Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett

that her children had been similarly blurred for him. Then Jonathan said, “That’s my family, there,” and Ruby said, “That’s mine, rightnext to yours,” and all the faces leapt into focus for both of them.
    Nothing that was to come—not the days in court, nor the days they moved, nor the losses of jobs and homes—would ever seem so awful to them as that moment when they first saw their families standing there, unaware and hopeful. Deceitfully, treacherously, Ruby and Jonathan separated and walked to the people awaiting them. They didn’t introduce each other to their spouses. They didn’t look at each other—although, they later admitted, they cast covert looks at each other’s families. They thought they were invisible, that no one could see what had happened between them. They thought their families would not remember how they had stepped off the boat and stood, for an instant, together.
    On that boat, sitting dumb and miserable in the litter of nets and equipment, they had each pretended to be resigned to going home. Each foresaw (or so they later told each other) the hysterical phone calls and the frenzied, secret meetings. Neither foresaw how much the sight of each other’s family would hurt. “Sweetie,” Jonathan remembers Ruby’s husband saying. “You’ve lost so much weight.” Ruby remembers staring over her husband’s shoulder and watching Jessie butt her head like a dog under Jonathan’s hand.
    For the first twelve days on the island, Jonathan and Ruby were so busy that they hardly noticed each other. For the next few days, after their conversation on the ledge, they sat near each other during faculty lectures and student presentations. These were held in the library, a ramshackle building separated from the bunkhouse and the dining hall by a stretch of wild roses and poison ivy.
    Jonathan had talked about algae in there, holding up samples of Fucus and Hildenbrandtia. Ruby had talked about the littoralzone, that space between high and low watermarks where organisms struggled to adapt to the daily rhythm of immersion and exposure. They had drawn on the blackboard in colored chalk while the students, itchy and hot and tired, scratched their arms and legs and feigned attention.
    Neither of them, they admitted much later, had focused fully on the other’s lecture. “It was before, ” Ruby has said ruefully. “I didn’t know that I was going to want to have listened.” And Jonathan has laughed and confessed that he was studying the shells and skulls on the walls while Ruby was drawing on the board.
    The library was exceedingly hot, they agreed, and the chairs remarkably uncomfortable; the only good spot was the sofa in front of the fireplace. That was the spot they commandeered on the evening after their first conversation, when dinner led to a walk and then the walk led them into the library a few minutes before the scheduled lecture.
    Erika Moorhead, Ruby remembers. Talking about the tensile strength of byssus threads.
    Walter Schank, Jonathan remembers. Something to do with hydrozoans.
    They both remember feeling comfortable for the first time since their arrival. And for the next few days—three by Ruby’s accounting; four by Jonathan’s—one of them came early for every lecture and saved a seat on the sofa for the other.
    They giggled at Frank Kenary’s slides, which he’d arranged like a creepy fashion show: abyssal fish sporting varied blobs of luminescent flesh. When Gunnar talked for two hours about subduction zones and the calcium carbonate cycle, they amused themselves exchanging doodles. They can’t remember, now, whether Gunnar’s endless lecture came before Carol Dagliesh’s filmstrip on the herring gulls, or which of the students tipped over the dissecting scope and sent the dish of copepods to their deaths. But both of them remember those days and nights