Deadwater Watch

The job posting had said live-aboard house sitting, three weeks, quiet ship, no pets. I said yes before I read the whole thing because my apartment lease was up and my truck route didn't start again until the middle of the month. That's the kind of decision I make. Fast, then I deal with whatever comes.

The Grey Gull sat in a tidal creek off the sound, tied to rusted chains that had been rusted so long they were more brown than metal. A real ferry once, now stuck in the mud for good, converted into a bar on the main deck and a row of small cabins below. The bar wasn't open yet for the season. The whole place smelled like diesel and damp wood, and you could hear it creak on the chains every time the tide moved, which was constantly.

I was twenty-eight, three months off a breakup with a man named Jace Ames, and I hadn't spoken to him since. So when the caretaker, a guy named Dorn who was maybe sixty and missing two fingers on his left hand, led me down the outside walkway and pointed at Cabin 7, I wasn't thinking about Jace at all.

"Cabin 6 is occupied," Dorn said. "Ferry crew, young fella, keeps to himself. You'll hear him come and go. Metal stairs, you know how it is."

"Fine by me," I said.

At that exact moment I truly did not know. That part matters to how this whole story went, so I'm putting it up front. I didn't know who was in 6 until later that same night, and by then I was already settled in and it was too late to pretend the situation was simple.

The cabin was small and stale, a bunk, a little desk, a porthole covered in a scrap of plastic sheeting gone cloudy with salt. There was a wall heater that ticked. I dropped my duffel on the bunk and started putting things away in the three drawers, and somewhere in the middle of that I heard boots on the metal stairs outside. Heavy steps, unhurried. Then they stopped, and a key worked a lock one cabin over, and a door closed.

I stood there with a pair of socks in my hand.

I knew that rhythm of walking. Two years of it. Jace walked heel first, always had, and he put his weight down as if the floor were in debt to him. I hadn't heard that walk in three months and my body recognized it before my brain caught up, which is a thing I didn't expect and didn't much like.

I told myself it was a coincidence. Men walk heel first all the time. Then I heard his voice through the wall.

The walls in that ship were thin. Not thin like paper, but thin enough that words came through if he wasn't trying to be quiet, and Jace never tried to be quiet on the phone. He was talking to his mother. I knew it was his mother because of how his voice changed, that patient, slightly bored tone he only used with her, the one he never once used with me even when I probably deserved it.

"No, Ma, I'm eating fine!" A pause. "Because the galley's right there, that's why." Another pause. "I'll come up sometime next month. I said next month, didn't I."

I stood with my ear against the painted metal wall like an idiot. I could hear the low hum of him more than the words after a while, and then the call ended and it got quiet except for the chains and the water.

Here's the part where I have to admit what kind of person I am, or was that week. We met at a truck stop diner off 95 when I was twenty-five and he was twenty-seven, he was working the counter shift and I came in off a long haul at two in the morning, and it went on from there. We split three months ago over nothing dramatic, just the slow grind of two people whose lives didn't fit. I had spent three months not knowing a single thing about where he was or what he did, and now I knew he lived one metal wall away from me, and something in me that I'm not proud of lit up like a stove burner.

Curiosity is the honest word for it. It didn't feel honest at the time. It felt sneaky and hot and a little shameful, and I did it anyway.

The plastic over his porthole had been put up badly. I noticed it that first evening when I went out on the walkway to smoke, which I don't really do anymore but the ship made me want one. His porthole faced the walkway same as mine, and the sheet of plastic over it was tacked at three corners, and the fourth corner, the one nearest my cabin, hung loose with a curl of tape that had given up.

I didn't plan anything. I walked past it. Then I walked back past it. Then on the third pass, in the dark, with nobody out on the deck, I peeled the loose corner back about an inch and looked.

His cabin was laid out the same as mine, mirror image. He was at the tiny sink, shirt off, washing his face. He was thirty now and looked much the same as at twenty-seven, broad in the shoulders, dark hair going gray early at the temples the way it started when he was twenty-six and I used to tease him about. Water dripped off his chin. He toweled off on an old gray shirt and I saw the scar on his ribs from the motorcycle thing, the one I used to trace with my finger when we watched TV.

I stood in the dark on the walkway like a burglar and watched a man dry his own face, and I could not make myself walk away.

He sat down on his bunk with his phone. The screen lit his face blue. I couldn't see what was on it and I told myself that was my cue to go inside and go to bed like a normal employed adult. I even took a step toward my door.

Then he put the phone down propped against something, slid under his blanket, and his arm started moving in a way I recognized.

I'm not going to dress this up. I stood there in the cold with my back against the ship's rail watching my ex-boyfriend masturbate through an inch gap in plastic sheeting, and I didn't leave. My breath got short. Something low in my stomach pulled tight, that dark hot drag I hadn't felt in months, and I pressed closer to the wall beside his porthole so I could see more of the bunk. His hand moved steady under the blanket. His head tipped back against the bulkhead. He made a sound, just once, low, and I heard it through the gap and through the wall both, doubled up.

I don't know what was on the phone. Some video, some woman on a screen who wasn't me, and the thought of that bothered me less than it should have and more than I'd admit. What bothered me was how much I wanted to keep standing there. I thought about my own bunk six feet away through the metal, how I could be doing the same thing to my own memory of him, and the idea that we were maybe about to be a wall apart doing the same private thing on the same rusted ship made my face go hot in the night air.

He finished. I saw the moment of it, the way his hand stopped and his whole body let go, and then he lay still, breathing, and reached for the phone again.

I peeled my corner of plastic flat, walked the few steps to my own door, and went inside. My hands were shaking a little. I sat on the bunk in the dark with the heater ticking and the chains groaning, and I made myself a deal, the kind of deal you make when you already know you're going to break it.

One more look, I told myself. Just one more, then I'd tell him, or leave, or something.

I'd had that exact thought before, in other parts of my life. It never once meant one more.

Morning came gray and slow, the way mornings do on a ship that isn't going anywhere. The tide had dropped overnight and the Grey Gull sat on the mud at a slight list, so my coffee tilted in the cup a little if I set it down wrong. I took it up to the main deck with the book I'd brought, a used paperback about a fishing boat that I'd already read twice.

The book was an excuse. I knew it the second I sat down at the little table by the rail where I could see the gangway. You don't need me to explain why I picked that table.

Jace came up around nine. I know because I checked my phone when he appeared, which tells you something too. He had a coil of rope over one shoulder and he walked heel first, same as always, that heavy even tread I used to hear coming down the hall of our apartment and know it was him. He dropped the rope by the cleat near the gangway and started coiling it proper, over and under, quick hands. His forearms had a new tattoo since I'd seen him last, some kind of compass rose on the inside of his right wrist, still a little raised. I wondered who'd done it and then I stopped myself wondering things like that.

The bartender came out, a woman about my age named Ro with a shaved head and a carton of cigarettes. I'd met her the first day. She and Jace stood by the cleat and talked while he worked. I couldn't hear most of it. Something about the season opening, something about a health inspector. I caught what sounded like my name once, or I thought I did, and my stomach did a stupid little drop before I realized they were talking about the tide coming back in. Ebb and flow. The universe has a sense of humor.

He looked good. That's the plain truth of it. Thirty looks fine on him. He squatted to check a shackle on the chain and the back of