Friend of My Youth

said the captain. “Another time, it was a lady.”
    Then he told Jeanine and Averill, and a few others who were standing around, a story. (Not Leslie—her husband took her away.)
    One time on this ship, the captain said, there were two sisters travelling together. This was on a different run, a few years ago, in the South Atlantic. The sisters looked twenty years apart in age, but that was only because one of them was very sick. She might not have been so much the elder—perhaps she was not the elder at all. Probably they were both in their thirties. Neither one was married. The one who was not sick was very beautiful.
    “The most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life,” said the captain, speaking solemnly, as if describing a view or a building.
    She was very beautiful, but she did not pay attention to anybody except her sister, who was laid up in the cabin with what was probably a heart condition. The other one used to go out at night and sit on the bench outside the window of their cabin. She might walk to the rail and back, but she never stirred far from the window. The captain supposed that she was staying within hearing distance, in case her sister needed her. (There was no medical person on board at that time.) He could see her sitting there when he went out for his late-night walk, but he pretended not to see her, because it seemed to him she didn’t want to be seen, or to have to say hello.
    But there was a night when he was walking past and he heard her call to him. She called so softly he barely heard her. He went over to the bench, and she said, Captain, I’m sorry, my sister has just died.
    I’m sorry, my sister has just died.
    She led him into the cabin, and she was absolutely right. Her sister was lying on the bed next to the door. Her eyes were half open, she had just died.
    “Things were in a bit of a mess, the way they sometimes are on such occasions,” the captain said. “And by the way she reacted to that I knew she hadn’t been in the cabin when it happened, she’d been outside.”
    Neither the captain nor the woman said a word. They set to work together to get things cleaned up, and they washed the body off and straightened it out and closed the eyes. When they were finished, the captain asked whom he should notify. Nobody, the woman said. Nobody. There is nobody but the two of us, she said. Then will you have the body buried at sea, the captain asked her, and she said yes. Tomorrow, he said—tomorrow morning—and she said, Why do we have to wait, couldn’t we do it now?
    Of course that was a good idea, though the captain wouldn’t have urged it on her himself. The less the other passengers, and even the crew, have to be aware of a death on board, the better. And it was hot weather, summer in the South Atlantic. They wrapped the body up in one of the sheets, and between them they put it out through the window, which was wide open for air. The dead sister was light—wasted. They carried her to the rail. Then the captain said that he would just go and get some rope and tie the body up in the sheet so that it wouldn’t fall out when they dropped it over. Couldn’t we use scarves, she said, and she ran back to the cabin and came out with an assortment of scarves and sashes, very pretty stuff. He bound the body up in the sheet with those and said that he would now go and get his book, to read the service for the dead. The woman laughed and said, What good is your book to you here? It’s too dark to read. He saw that she dreaded being left alone with the body. She was right, too, about its being too dark to read. He could have got a flashlight. He didn’t know whether he had even thought of that. He really did not want to leave her; he did not like the state she was in.
    He asked her what he should say, then. Some prayers? Say whatever you like, she said, and he said the Lord’sPrayer—he did not recall if she joined in—then something like, Lord Jesus Christ, in Thy name we commit this woman to the deep; have mercy on her soul. Something like that. They picked up the body and rolled it over the rail. It hardly made a splash.
    She asked if that was all, and he told her yes. He would just have to fill out some papers and make up the death certificate. What did she die of, he asked. Was it a heart attack? He wondered what kind of spell he had been under not to have asked that before.
    Oh, she said, I killed her.
    “I knew it!” Jeanine cried. “I knew it was