Notes

I feel then an anger, a sudden and irrational fury, for her
carelessness, this drama. I do not want this woman to have
entered our lives, to have touched Thomas or Billie, to have
drawn them to her, to have distracted them. I do not want
this woman to be up on deck. And most of all, I do not want
to have to go to her. Instead, I want to shake her for her
foolishness, for the theatrical way she carries herself, for her
gold cross.
I let the wheel go, bend forward at the waist, and clutch
at a stay. The wind flattens the oilskin against my body. I
reach for a winch, the handholds in the teak railing. I pull
myself forward. She is perhaps fifteen feet from me. My
hood snaps off my head.
Adaline leans over the teak rail. Her hair falls in sheets,
then blows upward from her head. I see then that she is sick.
I am three, four feet from where she is huddled at the
railing. I shout her name.
The boat turns itself into the swells and heels. Adaline
straightens and looks at me, an expression of surprise on
her face. The jib swings hard, and makes a sharp report,
like a shot. She holds out her hand. It seems to float in the
air, suspended between the two of us.
I have since thought a great deal about one time when I
shut a car door, gave it a push, and in the split second
before it closed, I saw that Billie’s fingers were in the door,
and it seemed to me in the bubble of time that it took for the
door to complete its swing that I might have stopped the momentum, and that I had a chance, a choice.
In Alfred, Maine, the jury took less than an hour to reach
a verdict of murder in the first degree. Wagner was
sentenced to be hanged. He was then taken to the state
prison at Thomaston to await execution.
The hanging at Thomaston was a particularly grisly affair
and is said to have almost single-handedly brought about
the abolition of the death penalty in Maine. An hour before
Wagner and another murderer, a man named True Gordon,
who had killed three members of his brother’s family with an
ax, were to be hanged, Gordon attempted suicide by cutting
his femoral artery and then stabbing himself in the chest with
a shoemaker’s knife. Gordon was bleeding out and
unconscious, and the warden of Thomaston was presented
with a ghastly decision: Should they hang a man who was
going to die anyway before the afternoon was out? The
warrant prevailed, and Wagner and Gordon were brought to
an abandoned lime quarry, where the gallows had been set
up. Gordon had to be held upright for the noose to be put on.
Wagner stood on his own and protested his innocence. He
proclaimed, “God is good. He cannot let an innocent man
suffer.”
At noon on June 25, 1873, Louis Wagner and True
Gordon were hanged.
Adaline goes over like a young girl who has been
surprised from behind by a bullying boy and pushed from the
diving board, arms and legs beginning to flail before she
hits the water.
The ocean closes neatly over her head. I try to keep my
eye fixed on the place where she has gone in, but the
surface of the water — its landscape, its geography —
twitches and shifts so that what has been there before is not
there a moment later.
The sea heaves and spills itself and sends the boat
side-to-sliding down a trough. Water cascades onto the
deck, pinning my legs against the railing. Adaline breaks the
surface twenty yards from the place I expected her to be. I
shout her name. I can see that she is struggling. Rich comes
above to see what has happened to the boat. He takes the
wheel immediately.
“Jean!” he shouts. “Get away from the railing. What’s
going on?”
“Adaline’s overboard,” I shout back, but the wind is
against me, and all he can make out is my lips moving
soundlessly.
“What?”
“Adaline!” I yell as loudly as I can and point.
Thomas comes above just then. He has put on a black
knit cap, but his oilskins are off. Rich shouts the word
Adaline to Thomas and gestures toward the life ring.
Thomas takes hold of the life ring and pulls himself toward
me.
There are thundering voices then, the spooling out of a
line, a life ring missed and bobbing in a trough. There is a
flash of white, like a handkerchief flung upon the water.
There are frantic and sharp commands, and Thomas then
goes over. Rich, at the wheel, stands in a semi-crouch, like
a wrestler, from the strain of trying to keep the boat upright.
I think then: If I had put out my hand, might Adaline have
grabbed it? Did I put out my hand, I wonder, or did a split
second of anger, of righteousness, keep my hand at my
side?
I also think about this: If I hadn’t shouted to Adaline just
then, she would not have stood up, and the sail would have
passed over her.
When Rich hauls Adaline over the stern, her skirt and underwear are missing. What he brings up doesn’t seem
like a person we have known, but rather a body we might
study. Rich bends over Adaline and hammers at her chest,
and then puts his mouth to hers again and again. In the
corner of the stern, against the railing, Thomas stands
doubled over from the effort to rescue Adaline and to pull
himself back into the boat. He wheezes and coughs for
breath.
And it isn’t me, it isn’t even me, it is Rich — angry,
frustrated, exhausted, breathless — who lifts his head from
Adaline’s chest, and calls out: “Where’s Billie?”