Letters from the Crossing

The ferry terminal at Harrows Neck smelled like diesel and old coffee, and Sam Delilah had been sitting in the same molded plastic chair for two hours, watching rain come at the windows sideways. He was forty-eight years old and had spent most of those hours thinking about nothing in particular, which was either restful or pathetic depending on who you asked, and nobody had asked.

The run to the mainland had been cancelled at noon, then cancelled again at one, and the notice board out front had given up trying to be polite about it. SERVICE SUSPENDED UNTIL WEATHER CLEARS. Below that, in the same marker, some joker had written GOOD LUCK. Sam suspected Pete, the dockmaster, who had the handwriting of a man signing an arrest warrant, and the sense of humor to match.

He worked the ferry line, had for eleven years, and before that he'd done six in the Army, moving boats and men across water that nobody was ever going to write a song about. It was useful work, steady work, the kind of work where you learned that most problems were solved by showing up early and checking the lines twice. After the divorce, four years back, and after his father died two winters ago, the steadiness was about all he had going for him, and he had made his peace with that, or told himself he had, which amounted to nearly the same thing and cost less in therapy.

Winter on the island had a rhythm and Sam kept it like a monk kept prayers. Up at five, coffee at the terminal by six, first run at six forty if the water allowed it, last run back at seven, then home to a house that held one man, one aging dog, and the furniture his father had never gotten around to replacing. He read. He ate the same four dinners on rotation. He did not go to the Christmas thing at the Legion hall, and he did not answer when Cora from the café asked why, and by February he had settled so far into himself that Pete said he looked like a man wintering his own boat, pulled up on blocks, covered, waiting out the season.

That was the winter he started talking to the dog more than he talked to anyone else, though he was getting ahead of himself, and anyway the rain was picking up and the terminal was starting to fill.

The cancelled run had stranded a dozen or so travelers, and they came in from the parking lot in a ragged procession, dragging bags and complaining in the tones of people who had been promised an ocean crossing and were being handed a waiting room instead. A family with two kids, a salesman type on his phone, an older couple already tired of each other's company. And at the back, alone, a woman with a suitcase covered in stickers.

He noticed the suitcase before he noticed her, which was probably the point of it. Every inch of the thing was plastered with decals, some faded to ghosts, some new enough to still shine under the fluorescent lights. Ports he recognized and ports he didn't, a humpback whale, a dive flag, something in a script he couldn't read. It was less luggage than a travel history, and the woman pulling it looked like she had been everywhere the stickers said.

She was forty-something, tall in a rain jacket that had done real work, with gray coming through dark hair that she'd clearly stopped fighting sometime around breakfast. She stood in the middle of the terminal, took one long look at the notice board, and said, out loud, to no one in particular, "Well. Shit!"

"Cabinets over the coffee machine still have blankets," Sam said, because he was the only other person in the room not on a phone, and because it was true. "And Pete's got a list of rooms in town, if it comes to that. He'll be back in an hour."

She turned and looked at him with the level, unhurried attention of a woman who had spent her career watching things in water and waiting for them to do something interesting. "Is it going to come to that?"

"Front's sitting on the route like a fat man on a canoe," Sam said. "Could lift by dark. Could lift Sunday."

"That's not a forecast, that's a shrug."

"That's the island forecast. We don't hold with precision here. Bad for the soul."

And she laughed, which surprised him, a real laugh, short and low, and then she stuck out her hand like this was a thing people still did. "Gail. Marine biologist, currently between grants, currently stranded."

"Sam Delilah. Ferry line." He shook it. Her grip was firm and her hands were cold from the lot. "Delilah like the song. My mother had a sense of humor and my father never forgave her for it."

"Sam Delilah," she repeated, trying it out. "That's a name that's been in a few bar fights."

"It has, mostly verbally."

The family went to get food, the salesman stayed on his phone, and the older couple sat down and resumed an argument they'd apparently been carrying in their luggage along with everything else. Gail dragged her stickered suitcase to the wall beneath the coat hooks and sat on it, which Sam guessed was a habit from a hundred ferry waiting rooms in a hundred worse places than this one.

"You've done this before," he said.

"Stranded?" She tipped her head back against the wall. "Twice this year alone. Weather delays, boat delays, once a general strike I still don't fully understand. When you work on boats for a living, you spend a lot of time waiting for them. It's the great secret of the profession. Everyone thinks it's the ocean. It's the waiting."

"What kind of boats?"

"Research vessel, mostly. I count things in the water. Plankton, mostly, though if you say the word plankton to a grant committee they get this look, like you've wasted their morning." She said it lightly, but there was a worn place under the lightness, the way there is with people who have been explaining their work to strangers for twenty years. "And before you ask if it's boring, it isn't, it's just small. Very small things, very large ocean, and I find it genuinely beautiful, and I've stopped expecting anyone else to."

"I didn't ask if it was boring."

"No," she said, and looked at him again, that same unhurried look. "You didn't. That's interesting."

The rain drove harder against the glass and the light outside went from gray to the color of wet ash. Sam checked the weather feed on his phone, which told him nothing he didn't already know, and then sat back down across from her, because the alternative was standing by the window like a man in a play about waiting rooms.

"Island's not the worst place to be stuck," he offered. "Cora's café does a crab roll that has talked at least three people into moving here. Pete knows every vacant room on the island and rents half of them himself, which is a conflict of interest he's at peace with. If the front lifts by tomorrow morning you'll barely have suffered."

"And if it doesn't lift?"

"Then you'll have suffered a little, but with crab rolls."

Gail smiled at that, and then her face did something quieter, something that moved through it like a shadow under a boat, and she looked down at her hands for a moment before she looked back up.

"Last time I got stranded like this," she said, "my husband was alive, and he thought it was hilarious. He'd drive over from the mainland and we'd get a motel room and treat it like a holiday. Cheap wine, bad television. He'd have loved this." She gestured at the terminal, the rain, the arguing couple, all of it. "He died eighteen months ago. Cancer, quick, which is a horrible thing to be grateful for, and I am anyway."

Sam did not say he was sorry, because everybody said they were sorry and the words had worn down to nothing by now, he figured, for a woman who'd heard them by the hundred. Instead he said, "The stickers. He do any of those?"

And she looked at the suitcase, and then at him, with an expression he couldn't read yet and would think about for a long time after, and said, "Most of them, actually. Yeah."

The afternoon wore itself out the way stranded afternoons do, slowly and then all at once. The family with the two kids came back from the vending machines with an assortment of chips that constituted dinner by island standards, the salesman finally hung up his phone and stared at the wall like someone who had run out of people to talk to, and the older couple's argument moved on from restaurants to some older, deeper grievance neither of them named. Sam made coffee at the terminal's little machine, which was older than Pete and twice as unreliable, and brought Gail a cup without being asked, which she accepted with a nod like this too was a habit she recognized.

"So what's the actual procedure here," she said, wrapping both hands around the paper cup. "Does somebody come around with blankets, or do we just slump against the wall and dream of home like sailors in an old painting."

"That's pretty much the procedure. Pete's got cots in the back for real emergencies, but he's gone up the hill to check on the weather station, back in an hour. You'd have to ask him nice."

"I can ask anybody nice. It's one of my few transferable skills."

He told her about the run, since she'd asked about the boat earlier and boat people always wanted the details. Six forty in the morning, last run back at seven at night, eleven years of the same water in both directions, and before that six years in the Army, which he mentioned the way he usually did, flatly, so nobody could make a ceremony out of it.

"Eleven years," she said. "So you could run this crossing blindfolded."

"I have run it blindfolded, once, in fog, and Pete never let me hear the end of it. It's not a boast, it's a confession. You get so you know the water the way you know your own hallway, and then one day you realize you haven't been anywhere else in a decade and the hallway starts to feel like a sentence you're serving."

"That's a very articulate complaint for a man who lives on a beautiful island."

"It's a beautiful island with one road, one café, and a Legion hall that throws a Christmas thing I haven't been to in four years. You run out of things to say about beautiful islands fast."

She looked at him over the rim of the cup, and he got the sense she was filing something away, the way she probably filed away data points out on the water, small things, large ocean.

The last chance of the day died at around five, when Pete came back down the hill shaking his head, rain running off the brim of his hat like it was personal. He chalked nothing new on the board, just tapped the existing notice with one finger, the one that said SERVICE SUSPENDED UNTIL WEATHER CLEARS, and beneath it his own contribution, GOOD LUCK, in that same arrest-warrant hand.

"That's it then," Gail said. "That's the ferry."

The family had already been collected by a cousin with a truck, and the salesman had gotten a room off Pete's list at a price he clearly found offensive, and the older couple had a daughter on the island they'd apparently rather sleep near than argue in front of, which left Gail standing in the terminal with her stickered suitcase and the particular stillness of a person doing arithmetic she doesn't like.

"Every room in town is either taken or flooded, if I know Pete's list," Sam said. "Which I do."

"I gathered." She looked at the window, where the rain was coming sideways now, genuinely sideways, the way it does when the storm has stopped being weather and become a fact. "I've slept in worse. Airports, mostly. There's a bench in the Corvo airport that I consider an old friend."

"You're not sleeping on a bench in a closed terminal in a storm."

"Sam." She said his name like she was testing its weight. "It's kind of you, but I know how this reads, a strange man offering a room, and I'd rather keep the evening friendly than find out."

"Well, the offer's practical, not romantic, and I'll tell you the house's whole situation so you can judge it. It's my father's old place up on the hill. He died two winters back. There's a spare room with a real bed in it that nobody's slept in since, a dog named Gus who is old and dishonest and will pretend nobody feeds him, and me, who will be asleep by ten because I get up at five. You'd have a door that locks and a bathroom to yourself and I'd drive you back to the terminal at dawn myself."

Gail looked at him for a moment in silence, and then she laughed again, that same short low laugh. "You've thought about how to make this not read badly."

"I've had four years of practice making things not read badly. It's mostly a matter of listing the facts early."

"All right," she said, and picked up the suitcase. "But I'm taking the dog's side in any dispute."

Gus, as it turned out, took her side immediately, which Sam should have expected. The dog met them at the door of the house on the hill, performed his whole act of starvation and neglect for a woman who had already been fed by Sam not an hour before, and then followed Gail into the living room like she'd always lived there. The house smelled like wood smoke and old coffee, and the rain made the windows sound like they were being typed on.

She put the suitcase down by the stairs and then stopped in front of the bookshelf, which is the thing people always did in that house, though few of them said anything about it. It was his father's shelf, mostly, built by hand and slightly too deep, and it held navigation charts and tide tables and a run of cheap mysteries bought by the yard, and between the mysteries, a row of notebooks in his father's handwriting, logbooks going back forty years, every crossing, every storm, every dead engine.

"He wrote all these," Gail said. It wasn't quite a question.

"Every one. He kept the log even after they went digital and stopped requiring it. He said a log you don't have to keep is a diary, and a diary is nobody's business but your own, and he was in the business of facts." Sam took down the most recent one, the last one, and didn't open it