Wild Harbor: Letters in The Floorboards

Water damage had spread across the northeast corner of the parlor in the shape of a coastline seen from far above, and Wren Hollister knelt beside it with a crowbar in her right hand and a flashlight wedged between her teeth. The beam wobbled as she shifted her weight. September light came slanted through the bay windows, catching the dust she had stirred up from the braided rug she had rolled back hours ago. The Harbor Light Inn groaned around her the way old buildings do when the wind comes off the Atlantic, a low, almost living complaint that ran through the joists and up into the walls. The parlor smelled of lemon oil and salt air and, beneath both, the particular mustiness of a house that had survived too many nor'easters.

She had been putting off this repair since spring. The floor had been soft underfoot for two years, maybe longer. Margot's answer, when Wren had mentioned it, was to place a small Oriental rug over the worst of the give and change the subject. Margot's answers to most questions about the inn's bones took that shape: redirect, distract, preserve. Wren had stopped asking.

But September brought bookings that required a parlor floor without soft spots, and Wren had waited until Margot left for her Tuesday afternoon visit with the Hendersons down the road before she pried up the first board. She did not want to negotiate. She wanted to fix it.

The crowbar caught, slipped, caught again. Wren braced her boot against the adjacent board and pulled. The wood came up with a wet, sucking sound and a smell that was older than the inn itself, dark and briny and faintly metallic, the way a copper penny smells after years in seawater. Beneath the board, the subfloor was dark with a stain that spread almost to the wall. She set the board aside and shone the flashlight into the gap.

Something glinted back at her. Not a nail. Not a piece of hardware. Something with an edge. Something tin.

Wren reached into the gap and worked her fingers around the object. It was a small box, no bigger than a deck of cards, and it was lodged tight against the joist. She eased it out with both hands, set it on the floor beside her, and sat back on her heels. The tin was the color of dulled silver, the paint worn through at the corners. No label. No markings. The lid was slightly bowed, and when she tilted it, she could feel the weight of paper shifting inside.

She should have put it aside. She should have set it on the mantel and waited for Margot to come home, and handed it over unopened. That was the right thing to do. The inn was Margot's. The history was Margot's. Whatever this was, it belonged to her mother first.

Wren turned the tin over in her hands. The metal was cold against her palms. The lid came off with a soft scrape.

Inside, stacked flat, were envelopes. Dozens of them. Cream-colored, some yellowed, some still almost white. They were tied together with a length of kitchen twine that had gone the color of weak tea. Wren undid the knot and lifted the top envelope.

The handwriting was careful, the letters slanted slightly to the right. The paper was heavy, the kind bought at a stationer, not the drugstore. The postmark read Portland, Maine. The date in the upper right corner was October 14, 1953. There was no address. No stamp. The envelope had been sealed and never sent.

Wren turned it over. On the back, in the same careful hand, was a single word: Margot.

She slid the letter out.

Dear Margot,

Dear Margot,

I have been trying to write this letter for three weeks. I sit down at the desk every evening after the dinner service and the inkwell is right there, and the paper is right there, and I can see exactly what I want to say, but my hand will not move. Or it moves, and what comes out is wrong. Too formal. Too careful. Like I am writing to a stranger, and you have never been a stranger to me. You are the least stranger of anyone I have ever known, and that is precisely the problem, I think. The closer you are to someone, the harder it becomes to find the true words.

So I am going to stop trying to be careful. I am going to write this the way I would say it if you were sitting across from me at the counter, the way we used to sit, with your elbows on the wood and your chin in your hands. Do you remember that? You would listen so patiently. You always listened as though what I was saying mattered, even when it was nothing more than a complaint about the morning fog or the price of flour.

I have something to tell you. I have been carrying it around since August, and I cannot carry it anymore. It is too heavy, Margot. It sits in my chest like a stone, and when I breathe at night I can feel it there, and I have to turn over, and then it is on the other side, and I cannot sleep.

I am going to have a child.

Wren read the words twice. Then a third time. Her thumb rested against the edge of the paper, holding it carefully, the way she had learned to handle old things at the inn. The handwriting grew smaller toward the bottom of the page, the lines pressing closer together, as though the writer had been running out of room, or out of courage.

She did not finish the letter. She could not, not yet. Not alone in the upstairs hall with the dust still settling around her, not with Margot's name on the back of the envelope and the knowledge that this was something her mother had never spoken of. Wren set the letter face-down on the floor, gathered the rest of the stack with both hands, and slid them back into the tin. She tied the twine, though loosely, and pressed the lid closed. Then she sat for a long moment with the box in her lap and her back against the wall, listening to the inn settle around her. The old radiator in the room below clicked and sighed. A gull cried somewhere out past the breakwater. The light through the window had gone the color of weak cider.

She thought about taking the tin to Margot. She thought about setting it on the kitchen table and waiting for her mother to come down from her evening bookkeeping, and watching Margot's face when she saw the postmark, the handwriting, the date. Wren thought about it so clearly she could almost taste the moment, the sharp and metallic taste of a secret finally being lifted from its hiding place.

But she did not do it.

The letters were not hers to give. They were hers to read, perhaps, since she had found them, since they had chosen her, in a way, by lodging themselves against that particular joist. But giving them back to Margot without understanding what was inside felt like returning a book she had only opened to the first page. And Wren had never been good at returning things half-read.

She tucked the tin under her arm and went downstairs.

The evening had come in soft and damp, the kind of late spring weather that smelled of low tide and cold stone. The harbor was a gray-green plate behind the inn's kitchen windows, and the boats in their moorings rocked with the small, patient motion of water that had been moving all day. Through the glass, Wren could see the lamp already lit in the cabin of the Voss boat, and she knew without checking the clock that Declan would be there. He always was, this time of evening. He liked to sit with the radio low and the kettle on, going over his gear, sorting hooks and measuring line, the way his father had taught him, the way his grandfather had taught his father.

She left the inn through the side door and crossed the parking lot. The gravel was still warm from the day. Her boots crunched against it, and the sound followed her down to the dock, where the planks were silver with the last light.

She knocked on the cabin door with her knuckle. Two knocks, the way she always did.

"It's open," Declan said.

He was sitting at the small table with a coil of line in his hands, his back to the wheel. The kettle was already beginning to whistle. He did not look up when she came in, but she saw his shoulders shift, just slightly, the way a man's shoulders shift when he is aware he is no longer alone.

"I found something," Wren said.

That made him look. His eyes were the color of the water outside, blue-gray and watchful. He set the line down on the table and waited.

She held up the tin.

"I was pulling up the loose board in the upstairs hall. The one that's been creaking since I was a kid. There was a space behind the joist, and this was in it."

Declan looked at the tin. He did not reach for it. He looked at it the way he looked at weather, or at the way a rope was fraying, taking his time before he decided what he thought.

"Postmark's 1953," Wren said. "Addressed to my mother. Unsent."

Declan was quiet for a long moment. The kettle reached its peak and then began to subside, the whistle dropping into a hiss. He got up and took it off the burner and poured two mugs without asking whether she wanted tea. He set one in front of her. He sat back down.

"Read it to me," he said.

So she did.

She read the letter aloud, her voice low and steady in the close cabin, and outside the porthole the light continued to fade, and the rocking of the boat made the lantern sway in its bracket. Declan listened without moving. His hands were flat on the table, palms down, as though he was holding the wood in place. When she reached the part about the child, he closed his eyes.

When she finished, the cabin was quiet. The only sound was the small lap of water against the hull and the tick of the cooling kettle.

"Keep going," he said.

She untied the twine and read the next one, and the next. The letters spanned three years. They were written by a woman named Iris, who had clearly loved Margot very much and very badly, in the way that people sometimes love the ones they cannot stay close to. Some of the letters were tender. Some were angry. Some were just tired, the way a letter gets when the writer has written so many versions in her head that the actual writing has gone thin. There were references to a house in Portland that Iris had wanted Margot to come see. There were references to a man whose name was never given, only ever referred to, and who seemed to cast a long shadow through every page. And there was the child. A daughter, born in April of 1954. A daughter who had been given up.

Declan listened to all of it. He did not interrupt. He did not ask questions. He drank his tea, and when the mug was empty he refilled it from the kettle, and the steam rose up between them, and the lantern light caught in it.

When Wren finally set the last letter down, her voice was hoarse.

She looked at him. He was looking at the table.

"Iris," he said, after a while. "My grandmother's name was Iris."

Wren stared at him.

"Small world," he said. But he did not sound as though he believed it.

He got up and went to the wheel and stood with his back to her for a long moment, both hands resting on the spoke. The porthole framed the harbor, and the harbor was almost dark now, just the last of the light holding on along the far shore. He was a broad man, broad through the shoulders and the chest, with hands that were rough and square, and Wren thought, as she often did, that he looked like a man who had been built for a particular kind of work and who would be wasted by any other.

"Declan," she said.

"I lost my wife," he said.

He said it to the wheel, and to the porthole, and to the dark water beyond.

"Miriam. Two winters ago. She went out in the sloop on a day I told her not to. She went out anyway. She was like that. She did what she wanted and she didn't much care what anyone thought of it, and that was one of the things I loved about her."

His voice was level. He spoke the way the tide comes in. Slow. Steady. No rushing.

"I pulled her out of the water myself. She was cold. I carried her up the beach and I laid her down on the dock and I called for help, and by the time they came I knew. I knew before they told me. There's a way a body stops being a person. You can feel it."

Wren set down the letter she was holding. She did not speak.

"I sold the sloop," he said. "I sold it the next week. I couldn't look at it. I couldn't walk past the mooring. I told myself it was practical. The boat needed work. The insurance was a nightmare. But that wasn't why. I sold it because every time I saw it I saw her at the tiller, and I couldn't carry that, and I wanted to carry it, and I couldn't, and I have not known what to do with myself since."

He turned around. He leaned against the wheel and looked at her, and his face was open in a way she had never seen it, as though a door had been unlatched somewhere inside him that he had not known was there.

"I have not let myself want anything," he said. "Two winters. I go out. I pull traps. I come back. I eat what Margot puts in front of me. I sleep. I do not let myself think about what I want, because wanting things is what gets you into trouble, and I have had enough trouble to last me."

The cabin was very quiet.

"I am telling you this," he said, "because you are the only person who has come into this cabin in two years and sat down and not asked me how I was. You just sat down. You read me a letter. You poured yourself some tea without asking. And that was enough."

Wren did not know what to say. She reached across the table and put her hand on his, and his hand was rough and warm and very still, and they sat like that for a long time, with the letters spread between them and the harbor dark beyond the glass and the kettle long gone cold, and neither of them spoke, and neither of them needed to.

The kettle sat cold between them, and neither of them had moved to refill it. The bergamot had gone flat in the pot, and the letters fanned across the table in their careful arrangement, weighted down at the corners by the tin of fishhooks and the stub of a pencil. Outside, the harbor had gone darker than she had thought possible, as though someone had drawn a cloth over the moon and forgotten to remove it.

After a while she could not say how long, the breakwater bell chimed midnight. The sound rolled through the cabin glass and through the wood of the hull, and Wren felt the vibration in her wrist where her hand still rested on his. Twelve slow strokes, and then the silence came back thicker than before.

Declan shifted first. He drew a long breath, the kind that gathers a man back into his body after he has said more than he meant to, and he turned his hand beneath hers so their palms were aligned, and squeezed once, firm and deliberate.

"Come up," he said. "There's something I ought to show you."

She did not ask what. She had learned in the last few hours that Declan Voss did not offer things he did not mean, and asking would only have made him fold in on himself again, the way she had watched him do when she read him the letter about the boat. So she rose with him, and the chair scraped against the planking, and the letters stirred under the draft of their passing.

He took the lantern from its hook and did not light it. They moved through the cabin in the dark, their shoulders brushing the low beams, and she could hear him breathing ahead of her, the particular sound a man makes when he is navigating a space he knows by feel. At the companionway he paused and held his hand out behind him without looking back, and she took it, and his palm was dry and callused at the base of the fingers, and he led her up the steep steps into the night air.

The Widow's Walk surprised her. She had expected something spindly and theatrical, the gingerbread railings she'd seen in picture books of the Cape. What waited up here was plain and practical, a square of planking railed with weathered two-by-fours, no ornament to speak of, just a place for a man to stand and watch the weather come. The boards were silvered by salt and gave a little under her boots. The air tasted of cold water and the faint mineral smell of kelp, and somewhere far off she could hear the sea working at the ledges, the way a dog worries at a bone.

He walked her to the eastern rail. He set the unlit lantern on the cap and placed his hand on the small of her back, a courtesy so unstudied it took her a breath.

"Look," he said.

She looked.

The harbor lay below them in a sprawl of black and pewter, the moored boats drawing small curves in the water. Beyond the breakwater, the open Atlantic lifted and fell without sound, and the stars were so thick and so close she could not at first pick out the constellations she knew. Then her eye found the line he wanted her to find.

Three miles to the south, set on a bald spit of granite that the charts called Whaleback Ledge, the Wild Harbor Light swept its beam. It came round slow, a measured arm of white light that passed over the water and passed over them and went on into the hills behind the village and came round again. Each pass was precisely twenty-two seconds. She counted two of them before she realized he was watching her count.

"My grandfather built this platform," Declan said. "When my father took over the boat, he used to come up here after a run and stand watch with him. They never spoke much. Just watched the light. My mother said it was the closest they ever came to saying what they meant."

He was quiet for a while. The beam came round again, and Wren thought of Margot as a young woman in the kitchen of the inn, looking out over the harbor at the same light, and of all the kitchens that had ever looked out over this same water, and of the patience of women who loved men who spoke in flashes.

"There is something I want to tell you," he said. "Before you go back tomorrow. Something I have not told anyone. Something Margot does not know I know."

He rested his forearms on the rail, and the boards creaked under him, and the lantern rocked gently on its base.

"Blizzard of seventy-eight," he said. "You would have been what, a year old. I was six. The harbor froze two feet thick. The wind off the north plain was so steady the snow lay in walls. Most of the fleet was hauled out for the season, but Margot's husband, Otis, was stubborn. He had a new boat and he wanted to prove it in heavy weather, and he went out alone the morning of the eighteenth to set a string of traps he should have left until spring."

She could hear him swallow. She did not look at him. She looked at the light.

"My father saw him go. He was in the wheelhouse checking rigging when he saw the boat clear the breakwater, and he went down the ladder and got his foul-weather gear and did not say a word to my mother, just kissed her on the forehead and walked out into the blizzard. He had a twelve-foot punt with an outboard that I am sure he had no business taking out in that wind, and he went alone after a man three times his age in a boat twice the size of mine."

The beam came round. She counted. She made herself count.

"He found the Hollister boat hung up on a ledge a mile and a half southeast of here. The hull was taking on. Otis was on the bow with a throwing line, and the wind was blowing so hard the line would not carry. My father brought the punt in under the lee of the hull and held her there with the outboard at full throttle for forty minutes while Otis got a line across. Forty minutes in that wind. The spray froze on him. They found him the next spring still picking glass out of his hands from where the icing had cracked the windshield of the punt. Otis got off the ledge. Otis got home. Otis walked into the inn that night and drank a bottle of scotch in front of the fire and told everyone the Coast Guard had got him."

He stopped. The silence that followed had a shape to it.

"No one knew what my father had done," Declan said. "I only know because I found the entry in his logbook two weeks after he died. I sat in this very place and read it by the light out there, and I read it again, and I have read it so many times since that I could recite it. I cannot recite it now, but I can tell you what he wrote at the bottom of the entry. He wrote: He never asked. I never offered. I do not think he will. That is all he said about it. That is all he ever said about anything that mattered."

Wren's throat had closed. She breathed through her nose and felt the cold of it in her sinuses, and she kept her eyes on the light because if she looked at him now she was going to lose the whole shape of herself.

"After my father died," Declan said, "I went to Margot. I did not tell her what was in the logbook. I sat in her kitchen and she poured me tea and we did not speak for an hour. I thought about telling her. I thought about it for the rest of the walk home and for the rest of the winter. I never did. I did not know how to say that her husband had been a coward, and that my father had been brave, and that the two things had lived in the same house for forty years without anyone putting them next to each other on the table."

He turned to her then. She felt the movement more than saw it, the air shifting against her cheek, and his face in the next sweep of the beam was old and young at the same time, a face that had carried this story alone for a long time and was tired of carrying it and was also not tired of it at all.

"I am telling you," he said, "because you read me a letter tonight that said the harbor was worth staying for. And I want you to know that before you decide whether to stay, you should know what my father thought it was worth. He thought it was worth forty minutes in a blizzard for a man who never thanked him. He thought it was worth more than that. I cannot tell you what I think it is worth, because I do not trust my own judgment on this yet. But I wanted you to have his."

The beam came round one more time, and on its passage it lit the harbor and the breakwater and the dark roofs of the village beyond the cove, and the windows of the Harbor Light Inn where a single lamp was still burning in the kitchen, and Wren thought of Margot up alone at this hour, baking something she did not need to bake, the way women bake when they cannot sleep.

She looked at Declan. He looked back at her. The light passed on into the hills.

"Thank you," she said. "For telling me."

He nodded once. He lifted the lantern off the cap and finally, as though he had only now remembered it existed, struck a match and lit it, and the small yellow flame steadied between them against the sweep of the great white beam, and somewhere below them in the cabin the cold kettle still sat on the table with the letters spread around it, waiting to be read again in the morning, when the light would be better, and the village would be awake, and Margot would come down the path to learn what her niece had decided.

The light came round. They counted it together. They had not yet decided what they would tell her, but they had decided, at least, that they would tell her together.