Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett Page A

asbeing almost purely happy. They swam in that odd, indefinite zone where they were more than friends, not yet lovers, still able to deny to themselves that they were headed where they were headed.
    Ruby made the first phone call, a week after they left the island. At eleven o’clock on a Sunday night, she told her husband she’d left something in her office that she needed to prepare the next day’s class. She drove to campus, unlocked her door, picked up the phone and called Jonathan at his house. One of his children—Jessie, she thinks—answered the phone. Ruby remembers how, even through the turmoil of her emotions, she’d been shocked at the idea of a child staying up so late.
    There was a horrible moment while Jessie went to find her father; another when Jonathan, hearing Ruby’s voice, said, “Wait, hang on, I’ll just be a minute,” and then negotiated Jessie into bed. Ruby waited, dreading his anger, knowing she’d been wrong to call him at home. But Jonathan, when he finally returned, said, “Ruby. You got my letter.”
    â€œWhat letter?” she asked. He wrote to tell me good-bye, she remembers thinking.
    â€œMy letter, ” he said. “I wrote you, I have to see you. I can’t stand this.”
    Ruby released the breath she hadn’t known she was holding.
    â€œYou didn’t get it?” he said. “You just called?” It wasn’t only me, he remembers thinking. She feels it too.
    â€œI had to hear your voice,” she said.
    Ruby called, but Jonathan wrote. And so when Jonathan’s youngest daughter, Cora, later fell in love and confided in Ruby, and then asked her, “Was it like this with you two? Who started it—you or Dad?” all Ruby could say was, “It happened to both of us.”
    Sometimes, when Ruby and Jonathan sit on the patio looking out at the hills above Palmyra, they will turn and see their children watching them through the kitchen window. Before the children went off to college, the house bulged with them on weekends and holidays and seemed empty in between; Jonathan’s wife had custody of Jessie and Gordon and Cora, and Ruby’s husband took her sons, Mickey and Ryan, when he remarried. Now that the children are old enough to come and go as they please, the house is silent almost all the time.
    Jessie is twenty-four, and Gordon is twenty-two; Mickey is twenty-one, and Cora and Ryan are both nineteen. When they visit Jonathan and Ruby they spend an unhealthy amount of time talking about their past. In their conversations they seem to split their lives into three epochs: the years when what they think of as their real families were whole; the years right after Jonathan and Ruby met, when their parents were coming and going, fighting and making up, separating and divorcing; and the years since Jonathan and Ruby’s marriage, when they were forced into a reconstituted family. Which epoch they decide to explore depends on who’s visiting and who’s getting along with whom.
    â€œBut we were happy,” Mickey may say to Ruby, if he and Ryan are visiting and Jonathan’s children are absent. “We were, we were fine.”
    â€œIt wasn’t like you and Mom ever fought,” Cora may say to Jonathan, if Ruby’s sons aren’t around. “You could have worked it out if you’d tried.”
    When they are all together, they tend to avoid the first two epochs and to talk about their first strained weekends and holidays together. They’ve learned to tolerate each other, despite their forced introductions; Cora and Ryan, whose birthdays areless than three months apart, seem especially close. Ruby and Jonathan know that much of what draws their youngest children together is shared speculation about what happened on that island.
    They look old to their children, they know. Both of them are nearing fifty. Jonathan has grown quite heavy and has lost much of his