Afterward, when he was done and he pulled out of her and sat there in the dark whispering Cariña, cariña, she lay rigid watching the stars poke holes in the torn fabric of the night, and then he wanted her again and if he did what he liked what did it matter? When it was over, finally and absolutely, and she felt everything begin to dry and tighten and tug at her skin like so many tiny crepitating hooks, she pushed herself up. He was sitting there beside her, burning something — a cigarette, he was smoking a cigarette, the smoke harsh and stinging. She couldn’t see his eyes. She could barely make out his face, a dark oval hung there on a hook of nothing. “Rafael,” she said, and it was the first word she’d spoken since he’d pulled her down, “I want you to take me away.”
He said nothing.
“Please.” Her voice seemed foreign to her own ears, a thin tensile rope of sound drawn out of some deep place inside her. She thought she might begin to cry.
“Away to where?” he said finally.
“Anywhere. Just away.”
He was silent a long moment. He inhaled and the cigarette flared and still she couldn’t see his face.
“On the boat,” she said. “When you go tomorrow with the others.”
“Captain Waters,” he said, his voice low and disconnected, “he will oppose it.”
“He won’t know,” she said, and though she was made of stone and could barely work her muscles or lift her arm from her lap, she took hold of his hand in the dark and stroked it, her thumb moving against the callus of his palm, the gentlest friction, over and over. “Take me,” she said. “Just take me.”
* * *
By the time the first tremulous sliver of light appeared on the horizon she was already up and stirring about the kitchen. Her movements were slow and mechanical, her feet tracing the floorboards by rote as she bent to the stove, put on water for coffee, mixed the batter for flapjacks and set the pot of beans, eternal beans, on the stovetop. Everything was ordinary, everything in its place. If she paused a moment and held her breath she could hear the distant ratcheting of her stepfather’s snoring as if some metallic creature were patiently boring through the walls, but there was no other sound. She ground coffee beans and told herself she didn’t feel appreciably different, though she was truly a woman now — and here a voice in her head that might have been her mother’s took the thought a step further: a fallen woman, ruined, like the heroine of one of the Hardy novels her parents wouldn’t let her read. She didn’t care. She was numb to it. Something had happened and now it was over. She’d washed herself in the basin after she’d crept into the house at one in the morning and then sat in front of the mirror for the longest time, staring into her own eyes, and there was nothing different there, not a trace — she was Edith Waters, still and always, a very pretty girl, consummately pretty, who was going to go onstage and acknowledge the applause of hundreds and hundreds of elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen with a deep bow and a flush of modesty.
The water came to a boil. The first bird began to call. And then there was a thump at the back door, the dog nosing there to be let in and fed, and the day, which for all appearances was like any other day, started in. She didn’t so much as glance in Rafael’s direction at breakfast for fear of giving herself away — or of breaking down, or no, choking, actually choking over the emotion wadded in her throat that was so dense and heartbreaking she could barely swallow — and she took her own breakfast out in the kitchen to avoid his eyes, their eyes, the eyes of the men. He’d made her his solemn promise and the plan had been set in motion. She’d packed her suitcase and laid out her best clothes and gloves and hat. When the men were at work — only a half day today, clearing up the odds and ends, hauling the sacks of wool to the barn, packing up their shears and knives and bedrolls — she would conceal the suitcase in a clump of rocks just off the road that led to the harbor and then, after luncheon, instead of washing and stacking the dishes and scrubbing the counter and sweeping the floor, she would go upstairs and dress and then steal away to wait for Rafael.
Yes. And then, when the others had gone out to the schooner (it was Lawrence Chiles’ boat, not Charlie Curner’s, thank God, because there was no telling what Charlie Curner would have done when he discovered her aboard), Rafael would claim he’d forgotten something — his guitar, which he’d have purposely left behind one of the rocks at the beach, nothing to it, just ten minutes at the oars, and they’d wait, they’d have to. She’d crouch in the bow, hidden beneath his serape, and when they got out to the ship she’d do her best to slip aboard unnoticed but if they knew and saw it would be nothing to them because this was between her and Rafael and nobody else. She was almost eighteen. She was a woman. She could do what she wanted in this world.
Luncheon. There was extra wine, unwatered, because it was a kind of celebration, the work concluded and the men on their way home, and maybe they had families to go to, wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, sons. She served at table, then kept herself apart, and though she felt Rafael there like a fire burning in the center of her being, she didn’t look at him, no more than she had at breakfast. There were handclasps and farewells that traveled from the parlor and across the yard, the dog excitedly barking and the chickens scattering, and then they were gone. Jimmie and Adolph went off into the fields and she waited at the kitchen door to see what her stepfather would do, praying he wouldn’t take it in his head to walk down to the harbor to see them off. He’d lingered with the Italiano, who was the last of the shearers to start down the road, but finally he’d turned and come back into the house. She heard him go up the stairs, then there was the sound of his door easing shut and finally the groan of the bedsprings. He’d drunk wine, a quantity of it — she’d made sure to keep his glass full — and now he was having his siesta.
By the time she got to the place where she’d stowed her suitcase, she looked out to sea and saw that the shearers had reached the schooner, which sat the waves as if it had been propped there on wooden pillars, scarcely shifting with the action of the water. The sun was abroad. The sea shone. The men were like stick figures in the distance. She snatched up the suitcase and hurried down the road even as the dinghy swung back round with a single figure at the oars.
As she followed the switchbacks down the road the dinghy floated in and out of view, now present, now obscured by the sharply raked hillside. The suitcase dragged at her — she’d packed it with everything she could, even her books, and she’d had to kneel atop it to force the latch shut — but she kept on as best she could, her blood high, shifting the load from hand to hand till it swung like a pendulum and hurried her on. And then she was there, coming round the final turning, and she saw Rafael in the boat, working hard at the oars, but it took her a moment even to begin to comprehend what she was seeing. He wasn’t heading in to shore. He was on his way out. Back out. And from the stern of the boat she could see, quite clearly, the sun-burnished neck of his guitar poking out from the nest of the serape.