Miracle Beach (24 page)

Sophie was sitting in one of the folding chairs near the fire, her back mostly to the campsite’s entrance, Glory on the ground beneath her between her knees. Sophie’s fingers had buried themselves in Glory’s blond ringlets, weaving the fine, wispy hair into a petite plait down the center of Glory’s head. Sophie didn’t even look down. She stared straight out into the forest. At what, Jack couldn’t be sure.

“Hey,” Jack said, maybe a little too forcefully, because Sophie jumped and put her hand over her heart. “Sorry,” he said, more quietly this time.

“I thought you were still sleeping,” she said.

Jack shook his head. “Naw. I was up early. Went for a walk.”

“Oh,” Sophie said. She turned her attention to Glory’s hair, smoothing a bump with her fingers like a comb.

“Hi, Grandpa,” Glory said. She couldn’t turn her head, so she just raised her hand and waved backward at him.

Grandpa
. The word fell on him like ash. Would this island still feel like home if she weren’t there with him?

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said, sitting himself down in a chair by the crackling fire.

Sophie wound an elastic band around the hair at the very nape of Glory’s neck. She ran her fingers through the remaining tail of hair, fluffing and separating the ringlets.

“Can I see?” asked Glory.

“There’s a mirror behind the passenger-side visor,” Sophie said, and nudged her toward the car. Glory skipped to it, feeling her braid the whole way.

“What should we do today?” Sophie asked.

Jack shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t want to
do
anything. “Nothing touristy,” he said.

Sophie reclined in her chair and ran a finger along her teeth like a toothbrush. “Yuck. Feels skuzzy,” she said. She cocked her head, thinking, and then added, “There’re whale-watching tours, or bear-watching tours. Or we could knock around town a bit. Surfing, too. There’s surfing.”

The thought of the three of them, the most unlikely trio of surfers in the world, attempting to ride the waves made him laugh.

“What’s so funny?” asked Sophie.

“Nothing. Just the thought of . . . Ah, never mind. Tofino or Uselet?”

Sophie laughed. “It’s Ucluelet—U-clue-let—not Useless, Jack.”

He hadn’t said “Useless.” “Whatever,” he said.

“Well, there’s a little more to Tofino—more shops, more to do.”

“Where are the whale-watching tours? I know Glory wanted to do that.”

“Mostly in Tofino,” Sophie said.

“Then we’ll go there.”

 

At one o’clock, Sophie and Glory boarded the Zodiac boat for their whale-watching tour, and Jack had the next few hours to himself. Glory had begged him to go, but he’d seen enough whales with Macy the few times they had visited her and Nash. But he couldn’t tell her that—that it wasn’t all that spectacular anyway, that he was all whaled out from the last couple of times—so he just said that he got seasick easily and would meet them afterward for dinner. Neither of them was any the wiser.

He crossed the busy two-lane road running straight through Tofino, walked up a few blocks, and bought himself an Americano at the town’s only coffee shop. It struck him as odd, ordering an Americano coffee in Canada. He thought the Canadians were more resourceful than that. Figured they’d at least change the name to Canadiano to make it their own. He’d noticed how fiercely proud of their country Canadians were, and how they seemed to get their collective dander up at the idea of being considered United States north.

He perused the streets of Tofino, but even though Sophie had said it had more going on than Ucluelet, Jack covered most of it in twenty short minutes. Finally, after the third pass just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, and for lack of other ideas on what to do with his time, he got directions to the marina a few blocks down and hoofed it over there.

Tofino curled itself at the feet of the ocean like a dog to its master. Fishing and crabbing boats sauntered in and out of the marina. Whale- and bear-watching tour boats buzzed out toward the horizon and back on regular schedules, and sailboats and the occasional yacht bobbed contentedly in the harbor. Jack walked up and down the docks shaped like combs, among boats lodged like bugs between the teeth, watching the activity. Or at times, the inactivity—three gruff old fishermen in matching yellow rain-slicker overalls, sitting like statues on crab traps and mostly just staring at one another. A young woman bundled in a sweatshirt and blanket was reading on the deck of a sailboat. A couple who seemed about Jack’s age—who looked sort of like him and Magda—played checkers on their yacht. Him and Magda. There wasn’t any such thing as him and Magda now . . . no. No. He wasn’t going to do that. He wasn’t going to wallow. Magda had been a hard woman to love, and he had tried. Lord, how he had tried. Now he didn’t have to.

He’d often imagined this day. In the sagging middle of their marriage—didn’t every couple have one of those?—he’d try to stimulate interest in his relationship with Magda, by imagining what would happen, in detail, if they split up. He thought through how he’d have to make dinner for himself night after night, and how often he’d rotate through the painfully short list of things he could cook. He considered who might get what furniture, how aggravating it would be to move from their beautiful house into an apartment, what it would be like to sit across from his wife in a courtroom, the fees they’d have to pay, how he’d have to work twice as hard to live half as well when you added it all up. And this long list of inconveniences was enough to make him realize that Magda was difficult, but rewarding at times. Turning life as he knew it on its ear would not be.

But with some words printed on a paper and a signature at the bottom, he had been set free in a way that many people longed for, knowing it wouldn’t ever happen. It should have made him feel light. Perhaps, though, it wasn’t so easy, or so quick. Jack had spent a whole lifetime loading himself down with obligations and duties; it only made sense that emancipation would take some getting used to.

“I’ve lowered the price on her a bit.”

The voice startled Jack. He looked to his left to see one of the old men from the crab traps standing beside him. The man thrust his hand toward Jack. “Name’s Will Carey, but most’round here call me One-ear.”

Jack offered his hand tentatively. He noticed that beneath the random, thick growth of beard that merged with an even wilder mane of steel gray hair, almost all of Will Carey’s right ear was missing. Jack looked away.

“I saw you ’miring her and thought I’d let you know she’s on clearance now.”

Just then Jack noticed the homemade For Sale sign in the window of the sailboat. He had simply been lost in thought, not admiring Mr. One-ear’s boat. But he was curious as to why a weathered old fisherman like Will Carey owned a sailboat.

“Why’s that?” he asked.

Will nodded as if Jack had asked a yes-or-no question. “She was my daughter’s. Loved this boat, that girl. She used to come back here from college in Vancouver, live on this here boat all summer long—breaks, too. See, her mum’s been gone for some time now. She left town when Lila was sixteen, and to make ends meet I sold the house and we lived on the fishing boat for a bit. But a fish boat filled with cranky old men ain’t no place for a pretty young girl, so Lila and I found this here sailboat and fixed’er up nice as can be and parked her right across from where the guys and I docked our boat, and that was that. But then Lila found a husband and a job up there in Van. They still come back to visit now and again. But they stay at the motel down the road when they come here now, or they camp, because the husband gets seasick,” Will said, rolling his eyes. “Isn’t she a beaut, though?”

Jack nodded. It was a nice boat. Nice size. Thirty-footer, maybe. He couldn’t be sure. It could’ve used a paint job—the red part of the boat, the hull, was flaking off, but it had a beautiful, shiny wood-finished deck that was the most appropriate visual of elbow grease that Jack had ever seen. “I like the deck,” he said.

Will Carey tossed his head back and laughed a booming “ho-ho-ho,” and Jack wondered whether he’d really said something all that funny—either funny ha-ha or funny strange, as far as boating went. “That was Lila’s favorite part, too. She insisted on refinishing the deck. Wouldn’t stand for anything else. Took us months to refurb it.”

“So you can just live on these things, these boats, all the time?” asked Jack.

“Sure. Lots of people do. As long as you don’t mind small spaces. Or get motion-sick. Although that goes away after a while. Honest. You get used to it so much that when you’re on land, you miss the rocking and rolling. I can’t even sleep on land anymore. Want to take a look at ’er?”

“Oh, I don’t—I mean, I’m not really—”

“Aw, c’mon,” said Will, already on the deck. “Let me show you around. I know she don’t look like much from out here, but wait till you see what’s belowdeck.” He didn’t pause for an answer, and Jack, with nothing much else to do, followed him.

One-ear Will Carey was right. The living area, or “belowdeck,” was spectacular. Everything—from the booth-style table at the bow, to the cabinets, to the three-foot-high base for the full bed at the aft, and anything else made of wood between—was fashioned out of a rich, almost black-looking mahogany. Miniature red Roman shades adorned each of the windows (Jack had endured enough of Magda’s redecorating whims to distinguish between styles of “window treatments,” as she called them, and even to know that ecru was not “more or less the same” as white), and a red couch almost large enough for Jack to stretch out on, and softened with overstuffed red-and-white-striped pillows, along the opposite wall of the kitchen. The kitchen was tiny but functional, as was the bathroom. Everything on the boat had its place—cup holders carved into the table and countertops, a magazine rack fastened to the left side of the couch, a drawstring velvet pouch tacked neatly to the anorexic bedside table, for loose change or jewelry or one of those mo-bile phones, as Will called them. Lila used it for jewelry, though, he said.

“This is great workmanship. I’m impressed.”

“Thought you’d be,” said Will. “Did it all ourselves, Lila and me.”

Jack raised an eyebrow at him.

“Used to be a cabinetmaker long time ago,” Will said, situating himself on the couch. “Yep, I was. But the cabinetmaking fell off a bit and the fishing got good, and when we moved here to Tofino the cabinetmaking went by the wayside altogether. Lila did all the decorating, all the sewing. Only thing she and I didn’t do was this couch. One of my buddies does some furniture making on the side—hobby of sorts. He did this for us. Not many boats this size have a couch this size in it, but he worked some magic, boy. Whaddaya think?”

“Seems like a real good boat,” Jack said, as emphatically as he could.

“Seems?” Will scoffed. “
Is
. She
is
a good boat.”

“I’m just not all that familiar with boats,” said Jack. “What makes a boat a good boat and all that. But I sure like it.”

“Sure like
her
,” Will said.

“Her,” Jack repeated. “I sure like her.”

“Enough to buy ’er?” asked Will.

“Yes,” said Jack.

The word sneaked out of him like a teenager at midnight. It was as if he had no control over his mouth. What the hell was he thinking? Buy a boat?
Live
on a boat? He didn’t know the first thing about boats. Hell, he couldn’t even keep the difference between port and starboard straight. Had he finally, completely, lost his mind?

But his mouth was paying him no mind. It had asked Will Carey, already, how much he wanted for the boat, and when Will Carey said eight grand American, Jack heard his mouth say, “That’s not bad. Not bad at all.”

And then there were Jack’s hands reaching into his wallet and pulling out one of the handfuls of checks he had stashed there just in case, and making check number 1098 out to William Carey for eight thousand dollars while Will signed a handwritten contract transferring ownership.

And just like that, Jack had his very own boat.

“Somehow I have to get it to Campbell River,” Jack said as they climbed up onto the deck from below. “I suppose there’s nowhere around here to rent a truck and trailer?”

“Her,” Will said. “If you’re gonna be a boatman, you gotta learn to talk like a boatman, eh?” He waited for Jack to nod, then continued. “And
think
like a boatman. This here’s a boat, which means it travels by water. Which means you don’t go lugging it all over the road.”

“But I don’t know how to sail,” Jack said. “Hell, I can’t even get the terminology right.”

Will waved him off. “Forgot to tell you: included in the clearance sale price is delivery. I’ve gotta guy who needs to go to your part of the island first thing Monday to pick up a fishing boat we just bought. He’ll sail this on over to you and then motor back on our new purchase. Everyone wins.”

“Sure?” Jack asked.

“Sure,” Will said.

The two men shook hands. Jack thanked Will. “I’ll take good care of her,” he said.

Will grinned and nodded.

Jack was almost to the edge of the dock when Will One-ear Carey called out to him. “Hey, don’t you want to know her name?”

“Whose name?” Jack called back.

“Your boat’s!” Will yelled, his hands like a megaphone around his mouth.

Jack raised both hands in a slight shrug. “Sure,” he said.

“
Nowhere Bound
,” yelled Will. “That’s her name:
Nowhere Bound
.”

“Perfect,” Jack yelled back to him with a wave. “Couldn’t be more perfect,” he whispered to himself as he walked up the steps to the street.

 

While Sophie put together tinfoil packets of potatoes and onions, pouring part of a beer in each one before closing the top like a tent, Jack taught Glory to play Go Fish and Hearts. How the girl had spent eight years on this earth without learning a single card game was beyond Jack. Yet she had just schooled him at both.