Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett Page B

hair; Ruby’s fine-boned figure has gone gaunt and stringy. They know their children can’t imagine them young and strong and wrung by passion. The children can’t think—can’t stand to think—about what happened on the island, but they can’t stop themselves from asking questions.
    â€œDid you have other girlfriends?” Cora asks Jonathan. “Were you so unhappy with Mom?”
    â€œDid you know him before?” Ryan asks Ruby. “Did you go there to be with him?”
    â€œWe met there,” Jonathan and Ruby say. “We had never seen each other before. We fell in love.” That is all they will say, they never give details, they say “yes” or “no” to the easy questions and evade the hard ones. They worry that even the little they offer may be too much.
    Jonathan and Ruby tell each other the stories of their talk by the tidal pool, their walks and meals, the sagging sofa, the moment in the parking lot, and the evening Ruby made her call. They tell these to console themselves when their children chide them or when, alone in the house, they sit quietly near each other and struggle to conceal their disappointments.
    Of course they have expected some of these. Mickey and Gordon have both had trouble in school, and Jessie has grown much too close to her mother; neither Jonathan nor Ruby has found jobs as good as the ones they lost, and their new home in Palmyra still doesn’t feel quite like home. But all they havelost in order to be together would seem bearable had they continued to feel the way they felt on the island.
    They’re sensible people, and very well-mannered; they remind themselves that they were young then and are middle-aged now, and that their fierce attraction would naturally ebb with time. Neither likes to think about how much of the thrill of their early days together came from the obstacles they had to overcome. Some days, when Ruby pulls into the driveway still thinking about her last class and catches sight of Jonathan out in the garden, she can’t believe the heavyset figure pruning shrubs so meticulously is the man for whom she fought such battles. Jonathan, who often wakes very early, sometimes stares at Ruby’s sleeping face and thinks how much more gracefully his ex-wife is aging.
    They never reproach each other. When the tension builds in the house and the silence becomes overwhelming, one or the other will say, “Do you remember…?” and then launch into one of the myths on which they have founded their lives. But there is one story they never tell each other, because they can’t bear to talk about what they have lost. This is the one about the evening that has shaped their life together.
    Jonathan’s hand on Ruby’s back, Ruby’s hand on Jonathan’s thigh, a shirt unbuttoned, a belt undone. They never mention this moment, or the moments that followed it, because that would mean discussing who seduced whom, and any resolution of that would mean assigning blame. Guilt they can handle; they’ve been living with guilt for fifteen years. But blame? It would be more than either of them could bear, to know the exact moment when one of them precipitated all that has happened to them. The most either of them has ever said is, “How could we have known?”
    But the night in the library is what they both think about, when they lie silently next to each other and listen to the wind.It must be summer for them to think about it; the children must be with their other parents and the rain must be falling on the cedar shingles overhead. A candle must be burning on the mantel above the bed and the maple branches outside their window must be tossing against each other. Then they think of the story they know so well and never say out loud.
    There was a huge storm three nights before they left the island, the tail end of a hurricane passing farther out to sea. The cedar trees creaked and swayed