The Island Ferry at Half Past Eleven

The last ferry to Orra was smaller than Mina expected. It had room for two cars, though there were none tonight, and a covered bench polished by years of coats and salt air.

She had come down to the harbor early, with a bag that held more books than clothes, and had waited on a bollard while the town finished its evening behind her. A café stacked its chairs. A dog was called in. The ferry’s engine had been turning over for some time before anyone appeared to want it, as though it were keeping itself warm rather than waiting. When the deckhand came down the ramp at last he looked at her bag, then at her, and nodded in a way that meant she was expected, or at least welcome, which on an island amounted to the same thing.

Six wicker baskets stood near the wheelhouse. They contained bread for the island shop, the deckhand explained, along with a small parcel of screws and a newspaper that would already be yesterday’s by the time anyone read it. A green bicycle leaned against the rail.

Nobody claimed the bicycle. It had been left on the mainland side that morning by someone who had gone across on foot, the deckhand said, and it would be there on the island side by breakfast, which was the way most things traveled to Orra: a little later than planned and entirely without fuss. Mina sat on the covered bench. The wood was warm from the day and smooth as a spoon. The deckhand cast off the rope with one hand and coiled it with the other, and the ferry moved away from the wall so gently that she only knew it had happened by the widening line of dark water.

The harbor lights drew away slowly. The sea was so calm that the ferry seemed less to cross it than to press one long, dark fold into its surface. Mina watched the faint wake and counted the lamps on shore until the distance gathered them together.

The engine kept one low note. Now and then the deckhand adjusted something in the wheelhouse and then came out to lean on the rail beside the bicycle, saying nothing, looking at the water the way a person looks at a fire. There was a smell of diesel and bread and the cold, clean smell of the sea at night. Mina found she had stopped thinking about the morning, or the room, or the reasons for the journey, and was thinking instead about the six baskets and who would carry them up from the jetty, and whether the shop would still smell of the bread when she went in for milk.

Halfway across, the lighthouse appeared. It did not sweep the water dramatically. Its light came and went with the measured patience of someone turning a page in another room.

She watched it for a long time. Between one turn of the light and the next there was time to notice the stars, which were more numerous out here than they had been above the town, and the shape of the island itself, which had risen out of the dark without her noticing: one hill, a scatter of small lights along its lower edge, and the pale line of the jetty reaching out to meet them. The deckhand went back into the wheelhouse. The engine note dropped a little, and the ferry, which had never been hurrying, began to hurry even less.

At Orra the deckhand rolled the bicycle down the ramp. The baskets followed. Mina stayed by the rail for one more moment, looking back across the dark water. There would be a room above the harbor inn, a narrow bed, and a window she could leave slightly open. That was enough of the journey to know for now.

The mainland had become a low string of lights with nothing behind it. The lighthouse turned once more, obligingly, as if to show her the way up from the jetty, and then went about its own slow business. Mina lifted her bag, which felt lighter than it had on the bollard, and stepped down onto the island, where the stones were still faintly warm and the night smelled of bread.