“But what if I am too sick to remember?”

“I’m not speaking to you. The lessons are not for you. They’re for your body. She will remember.” And then I felt his hand again, in the middle of my back, drawing, I suppose, the flowers that made up the shield of a Dorstenia.

He touched me until his fingers trembled. I shut my eyes even tighter, pressed myself into the hay mattress of the berth. His fingers lifted, and then I felt him turn over, onto his own back. He breathed hard and heavy, as if he was at a gallop, and the sheet that covered us began to shake.

I opened my eyes, sat up on my elbows, and watched him.

A man touching himself is a peculiar thing. My mother had told me about women’s bodies but not men’s. I’d seen male members on barnyard cats before, and sometimes rude and red on a stray dog. I remembered, once, glimpsing one, folded over on itself in a nest of gray hair, between the legs of an old man whom Mama helped to dying. I’d been six or seven then, and Mama had had to ask me three times to hand her her bag, before she’d looked up and followed my gaze. She’d pursed her lips, pulled the man’s cloak over him, and said, “You shouldn’t make patients uncomfortable with staring, Libertie.”

At Cunningham, in anatomy class, they had asked me to leave the room during the lessons on glands. I’d leaned against the side of the building, staring out into the unfinished green, listening to the muffled voice of the professor calling out the body parts. When the class was done, the men had left and I returned to the room, alone, to the lesson written on the chalkboard, to name the parts to myself. Since no one was in the room with me, I’d practiced saying them in different voices—high-pitched, like a superior lady’s, or low and growly, like a cat’s.

I watched my husband’s hand move faster. In the dark of the cabin, his skin was so dim—like a gray stone glimpsed at the bottom of a well. His breath shuddered. The whole cabin, so close, became nearly unbearably hot. And then he groaned—like a body taking its last breath—and shuddered one more time and was quiet.

I looked at him. He was staring glassily at the beams of the ship. “I’m sorry, my love,” he said. When he reached to touch my cheek, his hand was damp.

I did not leave my bed the next day. I tried to stand in the cabin, but the roll of the ship nearly forced me to my knees, so I crawled back into the berth and shut my eyes.

Emmanuel left me to walk on the deck. Above the groan of the ship as it moved through the water, I heard his high shout or some of his laughter.