Hush of the Sea

I've been a librarian for eleven years, and I've never once done anything reckless. I file things. I shelve things. I keep my mouth shut at meetings and my opinions in the margins of my own notebook. So when I handed my resignation letter in for a sabbatical year and booked passage on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, everyone at the branch assumed I was having some kind of crisis.

They weren't wrong, exactly. Just wrong about the kind.

The truth is a woman named Cyn. Cynthia Fuller, thirty-two years old, ship's nurse, the person I've been quietly in love with for the better part of three years. We met at a book launch in London, of all stupid places, and started dating six months after that. Six months of dinners and phone calls and one long weekend in Brighton where I learned she hums when she's happy. And then she took the job on the MV Selene, because the pay was nearly triple what she made at the clinic in Peckham, and she had loans from nursing school that weren't going to pay themselves.

The ship sails Barcelona to Athens, ten days. She told me about the itinerary in November, on the phone, her voice low like her roommate could hear her. There's a passenger library aboard, she said. Small. Understaffed. Volunteers welcome.

So I volunteered. I'm thirty-four years old and I followed a woman onto a cruise ship by applying to shelve paperbacks in a room that was like a generous closet, and I'd do it again tomorrow.

Boarding day was chaos. Two thousand passengers and their luggage and their opinions about where the elevators should be. I stood in the line for check-in with my one suitcase and my laptop bag, holding my passport so hard the corner bent, and kept scanning the crew at the gangway for a particular uniform.

I spotted her at maybe four hundred yards, which tells you something about what she does to me. White trousers, white shirt, the little medical cross on her collar. She was helping an older gentleman with his boarding documents, smiling the professional smile, the one that doesn't reach all the way up. Then her eyes came up over his shoulder, found mine, and stayed there for one second too long before she caught herself and looked back down at the paperwork.

One second. That was my whole welcome aboard. I walked up the gangway grinning like an idiot and a steward asked me if I was excited and I said yes, first cruise, which was technically true.

My cabin was on deck eight, an inside stateroom, no window, cheaper that way. I unpacked while the ship shuddered her horns below me and thought about how strange it was that the two loudest days of my recent life were both going to involve pretending I barely knew somebody.

The rules, as Cyn had laid them out over the phone, were simple and awful. No sitting together at dinner. No lingering in the library when she made her rounds through the passenger decks, which she did twice a day. No touching in public, no looking too long, no name-dropping. The cruise line she works for, she said, has a conduct policy that basically says crew fraternizing with passengers is a fireable offense, and her head of security, a woman named Marcy who's been running that ship's discipline for longer than some of the crew have been alive, enforces it with the warmth of a customs checkpoint.

Two years she's been a ship's nurse. Two contracts a year, back to back. She'd never risked a shipboard relationship before me, she made that plain, and she wasn't sure she wanted to start.

"You understand, right?" she'd said on the phone, back in February. "It's not you. It's the job."

"I understand the job," I told her. "I don't understand the hiding."

"Harriet."

"No, I do. I do understand. I'm allowed to hate it and understand it at the same time."

She'd laughed at that, the real laugh, the one with the hum in it. "God, I miss you!"

"Come miss me in person. Ten days. Barcelona to Athens. I'll even shelve your favorite awful novels where passengers can't reach them."

"That's abuse of library resources."

"That's initiative."

So there I was, day one, sun going down over the port of Barcelona, eating dinner alone at a table for two near a window, watching the water do its glitter trick, and feeling the exact shape of the empty chair across from me. A couple from Manchester asked if the seat was taken and I said yes before my brain caught up with my mouth, then spent the next course mortified at myself.

The passenger library opened the next morning. It was exactly as advertised, small and warm, with about eleven hundred books sorted badly by somebody who clearly believed all mysteries were interchangeable. I spent three hours fixing the shelving and one hour being asked by passengers where the mystery section was, and at half past noon Cyn walked past the open door on her rounds, glanced in, gave me a nod that wouldn't have registered on a seismograph, and kept walking.

I shelved Westerns for another hour with my hands not entirely steady.

"Rough morning?" asked Gracie, the steward who looked after the library and the lounge around it. Twenty-nine, chatty, tireless. She'd introduced herself that morning with a handshake and a full biography.

"Just concentrating," I said.

"You've alphabetized the same shelf twice."

"I like to be thorough."

She grinned at me and went back to her carts, and I decided she was going to be a problem, in the friendly way problems go.

That night I lay in my bunk listening to the engines through the hull and watched the little clock on the nightstand crawl toward midnight. At ten past, three knocks. Soft, spaced out, deliberate. Our signal, agreed weeks ago, the kind of thing that made me feel like a spy in a bad film and made her feel, she admitted, like she was going to be sick.

I opened the door and there she was in her off-duty clothes, jeans and a hoodie, hood up, looking left and right down the corridor as if the corridor might judge her.

"Hi," I said.

"Can I come in?"

"You never have to ask me that."

"I'm asking anyway," she said, and slipped inside, and I shut the door and we stood there in the lamplight of a windowless cabin, six feet apart, grinning at each other like the fools we apparently were.

"You look incredible in the uniform," I told her. "I saw you at the gangway yesterday. I nearly walked into a luggage cart."

"You didn't."

"I absolutely did not, because I have been trained in professionalism by eleven years of the public sector. But it was close."

She laughed, quiet, hand over her mouth out of habit, and crossed the little room and put her arms around me, and I swear my whole nervous system reorganized itself on the spot. She smelled like the same soap she's used since Brighton, and her chin fit on my shoulder the way it always did, and I thought, this, this is what I gave up a year of my life for, and it was worth it, and I also wanted to shake her.

"Two days," I said into her hoodie. "You walk past my library twice a day and I've gotten one nod."

"I know."

"One nod total. I'm counting."

"I know, Harriet." She pulled back enough to look at me. She's got a small scar through one eyebrow from a netball incident she refuses to describe the same way twice, and I made myself look at that instead of crying about a nod. "It's killing me too. Marcy has crew doing random cabin checks this contract. Somebody got caught with a passenger in Cartagena last month and got put off the ship at the next port with their belongings in a trash bag."

"That's horrifying."

"That's the job," she said, and then, softer, "I missed you. I missed you so much it made me stupid. I nearly waved at you this morning."

"I saw that wave die halfway. It was very dramatic."

"Was not." She pushed my hair back off my face with both hands, the way she does, and looked at me with that expression she gets, the one like she's memorizing something. "Can I kiss you now? Because I've been thinking about it since the gangway and I'd like to do it properly."

"You're asking permission to kiss me in my own cabin."

"Marcy has me trained," she said, wretched, and I laughed and said yes, obviously yes, please, and she kissed me, and it was the good kind, the slow kind, the kind where the ship could have hit a reef and I'd have filed a report about it later.

We ended up sitting on the bunk, her back against the wall, me tucked under her arm, talking in whispers about nothing, the library, her medical bay, the Manchester couple, whether the ship's mystery section had always been that bad or if a previous volunteer should be investigated.

"This is the part I missed," she said. "The talking."

"This is the part I get," I said. "The leaving is the part you get."

"Harriet."

"Sorry. Mostly sorry."

She checked her watch and made a sound like she'd been stung. "It's nearly one. I've got a sick crew briefing at seven."

"So soon?"

"I have to go before the corridor starts waking up." But she didn't move, which I noted, and filed, and shelved in the part of me that keeps records on everything.

"One more kiss," I said. "Then you vanish."

"That I can do." She kissed me once more, slower than the first, then got up and stood by the door with her hand on the handle, hood going up, and the whole transformation back into ship's nurse took about four seconds.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Same knock. Maybe later."

"Maybe later is not a time."

"Maybe later is all I've got, love." She blew me a kiss at the door, which was possibly the most reckless thing either of us had done all week, and slipped out, and I heard her footsteps go soft and fast down the corridor until there was nothing.

I lay back down in the bunk and stared at the ceiling of a cabin with no window and thought about trash bags in Cartagena and about the shape of her mouth, in whatever order they came to me.

Then I got up, because I couldn't sleep, and started alphabetizing the travel section of my own packed suitcase, just to have something to do with my hands until the knock came again.

Day three I shelved the whole mystery section by hand, because whoever came before me had apparently sorted it by vibes. I was halfway through a stack of Ngaio Granger when Gracie came through with her cart, and Gracie has never once entered a room quietly.

"Morning, library lady," she said. "You've made this place look almost professional. Cyn's gonna be gutted, she liked complaining about it."

"I don't know a Cyn," I said, automatic, and Gracie laughed at me.

"Oh, come off it. Everyone knows the nurse. Well, knows of her. She never says two words about herself, that one. Two years I've worked with her and all I know is she's got a scar and she's tight with her money." Gracie stacked towels and looked at me sideways. "You'd think after two years of ships she'd loosen up a bit. Marcy loves her for it, mind. Quiet crew, no drama."

"She sounds sensible," I said, putting a Granger back on the shelf upside down.

"Sensible. That's the word. Anyway, these need returning to deck six, so I'm off. Don't work too hard, it's a holiday for them, not us." And she wheeled out, and I stood there with a mystery novel in my hand feeling like I'd been read myself.

So that was the shape of it. Two years of working side by side and all Gracie knew was a scar. Two years of ships and Cyn had never once had a shipboard anything, which I knew because she told me, at Brighton, with her face in my neck. But hearing it from the outside, from a cheerful woman with a towel cart, hit different. It made our whole thing feel less like a secret and more like a symptom.

The knock came at ten past midnight, then at twenty past the night after, and each time I got two hours of her and then the sound of footsteps going away, and I was starting to keep a tally, which is not a healthy thing to do with your love life.

Day four I got up at five, because crew deck at dawn was the one place and time nobody watched. Cyn had told me the stairwell code in a whisper against my ear like she was passing state secrets, and I went up in the dark feeling like a burglar with a library card.

She was already there, leaning on the rail with two teas from the crew galley, hood down for once. The sea was that flat grey that isn't pretty yet. She handed me a tea and didn't touch me, because even up here she waited until she'd checked the deck both ways.

"There's nobody," I said. "I looked."

"I looked too. Force of habit." She still didn't reach for me. That was how I knew it was going to be that kind of conversation.

"Gracie talked about you yesterday," I said. "In the library. About how private you are."

"What did she say?"

"That you never talk about yourself. That Marcy rates you. That after two years she knows nothing about you."

"Well, that's the point of the rules," Cyn said, but she said it into her tea.

"It's not about the rules and you know it. Gracie's not a rule. Gracie's your friend, and you let her think you've got no life because it's easier than risking the truth. And I'm the same category now. I'm the thing you've got no life about."

"Harriet."

"Two hours a night. That's what I get. You knock at whatever time your shift dies down and you leave before the corridor wakes up, and I lie in the dark doing sums about how many hours that leaves in a ten-day cruise. It's sixty-two, by the way, if you take out your day shifts. I did the maths."

"You alphabetized my life into a spreadsheet, is what you did."

"Eleven years of shelving, love. It's how I grieve." My voice cracked on the word and I hated it, but there it was. "I don't want your hours. I want you to walk past my library and be able to smile at me. I want to sit with you at breakfast on a normal trip. I want to say your name out loud where