From Sea to Shore

By Amy Jarvis

The day that Carson slipped and hit his head on the Ann Elizabeth, Evelyn found out she was pregnant with a fetus she was told she’d never be able to have. It was Carson’s fault. Both things. Well, the baby was a miracle they both shared, Evelyn reasoned, but Carson working on a ship two centuries old and smacking his head on the rotted floorboards hard enough to knock himself out was his own damn fault.

No, that was unfair. Carson’s PhD in historical restoration from the University of Michigan very much proved he wasn’t an idiot. He was just the world’s biggest klutz, in the most endearing way. He tripped in front of the entire gaggle of friends and family at their engagement party, he once missed the nail when hanging up their pictures and put an irreparable hole in the plaster, and he sliced his whole pinky off with a knife one Christmas, not even drunk. 

“You’re kidding.” Evelyn’s voice came out flat. She had just gotten back to their apartment in Ann Arbor, staring at a sliver of herself in the bathroom mirror. It hurt too much to look head on, even though her figure hadn’t changed much yet. Just knowing there was something growing inside her belly dizzied her. The doctor, states away in Massachusetts, was patiently relaying the story of how Carson slipped on the rotted deck when the mast came down and bonked his head on the wood. That was the word the doctor used. Bonked.      

“No, Ms. Howard,” the doctor said. “Your fiancé is badly injured.” His voice was all Boston, even though Carson’s restoration was out of New Bedford. Evelyn poked her pale, distended belly where her sweater had ridden up. It was veiny, a very gradual semicircle. It was always bloated, a side effect from having endometrial tissue encroaching on the walls of her other internal organs, but today it felt bigger, more significant. Evelyn tried very hard not to think of the fetus starting to bloom inside her stomach, because the thought of growing a tiny human in a womb that was called an inhospitable environment for the better half of her life made her slightly nauseous.

“Is he okay?” Evelyn asked, concern suddenly rushing back. She hated the way her voice cracked in half, broke in the middle of the syllable. She picked the pregnancy test back up, fist white-knuckled around the thin red lines that declared her body shared.

            “He’s stable.” This was the fancy way of saying Carson wasn’t okay, thank you very much, and that his loving fiancée should get on the next flight out to the East Coast to see him.

“I’ll be there in a day,” she said, hanging up the phone in a daze. Evelyn’s whole body ached, remnants of having been poked and prodded in her own doctors’ offices for years. She curled a hand instinctively around her filling stomach, trying to feel for a heartbeat her little clump of cells wouldn’t produce for a few weeks more, if it even survived that long.

She preoccupied herself. She made tea, packed her bags, and ordered a one-way ticket to Logan Airport. She would rent a car, drive the hour to New Bedford where Carson was hospitalized. She made calls to the university to tell them she would have to cancel her lectures for the next week, maybe more. It helped to be distracted.

The plane ride, two hours and change, was short enough to go by quickly but long enough to force Evelyn to worry. She knew worrying was counterintuitive, that the stress would only hurt the fetus more, but she couldn’t help it. For the last ten years, since she was seventeen, the cysts that bubbled up and burst on her ovaries were glaring signs that she was never going to have a viable pregnancy. When she was twenty, she got diagnosed with endometriosis, and the OBGYN confirmed that Evelyn would never be able to carry a full term. No matter what she plugged into the equation, the answer was always no baby. It was a fun bonus in college when she and Carson fell in love and didn’t need contraception, and it was a failsafe when they graduated, got their masters’, and Carson started splitting his time between Michigan and Massachusetts. But somehow, despite all the odds, despite Evelyn’s unviable uterus and ovarian cysts, there was something growing inside her. And her fiancé was in a hospital bed. It was a sick joke, Evelyn decided in the air. She had somewhere wronged God, and this was the revenge. A baby in exchange for a broken fiancé.

She was being melodramatic. She knew that. But Evelyn’s calling was academia. When she found out she couldn’t have biological children, she and Carson made a deal—two doctorates in their respective historical fields. The PhDs would be their children. So, she delved into researching businesswomen in the Midwest. Growing up without her own mother meant her dad bringing home books about women on the prairie, working with their hands in the fields, running a household out in the middle of nowhere. As she grew, they graduated to Westworld and history books about frontier women, which her dad tried his best to puzzle through as Evelyn absorbed every word. Carson, on the other hand, split his time on the East Coast, working on fleets and fleets of whaling ships. He chose the Ann Elizabeth because it seemed like a paralleled beacon to Ann Arbor, a guiding light to always bring him back home.

When Evelyn finally arrived at St. Luke’s Hospital, she was buzzing with a nervous energy she hadn’t felt in years. She kept picturing Carson with a crack through his skull, seeing his grey brain all over the rotted deck, like a ghost story. When she finally found the right wing, Carson was sitting up in bed, eating a pudding cup.

“Hi, babe.”

“You scared the shit out of me,” Evelyn whispered, sinking down on Carson’s bed, gingerly reaching to give him a kiss.

“I’m fine.” Carson rapped his skull, winced, and showed his goofy smile. “Just a little tumble.”

Evelyn squinted. “The doctor said you bonked your head, Car. Bonked.”

Carson grinned again. “Bonked is infamous New England lingo. It’s like a wicked smack.”

“Is that so?” Evelyn’s hand instinctively drifted down to her stomach, smoothed it over her sweater. She was exhausted. There was a pain roosting deep within her pelvic area. She had gone to pee three times between the airport in Michigan and the hospital, and each time she pulled down her underwear, she expected blood. It never came.

“The doctor said you were badly injured. I was expecting your brains to be scrambled on the deck of the boat.”

“Subdural hematoma.” Carson adjusted on the bed, wincing again. “It’s in between the dura mater and arachnoid mater in the brain.”

“Is that straight from the horse’s mouth, or have you been spending too much time on the internet?”

Carson grinned. “Both. I need surgery. The doctor wanted you here to talk to about everything, though. Apparently, I have been deemed the biggest klutz the nurses have seen in years. I think he thinks I’m not retaining anything because of, y’know, the injury.”

Evelyn squinted. “He does know you’re a PhD?”

“I don’t think that came up.”

“Carson.”

“He just thinks I like working on ships. It’s not a lie.”

Evelyn sighed, smoothing a hand over Carson’s face. The stubble on his chin had somehow transformed into a beard, the results of the month and a half that had elapsed since they last saw each other. “How is the ship?”

“Oh god, Eve, the ship,” Carson exclaimed. “It’s beautiful, it’s so gorgeous…”

Evelyn couldn’t pay attention. Her focus turned to studying Carson, mapping the lines on his face. It had been so long since they were this close, and his warmth radiated. She startled with the sudden realization that she needed to tell Carson that she was pregnant, that he needed to know so they could figure out their next steps—

“Evelyn.”

“Yes?”

“I cannot believe I haven’t told you about Ann Elizabeth yet.” Before she could interrupt, Carson waved his hands at her. “Listen, that wasn’t its original name. It’s a whaling ship. They weren’t named after women until the 1940s, but there’s a reason why.” Carson paused, as if he expected Evelyn to guess, and then waved his hands again, too excited to pause. “Evelyn, there’s this secret history. It’s the pioneer vessel for this particular fleet, and the captain was dying, and he turned everything over to his wife. Ann Elizabeth Darcy. It’s a local legend. I thought it was just a story the townspeople told, but it intrigued me so much that I went looking for myself.” His eyes burned with a curiosity and enchantment Evelyn hadn’t seen in years. “It’s real, Evelyn. All of it.”

The doctor interrupted them then, and so, Evelyn played her usual role of bargainer, putting enough scowl in her eyes so the doctor would understand she wasn’t stupid, so that her very trusting fiancé wouldn’t be taken advantage of. The doctor explained that Carson needed brain surgery, a process called a craniotomy, which felt insurmountable. She didn’t know what Carson meant by all of it, and she didn’t understand how quickly her life was veering off its steady course. Before she could ask anything further, the doctors prepared to wheel Carson off to the operating room. He was still cracking jokes, her beautiful idiot, and when she said goodbye, Carson pushed his leather-bound journal into her hands.

“Read this,” he whispered, his usually bright eyes hesitant, reserved. “Listen to me. There’s enough in here to occupy you for hours. Go see it for yourself. Go to the ship.”

“Carson, I am not going anywhere while you are in brain surgery,” Evelyn hissed, ignoring the swarm of medical professionals around his bed. “You recover, and we’ll go see it together.”

“I know you.” Carson’s voice was loaded with intention. He didn’t elaborate. “I’ll see you on the other side, babe.”

“I love you,” she called after the gurney, voice cracking down the middle again, her throat like lightning. Her heart thrummed in her chest. Her belly hurt, which was a constant, but she could feel the flesh sinking, calling out to her, from where her potential child swam in the center of her womb. Just before wheeling Carson away from her, the neurosurgeon assured Evelyn a craniotomy was a fairly simple procedure and that it usually didn’t take more than six hours. But trying to keep herself still for even a handful of minutes was a Herculean feat. She paced circles around their apartment when she was deep in research about businesswomen on the frontier, she did yoga when her brain refused to shut off, and she preferred to go on walks to clear her head, even when the ground was covered in blankets of snow. Sitting stagnant was not an option.

So, Evelyn paced. She went back to Carson’s hospital room, which was stark white and sterile in his absence. When she poked through his stuff, the leather journal slipped out of his bag. She stared at it, confused, forgetting she had buried it back in the pile of Carson’s things to follow him when he had been wheeled away. She slid a slim finger between the pages, opening it up to Carson’s chicken scratch. The words swam on the page, entire sections crossed out, phrases cropping up in between crude drawings of the Ann Elizabeth from every angle. Carson wasn’t kidding. This one ship had captivated his attention worlds beyond what the others had. It hurt deep down in Evelyn’s chest in a way she couldn’t quantify. Some mystery Carson had unearthed sung in her hands.

An hour passed as Evelyn perused the pages, finally settling down in an uncomfortable hospital chair. There were scribbles of everything, from dates when Carson hypothesized Ann Elizabeth Darcy had taken over for her husband to charts of where the ship itself had sailed. In corners, there was handwriting she didn’t recognize, a sharp contrast to Carson’s unintelligible scrawl. Evelyn wondered if it was the work of Carson’s colleague Noah, whose name popped up in Carson’s conversation too much to be a coincidence. Evelyn was knee-deep in Carson’s history, so much so that she didn’t even notice that the surgeon came out until he called her name. Something seized in her chest. It was too early. Something was wrong.

“Carson—”

“He’s doing great,” the surgeon said, but his voice wasn’t reassuring. “It just seems that Carson’s brain has bled a bit more than we’d like, so it might take a few more hours to fix it. You shouldn’t worry,” he continued, but it was too late. Evelyn’s stomach was an entire menagerie of butterflies. Rare ones, from places she’d never heard of before. “He’s strong, Ms. Howard. I will continue giving you updates every few hours. Just try to relax.” Evelyn could not relax.

“Goddamn it,” she whispered, and before she could control her heart rate, her breathing, talk herself off a ledge, she was moving. Her feet were their own vessels. She breezed past the surgical floor, and the lobby, and she was suddenly outside. The frigid wetness of a Massachusetts November belayed her skin, sunk deep into her bones. She shivered. She hadn’t brought her winter coat, just her corduroy jacket that she had found in the backseat of her car on the way to the airport, but the wetness of the cold here permeated everything. Evelyn’s feet kept moving. It wasn’t until she unlocked her rental sedan and settled behind the driver’s seat that she realized she had brought Carson’s journal with her. It still felt warm in her hand, despite the weather outside. Evelyn flipped through the pages, furiously, childishly, looking for a sign. She knew she had promised Carson she wouldn’t leave. But she landed on a spread of scribbled findings of Ann Elizabeth Darcy, and Carson’s careful attempt at drawing her ended up looking an awful lot like Evelyn. Her cheeks were wet before she realized she was crying, and before she could stop herself, she turned the key in the ignition, and pulled out of St. Luke’s parking lot.

Evelyn had no idea where she was going. She was a good driver, but the other cars on the road seemed to be following their own rules. No one fully stopped at red lights, and people held up traffic to let her make what she thought were illegal left turns. Finally, she pulled into a CVS parking lot, and looked up New Bedford Whaling Museum on her phone. There was a large CLOSED sign on the door, but she went up and banged on the glass anyways.

“I’m sorry,” she said, over the sound of the wind, before the cranky caretaker who shuffled to the door could chastise her. “I’m really sorry, but I—I’m looking for any information on Ann Elizabeth Darcy, anything at all. I know she was a whaler, or—uh—that she took over for her husband’s fleet after he got sick. I need to know who she is,” Evelyn pleaded. She wanted to kick herself for sounding like a kid; with all her degrees, she couldn’t string a simple sentence together. “I’m a historian,” she managed, finally. “Dr. Evelyn Howard. My fiancé has been in New Bedford for the last three months working on the restoration of whaling ships, and I need to help him with research—”

The caretaker interrupted her, eyes filling up with understanding at fiancé, restoration, and whaling ships. “Dr. Carson McCarthy?”

“Yes!”

“He didn’t tell me you’d be coming, but there’s a little library round the corner, there.” He peered out from under thick glasses, index finger wobbling in the wind. “All his research should be localized there. Just tell them who you are, and they’ll let you in.”

Evelyn offered thanks up three times before she left the caretaker alone, stumbling along the old cobblestone sidewalk. If she squinted, in the rain, the old port looked exactly how it should have back in the late 1700s. She felt the history here. It seeped up from the streets, buffeted her back as she walked. Even though it was nearly winter, and the ocean wouldn’t be as inhabited by swimmers or passersby, she could feel how the town still breathed. She knew from Carson’s stories how much it bustled on good days, but walking through the streets of New Bedford, she recognized it for herself. The tiny little port felt like it belonged just as much to her generation as it did to Ann Elizabeth’s.

The sea whipped up in large, frothy walls against the barrier of the piers and docks, jostling the stronger sailboats still anchored out in the middle of the ocean. It was a cousin to the shorelines of Lake Michigan where she grew up, helping her father heave fish up on their old boat, learning how to fend for herself out on the waves. That would be where she’d want to take their child during the summers, she thought. The realization that she was thinking that far into the future rose up in flames, her cheeks reddening in embarrassment. She couldn’t plan for a future when she had no idea how much future they’d be able to have. It was her, and probably Carson, and maybe the baby, but two of those people were currently in limbo. Evelyn thought about Carson on the operating table. Her stomach hurt. It always hurt, but the prospect of something other than endometrial tissue growing in there was so foreign it ached. Evelyn shuddered, pushing forward so she could walk out of that thought and straight into the wind.

The little brick library rose up out of nowhere, startling Evelyn out of her reverie. She had to turn the old glass knob three times before she got in, walls and walls of books pulling her out of the cold.

“Hello?” A frail little librarian stood behind the desk. “How may I help you?”

“Hi,” Evelyn said, shaking rain out of her long dark hair. “My name is Evelyn Howard, and I believe my fiancé, Carson McCarthy, has some research here. He’s currently—preoccupied and wanted me to gather his findings.”

“Oh yes,” the librarian said, her eyes aglow with excitement and recognition. “How is he feeling, dear?” Carson’s energy for the history he loved was clearly infectious, leaving everyone he met with alive fragments of the past. Evelyn placated the librarian as they walked, assuring her that Carson was feeling better. She directed Evelyn to a study room, where Carson had left careful copies of newspaper clippings, books on the whaling industries, and a carefully outlined hodgepodge of Ann Elizabeth Darcy’s history, something he clearly puzzled together himself.

The librarian smiled, telling Evelyn that she could look through whatever she wanted if she returned it all to its original resting place when she was finished. Evelyn returned her small grin, the butterfly menagerie fluttering again in her stomach. There were hundreds of pages here, research that Carson hadn’t mentioned until today. This whole time, Evelyn thought he was simply engaged in a remarkably difficult restoration, not that he was gathering heaps of studies in staggering quantities, which was usually her modus operandi. Evelyn ached, knowing it was probably Carson’s intention to share his mountains of research with her once he returned home to Ann Arbor, but she felt fortified knowing Carson had told her to go searching. He led her here, consciously or not. The engagement ring on her left finger caught in the fluorescents, the tiny intentional moissanite diamond reflecting the shine. She hadn’t wanted a big ring or a big wedding, and as much as she knew Carson did, he had searched for months to get a minimalistic, ethically sourced stone to live on her finger for the rest of her life. He loved her so much. His love burst in her chest.

Evelyn slowly sorted through the history, the papers all colliding in a dizzying amount of information. It matched the scribbled, question-marked words in Carson’s journal. She had been there for what felt like hours when she stumbled upon a miscellaneous page, laminated and dated 1784.

Robert fell into a fever, and bestowed the fleet upon me. He entrusted me with the ship, the crew, the orders. I shall lead. I must lead.

Evelyn ran her hands over the paper, feeling even through the lamination the embossed, steady lines of Ann Elizabeth Darcy’s careful strokes. She flipped through these incredibly fragmented files, finding a page dated a few days later, in September of the same year.

I fear Robert is gravely ill. He has been ill for a fortnight, and this morn, he signed the entire business over to me. Fear consumes me.

How is leading possible when my love is on his deathbed?

Paralleling Ann Elizabeth’s notes, Evelyn found the same date in Carson’s journal. She followed Carson’s mess of handwriting, picking out only a few words: Widowed? The sea and whole fleet of whalers have become hers at this point…Does Robert die in December? This November…is this when she gets pregnant?

The word pregnant swam up to Evelyn. It both buoyed her and drowned her. She flipped frantically through the next pages, scanning for mentions of a baby. Ann Elizabeth wrote just three months later: I lost the child. That was it, no explanation. But Evelyn was already inventing her own. Either Ann Elizabeth had lost it due to stress or because she was in sort of a whaling accident. The decks of those ancient ships were so slippery. Carson fell. Carson. Evelyn’s gaze flew from the journal to the beige wall. He had led her here, to this moment. Before she could catch herself, Evelyn looked back down to Carson’s notes. Hidden against the seam was a note, barely-there, in pencil. Carson always used pen; he liked the intentionality of it. But the discolored words matched his chicken scratch: When we’re back together, ask Evelyn about her getting an ablation…or hysterectomy.

The word was ugly, large, dangerous. Carson, her sweet Carson, wanted Evelyn to purge the endometriosis instead of living with it. Evelyn knew that was what he intended and that his note wasn’t written out of exasperation or in an attempt to take the possibility of children away from her. He’d spent years watching her writhe in pain. But the thought of him wanting to cut into her stomach felt wrong, impossible. Even with his insistence that he didn’t need children to be happy, that he loved her enough, Evelyn knew Carson always wanted kids. His note felt like giving up on her, on any potential children. She ignored her usual impulse to smooth a hand over her stomach, just examined her little bump with the naked eye. Before she could stop herself, she curled her arms around her puckered belly, instinctually. Maternally.

Curiosity bubbled up, overpowering her disbelief. Evelyn tuned back into her unearthing of Carson’s research. She pawed frantically through the diary, searching for an answer. She couldn’t tell if it was for how Ann Elizabeth lost the baby or how Carson wanted her to cut out what was impossibly occupied. It ached inside of her, and she pushed the thought that she was projecting clean out of her mind. The drawing of Ann Elizabeth looked so much like her it ached. Evelyn’s erratic heartbeat interrupted her every thought—

“How’s it going in here?” The tiny librarian pushed through the door; her body swaddled in a sweater that enveloped her. Evelyn felt unfairly jealous of her warmth.

“I—Good. Do you know any more about Ann Elizabeth? Either the ship or the woman.”

“Well, her husband, Robert, fell ill…He’s rumored to have had dysentery, but it was never confirmed, because he didn’t want anyone to know. It was a secret the two of them kept. Ann Elizabeth ran the entirety of the fleet for almost six months before anyone discovered that Robert had died the year previous.” Her eyes shone with a shared pride, the same ferocity that lived in Evelyn’s heart. 

“And the pregnancy? What happened there?”

The librarian startled at Evelyn’s question. “Pregnancy?”

Evelyn pointed wordlessly to Carson’s notes, then to the diary. “Did Ann Elizabeth have a miscarriage?”

The librarian leaned into the page, squinting through her bifocals. “Oh, dear. I must have never read this page. She was out at sea by this point, it looks like. Poor thing was going from sea to shore, carrying her dead husband’s child.”

Evelyn shivered. Her stomach was roiling. The butterflies were gone, replaced by New England red tide against the rocks. Last year, Carson had taken her to Narragansett, and they swam furiously in the seaweed, fighting the current, fighting the grossness. That’s how it felt. The growing intensity of the parallels between her and Ann Elizabeth were sweltering, languished seaweed bumping up against her legs, lost in the current. She pulled furiously at her turtleneck, the green band choking against her throat.

“I have to go,” she managed, and before the librarian could stop her, Evelyn gathered Carson’s journal and Ann Elizabeth’s laminated diary. It felt like a giant professional offense to wrench such a rare artifact from a museum, but she ignored her better judgement and ran out into the wind, ignoring the poor woman’s pleas behind her.

Evelyn got in her car. She was going to the shipyard. She needed to know more.

The drive was only a few minutes, but the time dragged out for what felt like hours. The sea was all around her, crashing and rushing in impossible cold foam against the rocky shoreline. She had never seen a body of water so intense, so deep. Lake Michigan was vast, but it paled in comparison to the Atlantic. Evelyn knew how large it was, how many stories had been lived and lost out on the waves. She thought maybe in another life she would be a shipwreck archaeologist, that she’d dig up history from the deep and make it stand for centuries. She was buzzing with the same nervous energy that had occupied her body for the whole day, her need to pace warring with her need to find out what happened to Ann Elizabeth and her child. In the back of her mind, Carson’s want for Evelyn to get a hysterectomy pulsed like an inflamed red star. When Evelyn finally arrived, she soldiered out into the cold, unforgiving wind, holding Carson’s research against her chest like a pearl.

“Ma’am, you can’t enter here,” a man said, his greying hair covered by a yellow beanie. It matched Carson’s.

“I’m Evelyn Howard. Carson McCarthy’s fiancé? He needs something from here.” It was a lie. Evelyn looked up at the massive warehouse. It was only blocks away from the museum and the library, but this place was vast and modern in comparison to the rest of the town. It was built right against the massive pier that extended out into the bay, where restored ships and flashy sailboats alike were docked in the marina. 

The man shuffled forward. “I’m sorry, but you still can’t enter the warehouse. Since Carson’s accident,” he winced, “the Ann Elizabeth is currently off-limits.”

Evelyn couldn’t take it. “Please,” she whispered, and she finally began to cry. “I need to see it.”

The caretaker looked at her. A sloppy nametag on his raincoat read Noah. This was him. Carson’s friend. Surely, she could bargain with him to at least see the ship. “What do you want to know?” He asked it quietly, as if this too was a secret.

Evelyn inhaled. Even her breath was wobbly. She hated it. “Was Ann Elizabeth pregnant with her dead husband’s child? How did the baby die?”

Noah startled. “That’s something no one in this town uncovered before your fiancé. For some reason, that’s what he was focused on. Even her pioneer voyages as a whaler couldn’t hold his attention more than that lost pregnancy. I’m not sure why he was—is—so obsessed.”

“Did she want it?” Evelyn’s blood was pumping so furiously in her ears. The word legacy struck repeatedly against the shoreline of her chest. She felt like she was on a ship with no oars.

“What?”

“Did she want the baby?”

Noah, rightfully, looked entirely confused. “She didn’t write much about it in her diary. Just those few lines Carson puzzled together. You know, there’s so much more about her history and her business than her short pregnancy, and from what Carson’s told me about your research, that’s what I figured you’d be asking about—”

“I know that already,” Evelyn said, too harshly. She again felt like a petulant child, but she forged on. “Can I please just see the ship? I won’t go on it. I won’t touch it. I just want to see it.”

Against all odds, Noah finally nodded. Evelyn passed her reflection in the window on the way out to the warehouse. She looked like she’d been struck by lightning. Her hair was tangled and disheveled, and her normally hazel eyes were clouded and stormy. She didn’t look like a historian. She didn’t look intellectual. She looked like the basest version of herself, the one she kept locked away in places she’d compartmentalized long ago. She looked like she did when she first found out she’d never be able to have children. That small hurt had billowed up and fortified over the last day and a half. The momentary reflection in the window was the first time she had looked at herself since she held the pregnancy test in her hand back in Ann Arbor. She was both herself and entirely different.

The Ann Elizabeth was vast. Even decaying, in various states of ruin, there was a majesty to it. It commanded the warehouse like it commanded her attention. The build was strong, carefully cut wooden beams and tatters of sails stood proudly against the modernity of the warehouse. Evelyn could picture it out at sea, the regality of it. She swallowed a growing lump in her throat she was long past ignoring. Per her promise to Noah, Evelyn didn’t try to climb up the ladder or to even get within arm’s reach of the ship. She just stared, mesmerized, for what felt like hours before Carson’s research burned a hole in her pocket.

She pulled out Carson’s journal, wordlessly, landing again on the page where he ruminated on her pregnancy. His words were still hard to decipher, but Evelyn could see the timeline he had drawn up. If Carson’s imaginative hypotheses were correct, Ann Elizabeth had gotten pregnant with Robert’s baby a month before he died, in November of 1784. She lost the baby only four months along, in March of the next year. Underneath, written in shaky pencil lines, were Carson’s contemplations: Did Ann Elizabeth lose the baby because of stress? Grief? …She was out at sea when she must have miscarried (wood analysis shows remnants of blood all over the lower decks…it’s not too far-fetched to assume its hers). Evelyn ran her finger over the page, ignoring Noah who stood awkwardly behind her. She turned the journal to read Carson’s notes along the seam. They were hesitant, like an afterthought, or like something shameful. Why do both the women in my life keep losing the chance to have babies? Evelyn swallowed. I don’t even know, Carson mused in tiny script, if we’d be good parents. Evelyn flipped the few pages back to Carson’s first comment, the ugliness of “hysterectomy” storming in her chest. Tucked into the other seam was an even smaller note that Evelyn had entirely bypassed in her daze earlier: If Eve just gets the operation, maybe she won’t be in pain anymore. Use this in the conversation.

Evelyn sobbed. The word pain was underlined three times, intentional. Carson didn’t want to refuse Evelyn the possibility to have children—he was trying to rid her entire body of hurt. He wasn’t trying to desecrate her, to take her possibility of motherhood away. He was prioritizing her over even himself. Her guilt was a burning pyre deep inside her stomach. She never should have doubted him.

When Carson first got his masters, he thought he would go into art reconstruction, because his hand was steady and he had a deep love for that corner of history. But something had swayed him to ships and shorelines, his heart beating for New England. Evelyn had never quite understood why he loved this place so much when he, like her, was a born and bred Michiganite. She couldn’t figure out why the sea called to him, until now. There was something so ancient and sad and human about this ship. She flipped back a few pages of the journal, finding Carson’s drawings. Evelyn could almost feel Ann Elizabeth here, walking in her pants and boots, commanding a massive quantity of men. And in every imagination, and in Carson’s constructed sketch, she wore Evelyn’s face.

“Wow,” Evelyn finally said, barely audible. Her eyes once again filled with tears. Noah still stood out to the side with most of his fingers shoved in his pockets.

“She’s a beauty,” Noah echoed. Evelyn nodded. She understood why this ship took up so much of Carson’s heart. It breathed history they both could only hope to uncover. She took two steps forward, toward the ship, ignoring Noah’s soft protests. She touched a shaky hand to the cold wood of the underbelly of the ship, hoping that her grip alone could scry past her questions and give her a better understanding. The ship loomed up over her, eclipsing Evelyn entirely.

Evelyn’s calling had always been uncovering the mystery, excavating history, not making a new one. Even centuries earlier, Ann Elizabeth’s path was about legacy, forging forward—the same road Evelyn had followed for ten years. But now, it was shared with the intense desire to be a viable home for her child, for carrying on a family she’d secretly always wanted but never thought she’d be able to have. The drawing of Ann Elizabeth looked so much like Evelyn. Carson had drawn this woman to look like his barren fiancée. Evelyn shivered. The rain still beat against the windows, her hair dripping leftover salty air onto the floor.

“I want the baby,” she whispered, and it felt like a lightning crack down the sky, an entire divining rod she’d spent years being too afraid to test. Her hands curled once more against the imperceptible bump in her stomach, this time out of conviction rather than fear.

“What did you say?” Noah leaned forward. He smelled like turpentine and wet wood, Carson’s natural cologne. Carson. Evelyn’s heart did cartwheels backwards in time, her hands folding decidedly against her fiancé’s journal. “Evelyn?”

“I have to go,” she whispered, and then repeated it, reinforced. “I have to go. Thank you so much for your time.” She rushed back out front, up the wet stone steps, ignoring how the rain fogged and splattered her tortoiseshell glasses, frames heavy against her face. She drove off, back to Carson, into the storm.

The hospital was just as grey and foreboding as it was upon her first arrival. Her fear caught up to her feet as she made her way past the front desk and up to the surgical wing, found her chair from earlier. The surgeon that had given her an update earlier was just around the corner, and she waited for his update, her stomach fluttering, her heart in her throat.

“Carson?” she asked again, breathless. His expression was unreadable, sunken into his face.

“He’s out of surgery,” the doctor assured, “but I’m afraid there were complications.” Evelyn’s focus faded away as her vision clouded. Her entire body hurt, remnants of her nonstop day, her forceful voyage back and forth in time. She fought the growing spots in her eyes as she tuned back into the doctor’s monologue. “He’s not awake yet, although we’re very optimistic for his recovery. But his brain swelled up in surgery, unfortunately, and it was a bit bigger than we usually like. He should be waking up soon, but it’s difficult to tell exactly when that’ll be.”

Evelyn was only able to manage to ask to see him. She was in so much pain. Tears dripped out of her eyes, although she wasn’t able to identify if they were for Carson’s fate, from her decision to try motherhood after ten years of writing it off, or from the connection she had uncovered between herself and Ann Elizabeth Darcy. When she tiptoed back into Carson’s room, his soft, handsome face seemed unfinished. There was a tube in his throat, remnants of the adhesive of the tape on his eyes. She stifled a sob, reaching for his hand. It was still warm, still Carson’s. She traced the tip of her finger over the scar on his pinky where they’d reattached it on Thanksgiving. It was a small band of white, a ghost of skin.

“Hi,” Evelyn whispered. “I’m so sorry I left you, baby.” The starkness of the room was sweltering. Evelyn focused her eyes on Carson’s seaside window. “You were right, though.” She swallowed, trying to convey the hugeness that Carson’s all of it had encompassed. “Carson, I need you to wake up, please. I know you’re probably in pain, and it won’t be easy, but you need to wake up right now. I won’t even call you a klutz after this, scout’s honor.” Carson inhaled through the machine, and Evelyn seized his hand and pushed it against her stomach, even though she knew he wouldn’t be able to feel anything. She still ached, her body in fragments, but the pain emboldened her. She was weathering through.

“When you do wake up,” Evelyn promised, “I’ll tell you how right you were.” Evelyn breathed, letting herself fully imagine her future for the first time all day. She could give the university notice, and she could transfer somewhere along the eastern seaboard so that the three of them could live along the ocean. Their baby could grow up in the salt and brine, and Evelyn and Carson could compromise on history and discover women in the sailing and whaling industries. In her imagination, the baby’s always a little girl. Evelyn swallowed. “Carson,” she whispered, “I’ll tell you how your research uncovered a story no one else had been able to touch, and…” she paused, staring down at him, willing him to struggle against the tube in his throat, throwing all her weight behind the next words, “I’ll tell you that I’m pregnant.”