Grieving Julia Engelhardt

The woman on the dock is not what Jeffry expected, though he isn't sure what he expected.

His handwritten ad posted on the dock house said, “”Taking a yacht up to Bar Harbor. Looking for a crew member. No experience necessary.”

“Randy Hart, journalist,” she had said. Short greying hair under a black newsboy cap. A strict white blouse and black pants. Red sneakers. The one thing about her that doesn't fit. She holds a grey canvas bag against her side as if someone might try to take it.

"Randy Hart?" he calls down.

She looks up at him without smiling and steps aboard.

Her breath reaches him before she does. Something sour and concentrated, the smell of someone nervous. Like most of the Hainstown schoolteachers he once worked with back in Kansas. She has a sense of familiarity so faint he dismisses it. His eyesight hasn't been reliable in years after the microburst, and with the beard and the long hair he has grown since Hainstown, he has learned not to expect recognition in return. He offers his hand. After a hesitation, she takes his hand. Her hand is cold and damp. She withdraws it almost immediately.

"Welcome aboard," he says. "It's a good morning for it."

She looks at the water.

Off the harbor mouth, the destination set, the motor grumbling under them, Jeffry cuts the engine back and lets the autopilot take the boat. Three or four gulls fall in behind, riding the wind off the stern, making their calculations. He has spent six years watching gulls. What they are doing, always, is working. They are not riding for pleasure. He envies them this clarity of purpose.

He pours coffee from a thermos and holds a cup toward her. She shakes her head.

They sit across from each other in the open cockpit. The boat moves well. The water is flat and green-grey out past the harbor bell, and the sun is climbing behind a veil of cloud. The only wind is the air movement as the boat pushes forward. Away from the shore it gets cold.

“You want a jacket?” he says. He is zipping up his windbreaker.

She doesn’t respond. She pulls her black sweater from the canvas bag and puts it on. She stares past him at the horizon with an expression he can't read. A half-smile pinched at the corners, like she is listening to something far away.

He had hoped to find an interesting passenger, who would entertain him. Not the other way around. He tries to think of something to say. He has forgotten how to be a passenger in a conversation.

He needs someone who will stop him from hating himself. Not the first time he has posted such an ad. Probably not the last.

Alyson had stood there naked to provoke him. Beside her lover.

"So you're a writer," he tries.

"Articles," she says.

"About what?"

She shakes her head slightly, as if the question doesn't quite reach her.

Jeffry looks out over the water. When the boat takes a bad heel in a squall, when the fog comes down around them like a closing fist, when he thinks he might be dying, he imagines a solid wall of tetrahedrons rotating in the dark behind his eyes. He built the habit long ago, after the gunshot from her silver pistol. Behind the tetrahedrons, there is no room for the body's panic. He has found this works. Not always, but mostly.

He is not dying now. He turns back to look at her.

She is looking at him.

**

The painting lessons had been Alyson's idea. Her birthday. The new art teacher, Hugh Clarkson, recently out of the army, with his ridiculous ponytail and his tuna-smelling pocket sandwich and what Alyson called his deep and thoughtful eyes. Jeffry had agreed out of guilt. For what, exactly, he preferred not to examine.

The microburst dropped from the sky suddenly. Alyson ran when the storm broke, Hugh after her. Jeffry was a discarded molecule. He was left wrestling canvases and equipment. He reached Hugh's house, soaked and burdened. Their sherpa.

Up three steps, he was at the locked door. Between lightning and the dim light from inside, their silhouette in the small window had answered the question he had refused to ask himself for months. He pounded on the door until the pain in his hand was louder than everything else.

When Alyson opened it, she said, “Oh, Jeffry, you look so wet.”

He remembered her blouse on the back of the chair. The paint box on the table. Her standing there in the running shoes. Only in her running shoes.

She stood there naked beside her lover and told Jeffry what she knew about Julia Engelhardt. She told him it was a small town. She told him she would have had to be stupid. She was not stupid. She was crying while she said it, which he had not expected. He had not expected, either, what it would feel like to hear Julia's name said aloud in this house. In this storm. By this woman he had also lied to.

A large tree crashed to the ground outside the house. The electricity went. The only light in the house was from flickering lightning.

Jeffry tried to beat Alyson his belt. Hugh shoved Jeffry out the door. One hand behind Jeffry's back, the other at his collar. Efficient, army-trained, final. Jeffry tripped and flew down the porch steps and into the flooded grass. The uprooted elm beside him. Rain coming sideways. He lay there a moment. He seriously considered not getting up or rolling under the porch like he did as a child at home when he found a box turtle.

He crawled on the flooded ground like some sort of beaten animal to the street. His knees hurt. His beltless shorts were lost somewhere along the way. Jeffry wanted to feel more pain. He stood. The storm shoved him down the street like something it had finished with.

The house sold without argument. He finished the school year in Hainstown because he needed the money and had nowhere else to be. He had always dreamed of sailing while teaching physics to the uninterested. After the storm he found he could not think of a reason not to. The Merchant Marine exams took most of a winter. His damaged eyes were a problem until they weren't, until he found he could read weather and water without needing to see it clearly. Six years of delivering yachts up and down the New England coast, sleeping aboard in whatever harbor he ended in, posting his ads on dock house bulletin boards when the loneliness got too loud.

**

"You are staring at me," she says.

He puts his glasses back on. "Sorry. I thought I…I'm sorry. It's just that you seem…."

"Familiar?"

He pauses. "Yes."

She looks at the water again. The gulls circle patiently. Crying in the distance. Out here, this far from shore, they are expecting nothing in particular, just the general likelihood of human waste.

"I grew up in a town in Kansas," she says, as if reading from something. "Small. Flat. The kind of town where everybody knew everything and pretended not to."

He goes still.

"Hainstown," she says.

The word opens a space in his chest. He waits for what fills it.

She reaches into the canvas bag. What she takes out is heavy and chrome-plated, and she holds it flat on both palms toward him like an offering. Antique. Six chambers. He recognizes it not by its details but by something older than sight. A cold cellular knowledge.

His mind moves automatically toward the tetrahedrons and finds the door to it locked.

"You recognize it," she says. It is not a question.

He can't speak. He is counting backward. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years. A creek. Trees. The sound of a shot that split the world into before and after.

"Julia Engelhardt," he says.

She smiles. It transforms her face briefly into something he once knew.

She sets the pistol on the seat beside her. Not aimed. Not put away. Present, the way a third person is present.

He thinks about the autopilot. About the distance to shore. About the likely response time of the Coast Guard. He thinks about the gulls. He finds he is thinking about everything except what she has just said with her hands.

"I don't understand," he says.

"You do," she says.

He says, "It's good to see you, Julia. Truly. I've thought about you." He has not, mostly. He has buried her in the same locked space where he keeps the gunshot, and the note she sent him on their tenth anniversary, and the ashes of that note he crushed into the dirt around the petunias.

She watches him with an expression that is almost kind.

"I read about the storm," she says. "The hospital. I was glad you weren't badly hurt."

"My eyes. My sight was hurt. That was a long time ago."

"Yes."

He looks at the pistol. "You shouldn't have brought that."

He feels her breath in his eyes.

She says, "You remember. It was my father's. Everything of theirs came to me."

He thinks of her parents. Their odd, silent house with its porch that needed painting. The way her family left town without telling anyone. Without even the indignity of gossip.

"Why did you leave?" he asks. "After…. Your family. Why did you leave like that?"

"We had to," she says. “You know, the baby.”

“The baby?”

“What would have been our son, but my father forbade it.”

The boat rises over a small swell and settles.

“He would have been in high school now.”

She reaches across and picks up the pistol and flips a latch on its side. The cylinder swings open. All six chambers loaded. She tilts it toward him so he can see, then closes it with a clean mechanical click.

A son. He sits with the word. He has never once, in all the years since Hainstown, allowed himself to wonder why her family left so suddenly. He feels now that this was not an omission. His blindness, but not by accident.

"As opposed to then," she says.

He is quiet. He closes his eyes. He is not religious. But he can hope.

"You know what you said to me that day, Jeffry?" She is looking at the water. Her voice is level, almost academic, the voice of someone who has rehearsed past emotion into something that sounds like calm. "After. You said we should die together. You said it like it was the most natural thing."

He is not sure he remembers saying it. He nods anyway.

"I offered to go first," she says. "I said I would."

He opens his eyes. She is looking at him directly, for only the second time since they left the harbor.

"I didn't miss my head by accident that day, Jeffry. I just didn't quite believe you."

The gulls circle. The motor runs. The boat moves forward on its own.

He sits with what she has just said and does not try to answer it, because there is no answer. Because the answer carries inside it everything. Her waiting. Her faithfulness to a version of him he was never equal to. The child they made and lost that she had not mentioned in her note ten years later. The creek. The tree with its indelible mark of the ill-aimed bullet. Seventeen years of a woman tending a wound he left and forgot.

"Julia," he says, after a long time.

"No," she says, not unkindly. She has picked up the pistol again. "I know what you're going to say. You're going to try to explain yourself, or forgive yourself, which is the same thing. I've heard it in my head for years. Your part of this conversation."

He closes his mouth. Yes. He hears his part of the conversation. A thousand times.

She says, "We were meant to die together, Jeffry." The words come out flat and certain as compass points. Her eyes have tears in them. The twisted half-smile. "Even if we couldn't live that way."

Jeffry's mind clears, the way it does in bad weather when everything unnecessary burns off and what's left is only the moment and what the moment requires. He looks past her at the horizon. At the green-grey water going out in every direction. No edge to it. The sky and the sea meeting somewhere too far away to see.

He tries, one last time, to build the wall.

He finds the four faces. He finds the perfect angles. He rotates them in the dark behind his eyes, slow and indifferent as a planet. He multiplies them.

The gulls don't stop screaming when the first shot comes. They are excited. Then the second. They screech louder. They continue their wide circles, less patient now, riding the air off the stern, attentive to whatever the ocean offers.