Addison did not sleep in the cottage either, did not wrinkle the white sheets or the blue-and-white quilt on the narrow bed made up by the famous Berit. He’d found a number of crates and boxes stacked inside. Wallace said they were for him, had arrived by freight a year or two after he had entered Sing Sing. Chester Fine’s name was on the shipping labels. After closing the curtains, Addison pried open a crate at random. It was full of books—his books—from the house in New York. Others held the things he had collected on his journeys: masks and carvings, animal horns, weavings, a tortoise shell, a serving tray from Brazil with butterfly wings arranged in iridescent wheels under glass. Elsewhere, carefully wrapped and padded, Addison found the paintings Wallace had made in New York and given him in lieu of rent. Docked ships. Crowded streets. The Hudson. The redbrick townhouse.
The prosecutors had conceded that Captain Graves had not, strictly speaking, broken any law by surviving, but they pointed out that the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea required the captain to stay aboard until all passengers had been safely seen to, otherwise he was guilty of gross negligence. Furthermore, Graves had brandished a deadly weapon to prevent passengers—women, even—from boarding the lifeboat, which could be construed as second degree murder. Five hundred and eight people had died, passengers and crew, burned or drowned or floating dead from cold in their life jackets. The leading theory was that a fire smoldering in a coal bunker had ignited the coal dust that floated and drifted everywhere belowdecks, triggering a violent blast in one of the boilers, which had blown out the starboard hull.
At most, Chester Fine countered, Captain Graves took the place of one person in the boat, and he was, after all, carrying his own infant twins, a son and daughter. Who among us could judge a man for saving his own children?
Who then, said the prosecutors, ultimately, was responsible for the explosion? And who was responsible for the competence of the crew? Who was responsible for the safety and soundness of the ship? Who?
I alone was responsible, Addison told Chester Fine. He asked him to plead guilty to everything, not to bargain against his atonement. But Chester, in his quiet, resolute way, ignored him. He said they must disregard public passions, which would fade. He said Addison would one day regret making a martyr of himself. And why save the twins only to abandon them again? A plea of manslaughter, everyone eventually agreed. Ten years up the Hudson.
So Addison had disappeared into Sing Sing with something like relief.
Wallace had sent a studio photograph taken on the twins’ first birthday: two babies in white dresses sitting gravely in a wingback chair, their wispy pale hair carefully combed. Sketched portraits came, too, washed with watercolor. Addison had never arrived at a settled conclusion about which twin was which and felt too foolish to ask. Every year on their birthday, another photo was sent, and slowly the babies morphed into long-limbed, extremely blond children. Marian, with her skeptical gaze and small, reluctant smile, bore a resemblance to Annabel that, coupled with Wallace’s stories of her willfulness, disturbed Addison. Jamie radiated earnest sweetness.
Some buried, occult part of him believed if he had not brought Annabel and the twins on board the Josephina, the explosion would not have occurred, though, really, he had little doubt Lloyd’s crates were to blame. Or that he himself was to blame for not demanding to know what they contained, for allowing Lloyd to wave a hand and say they would be too complicated to declare.
As the night faded to pewter, he inched open the curtain. The stars bowed out one by one in a way that seemed gracious, even courtly, and a memory swallowed him: dawn on the Josephina as a few stragglers in evening wear lingered on deck or receded down corridors, tipping, stumbling, sparkling. He felt the deck vibrating under his feet. He smelled the sea.
No, it was pond water he smelled. In his hair, on his skin. Clay, not brine.
When the light turned lavender, two small figures emerged from the screened-in sleeping porch, three dogs tumbling out after. The children wore identical blue pajamas and, except for Marian’s long hair, were nearly indistinguishable in their blondness and skinniness. They watched the cottage like cautious deer. Addison held very still. After a moment, Jamie turned sideways, fiddled with his pajamas, sent out an arc of urine. Marian turned the other way, dropped her pants, squatted in the grass. The dogs sniffed around and joined in, lifting legs. When they were done, they all went off toward where the horse was kept.
The engine in Addison’s chest drove pistons through his limbs. At Wallace’s urging, he had peered through the sleeping porch’s screen in the night and seen the twins’ pale heads on pillows. He’d nodded with a furrowed brow the way people did when shown a prized object that was meant to be admired but only baffled.