away from the sea as possible? If Gar was trying to separate her from the sea, she would have to flee—flee to her true home and find her true kin.
“Pa, don’t misunderstand, I want to go back to school, but I really don’t want to go to Augusta or Bridgeton when I graduate.”
“Well, that’s not why I want you to go to school. You need to be with young folk—like you were at the dance.”
A sigh issued forth from the corner of the kitchen where Hepzibah was rattling a spoon noisily in a glass of one of her tonics.
“Yes, that would be nice. And, Pa, maybe I could help Miss Lowe at the library right in Bar Harbor. I mean, that would be good, wouldn’t it? I’m sure she needs help. And it wouldn’t be so far away, you know.”
“Well, it’s a tiny library—not like in Augusta. SoI’m not sure how much help she would need,” her father replied.
May was now desperate to change the subject. “Funny about that snow. Not a flake of it stuck. Just April fools’, I guess.”
“What snow?” Edgar Plum asked.
“Late last night, almost at dawn. It snowed … didn’t it?” May asked nervously.
“You were up?”
“No, no,” she paused. “I must have dreamed it.”
The rattling of the spoon in the glass stopped. Hepzibah turned around slowly and fixed her eyes on May. “You must have dreamed it because I was up. I got one of those terrible back cramps. The only way to get rid of it is to wrap a hot brick, tuck it behind my back, and sit in that chair. I didn’t see no snow.”
“You were up?” May said weakly.
“Certainly was.”
Hepzibah was up and hadn’t caught her coming back into the house? She rarely came into May’s tiny little bedroom on the landing a quarter way up thetower. But nonetheless May could have been caught returning. She must be careful when she went out again, which she planned to do as soon as possible.
For May had formed a larger plan and knew that the time was approaching for a very long swim. A swim to find the
Resolute.
She had to figure out where in the vast Atlantic the bones of that ship lay. She needed to study the tracks of the sea, learn about them through Maury’s wind-and-current studies, and through swimming herself. She would have to build up her own strength, her stamina. But there was something else beyond her own abilities that was crucial for this swim. It was as if she were waiting for someone to go with her, accompany her. She did not want to go alone.
After finishing her tea she returned to the watch room of the lighthouse and read Matthew Fontaine Maury. The book that had seemed so impenetrable to her the day before, she now read with a new understanding. Maury only wrote about the currents of wind and sea, but she had swum them. He had only thought about the tug of the opposing gyres andeddies off the New England coast, but she had felt them. He had his theories based on a combination of Scripture and mathematics, but she had been born to them. He had been a lieutenant in the navy, but she was a daughter of the sea, and she was determined to find her kin.
Oh, Mr. Maury,
she thought.
You don’t know the half of it!
14
THE BONES
E VERY NIGHT FOR THE NEXT WEEK, May slipped out to the sea. Each time she slid into the water she was overwhelmed by a powerful sense of belonging, finally being at home. She had no fears whatsoever. She had seen sharks, but they seemed to avoid her. She had become familiar with the grinding noise of the steamboat engines that brought people up from Boston to Bar Harbor and the slicing sound of a sailing schooner’s keel as it passed through the water. It did not take her long to learn the navigation routes of the larger vessels in order to avoid them. On one of her first nights, she had nearly ensnared herself in a herring weir. Ever since, she’d kept a keen lookout for the bobbing buoys to which the vast netswere attached. She swam every current between Egg Rock and Eastport and then down to Cape Rosier. These
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