Salt in the Wound Line

She had him by the collar and one fistful of hair before the harbor master’s boy finished tying the skiff to the dock cleat. The body came up wrong, all deadweight and waterlogged wool, and Wren’s knees hit the planks hard enough to crack a nail. She rolled him onto his back and the dock light caught his face.

Cass.

The word did not come out. Her hands did. They laced together over his sternum, and she pressed down with the heel of her right palm, counting compressions the way her father had taught her when she was twelve and too small to reach the training dummy’s chest. One, two, three. The harbor master’s boy said something behind her about an ambulance, about the coast road being flooded. Wren did not turn. She pinched Cass’s nose, tilted his chin, and sealed her mouth over his. The taste of the estuary came through, all silt and fuel and the faint sweetness of the reed beds.

She had kissed that mouth a hundred times. It had never tasted of the bottom.

His chest did not rise. She pressed again. The ring on her left hand clicked against his teeth when she breathed for him the second time. Her mother’s ring, reset in white gold after the old band had worn thin. Wren had not taken it off since the day the coast guard called off the search, nine years old and standing on a shingle beach in her school shoes, holding a thermos of tea that had gone cold.

The boy was shouting now. A second set of boots pounded down the dock. Wren ignored them. She bent her elbows, locked her shoulders, and pressed until she felt a rib give under her palm. The sound it made was wet and small.

Cass coughed.

Water came out of him, brown and thick, and he turned his head to retch. Wren rolled him onto his side and held his shoulder down so he would not aspirate. His body bucked once, twice, and then he lay still, breathing in short, ragged pulls that fogged the air. The harbor master’s boy knelt on the other side with a blanket. Someone had called the volunteer lifeboat crew. The dock smelled of diesel and low tide.

Cass opened his eyes.

They were the same color they had always been, a gray-green that changed with the light, but the stillness in them belonged to something that had not yet decided to move. He looked at Wren without recognition. Then he blinked, and the stillness broke, and he said her name through cracked lips.

“Wren.”

She put her hand on his face. The skin was cold. Not the cold of a man pulled from an estuary in November, but something older, as if the water had been keeping him at its own temperature for longer than six minutes.

“I’m here,” she said. “You’re out.”

He closed his eyes again. The volunteer crew arrived with a stretcher and a green oxygen tank, and Wren sat back on her heels and watched them work. Her hands ached. The nail on her right index finger had split to the quick, and blood thinned across her knuckles, mixed with river water. She did not notice until the harbor master’s wife pressed a wad of gauze into her palm.

The flat above the chandlery was cold when Wren finally got home that night. She had refused the hospital, refused the coast guard’s questions, refused the tea the harbor master’s wife kept pushing into her hands. Cass was in the district hospital under observation, and the flat was too quiet without him. She stood in the kitchen and ran the tap until the water went hot, then held her hands under it and watched the blood swirl down the drain.

Her mother had drowned in water shallower than the channel where Cass went under.

The thought arrived without knocking. Wren turned off the tap and dried her hands on a dish towel that had been hanging on the oven door since Tuesday. The ring caught on a loose thread. She tugged it free and stood there, in the kitchen of the flat above the chandlery, with the smell of the estuary still in her hair, and she did not pray. She had not prayed since the empty casket, the lilies, the priest’s voice reading words over a box that held nothing but a photograph and a Sunday school medal.

She went to bed in her clothes.

The next morning, the hospital called. Cass was awake, lucid, asking for her. Wren drove to the district hospital in the truck they used for salvage jobs, the bed still cluttered with lift bags and a coil of nylon line. She parked in the visitors’ lot and sat for