huffnagle island

Eleanor figured the pier was a thousand years old, the wood beaten smooth by centuries of surf, worn knuckle-thin in places, worn to nothing in others. She walked the length of it carefully, slowly, stutter-stepping her way over the gaps, smiling at the cool, damp lumber against the soles of her bare feet. The ocean was calm this morning, langorous, but charcoal-gray and sudsy, far from exotic.

The boat belonged to the man who lived on Sorens' Perch, a cliff with a natural rock stair, the only outcropping you could see from Huffnagle Island on foggy days, the cliff nothing but a smudge on clouded glass. The man never used the boat so far as Eleanor knew. For two years she and Jack had dutifully untied and retied it to its moorings, paddling to Huffnagle, imagining that they were discovering new lands each time they went ashore. Jack liked to leap out of the boat and run ahead, leaving Eleanor to pull it up on the gritty sand. She didn't mind; it was a small boat, light and unobtrusive, and besides, Jack liked to throw his shirt off when he ran ahead, and she liked to watch him cartwheel about, half-naked, at his least inhibited, the way he never was when Stacy came along.

Eleanor studied the fog closely as it swelled against the shore, wondering to herself: Is he here? Rephrasing the thought, saying it aloud, softly: "Are you here?" No answer but the fog, pressing closer, ceasing to exist as a bulging, expanding wall, instead becoming a syrup seeping between her skin and her housedress, threading through her hair like smoke.

She took the boat that morning, fully intending to bypass the island, to drift into the fog, to float endlessly in a place where the separation of heaven and earth was cushioned by sea. Since the fall, Eleanor felt safest near the ocean. If she were to fall again, she would say to herself, at least I'll fall into a ready embrace. Her dreams carried her to the sea and left her. Not once did she dream of the dry splinter of her body against rock or earth.

She intended that morning to float away from the land forever. She untied the boat and climbed in and pushed away from the pier and lay on her back on the aluminum bottom and closed her eyes. The boat pinwheeled slowly, lethargically, and for an hour drifted in small loops along the shoreline, never touching the sand, but never far from it, either. Eventually the boat washed into the cove past Sorens' Perch, and the backswell pulled Eleanor, who had fallen asleep almost immediately, into the wide, colorless morning sea and set her adrift. Eleanor's sleep was dreamless that morning, empty for the first time since the fall, blank for the first time in nine months.

She woke hours later, saw first the aluminum inner wall of the boat, saw a single narrow trickle of water descending the metal. Eleanor rolled onto her back and stared up at the sky, stretched thin and gauzy with pale clouds. The moon was faint in the distance, an eraser smudge on soft blue paper. She listened to the water, the slow build as it swelled against the shore.

The shore.

She sat up, and her face fell when she saw Huffnagle's familiar western shore splayed out before her, the sand like rocks chewed up and spit out, damp and black. Eleanor rocked back on her heels and looked up at the cliff and the tremendous emptiness between it and the sea below. Had she really jumped so many times without noticing? Could she ever, again?

Eleanor tucked her arms around her legs and bent her face to her knees and closed her eyes. The sudden darkness, so complete, reminded her of the first moments after the fall, or what she imagined the first moments to have been. Her internal timeline was tangled and knotted in ways she would never understand. She felt the late morning sea breeze on her face, smelled the salt it carried. Looked up at the cliff again, and knew she had to.