Her irises were light blue, filigreed with bright, pale interlocking rings like sun dapples. In them he recognized a proposition, brazen and unmistakable. He knew the look from women in the South Pacific lounging bare-breasted in the shade, from whores half hidden in the gloom of port city alleys, from karayuki-san ushering him into lantern-lit rooms. He glanced at her father across the table, a florid, wiry man talking boisterously, seemingly oblivious to his daughter.
“You despise this,” Annabel said in a low voice. “Talking to these people. I can tell because I do, too.”
* * *
—
Addison begged off dessert. Something needed his attention, do forgive him. He made his way out of the dining room and up two flights of stairs, clanged out through a door—CREW ONLY—onto a patch of open deck behind the bridge.
He rested his elbows on the railing. No one was around. The sea was lightly chopped. The marbled seam of the Milky Way arced through the clear, moonless sky.
He had politely denied despising anything, had turned away from the young woman and asked his other neighbor if she had any more amusing stories about her children. But Annabel had continued to burn at his periphery. Green dress, pale eyelashes. That look. So unexpected. A blue flame, unwavering and alien.
There was some relief in the workmanlike atmosphere of the bridge and, later, in the midnight pot of coffee brought to his cabin, but still she burned. In his bath, his bony knees poking out of the water, he had let his hand drift to his groin, thinking of her flushed cheeks, the loose wisps of pale hair at her nape.
It was well past midnight when she knocked at his door. She was still in the green dress, an apparition. He didn’t know how she had found his cabin, but she stepped briskly inside as though she had been to see him many times before. She was smaller than he’d thought, her head only reaching the middle of his chest, and she was shivering violently. Her skin was bluish and very cold, and for the first few minutes he could barely stand to touch her for the chill.
New York City
September 1914
Nine months later
The babies were crying.
Annabel did not move. She was standing at her bedroom window in Addison’s redbrick townhouse （black trim, black door with a brass knocker, near the river） and looking across the street at a black cat sleeping in a third-floor window. Often it was there. Sometimes, tail flicking, it watched pigeons pecking in the gutters below. When the cat flicked its tail, Annabel was compelled to wag one finger. When the cat stopped, she stopped. At night, lying sleepless, she would wag her finger until the digit was painfully tight and sore. A scold’s gesture. Tick-tock.
In overlapping bursts, the crying built to a furious peak.
Better not to move from the window than risk the visions that bubbled up, smelling of brimstone, when she went near the twins. She should not go in the kitchen where there were knives. She should not venture near down pillows or basins of water. She should not hold the babies in her arms because she might bring them up to this window and drop them from it. Wicked, came her mother’s voice. Wicked, wicked, wicked.
During one of her stints at boarding school, the morning after an ice storm, she had taken cautious gliding steps off her dormitory’s porch and into a blinding, brittle, splintery world. Each maple in the school’s central green was locked in its own close-fitting glass case, toothed with icicles. When the babies cried, she became like those trees: first rooted, then frozen. Their wails seemed as remote and unanswerable as the cries of birds circling their ice-filled nests.
Addison had been on the Josephina when they were born. Annabel had begun labor on September 4, three weeks early, and the twins were finally expelled more than a day later, an eternity later, before dawn on the sixth, the first day of the Battle of the Marne. No names had occurred to her, and she had waved a hand in acquiescence when the midwife suggested Marian and the doctor offered James, to be called Jamie.
For Annabel, the horror of the birth had merged with the horror of the war, now that she knew what it was to scream, to bleed. The birth had become the new trouble to which her mind returned when she let her guard down. The basin of red water reappeared, the doctor’s knives and forceps and sewing needles. She saw again the purple infants smeared with blood and something like custard, as small as puppies, and she was revisited by her first horror at the sight of them, her fleeting, addled belief that the doctor was holding her organs in his hands, that she had been eviscerated. The midwife had told her the birth would be a trial, but, afterward, joy would overwhelm her. Either the woman had been lying, or, more likely, Annabel was an unnatural mother.