Term Two

It had rained on Portland all Saturday, a steady grey spring rain that ran down the north window of the sewing room and took the last of the snow off the Promenade. By nine in the evening the house had gone quiet in the way it only did on weekends. Mrs. Ouellette had come and gone the day before, and nothing moved in the eleven rooms below.

Nell set the ninth duck on the batten and took her hands away.

The batten stayed where it was. She had not forced it. It lay along the run aft of hull 212 in one long sweep, with Amos Gilley’s lead birds sitting easy on it, and there was no hard spot anywhere in the curve. She bent until her eye was level with the vellum and sighted down it twice. Then she ran the pencil along the pear wood from the last station to the transom.

She had been wrong about that line since the first week of March. It had taken her three weeks and a Saturday to find out why, and now it was right.

On Thursday she had telephoned Rémy to say she was staying down for the weekend. She had told him the truth, which was that the lines plan was in Portland and so were the only battens she trusted with it. He had been silent for a second. “Tell Portland the tabs don’t stop,” he had said, and hung up.

She sat back on the stool and let herself think about yesterday, because she had not had a quiet minute to do it since.

Vera Nadeau had spent all of Friday inside the Petrel with her straightedge, her gauges and her cans. At ten past three she had come down the staging and handed Toby Keegan one page. Toby had read it standing by the notice board, with both shifts gathered at the overlap. Survey of structure, March 26, 2027. Twenty-two frames renewed, frames 9 through 19, port and starboard. No cracks found. Wet-deck panels within tolerance. Result: ACCEPTED. He had read the last word twice. Then he had pinned the page to the board over the snowblower flyer and turned around.

“Thibodeau,” he had said. “Barlow’s, on Broadway, four o’clock. You’re not buying.”

He had said it the way he said Brackett and Dunphy and Theriault. She had been Ms. Thibodeau to him for ten weeks, and the boss’s wife for one bad morning. Walt Brackett had put the bottle in front of her at Barlow’s himself and said nothing, and Danny had tried to make a speech and been shouted down. When she went back for her truck, she had looked at the board on her way past. Somebody had rubbed out all three question marks with a thumb. It just said Congratulations now.

She had got that floor with a straightedge. As of yesterday it was written down and signed by a woman who did not care whom she disappointed.

There were feet on the narrow stairs. They stopped at her open door, as they had every night that week.

“Coffee,” Win said. He had the blue mug. He had spent the afternoon at the yard with Gus Theriault’s Saturday crew, and he had come home wet to the knees and knowing that Gus took his light with three sugars. “I’ll leave it on the chest.”

“Bring it here. Mind the drawing.”

He crossed the room and put the mug down on the one clear corner of the oak. She saw him keep his eyes off the vellum. He was looking at her face, carefully, and waiting.

“You said you’d ask again when she was faired,” Nell said. “You can ask.”

“May I see her?”

“Yes. I finished her twenty minutes ago.”

She got off the stool and stood to one side. Her heart was going harder than it had when Vera shook the developer can.

He did not say anything for a long time. He put both hands flat on the edge of the table and read the sheet from the top left corner, as she had known he would. He read the profile, with the sheer rising to a high, blunt bow and the low house set well aft of it. He read the plan view under it, and then the body plan, the nest of curved sections that most people took for a drawing of an onion. He went to the block of figures in the lower corner as another man would have gone to the picture. His lips moved slightly at one of them.

“Forty-six feet,” he said. “Fourteen and a half on the beam. This heavy rail around the house is for someone to hold on to.”

“It’s a pilot boat. She runs a pilot out to a ship and lays alongside while he climbs a rope ladder up the side. Then she goes and waits for the next one.”

“And this is the engine.” He touched the profile without touching the pencil. “One diesel. Then there’s a second box behind it, drawn in dashes, with a line running to the shaft.”

“Battery bank and an electric motor on the same shaft. She’s a hybrid. She runs out to the ship on the diesel at twenty-four knots. Then she shuts it down. A pilot boat spends two-thirds of her hours at under eight knots or sitting still, burning fuel to go nowhere, with a man on a ladder breathing her exhaust. This one does all of that on the battery, and she’s quiet enough alongside that the crew can hear him shout.”

He nodded slowly. He went back to the figures in the corner. He looked at the dashed box again, and then at the line she had just drawn under the nine ducks.

“So she carries two power plants and uses one at a time,” he said. “On a ledger, nothing comes in without something going out. What does the battery weigh? And what did you give up to carry it?”

Nell let her breath go. It came out as half a laugh.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing. That’s the question. Kurt Halvorsen would have asked me about the paint.” She put her finger on the dashed box. “Twenty-six hundred pounds. It wanted to go aft, where there’s room for it, and that’s the place I told you I wasn’t sure of. With that weight back there she squatted. She’d have dragged half the Kennebec behind her at twenty knots. So I moved the bank forward eighteen inches, under the house, and filled out the run a little to carry what was left. I’ve been arguing with these three lines ever since.”

“And what went out?”

“A knot and a half off the top. She’d have done twenty-five and a half without the battery.” She shrugged. “I’d rather have the quiet. So would the man on the ladder.”

“Then it balances.”

“As of twenty minutes ago it balances.”

He looked at the lower right corner of the sheet. The title block was ruled in her own hand and it had two lines in it. Design: N. Thibodeau. Drawn: N. Thibodeau. He read both and did not remark on it, and she loved that he did not.

“She’s a serious boat,” he said. “I can’t tell you she’s beautiful, because I don’t know enough. I can tell you I couldn’t find a number in that corner that was there to flatter anybody.”

“That’ll do.”

“I was about to tell you who buys pilot boats.” He straightened up. “You didn’t ask me. I’ll keep it until you do.”

“I might ask. Not tonight.”

“All right. Thank you for showing me, Nell.”

He meant to go then. She saw him gather himself for it, for the six feet of carpet and the other door. He had done it every night for a month, and he had never once made her feel the weight of it. He had walked past a tarp without turning his head. He had put a warranty on her frames from a gantry in front of forty men.

She had spent the whole rainy day fairing a line and thinking about something else, and she was finished with the line.

“Wait,” she said.

The cardboard tube stood in the corner by the chest of drawers. She pulled out the rolled sheet that had been in it since January and flattened it on top of the chest, under the lamp. Her seven terms looked back at her in her own square hand, with two signatures and a date at the bottom.

She took the drafting pen from behind her ear and a triangle from the table. She laid the edge of the triangle under the second line.

Two. Separate rooms.

She ruled one stroke through it, end to end. In the margin she wrote N.O.T. and the date.

Win had not moved from the table.

“Your initials spell ‘not,’” he said. His voice had gone careful.

“I’ve heard about it since kindergarten. Faye thinks it’s the funniest thing in Maine.” She capped the pen. She made herself turn around and look at him squarely. “The rooms were my term. I wrote it and I meant it, and I’m the one ending it. Nothing else on that page moves. I still owe you one million eight hundred seventy-six thousand dollars, and you’ll still get an invoice on the first. I told you in that boat I wouldn’t have forty men think they knew how I got their floor. Yesterday Toby Keegan called me by my last name. They know how I got it.” Her mouth was dry. “So I’m asking you. Do you want that?”

“Yes.”

He said it at once, and then he took his hands off the oak table and came across the room to her, and stopped a foot away.

“Yes. I’ve wanted it since a staircase in February, and I’ve been very tired of your handwriting.” He drew a breath. “And you can change your mind at any point. Tonight, or ten minutes from now, or in the middle of it. You say so and I stop, and nothing on that page changes because you did. I need you to know that before I touch you.”

“I do know it. That’s why it’s you I’m asking.”

“Then may I?”

“Win. Yes.”

He kissed her the way he had begun to in the boat, with his fingertips under her jaw. It was slower this time. There was no hard hat and no crew coming back with coffee, and he seemed to understand that he had all the time there was. She put her hands inside his sweater, against his shirt, and felt his breath catch along his ribs.

She took his glasses off herself. She folded them and reached back to set them on the drafting table, beside the ducks.

“I can’t see the drawing now,” he said.

“You’ve seen the drawing.”

“I can see you. You’re very clear.”

She laughed against his mouth. He got the sweater off over his head, and his hair stood up, and she started on his shirt. He put his hands to the hem of her sweatshirt and stopped there.

“Is this all right?”

“Yes.”

He drew it up and off. A moment later his fingers were at the clasp at her back. “And this?”

“Win. You’re asking leave for every hook.”

“I’d rather ask.”

“I know you would. Ask with your hands for a while. I’ll tell you if the answer’s no.”

He was silent for a second. Then he laughed, low, and it was a sound she had never heard from him before. He stopped asking. His hands were warm and exact, and he learned her as he learned everything, from the top down, missing nothing. He ran his palms over her shoulders and down her back. He cupped her breasts and bent his head to them, and she heard herself say his name in a voice she did not know.

She got his shirt open and pushed it off his arms. He was lean all the way down, pale, with dark hair on his chest and a long, flat stomach that jumped when she laid her hand on it. She spread her fingers there and watched his eyes close.

“You’re shaking,” she said.

“Yes. I can’t seem to stop it.”

“Don’t stop it. I like it.”

He lifted her left arm then and turned it over in the lamplight. She had pushed a sleeve down over that forearm in front of him since the first day. The scar ran from wrist to elbow, slick and pale and puckered along one edge.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I was fifteen. I reached for an offcut that was falling and laid my arm down on a seam Dad had just run. He told me I’d only ever do it once.”

“Was he right?”

“He was right.”

He put his mouth to it, at the wrist, and then higher. She had not expected that to undo her, and it did. She pulled him toward the bed by the waistband.

The bed he had had brought up in January was wide enough for two if neither of them was being polite. They got the rest of their clothes off sitting on the edge of it, clumsily. His belt gave her trouble and her jeans caught on her heel, and she laughed again, and so did he. Then they were lying down, skin to skin from shoulder to ankle. She felt how hot he was, and how hard he was working to hold still.

“There’s a thing I should say,” he said into her hair. “The morning after the boat, I went into a pharmacy on Congress Street and bought a box. I had no reason to. You’d just told me no. I felt like a criminal at the till.”

“I’m on the pill. And I bought a box on Tuesday, at the Hannaford.”

“Tuesday.”

“Vera hadn’t even signed yet. I’d say I was hoping.”

“We’ve over-ordered,” Win said gravely, and she bit his shoulder for it.

He was careful with her for a long while. He kissed her throat and her breasts and the inside of her elbow. His hand moved over her hip and along her thigh, and when she opened to it he watched her face the whole time, intent, as he had watched her chalk go onto his boat. She told him where. She told him slower, and then she told him not to stop, and he did not stop. The room went away for a while. There was the rain, and his hand, and her own voice saying yes.

When she could see again he was braced over her on his forearms with his jaw tight.

“Now,” she said. “Come here.”

“You’re sure.”

“I struck it out in ink, Win.”

She drew him down with her hands on his hips and her knees coming up around him. He came into her slowly, and he said her name once, roughly, as if it had been knocked out of him. She felt him try to keep the care, even then. She ran her hands down the long muscles of his back and pulled, and she moved under him, and felt it go.

It came apart all at once. His mouth was open against her neck. His hand found hers on the pillow and gripped it until the bronze bands ground together. He was not measured any more and he was not quiet. She had wanted exactly this, more than she had let herself know. She held on to him and went with him.

“I lost count,” he said, some time afterwards. He was lying half across her with his face in the curve of her shoulder, and his heart was still pounding against her ribs. “I always count. I got to three, I think.”

“Three what?”

“I’ve no idea.”

She laughed until the bed shook. He raised his head. Without the glasses his eyes were darker and a little unfocused, and he looked at her as if she were a figure that had come out better than any forecast.

“Was it—”

“Don’t you dare ask me for a number.”

“I was going to ask if I’d hurt you.”

“No. You didn’t hurt me.” She pushed the damp hair off his forehead. Her hand was not steady. “You were good to me. Then you stopped being so careful, and that was better.”

He turned his face and kissed her palm. The rain went on against the north window. After a while he reached down and pulled the quilt up over both of them, and tucked it behind her shoulder where the draught came.

“Do I go back across the landing?”

“It’s six feet of carpet and I’ve just crossed it out. Stay where you are.”

He stayed. He fell asleep before she did, heavily, with one hand spread on her hip.
***
She woke at her usual hour, a little after five, in grey light.

For a moment she did not know why she was warm. Then she did. Win was asleep on his stomach beside her with his face turned toward her and one arm flung over the pillow. He looked about twenty-five. His left hand lay open on the sheet, and the ring she had turned on the yard lathe was on it. His glasses were on the drafting table, next to her finished line.

She was happy. She lay and tested it, like a weld she did not quite believe in, and it held. She had not been this happy since before Seattle. She could hear a gull somewhere over the Fore River, and the rain had stopped.

She got up quietly, pulled his shirt on because it was nearest and went to the chest of drawers.

The vellum lay where she had left it. In the early light the ruled line through term two was very black, with N.O.T. beside it. Her eye went up one line, without her meaning it to.

One. One year on paper, counted from the wedding day. Then a quiet divorce.

Nothing was ruled through that. The wedding day had been the twenty-ninth of January. It was the twenty-eighth of March. She did not have his head for it, but she could do this one. There were ten months left.

She had told him last night that nothing else on the page moved, and she had believed it while she was saying it. She had thought she was crossing out a sleeping arrangement. She stood there in his shirt with her bare feet cold on the boards, and she understood that she had started something she had no drawing for. She did not know its sequence. She did not know where the heat would go or what it would pull against when it cooled. In ten months she was due to go home to Skerry Harbor and start paying this man twenty-three thousand nine hundred dollars a month across a desk.

The pen was lying beside the sheet. She did not pick it up.

“Nell?” His voice was thick with sleep. He had lifted his head and was squinting toward the window. “I can’t see where you are.”

“I’m here.”

“Is it morning? Are you going?”

“It’s Sunday. I’m not going anywhere till tonight.”

“Then come back.”

She was frightened. She was also so glad to hear him say it that her eyes stung, and she could not have said which was the larger. She left the vellum where it lay, with ten months on it, and went back to bed.
***