He paced his boat, oblivious to everything else as he’d been since her first failure to return the day before. Now it seemed as though this had been going on not a single day but many days, maybe weeks. He hastily sailed the passengers back a couple of hours later, even leaving behind one or two latecomers calling from the beach; people began tying themselves to the boat in the manner of Zeno’s skeleton tied to the boat’s bottom, so they wouldn’t be thrown over from the captain’s assault on the river. “My God, man,” someone said to him, “do we have to go this fast? Everyone’s frightened.” There was a girl, the boatman answered, she wore a blue dress. You see a girl in a blue dress? All of them just shook their heads a little. He turned back to the black water; he seemed to push the boat a little faster. Passengers clung to the vessel whitefaced, teeth clenched.
On this trip back, or perhaps the next, he realized it. After fifteen years it was a little unthinkable he wouldn’t have seen it immediately; but it happened several times before he noticed. Rather, it didn’t happen. The Moment. The Moment didn’t happen. That moment in which time and space belonged utterly to his boat, destination and point of departure disappeared. And now that he thought about it, he realized it hadn’t happened this morning either, when he woke at the island; and now that he thought about it, he couldn’t remember it happening the evening before. For that matter he couldn’t remember it happening since she’d left the boat. And it didn’t happen the rest of the day; and for all the fear and desolation of every time it had happened every day over the preceding fifteen years, now the fear and desolation of it not happening were such as to trivialize everything he’d feared before.
And he began to fear that she was not going to come back to his boat. In the way he’d told himself before that there simply couldn’t be any doubt about it, now he told himself there was nothing but doubt; now every time he sailed up to the island, and all through the time he waited there, he knew she wasn’t going to come. It was as though she’d taken with her that moment on the river; she’d taken it and was living in it somewhere there on the place he’d sworn to leave forever. There’s a girl in a blue dress, he’d call to the tourists going into town, keep your eyes open for her. And when they came back he’d ask if they’d seen her. When they came back, he interrogated them one by one. He stood in the middle of the boat barking at them, and they shrank from him, and lied. They lied that they’d seen her in the bar, they lied that they’d seen her at the hotel, where no one but his mother had lived for over forty years. They lied they’d seen her walking along the street. They lied they’d seen her among the ice, or the graves, and those were the lies he believed most, since he’d thought of her long before he knew her, or long before she even was, when he lay amidst the ice as a boy; and since she had, after all, come to bury something.
The group of them sort of huddled against each other before him. After he heard their lies he didn’t even see them anymore. He kept looking ashore, at the town. He paced and waited, thirty minutes, an hour. Not a single one of the passengers worked up the courage to ask when they were going back. Two hours passed; it was nearly midnight. And then, like the man who must scream to himself, if in no place other than his own heart, as he hurls himself into the chasm beyond the cliffs edge, he leapt, though it was only inches, from the edge of the boat to Davenhall Island, and went to look for her.
17
HE HADN’T BEEN ON the island ten minutes before all the townspeople knew he was there. Even though it was midnight, when most of them were asleep, all it took was one witness, a man or woman reading by the window perhaps, who happened to glance out his window and see the sailor with the white hair striding down the street. At which point the man or woman in the window would have jumped from his or her chair and run into the back bedroom to wake the rest of the family with the news. Ten minutes and it was all over town. The general assumption was that the appearance, after so many years, of the boy with white hair, who grew up to spend his life sailing back and forth to the home he left and had surely grown insane in the process, could only be a harbinger. Something dreadful was inevitable, a storm moving upriver from the east; or the sinking of Davenhall Island altogether, after decades of its inhabitants honeycombing its innards with tombs they didn’t fill; or herds of silver buffalo sweeping everything in their path: animals and birds and boats and tourist groups and lost Asian tribes in a dying ghost town.
There’s a girl in a blue dress, he said to Judy in the door of her tavern.
She was wiping the counter and picking up the furniture. Racking up the glasses, casually drying her hands on an apron. She came from behind the counter and crossed the room to him.
I’m looking for a girl in a blue dress, he said again, have you seen her?
She didn’t say anything for a moment, as though still listening to sentences said between them that neither uttered; and then she turned from him just slightly, and brought her hand flying across his face.
He staggered a little, his eyes flared.
“You son of a bitch,” she whispered, “your own mother might have died and you wouldn’t budge off that God damned boat. All those years and you had no use for anything in this town, and now the thing that brings you back is a girl in a blue dress.”
He swallowed hard but steeled himself: That’s right, he told her.
She wiped her hands some more on her apron, though the hands were already dry and the apron was already wet. “I haven’t seen any girl,” she just said, “don’t worry about it, there will be other girls.” She added, “You should be careful, these are modern times. You should be careful.” She almost laughed at him.
That isn’t what this is, he just said. I wouldn’t have come for that, if that was what this was. Then he turned and walked out of the bar.
Out in the street a gust almost blew him over. He pulled his faded blue coat around him and the wind ripped the last of the gold buttons off its stitches. Across mainstreet was the hotel where he was born and raised; he was startled to see a light in his mother’s window, and the form of someone watching him. He only turned up his collar and headed toward the other end of the island. He strolled up mainstreet through the dust of the wind that was silver like razors; he went from door to door rattling them on their hinges to find them locked. He put his elbow to the windows and one by one knocked them in: this was the sound of Davenhall, the shriek of the wind and the blistering of windows, all up and down the street. The Chinese hadn’t been wrong then to believe a storm had come to them from the river. Families huddled in their houses waiting for it to pass; finally the storm reached the ice, where it stood before the white and black machine that never stopped churning. In the dark, in no starlight at all, the blocks hurtled invisibly by, ejected into the night air; he heard them break but he believed it was only the echoes of broken windows, not even his broken windows but someone else’s in some other city, people all over the night searching madly for those who transmitted the vague and unpersuasive frequency of destiny, not even this night but some other night that came before, from which the sound of breaking windows reached him only now like the light of novae. Ice busting in the dirt. The storm turned north. He left the ice machine and headed for the cemetery. To bury something, he said to himself. At the cemetery the wind was harder, because it faced the east of the river where the other side could never quite be seen, but from which came the red trains on the tracks high above the water. There the trees were bare of obituaries, the graves silent. He stood in the marsh that lay shadowstunned and bleeding up worms between his feet, and faced the sky. He could not call her name because he didn’t know it. It isn’t the time to look for her, not at night, he said to himself; and yet only in the dark would he have found the courage and desperation. Only in the dark would the frequency have been so far beyond denial. It isn’t the time, he said to himself, to look for her body in the river, if she tried to escape by swimming; or to look for the remains of a stray boat, if she believed there was any other boat to take her back. But there are no other boats, he said to himself. And he wasn’t ready yet to accept that she wasn’t here.