The Salt Line.

Mara counted the crossing by the engine, not by Holt’s clock. The Mercy kept a tired four-beat under the boards, and every time the bow took a step down into the fog the smell came up fresher: diesel, wet rope, and under those the sweet rot of kelp that had lain in the sun and been claimed again.

She stood with her bag between her boots and her collar up. The ticket in her pocket had gone soft from her hand.

Marrow’s Landing unstitched behind them. The ramp first, then the stacked traps, then the pale shed where a woman sold tickets and coffee that tasted of the pot. Forty minutes if the tide was civil. Holt had not said which kind they had. He had looked at her face long enough to be sure of it, torn her ticket, and gone up the three steps to the wheel. He was narrower than she remembered, cap salt-stiff, the same habit of putting his shoulder between himself and a conversation.

She had been in a rented kitchen in Portland with a sounding sheet pinned to the table when June called, three mornings ago. The sheet had been behaving. June had not. Elias was dead. The cottage was still on the lease.

If Mara meant to come, she could come on the afternoon boat on the seventh, and there was no sense hiring a skiff to beat the fog. June had hung up before the condolence could become a second sentence. Mara had sat with the pencil in her hand until the line she was correcting dried wrong, and then she had packed.

Four other people rode in the cabin and none of them wanted her name. A boy slept on the floor with his mouth open and his duffel for a pillow. A woman Mara almost knew held a white bakery box on her knees. A heavy man who had Peter Hatch’s shoulders braced a crate against the bench and checked the knot whenever the hull shuddered: milk, bread, a net sack of onions. October did not bring people who needed to be met. It brought what the store could not grow.

Mara stayed outside the wheelhouse with the weather on her teeth. Fog moved on the glass in sheets, not drops. She had forgotten the exact cold of it, the way it found the seam under her jaw. The last time she had ridden this boat she had been twenty-three and furious in a quiet way, and Holt had not come down to say goodbye then either. Eleven years. She did the subtraction once and let it be arithmetic.

She put her head in at the wheelhouse door because not asking would have been a kind of theatre.

“You see him this week?” she asked.

Holt’s hands rested on the spokes. He watched the nothing in front of the bow as if it might become a ledge. “I see the light. That’s what I see.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“It’s what I have.” He reached past her and pulled the door to, not hard. The gesture had no temper in it. It was the end of a thing. She went back to her bag. A gull crossed low and was gone into the white, and the bell somewhere ahead struck once and then thought better of it.

The island did not arrive so much as it failed to stay hidden. Spruce first, a darker nap in the cloth. Then granite under the trees, then the long wall of the harbour coming out of the murk in sections, like a sentence she had to read as it was spoken.

The lamp at Harrow Light turned in its glass. Automated, the lease still in her father’s name, the beam smeared to a pale thumbprint and back. She did not look at the headland long. Looking was a way of getting there ahead of the hull, and she did not want to give the morning that.

She looked at the wall.

A white stripe ran the top of it, higher than the rockweed, higher than the rust weeping from the bolts, higher than any ordinary high-water line she would have inked without a storm date beside it. The paint was fresh and cheap. House paint, already thinking about chalk. It did not stop where a flood mark would stop, at the corner, at the practical end of concern. It continued, thin and stubborn, as if the brush had been following a string only one person could see.

Her eye took the height before she gave it permission.

She knew the stripe. She had grown up with it the way she had grown up with the church step, a thing you did not put your foot on because a grown voice had said so, once, in a tone that did not invite the second question.

From the water, with the tide she could read off the stained pilings sitting well below it, the stripe stopped being furniture. It was in the wrong place for a warning about waves and too carefully renewed for a whim. She saw it. She did not understand it.

The gap between those two facts irritated her like a sounding plotted on dry land.

Holt brought the Mercy in on a short arc. The basin opened: three masts, a pallet of traps, the stern of a lobster boat whose name she did not let herself assemble.

Tires along the dock. A figure in a dark coat, not waving.

The hull took the pylons. Wood, rubber, a single dull knock that went up through her boots into her knees.

“Your father paid the freight,” Holt said. He still did not turn. “Don’t you pay the tax.”

The engine fell off. Someone on the dock threw a line and the heavy man caught it against his thigh.

“What tax?” Mara said.

Holt watched the line go tight. “I already said the part I’m saying.”

He tapped the sill twice with his knuckle, which meant the deck was no longer his problem. The boy woke. The bakery box went past Mara at the height of her ribs, sugar and warmth and a person’s careful hands. She stood one second longer than was useful, then took her bag and went down.

The ramp was slick and the crate of onions caught on the cleat, so she had to wait with her boots on boards that shone. The white stripe came off the wall and onto the capstones at the height of her hip. Close, it was worse: new paint over an older crust, the crust flashing through where the brush had skipped, salt gone hard as sugar candy.

In the stone just past the ramp sat a plaque the size of a palm. No letters. A groove cut across the metal, deep enough for a thumb, worn bright at the center. She put her thumb in it because her hand remembered the motion and the rest of her was still on the boat. Cold went through the glove. Nothing else happened. She took the thumb back and felt foolish, which was at least a feeling she could price.

June Pell stood at the foot of the ramp with every button of her coat done, including the one at the throat that was only for weather with intentions. Her hair had gone the colour of rope left in a shed. She looked at the bag, then at Mara’s face, and kept her arms where they were. Mara was grateful and annoyed in the same breath.

“You made it,” June said.

“The boat made it.”

A man on the float called up about a mooring chain that had chewed itself.

June lifted two fingers and he swallowed the rest.

Then, lower, to somebody Mara could not see behind the fish-house corner: “No. And not on my dock.” When she turned back, the no was still in her mouth.

“Peter put milk in the cottage,” she said. “The damper sticks halfway. You remember. You can go up, light the stove, sleep in a bed that isn’t moving. Irene doesn’t need an identification. We aren’t confused about who he is.”

The heavy man nodded at June and did not nod at Mara, which was a kind of manners.

The bakery woman took the lane with her eyes on the box. Nobody asked Mara how she was. She had forgotten to want that, and then she remembered, and then she was glad of the fog because it gave them all a reason to look at their feet.

June’s hands were in her pockets. The coat did not gap. “Or you see him. She has kept the front room cold. I told her you’d pick the body over the house. If I guessed wrong, correct it. I’ve got a harbour to keep looking ordinary. I can walk you one place. I won’t walk you both.”

House or body. The cottage would be charts and his mug and the particular quiet of a man who had stepped out to check a gauge. The clinic would be the man. Mara thought of Holt’s tax and refused to spend it here, in front of June, like a fool with a riddle. Her father had paid something. She did not know the currency. She knew which errand was hers.

“The body,” she said.

June nodded as if a number had come out right and she was sorry about the arithmetic. She turned up the lane between the fish houses. The coat stayed buttoned. Mara shifted the bag to her other hand and followed.

At the corner she did look back. The stripe on the wall was already softening into the fog, bright, then less bright, a line drawn by somebody who expected it to matter. She still had no name for what it was doing up there above the tide. She went after June anyway.