I returned to Winthrop Island on an unseasonably cold day in early May, one week after my tenth wedding anniversary. I missed the last ferry from New London—the schedule, not surprisingly, had changed in the eighteen years since I last climbed aboard—and hired an old tub of a fishing boat to carry me across from Stonington. I don’t think the fellow recognized me, but I can’t be sure. Fishermen are a stoic lot, you know. They don’t emote. I paid him twenty dollars cash, and in return he didn’t ask me any awkward questions, like my name and my business on the Island, though I wonder if it would have made any difference. What was he going to do, call the newspapers? Probably he’d never heard of me. Lots of people had never heard of me.
Because it was May, the sky was still light as we bumped across the few miles of Long Island Sound that separate the Island from Connecticut. I wore my sunglasses, which were black and extremely large, giving me the appearance of an exotic bug, and the spray soon coated the lenses with a film of salt. When I couldn’t properly see any longer, I took them off, and the strength of the draft on my face surprised me, and the smell. I’d forgotten about the scent of the Sound, which had its own particular tang, different from anywhere else in the world, the English Channel or the Mediterranean or the South Pacific—or maybe it didn’t, and that was all in my imagination. Still, it seemed to me as I stood near the bow of the fishing boat, leaning against the deckhouse, that the brine on that wind reached deep inside the wrinkles of my brain, penetrating the furthest regions of the hippocampus to lay its fingertip on certain tender memories therein. Bending over the stern of a lobster boat, hauling cages from a buoy line. Sitting next to a girl at the end of a midnight dock, sharing a bottle of cold champagne. Lying on a beach while the rain coursed upon me and a boy, kissing each other for the last time.
Ahead of me, the Island made a dark, flattened parabola, growing larger by the second until it dominated the horizon and the specks on its surface took on the character of houses. I saw the cluster of buildings around the harbor, the scattering of estates along the shore. I couldn’t see Greyfriars from here—perched as it was on the southeastern corner of the Island—but I knew it still existed, overlooking Fleet Rock and its famous lighthouse. I knew this because of the letter in my pocketbook, which was written on Greyfriars notepaper and signed, in old-fashioned, reproachful copperplate, Your Mother. There was no mention of Isobel, but I knew she existed, too. There could be no Greyfriars without Isobel, could there?
Without thinking, I turned to address the fisherman, and his face went rigid with shock at the sight of me, now unhidden by sunglasses. “An accident,” I said, touching the bruised flesh around my left eye and my cheekbone. “An automobile accident,” remembering to use the American term—accident—instead of the British one, smash. A car smash, which is an interesting difference, you know. To call it an accident implies an absence of intent, nobody’s fault, a tragic mistake. A smash is just that. Makes no judgment on how the thing happened, or why.
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” He returned his attention to the direction of the boat. (Like I said, a stoic lot.)