The Wren

Ev Thibodeau's kitchen smelled of percolator coffee and the kerosene heater he kept going in June because, he said, his blood had quit on him around the time his eyes did. He sat at an oilcloth table with a magnifying sheet propped against the sugar bowl and a scanner on the windowsill turned low, the co-op boats checking in on 10 like neighbors calling over a fence. Maren had brought a blueberry pie from the Hannaford in Rockland. He smelled it before she got the lid off.

"Store pie," he said.

"It's what they had."

"Walt brought store pie once. I fixed my own radar that time, out of spite." He pulled the tin toward him anyway and cut a wedge with the side of his fork. "Ruthie send you?"

"She said to ask what you've been telling people since the funeral."

He chewed. The scanner said something about a trap line fouled off Mark Island, and Ev turned his head toward it the way a dog does, then back. His eyes were pale and wet and aimed about four inches to the left of her face.

Maren had made a list, of course. She had dropped the last list on Ruthie's floor and was trying not to make another, but the facts had arranged themselves on the drive over whether she liked it or not. Whoever broke into the oil house had known it was the oil house. He had walked past a two-thousand-dollar MacBook and a signal lamp and a radio worth more than her car. He had gone along a shelf of thirty-three identical green ledgers and taken the first one. Only the first. That wasn't a burglar. That was a man who knew what year he was looking for.

"Somebody knew exactly where to look," she said. "He knew there were logbooks. He knew which one."

"Lot of people knew Walt wrote things down."

"Name one."

Ev set his fork on the plate, very precisely, lining it up with the edge by feel. He didn't answer. Out on Pine Street a truck downshifted for the hill.

"Ev."

"They had the coffee after, at the Legion," he said. "Ham sandwiches. Somebody made those little whoopie pies. Sam was standing by the urn not talking to anybody, and I'd had a couple of beers in the truck first, which I don't do, and I thought he ought to know." He rubbed his thumb along the oilcloth, back and forth over a cigarette burn that had probably been there since the Carter administration. "Thought somebody alive ought to know."

"Know what?"

"That night. On the ledge." He said it flat, the way the radio read tide heights. "I had my arms around a rock and the water coming up my boots, and I could see the point. Tower was dark. Fine, generator, that's what they said after. But the house was dark too. Every window. Walt had a lamp in that kitchen he never shut off, not once in nine years I'd been fishing past it. And it wasn't burning." He picked the fork up again and put it down. "Nobody fights a generator with the house lights off and his wife's car gone. I knew that at nineteen minutes past two in 1988, and I kept it shut for thirty-five years, and then I opened it up at a funeral by a coffee urn."

"What did Sam say?"

"Didn't say anything. Asked me was I sure. I said Walt kept books on everything, and if there was anything to find it'd be in there." He turned his face toward the window, toward the scanner, toward the bright square of light he could probably only feel. "I meant the Coast Guard books. Government ones. I didn't know about the others till you."

Maren sat very still. February. The service had been in February, which meant Sam Pelletier had stood at the co-op counter in April and heard her name and put down his coffee with that sentence already in him. Two months of it by then. Four months now. He'd had all of mud season to turn it over, every foggy morning hauling past the point and the house and the kitchen window, and then he'd found out the daughter had come back and was poking around in the brick building nobody was allowed near.

He'd taken volume one because he thought the story started there.

"He's going to think it proves something," she said.

Ev reached across the table and found her wrist on the first try. His hand was cold and enormous and shook a little.

"Whatever's in that book," he said, "it isn't what he wants."

---

The Pelletier wharf was at the far end of Water Street, past the co-op and the town float, a gray plank finger that leaned a little to the south as if it had been listening to the harbor for a hundred years and gotten tired. Lobster crates stood stacked four high along one side, yellow and green and a faded orange that might once have been red. A bait barrel sweated herring into the June air. The sky had the color and texture of a dishrag, and the tide was most of the way out, so the pilings showed their black weed and their barnacles all the way down to the mud.

Sam Pelletier was on his knees on the planks with a trap open in front of him, lacing new twine into a broken head with a plastic needle. He didn't look up when her sneakers hit the boards. He looked up when she stopped.

"You're on private property," he said.

"So were you."

He went back to the twine. Pulled a knot tight. His forearms were sunburned in a hard line at the elbow, and his right leg was stuck out straight beside him, the knee wrapped in a black neoprene brace gone gray with salt.

"I talked to Ev," Maren said.

"Ev talks."

"He told you the house was dark." She had decided in the truck that she would not wait for him to deny it, because a denial was a branch she'd have to follow, and she didn't have the patience left. "You pried my kitchen door with something flat. A bar. You tore the hasp off the oil house. You walked past everything worth money and took volume one."

Sam set the needle down on the trap. For a moment he stayed kneeling, looking at the water between the planks. Then he got up, which took him longer than it should have, a hand on the crates and a grunt when the knee came straight, and he walked to a gray Ford parked at the head of the wharf without saying anything at all. She heard the door open. She heard it slam.

He came back with the ledger in a Hannaford bag and pushed it at her chest hard enough that she had to step back to catch it.

"There," he said. "Take it."

She looked down. Green cover, soft corners, a water ring on the back that hadn't been there before. VOL. 1 in her father's capitals.

"It starts the fifteenth," Sam said. "You know that? You read it? October fifteenth. My father went in the water on the fourteenth. The book starts the day after." He laughed, one short ugly sound. "Your old man writes down every boat in the bay for thirty-five years, what color their lights are, what kind of coffee he drank, and he starts the day after. One day. That's all I needed. One page."

"Sam."

"I read the whole thing. Twice. Kitchen table, three in the morning, like an idiot." He was pacing now, a short uneven track between the bait barrel and the crates, three steps and turn, the bad knee swinging stiff. "Fog this, fog that. Talked so-and-so past the ledge. Like he was a saint. Like nothing happened before he picked up the pen."

A gull landed on the piling behind him and looked at them both.

"I wasn't going to sell it," he said. "I wasn't going to put it in the paper. I don't want your house." He stopped pacing. He stood with his back mostly to her and his hands open at his sides, and the anger seemed to go out through the soles of his boots into the planks, leaving him smaller and wetter and forty-six years old. "I was ten. They told me the generator. Just the generator, just bad luck, like weather. I've been hauling past that ledge since I was fourteen thinking it was nobody. Nobody did it. Nobody was there."

He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, quick, as though it was spray.

"I wanted it wrote down somewhere," he said. "What happened. That's all. I wanted to see it in his hand."

Maren held the Hannaford bag against her fleece. In the inside pocket, zipped, was a black notebook with a date on the first page.

She unzipped the pocket. The notebook was the size of a paperback, black pebbled cover, the elastic band long since gone slack, and it had been warm against her ribs all the way down Water Street. She held it out.

Sam looked at it and didn't take it.

"It's not a logbook," she said. "He didn't put this in the logbooks. He wrote it the day after and kept it in a drawer for thirty-five years, and then he gave it to somebody to give to me." She kept her arm out. "It's the page you wanted."

He wiped his hand on his jeans before he took it. She noticed that, and wished she hadn't. He opened it standing up, the knee locked, his back to the harbor so the light from the dishrag sky came over his shoulder onto the paper, and she watched his eyes go to the date first, the way hers had. 15 Oct 88. Then down.

She knew the first page well enough to follow him through it without looking.

Station log for 14 Oct is a lie. I wrote it. Writing the true one here.

0128 M seized on kitchen floor. Fever 105 plus. L in Bangor. No phone answer at Rockland. Took her in the truck. Left the light running on main. Did not wake anyone. Did not call Group.

Main failed after I left. Transfer switch stuck. Backup never took. Light dark 85 min by the clock on the panel when I got back. Fog signal off too.

Constance Grey on the Hogsback approx 0220. Cal Pelletier. Donny Ames. Ev on the ledge till light.

I was in the hospital lot in Rockland holding my daughter. She is all right.

They are not.

There was more. A second page about the board of inquiry, a third that was mostly crossed out, the beginning of a letter to Sam's mother that stopped halfway down. Sam didn't turn to them. He stayed on the first page a long time. The gull on the piling lifted off and came down again on the next one over. Somewhere out past the town float an outboard coughed twice and caught.

He read it again. She could tell by where his eyes started.

"Eighty-five minutes," he said.

"Yes."

"Panel clock." He tapped the line with a thick finger, once, hard enough to dent the paper. "He looked at the clock. He came back and looked at the clock and wrote it down." He closed the notebook and held it against his leg. He didn't hand it back. "So that's it. That's what I came in your house for."

Maren waited for something to happen to his face. She had pictured this in the truck, a version of it, the way she used to picture a fix going out to production: the alert clears, the graph drops back to baseline, everyone goes home. Sam's face didn't do anything. He looked at the black cover and then at the water and then back at the cover, and his jaw worked on one side like he was chewing something that wouldn't go down.

"I thought I'd feel different," he said.

She didn't say anything. She didn't trust whatever she might say.

"Ten minutes ago I wanted his name on it. Now I got his name on it." He shook his head. "My father's still in the water."

"I know."

"You don't know." He said it without heat, which was worse. Then he turned on her, the notebook coming up in his fist. "Here's what I want to know. Why'd he stay?"

"Stay where?"

"There." He pointed with the notebook, past the co-op roof and the steeple and the spruce line, toward the point where the tower stood, out of sight from here but not out of mind, never for anyone in this town. "They automated it. Took the job away. He could've gone anyplace. Ohio. Your California. Some place with no water in it. And he goes and buys the thing. Pays money for it. Sits out there twenty years looking at the ledge every morning out his kitchen window." His voice cracked on window and he pushed through it. "Who does that? What kind of man buys the place he did that?"

The outboard was getting closer. Maren could feel the notebook's absence against her ribs, and volume thirty-four, thicker, still zipped in the other pocket, pressing on her hip like a hand.

Maren unzipped it.

"I don't know why he stayed," she said. "I've been reading him for two months and I don't know. But I know what he did with it."

Volume thirty-four was the same green as the others, the same soft cardboard corners, except that one of them was crushed flat and the spine had a dark stain along the bottom edge that she had decided, the first night, not to think about. She opened it past the middle, where she'd tucked a Werther's wrapper as a bookmark, and turned it around so it faced him.

He didn't reach for it. She held it up anyway.

0447. Fog to the water. F/V Wren out of Port Ellery, the girl again. Plotter froze off Hogsback. Brought her inside R4 on 68. She talked the whole way. Coffee.

0512. Thick. F/V Wren. Asked was I a robot. Told her no. Asked was I sure. Toast.

0530. Wren. Showed her the gap between the ledge and the point. Holds her course like Cal did. Didn't say so.

Sam's eyes stopped on the third one. Maren watched them stop.

"The Wren came in at the back of volume thirty-three," she said. "December 2022. A girl alone. In this one she's on almost every page with fog on it."

"I know whose boat it is." He took the book out of her hands. Not roughly. The way you'd take a line somebody was about to drop.

He read it standing up, the knee locked, the black notebook still clamped against his thigh with his other hand, so he had to turn the pages with his thumb. She could hear each one go. July. August. A run of mornings in September where the entries got shorter and the times got earlier and the final word was the same three days running, Cold, and then a morning where it was Good, which her father had used, by her spreadsheet's count, four times in thirty-five years. Sam went back to that one. He went forward again. The outboard came around the end of the town float, a kid in an orange hoodie standing at the tiller of a skiff, and the kid lifted a hand to Sam. Sam didn't see it. The kid let the hand drop and puttered off toward the moorings.

Maren knew where the last page was. She watched him find it.

7 Feb 24. 0610. Fog lifting. Wren in safe. Told her nothing. Same as always.

Underneath that, nothing. Ruled lines all the way to the bottom of the page, and the page after, and the forty-some pages after that, empty and very slightly warped where the book had lain on the stairs.

Sam stood there. The light was going. The sky over the co-op had gone from dishrag to pewter and the water under the wharf had turned the color of a closed laptop lid, and the bell buoy off the breakwater rang twice in a swell she couldn't see. She waited for him to say something. She waited the way she'd once waited on a support call, with her mouth shut, counting, because the other person always filled the silence eventually.

He didn't fill it.

He closed volume thirty-four, carefully, the crushed corner lined up with the cover. He held it out to her. She took it. Their hands didn't touch. Then he put the black notebook inside his jacket, zipped it, turned, and walked up the wharf with the bad knee swinging stiff on every second step, past the bait shed, past the stack of wire traps with the Pelletier buoys hung on the end, yellow over black, and up onto Water Street, where the one traffic light was blinking amber at nobody.

He didn't look back. She'd been fairly sure he wouldn't.

Maren stood on the planks with the Hannaford bag hanging from one wrist and the logbook against her chest. Penance, she thought. Or a man who couldn't stop checking whether the door was locked. Or something simpler and worse, a father practicing on somebody else's daughter because he'd lost the address of his own. The data didn't say. The data said Coffee and Toast and Told her nothing.

Out past the steeple, low on the cloud, a pale smear brightened and faded.

She counted. One, two, three, four, five, six.

It came again.