The ferry left Meridian at 6:14 every evening, and for thirty-one years InesVargas had been the woman who untied it from the dock. She knew the rope's temper in cold weather, the way the cleat sang when the tide ran hard against the pilings, the exact half-second of slack that let the hull swing free without scraping. Tonight the harbor smelled of diesel and wet iron, and the town behind her had the particular quiet of a place that has already finished arguing. The evacuation notices had gone up in April. It was November. Forty-one people remained on the island, and thirty-nine of them were standing on the pier with suitcases, and the other two were Ines and the boy who would not tell her his name.
He stood a little apart from the others, a canvas duffel at his feet and both hands in the pockets of a coat two sizes too large. Ines had seen him twice that week: once at the closed bakery, eating from a tin, and once on the seawall at dawn, watching the channel as if he expected someone to come the other way. She did not ask him to board. She did not tell him to stay. She walked past the line of suitcases and put her palm on the ferry's rail, which was cold enough to sting, and called the first names from the list she had written on the back of a tide chart. The engine coughed, then caught. Someone on the pier started to cry, and then, as if embarrassed by it, stopped.
The list took eleven minutes. Ines read the names the way she had read them for three decades, flat and unhurried, giving each one its full weight before letting it go: Abelard, Costa, Delgado, the Ferreira sisters who had not spoken to each other since 1994 and who boarded now in the same six inches of gangway. She did not look up at the boy, but she was aware of him the way you are aware of a door left open in a cold house. When she reached the end of the page she turned it over, out of habit, and found only the tide table on the other side, the numbers for a month that no longer had anyone to use them.
The last of them went aboard without looking back, except for old Costa, who paused on the gangway and lifted two fingers toward the dark windows of the post office, as if someone might still be sorting mail. Ines counted heads against the list and came up even. The boy had not moved. She could have called the crossing closed then; the permit on the wheelhouse wall said she was allowed to. Instead she stepped down onto the dock again and walked to him, the boards complaining under her boots, and asked, not unkindly, whether he had a ticket. He shook his head. Rain started, thin as thread. Behind them the ferry's lights made a small yellow room on the water, and the island, already, felt like a place you could only visit in the past tense.
"I'm not going," he said. "I'm waiting." He said it the way children say things they have decided to be true, with the flat certainty of a fact looked up in a book. Ines asked who, and he told her: his mother, who had gone across in September for work and had written twice, and whose second letter said she would come back for him before the island closed. He took it out to show her, folded to softness along the creases, the ink furred where the paper had been wet and dried and wet again. Ines read it standing in the rain. It said what he said it said. It did not say when, and it was dated eleven weeks ago.
Ines remembered the woman, or thought she did: a dark coat, a small suitcase, a child she had not brought on board. That had been a Thursday. The crossing was choppy and the woman had stood at the rail the whole way, not waving, just watching the island shrink as if she were trying to memorize it. Ines had not asked her name. She asked the boy now whether he had eaten, and he shrugged, which she took for a no. From the wheelhouse someone called her, impatient, a voice already halfway to the mainland in its mind. She raised a hand without turning. The rain thickened. She told the boy that the last ferry did not wait, and even as she said it she knew she was lying, because it was waiting right now, because she was the one who decided when it left.
So she made him an offer, the only one she had. The ferry would go tonight because thirty-nine people had already given up their houses to be on it, and it would come back tomorrow, empty, for the last of the equipment, and she would be the one steering it. She would put his letter in the pouch that went to the harbormaster's office on the mainland, where they kept a list of everyone who had crossed since April, and she would look for the name. If his mother was on that list, Ines would find her. If she was not, Ines would come back at noon with bread and stand on this dock with him and wait. She held out her hand for the letter. It took him a long time to give it up.
She folded the letter into the inside pocket of her jacket, next to the tide chart, and went back up the gangway. The boy stayed where he was. She did not watch him recede; she had learned, years ago, that watching made the leaving worse. She took the wheel, called the all-clear, and eased the ferry off the cleat with the same half-second of slack she had used since she was twenty-four. The passengers sat with their bags between their knees. Nobody spoke. Halfway across, when the island was only a darker line against the dark, she took the letter out and read it again under the compass light, as if a third reading might produce a date. It did not. She put it back. The mainland lights came up like a second, more stubborn town.
At noon the next day the rain had stopped and the light was the thin, rinsed kind that comes after. Ines brought the ferry in empty, tied it off herself, and carried a paper bag of bread down the gangway. The harbormaster's list had held no such name; she had checked it twice, and once more while the clerk waited with his coat on. The boy was on the seawall where she had first seen him, watching the channel, hands in the pockets of that enormous coat. She sat down beside him and tore the loaf in half and gave him the larger piece, and together they looked at the water, which went on arriving, patient and indifferent, from the direction anyone would come.