Far From The Sea We Know (52 page)

“Way too precious,” she said solemnly, and
then laughed.

“Hey, I’m trying to be serious,” he said,
smiling. “Listen, here’s a question, sugar. If you or I were to
have as much experience, a life where even millennia might seem but
a moment, and there was no one else like you anywhere, and you
remembered
everything
, what would you be?”

“Only a fool could know,” she said. Then
closed her eyes. “Everything and nothing.”

“Now who’s being precious?”

She laughed and shook her head. “Listen,
it’s a waste of time. You’ll never figure it out. It
can’t
be figured out.”

“Maybe, but my reality is that I have to try
until some better way comes along. And it hasn’t, believe me.”

She leaned over toward him and looked into
his eyes unblinking. “Out there. On the
Valentina
. That was
reality, or at least a taste of it. Most of the rest of our lives
we spend in a little cage of our own making, bumbling around
showing our teeth as we lurch into one another. We settle for a
shambling fake of a life, and burn through our days, all the while
hoping for the unlikely happy ending. You believe that’s
reality?”

“No need to sugarcoat it for me.” He stared
out the window for a while before saying more. “I know most of that
song, and it’s been around as long as people have.”

“And why is that, do you think?”

“Because there’s too much truth in it to
ignore, much as we might like, though I hope I’ll never find it’s
the only truth.”

“Same here.”

Chiffrey raised his cup in a toast. “We’re
more alike than you might like to admit. My cupcake’s just frosted
a little different, is all.”

He drank the rest of his tea and eyed the
pot, so she poured him some more. He nodded in gratitude and took
another sip, peering at her over the rim like a puppy on the wrong
side of the screen door. “Reminds me. Went to the metaphysical
section of a bookstore the other day, thumbed through a few volumes
of new and forgotten lore. Some of what I read did give rise to
wonder, but I can’t see me going that way. I just wish I understood
what really happened out there.”

“Maybe you just don’t realize yet that you
have understood something.”

“Meaning…?”

“Well, you’re sitting here now instead of
skulking around on whatever your next assignment would have been.
That should tell you enough.”

He let out a deep sigh. “After I bailed on
my career, I spent too much time wondering why. I mean…I never had
the encounter experience that seemed to touch most everyone else
onboard. Why was I left out? And that I was has to be at least part
of the reason Becka moved on without me. And why what I thought was
my life moved on without me.”

“Think back a little,” she said. “I wasn’t
exactly an early convert, if you recall, and I can remember feeling
a little like you do now.” Chiffrey just looked off at the wall,
nodding vaguely. She didn’t know what else to say. They sat
together in silence, drinking from their cups, taking in a little
warmth against the winter. “Pie?” she finally asked. He smiled, and
she put half an apple pie in the now-hot oven to heat it up.

“Why the dance?” he said. “Why won’t this
thing make direct contact? Can only be one reason. It can’t. Or at
least, can’t all on its own. Needs someone. That would explain
Matthew. Maybe Lorraine, too, and to some extent everyone else who
was touched in some way. And the Captain with his ship, apparently.
How about you?”

“Mine was a one-night stand, and the bed was
cold and empty in the morning. But to answer your question, before
he left, my father came up with this analogy: What if you were
trying to speak to someone, but the softest you could make your
voice would still kill them? You’d have to filter or dampen it
somehow. Or maybe find someone who could take that volume. Do that,
and they can pass it on at a lower volume.”

“Only it wasn’t a person,” he said, showing
no surprise. “You mean the whale. So, it can’t communicate with us
directly. It needed something in between, like a mediator. Or
filter.”

“The decibel analogy is far from perfect,
however. It’s not just a matter of intensity. It would be as if
there were an untranslatable language.”

“Maybe not perfectly, but every language can
be translated.”

“The dome, which is really a sphere, has no
language at all, or at least not one in the sense that we would
understand. Why would it need a language, after all, if it’s the
only one if its kind? Language is essentially symbols. It doesn’t
use symbols. For me, it was a direct link to knowing. But there’s
another reason it doesn’t just say, ‘good morning, what a day,
huh?’ Back in the tank, for one long moment, it was as if I took us
all in as we appear to the dome.”

“And?”

“Mad.”

“She…it’s angry at us?”

“No, ‘mad’ as in crazy, and it’s us who are
crazy. We’re like a snarling dog with its leg caught in a trap,
dangerous even if you’re trying to help. And if you do manage to
help, the dog just runs back to jealously guard its dirty little
chew toy, instantly forgetting everything else. Or tries.”

“Kind of a bleak assessment even by my
standards.”

“We expend an enormous amount of energy and
resources to
make sure
we never know how bleak.”

“So, no hugs coming our way from our new
neighbor.”

“We probably got more than we deserved.”

“Well, I kind of hope we deserve all the
help we can get, but I take your point.”

She didn’t comment. A winter fly appeared
and landed on the table amid a few grains of spilled sugar.
Chiffrey watched it eat for a while before saying, “In case you
didn’t know, Jack’s been moved to a private psychiatric hospital, a
place so posh I wouldn’t mind a holiday there myself. My old crew
certainly has people inside.” He smiled. “To watch him, I
mean.”

“How’s he doing?”

“They wouldn’t let me see him. Being out of
the game, I’m little people now. Their excuse was they didn’t want
to get him going again which, to be fair, is exactly what happened
when Becka tried a visit. Took three guys and the maximum dose of
tranquilizers to bring him to earth, apparently.”

“Where does he get that strength from?”

“No idea. But I did see Mary there.”

“Served no time and got probation,
right?”

“Your father’s board at the Point didn’t
want to attract unwanted attention, so they dropped the main
charges.”

“She got a wrist slap like I predicted.”

“Yeah,” he said, yawning without trying to
hide it, “you called it.”

“Is Mary looking after Jack?”

“Oh, yeah. There everyday. About the only
person he can tolerate. Even though the place is private, it’s part
of her required community service. Can you believe that? Somebody
pulled a string, I guess.”

“How is she?”

“Wears a crucifix, carries a rosary. Looks
more like a nun than ever, yet the damnedest thing is, she’s
somehow even cuter.”

He glanced at the oven. “That pie ready
yet?”

“Soon.” She could tell he had something else
on his mind.

“Do have one thing for you,” he said. “I
still have to abide by my clearance obligations just like you, but
I’m taking that to apply to everything that happened before my
early retirement. I recently ran into an old friend from work. Over
a few grasshoppers—hers, not mine—she mentioned that a satellite
had picked up an image of the
Valentina
. I didn’t see it,
but she told me it was a perfect match.”

“Where?”

“Off the coast of Argentina. Golfo
Nuevo.”

She was sure he noticed the look on her
face, but didn’t try to hide it.

“Penny, when you all got clearances, we did
standard background checks. I know that’s where Captain Thorssen
lost his wife. Valentina.”

“He didn’t ‘lose’ her,” she shot back. “I
was there when it happened. You know that, too, of course. Six
years old. I was mad at her. She had promised me earlier she’d
finally take me out on the sailboat she used for her whale
research. Then she felt it was too rough. I was mad, and screamed
that I hated her. And those were the last words she ever heard from
me.”

“I really am sorry.”

“That’s not the point. She had been like my
angel. I followed her around everywhere, wanted to be just like
her. It never should have happened, not to her. It wasn’t a
tragedy, it was a mistake, it was just wrong. She was special.
Andrew and her together were special. The world just seemed to make
sense when they were around. It was the only time it ever really
did for me.”

“It must have been terrible. And for
him.”

“It was.”

“And I can see now, for you.”

“I would give
anything
to be able to
go back and change that day, to stop her from going! Eventually, I
made a partial kind of peace with it, but I still wish I hadn’t
screamed the words I did. I never bought this ‘have no regrets’
thing. I have regrets and that will always be one of them.”

“You didn’t mean it. And she knew.
Six-year-olds say that stuff all the time.”

“But if I hadn’t, maybe she would have been
more collected and seen the storm come earlier, headed back
sooner.”

“Who can say?”

“I just did.”

“You’re double thinking it. My old Grampy
told me, ‘no, you don’t shy away, you just look your trouble square
and true. Then keep walking your road.’”

Chiffrey sighed and after a while slowly
began to speak again. “When Brand, our ancient hound died, I was
ten. Loved that dog, he’d come with me wherever I roamed.
Everywhere, never a complaint, nothing but love. One morning, he
doesn’t get up. Couldn’t walk. We took him to the vet. Liver
failure, nothing he could do. So they put him down.”

“I was devastated, and I finally went to
Grampy. The only thing he said was, ‘every dog has his days and
when they’re done, they’re done. The dog dies, but the dog lives
on.’ He got me a puppy a few days later, and you know, when I
looked into that whelp’s eyes, I saw Brand, I swear. Never forgot
that. It’s gotten me through some rough patches.”

He looked for a moment as if he were gazing
into those puppy eyes again. “Anyway,” he said, “the next pass of
the satellite, and that ship was nowhere to be seen, but I am
certain it was the Captain. If you ever see him again, I’m ready to
sign on as deckhand anytime if he has need of one. Seriously.”

He paused for a moment and traced the grain
of the tabletop with his finger. “There’s been nothing on
Matthew.”

“I didn’t expect there would be. Ready for
your pie?”

Not long after Chiffrey’s visit, she was
surprised to find herself missing the sea, its smell, its sounds,
the movement of water. Even though it was winter, she began to take
their small sailboat out into the Strait a few times a week.
Sometimes a vision of Valentina, Andrew’s wife, would return,
topping the waves in her sloop off the Argentinean coast for the
last time. The sadness was still there, like a root crept deep into
a crack, impossible to dislodge, but this time she simply left it
there in peace.

On other days, if it wasn’t raining hard,
she rode Akaba, their aging stallion, through the many woodland
trails. One morning she found a pathway that led her back through
her mother’s orchard. She stopped to take a closer look. Small buds
were on the branches, life ready to return when prompted by the
warmer sun of spring. She came back the next day and the next and
soon was also spending time in her mother’s gardens, legendary for
their lushness and variety. At first she only strolled through
them, but later she began to notice details she had never taken in
before. Stones, fitted together on a mound to provide the best
conditions for a wildflower, raised beds spaced to maximize the
growing potential. She watched a snail for an hour to see where it
would go and what it would do. Its shell was a shiny yellowish
green and as perfect as anything could be.

She began to work.

For the most part, she simply noticed what
needed to be done, and as she noticed, started to see what had
always been there: the infinitesimal dramas of the natural world.
One afternoon as she was weeding, a sun break fell upon some winter
flowers and they seemed to smolder with their own luminescence.
Though far more subtle and less overwhelming than her experience in
the tank with Matthew, that sense of the quintessential in things
glimmered again. She rose with it, fell with it, and slipped with
joy through its wilder parts.

Like a stone under falling water, her old
cares began to wear away as she gave her hands to the plants and
animals immediately around her. Her steps grew lighter on the
earth.

There was a day Penny rode out on Akaba to
the one nearby country store for some butter. She wanted to make
another pie from the last of the previous summer’s raspberries she
had taken from the freezer. When she had walked into the small
local store, an old logger she remembered from her childhood was
buying bait and ammunition. When she was eleven, he and his crew
had clear-cut her favorite gully. It was near her parents’ place,
and before it was logged she would wander there and sit with her
feet in the stream, watching for the odd fingerling. She had hated
the loggers on the day it was all destroyed, the hate burning like
a branding iron in her heart.

Now she stood in the store gazing at this
man, and the rain outside seemed to fall in an unfathomable rhythm.
An old dark pain deep inside her began to dissolve, like a shadow
in sunlight. Her connection with the old logger became like an old
dance remembered. Whether he would dance with her or not didn’t
really matter. Whether they knew it or not, the circle was big
enough to hold them all.