Envious Moon(14)

When I was first here, they did not allow me to have a mirror in my room and they had to bring me to the barber to shave my face and trim my hair. Now I have a metal mirror of my own and I can look at myself anytime I want. It’s hard to be a good judge of oneself, but I wonder if she would recognize the boy I once was. I still have curly hair, though there is a little touch of gray at the temple. My face is a little heavier, especially around the jowls, and from the corners of my eyes crow’s-feet radiate out toward my hairline. You can also see my age in the corners of my mouth.

I am different in other ways. I read all the time now. I must go through three books a week. I read all kinds of stuff. I think I like true adventure stories the best. People climbing mountains and having to fight their way out of snowstorms. Or sailing around the world. Men who show extraordinary courage with their backs against the wall.

They encourage my reading and they encourage my writing, though they would prefer it if I would write other things. I told Dr. Mitchell that I am of the mind that we all have one story to tell, one important story, and that this is mine.

“How do you know that?” he says. “You have so much living to do, Anthony.”

And when he says this, I’ll tell you the truth, I think about it. But then I look out my one window to the manicured lawns and the walkways, and if the leaves are off the trees, I can strain my eyes I and make out the blue-green Atlantic between some of the other buildings. Whenever I see that water, it is this I come back to. This story. Hannah.





In the morning I said good-bye to Berta and when she stared up at me I wanted to tell her that she did not need to worry, that I had no intention of going to sea this time, but I knew she couldn’t know this. I didn’t say anything to Victor either. He would try to talk me out of it. I lied to Captain Alavares in a note and said I was on my way to New Bedford because of a death in the family. I knew Captain Alavares would not believe me and that I was making his life difficult. I also knew that I was probably forfeiting the right to ever be on his boat again, and I did not care about this either.

An hour later I was on the first ferry to leave Galilee for Cross Island. I wore a Red Sox hat pushed low over my forehead and I had my oilskin bag and inside it was everything I normally brought fishing. All that I would need for a month at sea. Warm clothes and rain gear. A jug of water. My bedroll. A surf rod, separated into two pieces. Tackle. A few ham and cheese sandwiches. A carton of cigarettes and a lighter. Yesterday’s Boston Globe. And I brought two other things I would not have bothered with if I was going to the Grand Banks. Ten one-hundred-dollar bills that I had exchanged for one of the thousands at the bank. And two bottles of Berta’s homemade wine.

I had never been on the ferry before. Fishermen didn’t belong on ferries. This early in the morning it was mostly filled with trucks bringing produce and other goods to the island. The truck drivers didn’t leave their cabs during the crossing. There were a few tourists and I had worried I might see some of the girls I knew from Galilee, girls who worked on the island, but I did not. I climbed to the top deck and sitting on the blue metal benches were a few older couples. The other day, Hannah had stood on this same deck. I went to the railing and looked out over the harbor and the village. Below me ferry workers in their blue shirts and white shorts untied the ship from the moorings. And, slowly, the ferry began to drift away.

The morning was hazy and ocean-cool. When it burned off, it would be a warm one. Around me, the harbor was waking up. All manner of fishermen readied themselves and their boats to go out. Workers arrived at the cannery and the fish stores. Lobstermen unloaded their catch onto the wharf. The air full of brine and fish and diesel fuel.

This village was all I had ever known. That morning, seeing it from the high deck, from a height greater than I had ever seen it before, it was almost as if I was seeing it for the first time. The working wharves and the gray, featureless commercial buildings. The fish markets and the clam shacks. The small houses in the distance, houses like mine, where the men and women who made their living on this little sliver of coast lived. The bulbous steel water towers inland that loomed over everything. Where the town ended, where the sandy highways that led east to the tourist beaches started. And maybe it was because I had made another choice this day, a choice that would once again lead me away from my life, that it looked so small to me. It looked small and it looked sad.

I turned to the front of the ship. The ceiling was starting to lift and the ocean sparkled in the first sunlight. I could see the rocky bluffs of the island, a mass of brown rising out of the water and toward the sky.





I was the first one off the ferry. I walked down the ramp and past two pretty blue-eyed girls holding the rope open for me. I walked through a parking lot and threaded my way through the line of cars and trucks waiting to board the ferry for the return trip to the mainland. On Main Street the sidewalks were clogged with tourists carrying beach stuff and shopping bags. I pulled my hat lower over my face. On my left large Victorian inns built into the hillside leaned out over the road. On their tiered porches, people sat at tables above me and watched the harbor.

The short Main Street followed the curvature of the island and soon I had left the harbor behind and now there were small Cape houses with porches and yards full of gardens and flowers. To my right the road fell sharply away and below there was a long beach that stretched until the island slipped out of view at other bluffs. High cliffs led to where I walked and this was so different from Galilee, where the land bled right into the ocean. I watched the rippling tide moving unevenly across the beach and into the sand, and the people bathing in the morning sun were scattered like bugs, no more than tiny spots of color.