In the car going down the hill, neither of them spoke for a long time. Then Alba said, very quietly, "She was scared of me." Vivienne glanced over, surprised. "Did you see her face? When she looked at —" Alba touched her collarbone. "That wasn't disgust. That was fear." Vivienne gripped the wheel harder. "My mother has never been afraid of anything in her life." "There's a first time for everything," Alba said, and surprised herself by almost smiling. Below them, Greyport glittered in the afternoon light, and the lighthouse turned, and turned.
They drove the rest of the way in silence, but it was a different silence now — not empty but full, the way the darkroom went full before an image surfaced. Alba watched the lighthouse sweep the bay and thought about fear: Cornelia's, Vivienne's, her own. We're all just scared, she thought, of what the mark means. And then, surprising herself: I'm not. Not anymore.
Chapter 13
Marcus's Letters
Ruth Webb's bakery smelled of cinnamon and yeast and comfort, and Ruth herself — fifty-four, broad, flour permanently in the creases of her hands — looked at Alba across the scarred wooden table with eyes that had been crying.
"You're his girl," Ruth said. It wasn't a question. "You've got his mouth. And —" She gestured helplessly at Alba's shoulder. "Vivienne told me about the mark. Marcus used to tease her about hers. Called it her little moon."
The bakery kitchen was warm and close, the ovens ticking as they cooled, and through the doorway Alba could hear the shop bell jingling, Ruth's girl calling out change. It struck her — absurdly, powerfully — that this was family too: not blood she'd known, but blood all the same, flour-dusted and kind, offering coffee before questions.
Alba's throat closed. She'd come because Nate had found Ruth's name in the shipyard records — Marcus Webb's emergency contact, his sister. She hadn't expected to be recognized.
"I didn't know him," Alba said. "I don't know anything about him."
"Then sit." Ruth poured coffee. "I'll tell you." She moved with the economical grace of a woman who had run a kitchen for thirty years — coffee, cups, the sugar bowl, all without looking, her hands knowing the way.
What followed was a love story, told in a bakery kitchen with the ovens ticking as they cooled. Marcus Webb, dockworker, twenty-five in the spring of 2001 — strong, funny, "with a laugh you could hear across the yard." "He could fix anything," Ruth said, refilling their coffees. "Engines, radios, half the porches on Water Street — the whole waterfront owed him favors. And he sang, did I mention? Terrible voice, total confidence. He'd sing while he worked and the gulls would leave." She smiled into her cup. "Vivienne started coming to the cleanups in May. By June he was timing his shifts to match hers. By July —" She shook her head. "By July he was a goner, and he knew it, and he didn't care." Vivienne Halden, twenty-two, who'd started volunteering at the harbor cleanup and kept coming back, and back, and back.
"They were careful," Ruth said. "God, they tried to be careful. But Cornelia Halden found out in September. She came here — to this bakery — and told me that if Marcus didn't end it, she'd see to it he never worked on a dock in Maine again. And then she told him worse." Ruth's hands twisted in her apron. "She told him Vivienne would be cut off without a penny. That the family would destroy him."
"Did he end it?"
"He tried. For about a week." Ruth smiled through tears. "Then Vivienne told him she was pregnant, and he —" She laughed, a wet sound. "He bought a ring. A cheap little thing. He was going to marry her if he had to stow away on a freighter to do it."
Alba thought about that week — the week he'd tried to stay away. She imagined him on the docks, hauling rope, not looking toward the harbor cleanup crews, failing. "He came here that week," Ruth said, as if reading her mind. "Sat right where you're sitting. Said, Ruthie, she's having my baby, and I'm going to marry her or die trying." She wiped her eyes with her apron. "He laughed when he said it. God forgive me, I laughed too."
The ring was never used. In October, Vivienne was taken to St. Aubin's under a false name. Marcus waited outside the clinic for two nights — Ruth brought him sandwiches; he wouldn't leave. On the third morning, Dr. Crowe came out and told him the baby had died, and that Miss Halden was resting and wanted no visitors.
"He didn't believe it," Ruth said quietly. "He told me — I'll never forget — he said, 'Ruthie, something's wrong. That baby was fine. I heard her crying through the wall.'"
Alba's hands were shaking. "What did he do?"
"He wrote letters. Dozens of them. To Vivienne. Begging her to tell him the truth." Ruth stood and went to a cupboard, and came back with a shoebox tied with string. "They all came back unopened. Cornelia's people intercepted them. After the crane —" Her voice broke. "After Marcus died, I kept them. I thought someday —"
She pushed the box across the table.
One letter stopped her cold — half a page, undated, the handwriting wilder than the rest: They say I can't see you. They say a lot of things. But I heard her, Vivienne. Through the wall, I heard her crying, and she sounded perfect. Tell me she's all right. That's all I ask. Tell me our girl is all right.
Alba untied the string with fingers that felt like someone else's. The letters were in a young man's hurried hand, the ink faded. My dearest Vivienne. They tell me our daughter died. I don't believe them... If she's alive, I'll find her. I swear on my life I'll find her... The last one, dated a week before the accident: I love you. Whatever they took from us, they can't take that.
Alba read until the words blurred. When she looked up, Ruth was crying openly.
"He died trying to find you," Ruth whispered. "Don't let them bury that too."
Alba took the box home and read every letter twice. Then she did what she always did with things too big to hold: she loaded film into her camera, and drove to Harrow Point, and photographed the lighthouse until the light failed — trying, frame by frame, to capture a man she'd never met, who had loved her before she was born.