Blue Water (7 page)

She pulled the thick curtain, revealing Eli's sweating face. He gave us a thumbs-up through the salt-spattered glass, mouthed a single, jubilant word.

Water
.

w
e ate dinner at the round teak ta
ble: hamburgers, canned green beans dressed up with slivered almonds, applesauce that Bernadette had made from her stock of dried apples. Leon sat in his wheelchair, watching our faces as we talked. He seemed restless, I thought, uncomfortable, and I wondered if this was because of Rex and me. From time to time, he jerked his head, cried out.

“What's up, honey?” Eli asked, massaging the child's stiff shoulders. “This calm really gets to a person, doesn't it? Even an old salty dog like you.”

He and Rex were working their way through a six-pack, discussing the pros and cons of storm anchors, the nuances of single sideband transmission. Bernadette and I, on the other hand, had been talking about the homes we'd left, the people we missed. Again, it struck me how easily we might have been back in Fox Harbor. While there wasn't enough space for the men and women to physically
separate themselves, the conversation itself had formed two discrete rooms, each with its own priorities, its own independent furnishings. A colleague of mine at Lakeview—old Fred Pringle, ears and eyebrows bristling with wiry, gray hairs—once told me that the difference between men and women was that a man, looking up at the night sky, wondered about the stars, whereas a woman looking up at those same stars thought,
I need to wash my hair
. Of course, I'd been offended. Of course, I did not—and do not—agree. But it occurred to me that Bernadette's sense of direction, much like my own, came out of a deep understanding of where she'd begun: a compass built of sinew, blood, bone, one that could never be damaged or lost. Eli, on the other hand, spoke of chart kits, headings. Like Rex, he looked up and saw only the stars, places he wanted to go.

As Bernadette slipped a bit of burger into Leon's mouth, I glanced at the men, who'd pushed their plates aside and wandered over to the nav station. There they stood, scrutinizing
Rubicon
's GPS. Heads nearly touching. Exchanging coordinates, distances, frequencies like promises. Like kisses. Even their gestures held something like tenderness. But the words that they spoke didn't match.

“Are you ever lonely out here?” I asked.

“Yes,” Bernadette said, without hesitating. “And no.” She shrugged, made a funny face at Leon. “There are different kinds of loneliness.”

“What about the homesickness kind?”

She nodded, her red braids catching the light, and I wondered how I could have thought of her as
pretty
. She was, in fact, quite beautiful. I couldn't keep my eyes from her face. “I get that a lot, actually. My parents are gone now, but I miss my sister.”

“I miss my brother,” I said. It was the first time I'd admitted this out loud.

“I miss the house where I grew up. We had all kinds of animals, horses and cows, dogs. A dozen cats, at least.”

“I miss—” I began, then stopped.
Evan
. I imagined him curled up in the V-berth, coloring—
illustrating,
he would have said. I imagined him standing at
Chelone
's helm, scanning the horizon for pirates. I imagined the friends he would have made, year after year, in a place like Houndfish Cay. But, no. If Evan were alive, we wouldn't have purchased
Chelone
in the first place. Never would I have taken so deliberate a risk, not with my own life, certainly not with his.

“What is it?” Bernadette said.

I blushed, shrugged, but she wasn't speaking to me. She was looking intently at Leon. Abruptly, his legs kicked out as one, striking the underside of the table.

“Aah!”
he insisted.
“Eee!”

And Bernadette said to everyone, to no one: “Something's wrong.”

The lolling motion of the boat had changed. We turned to Leon in unison, listening now, with the whole of our bodies, the way he was listening, too. I could sense something building around us, beneath us.

“Better take a look topside,” Eli said.

A grinding sound brought us all to our feet as
Chelone
's hull rubbed up against
Rubicon
's, long and hard, a lazy cat arching against a table leg. Glasses spilled; a fork clattered to the floor. Even before the second wave lifted us, everything seemed to be in motion. Rex was already at the top of the companionway, struggling with the unfamiliar hatch; Eli hurried after him while Bernadette tightened Leon's harness, bent to check the floor locks that gripped the wheels of his chair. I cleared everything off the table, securing
plates, bottles, and silverware inside the deep sink wells. Waves were coming regularly now, and after so many days of stillness, they felt larger than they actually were, unsettling. Exhilarating, too. Waves meant wind. At last, we'd be on our way. With a little luck, we'd be motoring into Saint George's harbor in just a few days. As I sealed the second sink well with its heavy teak cover, I heard Rex calling me from above.

“Meg! Squall line!”

“I don't believe this,” I said to Bernadette, bending to grip Leon's hands for a moment—his face was bright, triumphant—before straightening up, looking around. Somehow it seemed important to remember everything: the clever shelves, the teak bathtub, the paintings and books and curtains. This intimate glimpse into the lives of three people I believed I would never see again. Bernadette kissed my cheek, pressed a Tupperware container into my hands. “Dessert. No, take it. It's the least we can do.”

“Gotta get these boats apart!” It was Eli calling now, and I scrambled topside just in time to see Rex leap aboard
Chelone,
his good arm extended for balance. As he ducked below to start the engine, I glanced at my watch. Eight-fifteen. The western sky burned red with sunset, but a black mass of clouds, webbed with lightning, choked the east. Crouching on
Rubicon
's rub rail, I waited for the next wave to pass before I launched myself after him, Bernadette's Tupperware tucked beneath my arm. Gusts of wind pulsed over me; I dashed from cleat to cleat, collecting
Rubicon
's lines. Rex engaged the throttle just as Bernadette appeared. We traded lines, and Eli gave a shout.

Chelone
was free.

“Remember—Houndfish Cay!” Bernadette called as
Rubicon
wheeled away from us with amazing agility and speed. Lightning
split the sky like glass, glittery pieces scattering across the dark water. I ran through the cockpit and down the companionway, the sound of the wind rising, thickening, reminding me of the tornado I'd seen once, as a child, touching down in my grandmother's fields. Safety lines hung at the foot of the stairs; I tossed a set up to Rex.

“Portals and hatches!” he shouted.

“Got 'em!”

The ocean was pitching now, a confusion of waves that splashed through the open portals. One by one, I screwed them shut, clinging like a monkey to the grab rails. I'd just reached the forward hatch when
Chelone
pitched forward into what seemed like an endless trough. A torrent of water knocked me down and I rolled beneath the table, sputtering, banging my head against the brass pedestal. More water poured through the companionway, flooding the bilge;
Chelone
's engine sputtered, died. One by one, the floorboards covering the lockers began popping up, sloshing around like small, wooden rafts. Pulling myself onto the sodden settee, I wedged my torso between the table and the bulkhead just as the rain began: staccato, fierce, a battery of bullets. Abruptly, the forward hatch snapped shut, cotter pins stripped by the weight of the incoming water. Momentary darkness.
Chelone
pitched again, an interior wave rolling into the forward berth, soaking the mattresses, the bookshelves. And then, rearing back, we were swept into a chorus of lightning bolts, bright, singing spears hurled into the sea.

At the very moment I thought of the mast, there came a sound I couldn't have imagined, a sound I would hear only once again in my life. A boom that seemed to reverberate within my very cells, recalibrating flesh and muscle and bone. Blue wires of electricity crackled through the air. My forearms tingled; in an instant, the fine sun-bleached hairs were singed away. I thought about Rex, my parents.
I remembered, oddly, intensely, a small gray kitten I'd found, half-starved, when I was ten. Evan popped a red crayon into his mouth, spit out the bloody pieces, and I bit into an ice-cream cone, half vanilla, half chocolate, a soft serve Dairy Castle twist. Something was about to happen, something important, I was certain of this, and then Toby's words came back to me, as if he were whispering in my ear.

Are you sure this is the hill you want to die on?

As quickly as it had come, the storm passed over us, continued on its way. I wriggled out from the table, calling, “Rex! Are you up there?”

“More or less.”

Gray light filtered in through the portals, the companionway hatch. I waded across the flooded salon, stepping over holes left by the floorboards, avoiding the sharp edges of floating debris. Already, the seas were lying down, gusts of wind steadying into a smooth, stiff breeze. Climbing up into the cockpit, I glanced, again, at my watch. Only six minutes had passed since I'd stepped from the air-conditioned comfort of
Rubicon
's salon and into the first, wet gusts of the storm.

Rex was still bent over the helm, eyes dull with pain, astonishment. The bimini had been completely torn away. Our propane tanks were gone. So were our jerry cans of fuel. At least the sails were intact, secured beneath the heavy sail covers.

“It hit the mast,” he said, his voice like a scratch.

I extended my bald, pink arms. “I know.”

He'd woven the safety lines through the helm, tied them around his shoulders and waist. “There wasn't time to put them on properly,” he said, straightening up a little, fumbling at the knots. Then he stopped, lowered his head again, rested it on the compass. “It's my goddamn shoulder. That last wave felt like a ton of bricks.”

“Here,” I said, dropping to my knees, and I began to work on the knots. Darkness was falling, but you could still see the front in the distance, faint as a curl of smoke. Ironically, it was drawing all the wind after itself, unraveling the brief, lovely breeze. As my fingers picked and pulled, my mind overflowed like
Chelone
's bilge, thoughts bumping into one another, piling up: Rex's shoulder, my stinging forearms, would they actually blister? Gallons of water sloshing around in the cabin. The lost jerry cans of fuel. The silent engine. My last glimpse of Leon, the floor locks, the harness which seemed, in retrospect, no stronger than a cat's cradle, a child's useless weave of colorful yarn.

The eastern sky was sprinkled with stars by the time I got the last knot loose. Rex stepped back with a groan. Something had been wedged between his body and the helm; it clattered to the cockpit floor.

“What was that?” I said.

“Don't know. It flew back into the cockpit, so I grabbed it.”

Miraculously, the emergency flashlight still hung on its hook beneath the top stair. I clicked it on, swept it around the cockpit, and there, on the floor, between Rex's bare feet, was Bernadette's Tupperware. I picked it up, peeled it open. Together we looked inside. An exoskeleton of Ziploc bags. A bony lump of foil. And then—

Toll House cookies.

The smell of them rose, incongruous, into the damp, dark air: butter and egg, chocolate, vanilla. The odor of comfort. Contentment. Home.

“They're from Bernadette,” I said, and even to myself, I sounded pitiful, lost. “I'm going to try hailing
Rubicon
. Make sure they came through all right.”

Rex gave me a weary look. “That isn't going to work, you know.”

His voice sounded as thin, distant, as the last frail traces of wind.

“Why—” I began, then stopped. Clicked off the flashlight. “Oh.”

Of course, the lightning strike would have fried our VHF, along with the rest of our electronics: radar, autohelm, inverter. Possibly our batteries were damaged as well. Not to mention the engine, half-submerged in salt water. And what about drinking water? We couldn't run the water maker without electricity—how much was left in the tanks?

I put my head in my hands.

“It's not so bad,” Rex said.

“You've reinjured your shoulder,” I said, without looking up. “We're still becalmed. We spent an afternoon with people who”—I swallowed hard—“are probably
dead
for all we know.”

“Dead?” Rex said, and I now heard him exhale: a sharp, exasperated sound. “C'mon, Meg. They've been doing this for how long—ten years? You can bet they've weathered worse than a ten-minute squall.”

At that very moment, the cloud cover cracked, releasing the moon like a round-eyed yolk. One day short of fullness, it illuminated everything I didn't want to see: the open sky above us where the bimini should have been, the missing propane tanks, the standing water at the foot of the companionway, the motionless paddles of the wind generator.

“Forgive me,” I said, and now my voice rose, too, “if I'm not feeling particularly optimistic.”

Rex got to his feet, picked up the flashlight, and hobbled past me down the companionway. Beams of light shot from
Chelone
's portals, pooled along her hull. I listened as he sloshed across the salon, stopped, rummaged around in a locker. “What is it with you?” he
called up to me. “Why do you always have to make things worse than they already are?” He reappeared with a leather-bound flask. “My shoulder, for example. For Christ's sake, Meg, if something were seriously wrong, do you think I'd be able to move it like this?” Deliberately, fiercely, he raised his arm a couple of inches; I had to look away. “
Chelone
's fine! She's built to take this and more. As long as we've got a sound hull and good sails, we can make it around the world.”