The Ghost

easily McAra might have gone over. I actually had to brace myself to keep from slipping. Rick was right. The line between accident and suicide isn’t always clearly defined. You could kill yourself without ever really making up your mind. The mere act of leaning out too far and imagining what it might be like could tip you over. You’d hit that heaving icy black water with a smack that would take you ten feet under, and by the time you came up the ship might be a hundred yards away. I hoped McAra had absorbed enough booze to blunt the horror, but I doubted if there was a drunk in the world who wouldn’t be sobered by total immersion in a sea only half a degree above freezing.
    And nobody would have heard him fall! That was the other thing. The weather wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been three weeks earlier, and yet, as I glanced around, I could see not a soul on deck. I really started shivering then; my teeth were chattering like some fairground clockwork novelty.
    I went down to the bar for a drink.

    WE ROUNDED THE WEST Chop Lighthouse and came into the ferry terminal at Vineyard Haven just before seven, docking with a rattle of chains and a thump that almost sent me flying down the stairs. I hadn’t been expecting a welcoming committee, which was fine, because I didn’t get one, just an elderly local taxi driver holding a torn-out page from a notebook on which my name was misspelled. As he heaved my suitcase into the back, the wind lifted a big sheet of clear plastic and sent it twisting and flapping over the ice sheets in the car park. The sky was packed white with stars.
    I’d bought a guidebook to the island, so I had a vague idea of what I was in for. In summer the population is a hundred thousand, but when the vacationers have closed up their holiday homes and migrated west for the winter, it drops to fifteen thousand. These are the hardy, insular natives, the folks who call the mainland “America.” There are a couple of highways, one set of traffic lights, and dozens of long sandy tracks leading to places with names like Squibnocket Pond and Jobs Neck Cove. My driver didn’t utter a word the whole journey, just scrutinized me in the mirror. As my eyes met his rheumy glance for the twentieth time, I wondered if there was a reason why he resented picking me up. Perhaps I was keeping him from something. It was hard to imagine what. The streets around the ferry terminal were mostly deserted, and once we were out of Vineyard Haven and onto the main highway, there was nothing to see but darkness.
    By then I’d been traveling for seventeen hours. I didn’t know where I was, or what landscape I was passing through, or even where I was going. All attempts at conversation had failed. I could see nothing except my reflection in the cold darkness of the window. I felt as though I’d come to the edge of the earth, like some seventeenth-century English explorer who was about to have his first encounter with the native Wampanoags. I gave a noisy yawn and quickly clamped the back of my hand to my mouth.
    “Sorry,” I said to the disembodied eyes in the rearview mirror. “Where I come from it’s after midnight.”
    He shook his head. At first I couldn’t make out whether he was sympathetic or disapproving; then I realized he was trying to tell me it was no use talking to him: he was deaf. I went back to staring out the window.
    After a while we came to a crossroads and turned left into what I guessed must be Edgartown, a settlement of white clapboard houses with white picket fences, small gardens, and verandas, lit by ornate Victorian street lamps. Nine out of ten were dark, but in the few windows that shone with yellow light I glimpsed oil paintings of sailing ships and whiskered ancestors. At the bottom of the hill, past the Old Whaling Church, a big misty moon cast a silvery light over shingled roofs and silhouetted the masts in the harbor. Curls of wood smoke rose from a couple of chimneys. I felt as though I was driving onto a film set for Moby-Dick . The headlights picked out a sign to the Chappaquiddick ferry, and not long after that we pulled up outside the Lighthouse View Hotel.
    Again, I could picture the scene in summer: buckets and spades and fishing nets piled up on the veranda, rope sandals left by the door, a dusting of white sand trailed up from the beach, that kind of thing. But out of season the big old wooden hotel creaked and banged in the wind like a sailing boat stuck on a reef. I