Hester(69)

A brigadier floats far off across the horizon, and then another. We’re quiet together as we eat. After a while he takes out his notebook and writes. I’m trying to imagine how I’ll tell him all that I must—I’ve used the herb plug and rinsed with water and vinegar every time, but it’s been more than six weeks since my bloods and nearly four weeks since the night of shooting stars. It could have happened then, or it could have happened any of the nights that followed.

The sun is at the top of the trees when he looks up and reads to me about a midwife who helps deliver a child out of wedlock. As the new mother is dying, she begs the midwife to keep the child for her own “so that no one will know he was born a sin.”

The midwife agrees and loves the child as her own. But what begins as a tiny birthmark on the infant grows as the boy grows, until it is the size and shape of an ugly mushroom across the back of his hand.

I feel my hands twisting one across the other.

“The boy was good and pure,” Nat reads. I bite my lip and will him to look up, to see how the story is hurting me. “But the sin had to be paid for, and so it would be.”

He chews on his pencil, looks at his notebook, and crosses out entire paragraphs.

“It’s not a good story,” he says. “Not yet.”

“Couldn’t they live happily?” I say after a moment.

He shakes his head before he puts aside his notebook and looks out to the horizon where sky and water meet.

“I like to swim here,” he says.

“I don’t know how to swim.” I’m miserable, but he seems not to notice.

“Then I’ll teach you—the day is warm enough.”

He pops up and holds out his hands to me. His hair is in his eyes and he pushes it away with a toss of his head. He’s left the darkness of the story folded inside his notebook.

“Today?”

“Yes, today. Now.”

A sly look comes over his face and he pulls off his jacket, then shrugs off his suspenders and strips to his breeches.

“What if you’re seen?” I cry, but his boldness lifts my spirits.

“I’ve been swimming here since I was a boy, and I’ve never seen a soul. It’s the one place in Salem where I’m truly free.”

He scrambles to the edge of the rock and dips his foot into the water, then jumps in. He surfaces with a howl, yelping and shaking his head like a pup. I’ve heard that a lady with child shouldn’t step into cold water. But I’d like nothing more than to bring on my bleeding even here and now, for then the burden would be gone and everything would be easier.

“Come in,” he calls. His eyes fleck green in the light, the color of the sea on a calm bright day. “Step there—onto the rock.”

His happiness is seductive. I’ve stepped this far into sin, and it hasn’t felt like sin. I’ve gone this far in the dark, and now I’ll show myself to him in sunlight and he’ll see that I love him.

I strip to my petticoat and step onto the dark, wet gray rock. “Here—” He scrambles to where the water is up to his waist and takes my hand. “Come in here.”

The water is cold and it empties my mind of every sadness. I feel a tug in my abdomen and welcome it. He puts his hands on my waist and I look up into his face. We’ve never been this close in daylight. There’s stubble on his chin, but the cheeks above his whiskers are smooth and rosy. His green-gold eyes in the bright sun are the color of a cat’s, or a moonstone, or a yellow gem.

He’s strong and sure of himself as he narrates each step I’m to take—bend my knees, lean forward, let my arms float and then my legs rise up behind me. It is effortless—the water holds me. He puts a hand under my belly and I am prostrate on the sea. My petticoat floats around me like a cloud, and he shows me how to float, then to blow air bubbles and move my arms in long, steady strokes.

“You’ve got it,” he says. “Now kick.”

He takes his hands from beneath my stomach and shouts again, “Kick, kick harder,” and with two kicks I’m propelled ahead of him to the edge of the inlet where a circle of rocks is all that stands between me and the wide Massachusetts Bay.

“I’m swimming,” I shout. A snout and then a black head bobs up in the water on the other side of the rocks. It’s a seal, followed by another. I begin to call to him, to say “Look,” but then my mouth is full of water and I am choking and he is behind me, his arms under mine, and then he’s holding me up, breathing words of encouragement into my ear, taking me close enough to shore that I can stand on my tiptoes.

“There are seals.” I sputter and snort up the salt water that’s gone up my nose. “Did you see them?”

“I saw them,” he says. “Sometimes one comes and looks across the water when I swim alone.”

He presses himself behind me, and together we look out to the sea as my breath calms.

“There.” I point to silky black heads bobbing up and down, swimming away from us now. I think to tell him about the selkies—seal-women who shed their black skin and come to the land in human form. Or the dark-haired selkie seal-man who romances a lonely woman and breaks her heart. But then Nat runs his whiskers along my neck, and all my words leave me.

“We’re free here,” he says.

“And cold,” I say, for my wet skin in the air has turned a slight blue, and goose bumps rise on my skin.