and the shapes of things start losing definition, as if with evening everything will melt into one. He wonders how well the paint he applied this afternoon has dried. He glances again at his watch, and then jogs down the stone steps that lead to the lawn, where moisture has begun to gather on the grass and the nightbugs have begun their noisy chorus.

He bends close to the boat and sniffs the paint. He touches a finger to the hull; the paint has dried even faster than he’d hoped. He squats down to examine the drainage hole he’s drilled in the transom and lined with rubber. He leans over the boat to look at the slit for the dagger board, around which he’s put three layers of sealant to keep the air compartment beneath the floorboards watertight. Transom, dagger board, sealant; he silently forms these words with mouth, wonders at their new familiarity. He can’t imagine them unknown to him now. He runs a hand along the bottom of the boat, feeling its gentle curve. It is perfectly, pleasingly smooth, as it well should be for all the time he’s spent sanding.

Sanding, measuring, sawing, painting.

He pictures Lily alone in the garden, the uncoiled hose, the broken spring on the kitchen door; the images nettle his satifsaction.

He looks up at the house, a dark shape against the darkening sky. Like a warm beacon beneath the looming gambrel roof and jutting stone chimneys, the screened porch light is on; he can see Lily bending across the small table they keep out there, setting down a fork, a knife. She lights a few candles on the table and then turns the porch light off. He can see her in the candlelight, looking out through the screen at what Porter can only guess: the clusters of lights of the towns across the bay, the growing darkness, the brightening stars.

It is then that it occurs to Porter what he can do, as a gesture, in apology. He will name the boat STARGAZER, he thinks, after Lily. Lily is a stargazer; a stargazer is a lily. Relief surges warmly through his limbs as he considers how the name should appear. He doesn’t want to paint it on; he’ll carve it instead, or get it carved, into a wooden plaque that he’ll affix to the stern. Or perhaps he’ll have two plaques done, one for either side of the bow. He stands back and looks at the boat, and then, so that he can visualize things better, he decides to take the boat off the sawhorses and set it rightside up in the grass. Carefully, he lowers one end at a time, then he lifts an edge, so that the boat is up on its side, steps around the boat, and gently lowers it onto the lawn.

Then the breeze blows, and Porter’s heart drops; mingling with the smells of dried paint and salty air is the unmistakable smell of something burning.

*   *   *

When Porter gets to the terrace, Lily is at the grill in a cloud of smoke. He jogs toward her. She holds the fish with the tongs above the grill and looks at him, her eyes watering in the stinging smoke. Then she flips the fish and sets it white-side down. They gaze together at the blackened flesh. Porter waits for her angry reprimand, but Lily only sets down the spatula and tongs and looks at him sadly. “Let me guess,” she says before she goes inside. “You were checking on your goddamn boat.”

Porter stays out by the grill and waits for the fish to finish cooking, though the timing is all off, now. He can hear Lily on the screened porch behind him, setting down the plate of sliced tomatoes, and the salad, and the corn, which he knows she’ll have covered with a towel to keep warm. He listens to her movements, and his body twitches with an uneasy shame, an awful sense that he has let her down in a profound, cumulative way.

Later, they sit across from each other in a silence that Porter is afraid to break; the click of cutlery takes the place of conversation. Eating is an exercise; Porter hardly tastes the fresh tomatoes, the charred flesh, but he works diligently on his meal, glancing at Lily between bites. Her cheekbones cast her eyes in shadow, so it is hard for him to tell when she is looking back.

“Lily,” he says, finally.

Lily pauses, her knife poised above the stick of butter between them.

“I’m sorry about the fish.”

Lily butters a piece of bread and sets it on the side of her plate. “One thing, Porter. I ask you to do one thing to help with dinner.”

A moth outside slams into the screen beside them, lured by the flicker of the candle. They both look toward it.

Porter sets his fork down. “Lil,” he says.

She looks at him, waiting.

He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I got distracted.” He looks bleakly toward the moth again. It clings to the screen, very still.

“Porter.” Lily takes a breath, and the way her next words come out makes it seem as if they have been on the tip of her tongue for some time. “You have been distracted since September. I may as well be living here alone.” She pushes her plate aside. “Half the time you can’t look at me; when you do it’s like you’re looking at a ghost.”

Porter doesn’t know what to say; he doesn’t know how to explain himself. She stands to leave the room.

“Lily, wait.”

She does.

He feels desperate; he can’t think of what to say.

“It’s me, Porter,” she says, finally, bringing a hand to her chest. “It’s still me.”

*   *   *

After Lily has gone upstairs, Porter clears the table. He puts the leftover tomatoes and salad into an old plastic take-out dish and puts them in the fridge, where the untouched Jell-O pudding sits. He scrapes the kernels from the untouched ears of corn into a bowl. The leftover swordfish he throws away. He goes to the terrace and collects the fertilizer and soil bags from beneath the foot of the chair and brings them to the garbage cans they keep in the garage, and he finds the spring he’d bought weeks ago for the kitchen door and brings it up to the house to attach in the morning.

When finally he comes upstairs to the bedroom, Lily is asleep beneath a single sheet. Moonlight falls across the bed, broken by the window sash into so many blue squares. She lies on her side, facing away. Porter slides into bed beside her. The beam of the lighthouse sweeps across the ceiling. The string of the undrawn shade clacks against the windowpane. Lily gently breathes.

He has passed many nights like this, unsleeping, resisting the urge, the instinct, to curl himself around the familiar body beside him. Now he wonders why. Maybe because he was afraid of the way that her body had changed; maybe because he was afraid he wasn’t welcome. Now, he slides a hand closer toward Lily’s body, slips his fingers beneath the warm arch of her waist, and then, with the inevitability of a tumbling avalanche, the rest of him follows. He rolls over and puts an arm around his wife, pulls her tightly in, knees to knees, back to chest, and he holds her there against him, feeling the warmth of her flesh, the gentle thudding of her heart, filling them both, it feels, with life.

“Lily,” he says into her hair. “Lil.”

Part Four

Porter was surprised this morning when Lily came into the kitchen ready to go, as if they’d made an actual plan the day before, as if she were really enthusiastic about the boat. He’d been standing in the kitchen removing the door spring from its packaging when she appeared in the doorway with a couple of faded old lifejackets which Porter recognized from Sophie and Calen’s days at summer camp. “So,” she said. “What time do you want to do this?”

Porter looked at her in surprise. “Noon?” he said, almost as a question. “High tide’s around noon.”

And now, at noon, Porter stands at the boat ramp knee deep in the frigid water, clutching the sides of his boat as he waits for Lily to park the car and trailer. He’s packed the boat with the two lifejackets, a spare set of oars, a small anchor, beach towels, and a nice picnic lunch he picked up in town when he went to get the trailer. He ordered chicken salad for Lily, which is her favorite, and tuna for himself, which is his favorite. He chose a selection of pastries from beneath the deli counter, and a couple of early peaches — “for summer,” as Lily would say. From the liquor store, he bought a bottle of good Sancerre.

It is quiet in the harbor for Memorial Day weekend. The buzz of hot bugs swells and shrinks in the nearby trees. Somewhere, a dog is barking, and Kevin! Keviiiiin! KEVIN! is being called for. A couple of kids fish from a drifting whaler, and a man is sailing back and forth in a flat-keeled boat, making adjustments to his sail. Overhead a small, silver plane glints against the sky, circling. Porter squints up at it. He wonders what the view is like from up there, whether he, standing with his boat, factors into it at all.

He looks across the channel towards the beach. A few boats have anchored off the shore, but it is mostly empty. It isn’t a wide channel, maybe a quarter of a mile across, so the beach isn’t far; it shouldn’t take him more than fifteen, twenty minutes to row them over there, is Porter’s guess. Once he’s stepped the mast and rigged the sail, they’ll be able to cover further distances.

After some time, he hears the crunch of gravel behind him as Lily approaches.

“I thought you’d driven away and weren’t coming back,” Porter says, joking.

“I went back to the house,” she says, stopping at the waterline. “You forgot this.” She holds up his captain’s hat and tosses it towards him. He catches it, sets it on his head.

Porter turns the boat so that the bow is facing away from the shore and backs it up as close as he can to where Lily is standing. She is shielding her eyes and looking up at the plane, which is lower than it was before, its engine a steady hum. Porter watches with Lily as the plane steers itself through a barrel roll.

“You ready?” he asks, as the plane levels out, circling again.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” She holds onto Porter’s shoulder as she climbs carefully into the boat. “Where do you want me?” she asks.

Porter points to the front of the boat. “There for now,” he says.

After she has taken her seat, Porter walks the boat out into deeper water. He hoists himself up and into the boat. He is soaked up to the waist, and his legs are numb, but he hardly notices. He sits on the middle bench, facing the stern. “Well,” he says over his shoulder. “She floats!” He takes the oars from the floorboards and puts them in their locks.

The boat is more difficult to row than Porter would have guessed; it is heavy, and seems to choose its own direction. He rows them first into the stone wall that lines the boat ramp, and then, beyond that, into the dock where a handful of dinghies are tied, grimacing as he imagines the new scratches in the paint. He feels a knot of frustration gathering in his chest. How is he supposed to keep them going straight when he can’t even see where he’s going? It doesn’t make sense to him to be looking at the place he’s trying to leave behind.

“Porter,” Lily says, uneasily.

“We’re fine,” he says. He pushes the boat away from the dock and swivels on his bench, so that he is facing forward. He doesn’t care if it isn’t proper form, because there before him is Lily, there is the channel, there is the beach; he’ll get them where they’re going. He tightens his grip on the oars and starts to row, and to his satisfaction, he gets the boat going straight. “Here we go,” he says.

*   *   *

Let’s say Porter and his boat do factor into the pilot’s view. A pilot at low elevation is high enough that he has the ability to look at the larger canvas of the earth beneath him the patterns that the waves make in the bay, the meandering course of tidal rivers through the marsh grass, the tidy patchwork of inland fields. At the same time he is low enough that he can focus, if he wants, on the smaller details of the scene the route of a single car along a road, a baseball game being played on the diamond in the park, clusters of picnickers gathered on grass, or a man standing at the boat ramp holding onto a small green boat.

If he chose to focus on that man, on Porter, he would notice the man looking up at him, too. He would notice the bench seats, and the small picnic basket, and the life jackets. He would see a woman join the man, and at the sight of their two upturned faces he might do a barrel roll in salute. He would watch the man help the woman into the boat, and then he would watch the man hoist himself awkwardly on board. He would watch the boat’s zigzag path as the man rows into the dock, into the wall, into the dock again, and then, just as its course had straightened out, he would see the small green boat list hard to the left, and then suddenly overturn. He might be saddened, because he was rooting for the man; he might have wondered where the man was going, might have been planning on tracing their journey from the air. But now what he sees is the red of an upturned hull, loose oars drifting away, thin as twigs from the air, the small woven basket floating only for a moment before going down. He’d see the woman swimming quickly to the shore, just a dozen yards away; he wouldn’t see the man at all. And then he might not want to watch anymore. Instead he might choose to soar away from earth, high into the clouds, and leave that tragic scene behind.

Part Five

All Porter knows is that suddenly he is underwater. It is silent, down here, and still. The cold shocks him. Around him, sunlight bends in shattered beams through the surface of the clear green water before fading into the darkness below. A mop of seaweed wavers overhead. Their towels flutter slowly down and out of sight, graceful ribbons of twisting color, and the picnic basket follows, following the swooped trajectory of a falling feather. His boat is a large, dark shape hovering above him; the sunlight breaks around it in a way that seems to Porter quite beautiful. He is aware of a pressure in his head, a certain pounding, but it doesn’t feel like pain. He feels neither as if he will sink to the bottom or float to the surface; he feels peacefully suspended, a piece of fruit in one of Lily’s Jell-o puddings.

Lily. At the thought of his wife, Porter is slingshotted back into himself. He spins around, suddenly aware of the heavy numbness of his limbs, of a growing tightness in his chest, a desperate need for air. He can see Lily nowhere. He struggles toward the surface.

He breaks into daylight beside the overturned boat and breathes greedily. Lily! he is about to call out, but then he sees her standing safely on the shore. Porter grabs onto the side of his boat, waits to catch his breath. He blinks water from his eyes, struck by the contrast between this world and the dreamlike one from which he’s just emerged. Up here, everything is as it was. The plane’s engine murmurs overhead. Whatever dog it is is still barking, though Kevin evidently has been found. The kids are fishing in their whaler, oblivious, and the sailing man is still sailing back and forth.

He looks at Lily standing on the shore. He can’t read her expression from this distance, but he imagines he can feel her radiating anger, and he can’t blame her. He can’t believe it didn’t occur to him that this would ever happen; he can’t believe he didn’t think to test the boat first. The goddamn boat, he hears Lily’s voice in his head. Beside him, the boat gives a gurgle. Porter feels the stern begin to sink, the bow to rise, and he understands that his boat is sinking. He understands that in a minute the bow will follow the stern down to the bottom, and that after the ripples of its sinking have subsided, the surface of the water will heal itself as if the boat were never there. He lets go of it, and begins to swim to shore.

It isn’t far to swim. Soon, Porter can touch the bottom, and he begins to wade the rest of the way in. He goes slowly, aware of Lily’s eyes upon him; he does not look back. Instead, he looks up at the plane, which has soared so high that it is just a speck against the sky, its engine a gentle purring sound. Soon, Porter cannot hear even that, not because the plane has flown higher still, but because the engine has cut off. Porter brings a hand up to shield his eyes as he watches the plane tumble toward the earth in a reckless free-fall, wing over wing over nose over tail. He blinks.

The first time Porter saw a plane do a trick like this, he thought for sure that he was witnessing a death. Now he only watches curiously, picturing the pilot’s view, the dizzying rush of the earth coming at you. He shudders; he’d be so lost in the falling he’s not sure he’d be able to recover, as he knows this pilot will. And the pilot does; maybe a thousand feet above the ground, the engine chokes back to life and the plane levels out, flies away.

Porter makes his way to the shore, ready for whatever he deserves.

“You’re bleeding,” Lily says, reaching for his arm. He is unsure how to read her tone.

“Your head.”

Porter touches his temple and comes away with bloodied fingers. “So I am,” he says. When he looks into Lily’s eyes, he is surprised to find them filled not with anger, but with pity. “And I’ve lost my hat. I’m sorry, Lil.”

“Porter,” she says, holding his gaze. “I’m so sorry about your boat.”

He shrugs. “I guess the watertight compartment wasn’t watertight.”

“We can bring it up,” Lily says. “At low tide, we can get Calen to help. You can fix it.”

He shrugs again. “It doesn’t matter.”

He looks out at the water.

“All that work,” Lily says.

They stand quietly, letting the sun warm them.

“I was going to call her Stargazer,” Porter says, suddenly. Somehow it seems important that Lily know this. “After you.”

“After me?” Lily asks, and to Porter’s surprise she starts to laugh, a full, throaty chuckle. “You were going to name that boat after me?”

Porter looks at her, bemused. “Yes,” he says. “Why is that funny?”

But this only makes Lily laugh harder, and even though Porter is dumbfounded, there is something contagious about her laughter. There has always been something contagious about Lily’s laughter, and, in spite of his boat, in spite of his head, in spite of everything else, it is only a matter of seconds before Porter finds himself laughing too, in a way he hasn’t in months, in a way that feels like he’ll never stop.