The Weight of Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

a hangover, I thought. He must be ill.
    He raised his head off the pillow and looked at me. He seemed not to be able to see me. There was something wrong with his
     right eye. “This will pass,” he said. “It’s just a headache.”
    “What can I do for you?” I asked.
    “Don’t go,” he whispered. “Promise me you won’t go.” He reached for my hand, catching my wrist. He gripped me so tightly,
     he raised welts on my skin.
    I prepared him an ice pack in the tiny kitchen of his apartment and lay down next to him. I, too, was naked. It’s possible
     I slept while he waited out the pain. Some hours later, he rolled over, facing me, and took my hand. He placed my fingers
     on the scar. His color had returned, and I could see that the headache was gone. I traced the long bumpy curve on his face,
     as I was meant to do.
    “There’s something I want to tell you,” he said.
    In the morning, after our long night together, after the migraine, the first of dozens I would eventually witness, I persuaded
     him to get up and take me out to breakfast. I made him pose for a photograph at the front door of the apartment house. At
     the diner, he told me more about the scar, but the language, I could hear, had already changed, the telling of it was different.
     I could see that he was composing images, searching for words. I left him with a promise to return in the late afternoon.
     When I came back, Thomas had still not showered or changed his clothes, and there was an unmistakable exhilaration about him,
     a flush on his face.
    “I love you,” he said, getting up from the desk.
    “You couldn’t possibly,” I said, alarmed. I looked over to the desk. I saw white-lined papers covered with black ink. Thomas’s
     fingers were stained, and there was ink on his shirt.
    “Oh but I do,” he said.
    “You’ve been working,” I said, going to him. He embraced me, and I inhaled in his shirt what had become, in twenty-four hours,
     a familiar scent.
    “It’s the beginning of something,” he said into my hair.
    In the restaurant in Portsmouth, Thomas turns slightly and sees that I am watching him.
    He reaches across the table. “Jean, do you want a walk?” he asks. “We’ll go up to the bookstore. Maybe we’ll find some old
     photographs of Smuttynose.”
    “Yes, that’s right,” says Adaline. “You and Thomas go off for a bit on your own. Rich and I will take care of Billie.”
    Rich stands. My daughter’s face is serious, as if she were trying to look older than she is — perhaps eight or nine. I watch
     her smooth her T-shirt over her shorts.
    “Fat repose”
Thomas says. He speaks distinctly, but there is, in his voice, which is somewhat louder than it was, the barest suggestion
     of excitement.
    At the next table, a couple turns to look at us.
    Adaline reaches around for a sweater she has left on the back of the chair.
“Spaded breasts” she
says.
    She stands up, but Thomas cannot leave it there.
    “Twice-bloated oaths on lovers’breath”
    Adaline looks at Thomas, then at me.
“The hour confesses”
she says quietly.
“And leaves him spinning.”
    Thomas and I walk up Ceres Street to the center of the town. Thomas seems anxious and distracted. We pass boutiques, a microbrewery,
     a home-furnishings store. In a storefront window, I see my reflection, and it occurs to me there are no mirrors on the boat.
     I am surprised to see a woman who looks older than I think she ought to. Her mouth is pressed into a narrow line, as if she
     were trying to remember something important. Her shoulders are hunched, or perhaps that is simply the way she is standing,
     with her hands in the pockets of her jeans. She has on a faded navy sweatshirt, and she has a camera bag on her arm. She might
     be a tourist. She wears her hair short, hastily pushed back behind her ears. On the top of her hair, which is an indeterminate
     and faded chestnut, there is a thin weave of dew. She wears dark glasses, and I cannot see her