Friend of My Youth

murder!”
    The captain walked the woman back to the bench under the window of the cabin—all lit up now like Christmas—and asked her what she meant. She said she had been sitting here, where she was now, and she heard her sister call. She knew her sister was in trouble. She knew what it was—her sister needed an injection. She never moved. She tried to move—that is, she kept thinking of moving; she saw herself going into the cabin and getting out the needle, she saw herself doing that, but she wasn’t moving. She strained herself to do it but she didn’t. She sat like stone. She could no more move than you can move out of some danger’s way in a dream. She sat and listened until she knew that her sister was dead. Then the captain came and she called to him.
    The captain told her that she had not killed her sister.
    Wouldn’t her sister have died anyway, he said. Wouldn’t she have died very soon? If not tonight, very soon? Oh, yes, she said. Probably. Not probably, the captain said. Certainly. Not probably—certainly. He would put heart attack on the death certificate, and that would be all there was to it. So now you must calm down, he said. Now you know it will be all right.
    He pronounced “calm” in the Scottish way, to rhyme with “lamb.”
    Yes, the woman said, she knew that part of it would be all right. I’m not sorry, she said. But I think you have to remember what you have done.
    “Then she went over to the rail,” the captain said, “and of course I went along with her, because I couldn’t be sure what she meant to do, and she sang a hymn. That was all. I guess it was her contribution to the service. She sang so you could hardly hear her, but the hymn was one I knew. I can’t recall it, but I knew it perfectly well.”
    “Goodness and Mercy all my Life,” Averill sang then, lightly but surely, so that Jeanine squeezed her around the waist and exclaimed, “Well, Champagne Sally!”
    The captain showed a moment’s surprise. Then he said, “I believe that may have been it.” He might have been relinquishing something—a corner of his story—to Averill. “That may have been it.”
    Averill said, “That’s the only hymn I know.”
    “But is that all?” Jeanine said. “There wasn’t any family fortune involved, or they weren’t both in love with the same man? No? I guess it wasn’t TV.”
    The captain said no, it wasn’t TV.
    Averill believed that she knew the rest of it. How could she help knowing? It was her story. She knew that after the woman sang the hymn, the captain took her hand off the rail. He held her hand to his mouth and kissed it. He kissed the back of it, then the palm-to-rhyme-with-lamb. Her hand that had lately done its service to the dead.
    In some versions of the story, that was all he did, that was enough. In other versions, he was not so easily satisfied. Nor was she. She went with him inside, along the corridor into the lighted cabin, and there he made love to her on the very bed that according to him they had just stripped and cleaned, sending its occupant and one of its sheets to the bottom of the ocean. They landed on that bed because they couldn’t wait to get to the other bed under the window, they couldn’t wait to hurtle into the lovemaking that they kept up till daybreak and that would have to last them the rest of their lives.
    Sometimes they turned the light off, sometimes they didn’t care.
    The captain had told it as if the mother and daughter were sisters and he had transported the boat to the South Atlantic and he had left off the finale—as well as supplying various details of his own—but Averill believed that it was her story he had told. It was the story that she had been telling herself night after night on the deck, her perfectly secret story, delivered back to her. She had made it, and he had taken it and told it, safely.
    Believing that such a thing could happen made her feel weightless and distinct and glowing, like a fish lit up in the water.
    Bugs did not die that night. She died two weeks later, in the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. She had managed to get that far, on the train.
    Averill was not with her when she died. She was a couple of blocks away, eating a baked potato from a takeout shop.
    Bugs made one of her last coherent remarks about the Royal Infirmary. She said, “Doesn’t it sound
Old World
?”
    Averill, coming out to eat after having been in the hospital room all day, had been surprised to find that there