Chapter 71
JOEL
The water was serene, the same blue lapis of the painting that had hung over his hotel bed.
Most of the guests must have boarded the first ferry, as the cabin was not very full.
Nearly all of the others had chosen to hide from the sun, many clearly hungover behind their sunglasses, leaving Joel alone in the upper deck’s rows of seats.
His bag sat next to him like another passenger.
The tops of the island’s trees swayed in the wind.
A trio of seagulls rose and dipped toward the dock.
Two fishermen, eyes hidden by baseball caps, smoked next to a weathered piling.
It was so strange that the Pruitts would keep returning to this island, attempting to trim its marsh grass and tame its dandelions and chickweed; that they would think they owned such a wild growth of rock and earth.
And all because a man who had lived centuries before them, who they would not know from Adam, steered his ship into these shallow waters in the same way the fishermen did every evening.
Joel closed his eyes against the sun, thinking that, like Ken, he would never see Andrew again.
Andrew seemed like one of those people who would find peace in growing older and not feel loss so keenly.
Joel had once thought of himself that way, but he realized he had not fully lost Shay until now.
He’d been sustained by the possibility of her: a conversation on a park bench, a phone call, her waiting outside his office wrapped in a mohair coat, tapping out the seconds with the toe of her boot until he appeared.
Now her absence was a siphon. New York would be bloodless.
Gray skies and gray buildings, the only color the red of his pen.
When he got home, he would call Jack or Roger.
Tomorrow, after work, they would come over to Joel’s apartment, and he wouldn’t be able to talk about what had happened in any detail, but he would share the broad outlines, and they would drink too much and go on a walk or see a film at the Thalia, and for that day, it would have to be enough.
The water lapped against the ferry’s hull. He tried to think of the scene as if he was editing it: a man, exhausted, sitting on the bleached deck of a boat. It was an ending. It was a beginning.
“One more!” he heard a crew member yell.
Joel turned toward the dock, but the person must have already boarded the ferry.
The captain had gunned the engine, the sound of the waves drowned out by its even drone.
There were footsteps on the stairs, a quick patter, like the person was desperate to reach the upper deck, like they were searching for someone.
Joel felt a hook in his stomach, the familiar pure, joyous heat of possibility, and when he looked up—just like in countless moments before—there she was.