The Offer

She was only around at night. That was the first sign, and I had catalogued it before she admitted anything, because I had been reading signs since I was sixteen and I was not, even at twenty, someone who was slow to see a thing clearly.

She came only after dark, and she was evasive about where she slept, and there was something still about her that had not been there before, a stillness that went deeper than calm. Her skin was cooler than it had been. I noticed these things without naming them, because I did not yet have a name for what they were.

She told me on my twentieth birthday, sitting on the waterfront at Portsmouth with the ships’ lights moving in the water. She told me plainly, which I had always appreciated about her. She said she had been changed. She said she was now something other than what she had been. She said she wanted to offer me the same.

I asked her what it cost.

She told me.

I sat with that for a time. The ships’ lights moved. The water smelled of salt and pine resin and pitch; the harbor was freshly timbered, barely a decade old, and it still had the smell of new wood mixed with the sea. I was twenty and I had buried my mother and lived in the woods and worked the waterfront and none of it had broken me, and I was looking at those ships thinking about what was between here and there and whether I would ever have the courage to find out. I was tired of being at the mercy of what was permitted. I was tired of what women were allowed to be in the year of our Lord 1696.

I asked for a year to think.

She gave it to me. She always gave me what I asked for. That is perhaps the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me: not the answer, but the time.

In that year I thought about the harbor a great deal. I thought about the ships. I thought about the distance between who I was and who I might become if I were not required to be what the world had arranged for me.

On the first night of my twenty-second year, she came back. The lights were the same. The water was the same. The smell of salt and timber and pitch was the same.

I said yes.

I was Sarah Bishop for the last time that night, and then I was not.

Some things you need to let go of cleanly. She had taught me this too, in the woods, with the deer: if you are going to cut, cut true.

I cut true. I have been cutting true ever since.