The Tears of Dark Water (2 page)

His eyes never left hers from the beginning of the performance to the end. The music was Beethoven, his first and only violin concerto, and she played it immaculately, even the most virtuosic passages in the Kreisler cadenza. At the close of the third movement, the audience gave her a rousing ovation. She received it with an almost perfunctory bow and exited the stage with a swiftness that confirmed Daniel’s suspicion. She had come to be heard, not to be seen. The magic was in the violin.

The receiving line outside the auditorium was long, and Daniel took his place at the end. While he waited, he tried on phrases like costumes until he felt more confused than confident. When the moment came and she offered her hand, thanking him for coming, he spoke purely by instinct.

“You play like your name,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” she asked, taking back her hand.

“Vanessa in the old Greek. It means butterfly.” Something changed in her eyes, but she didn’t reply, so he forged ahead. “It’s like you’re somewhere else—in the air, dancing with the sun.”

She stared at him for long seconds before her lips spread into a smile. “It doesn’t last,” she said, surprising him with her candor. “It fades like everything else.”

“But it’s why you play, isn’t it? Even when it makes you uncomfortable.”

He saw it then: the inquisitive look she wore in the flier in his pocket. She tilted her head and her eyes glittered in the light. “Do I know you?”

He shook his head. “I’m Daniel.”

“Are you a student?” she asked, trying to place him anyway.

“Columbia Law,” he affirmed.

“Law. I would have guessed poetry.” Suddenly, she caught the eye of the conductor as he bid farewell to his last guest. “I’m sorry. I have to go. It’s nice to meet you.”

She said it almost regretfully, and he took courage. “When will you play again?”

He saw it a second time, her instinctive curiosity. “I’m graduating in May.”

He nodded. “So am I.”

She glanced at the conductor again. “I really have to go. There’s an after party.”

“Right,” he replied, feeling the moment slipping away.

Then she said the words that changed his life. “I practice at Schapiro Hall. Maybe I’ll see you there sometime.”

Daniel picked up his pen in the waning dark and began to write her a letter. “Dearest V: Is love like the body? Does it begin to die the day it is born? Is it like the breath of transcendence you feel when the Bissolotti is in your hands—evanescent, a chasing after the wind?” The words flowed onto the page like spilled ink, as the sky brightened and the dawn came. The first light caught him by surprise and pierced his eyes when he looked toward the east. He took another sip of his now lukewarm coffee and watched the sun rise above the distant masts of a large ship. The advent of day transformed him, lifting his spirits. He looked down at the unfinished sentence before him and thought: She doesn’t need this.

He folded up the pages he had written and placed them in the chest. He took out fresh paper and began again, telling his wife about Quentin, about climbing boulders with him on the island of La Digue, about the transformation he had seen since they set sail so many months ago. He signed his name and wrote out the address on an envelope. It would take three weeks to reach her. By then he and Quentin would be in South Africa—her last chance to join them before the long passage to Brazil.

“Morning, Dad,” Quentin said, appearing in the companionway dressed in board shorts and a T-shirt, his wavy brown hair past his shoulders now. He had been growing it long since he met Ariadne in the South Pacific. The Australian girl had transformed everything about him—well, the girl and the sea. Every day, he seemed surer of himself, less afraid. He was even calling himself Quentin again, after years of going by “Quent.” The eighteen-year-old boy was slowly becoming a man.

“I checked the Passage Weather report,” Quentin said, taking a seat in the cockpit. “Steady winds out of the north at eight to ten knots, seas less than a meter, and no tropical activity in the forecast. We should make decent time with the gennaker up.”

“Ten days if it holds,” Daniel replied. “More if it doesn’t.”

Quentin pointed at the letter. “Do you think she’s going to come?”

“She might,” Daniel said, giving voice to a hope he didn’t feel.

Quentin placed a postcard beside the envelope. “I wrote her something, too.”

“Good man,” Daniel said. “I’ll get the harbormaster to mail them.”

“Hey, did you hear about the Navy ship?” Quentin asked. “It put in yesterday with a bunch of Somali pirates. They’re going to be tried here.”

Daniel was intrigued. “An American ship?”

Quentin nodded. “The
Gettysburg
. François says it’s a cruiser.”

Daniel looked toward the sunrise and focused on the silhouette of the ship just visible above the port. He saw details he had missed earlier: the gray paint; the twin superstructures, bristling with masts and antennae; the raked bow and athletic lines. “Did François say anything else?”

Quentin nodded. “He said the Navy caught them off the coast of Oman after they tried to hijack an oil tanker. They’ve been in the brig until now.”

“François seems to know everything that happens in this place,” Daniel said.

Quentin smirked. “The guy’s got more friends than marbles in his head.”

Daniel laughed out loud, thinking of the garrulous and absent-minded captain of the catamaran
La Boussole
anchored nearby. Inside, however, he felt a vague disquiet. The number of pirate attacks had dropped off substantially in the past year, thanks to patrols by international naval forces and armed security teams on merchant ships. But the pirates were still a threat from Egypt to India to Madagascar, a vast area of ocean that included the Seychelles. Since August, he had been monitoring reports from maritime organizations in London and Dubai to see whether the end of the Southwest Monsoon—a period of high winds and heavy seas around the Horn of Africa—would trigger a fresh wave of hijacks, as it had in years past. But for two months the pirates had been largely quiet, their attacks infrequent and distant. Looking at the
Gettysburg
, Daniel felt the weight of his responsibility. Quentin’s life was in his hands. No matter what it took, he would bring his son home.

“Something wrong, Dad?” his son asked, examining him carefully.

“It’s nothing,” Daniel demurred. “Are we set for supplies?”

Quentin nodded. “I went through it all yesterday.”

“How about a system check?”

“I did a full workup. Engine, generator, instruments, radio, everything’s good to go.”

“And our course?”

“I plotted it twice. Outside the harbor, we take the channel south, avoiding the shoals near Isle Anonyme and the Isle of Rats. After the airport, we turn south and follow the coast of Mahé to Point du Sud. Once we’re clear of land, we sail almost due south for a thousand miles to Réunion.”

Daniel smiled. “Well done, Captain Jack. There’s just one thing you forgot.”

“What?” Quentin looked puzzled.

“Breakfast. It’s your turn. I’d like an omelet and some fresh-squeezed papaya juice when I get back from the harbormaster.”

“I was actually thinking of spam,” Quentin deadpanned, “and some of that Vegemite Ariadne’s mom left with us. I remember how much you loved it.” He laughed when his father threw his pen at him and then disappeared into the cabin below.

“Make it quick,” Daniel called after him, taking the letter and postcard in hand. “Anchors aweigh at eight.”

It’s called crossing the bar, when a ship leaves the harbor and puts out to sea. For Daniel, the feeling it evoked was the same in all latitudes—an epinephrine shot of intoxication and danger. The blue horizon beckoned like the sea stories his father had read to him when he was a boy. Voyaging under sail was an adventure unlike any other, the ultimate test of courage and will. The risks were enormous, but the rewards were greater still.

He stood in the cockpit of the
Renaissance
, feet wide apart, one hand on the helm, as the 46-foot yacht glided effortlessly through the cobalt waves, bow pointed just south of east, toward the open sea. The custom-built sailboat was lithe and graceful in the water, with the high mast and spare rigging of a sloop and the bulb keel of a racing craft. Manufactured in Sweden to the exacting specifications of her original owner—a surgeon from Maine—she was the most pleasant boat Daniel had ever sailed. She had also proven herself to be exceedingly durable, surviving two knockdowns in a Force 10 storm off the coast of New Zealand with only minor leaks and a few tears in the mainsail, and shrugging off a lightning strike in the Strait of Malacca that might have split the mast of a lesser boat.

Daniel watched as Quentin worked the main sheets and let the boom out to port, allowing the mainsail and gennaker—a headsail much larger than a jib—to drive the
Renaissance
forward on a leisurely four-knot run. The winds off Mahé were as fair as predicted, which surprised Daniel. In the Seychelles, November was a month of transition between the dominant monsoons, which meant that anything was possible, including a perfect calm. Two days ago, Daniel had topped up the fuel tanks, expecting to motor-sail all the way to Réunion. Now, however, he powered down the engine and enjoyed the gentle swish of the wake dovetailing behind him.

“Motor’s off,” he called to Quentin, as his son spider-walked to the foredeck, the strains of Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” wafting out of the cabin below.

Quentin gave him a thumbs-up sign and sat down beside the bow rail, his long hair flowing out behind him. Seeing his son so at peace with the world brought Daniel a joy he could scarcely describe. It was as if Quentin had been sent back into the womb and reborn. After three quarters of a year at sea and twenty countries sprinkled like fairy dust around the equatorial belt of the earth, the years of parental anguish he and Vanessa had suffered almost seemed like someone else’s history.

Quentin had been a challenge from birth. As a newborn, he had squalled while other children cooed. As a child, he had made impossible demands and thrown tantrums when they weren’t met. In adolescence, his moodiness had grown into low-grade misanthropy. He was extremely bright—his IQ was in the genius range—but he had treated people like irritants. After years of struggling, Daniel and Vanessa had sought professional help, but the therapy and medication had only confused him further. He was highly sensitive and emotionally immature, the psychologists said, but he was too functional to be autistic, too socially capable to have Asperger’s, and too stable to be bipolar. His agitation wasn’t mania, just intense frustration with a world that never met his expectations. He was, in short, undiagnosable, which left everyone around him floundering.

There were only two things in Quentin’s life that brought him consistent happiness: sailing and music. He was a gifted pianist. When his fingers were on the keys, he entered a state that seemed almost dream-like—especially if Vanessa was accompanying him on the violin. And on the water, with the deck of a sailboat beneath his feet, he came alive. Sailing was pure, Quentin had said at the age of fourteen. So were Mozart and Mendelssohn, Vivaldi and Dvor?ák. The world, on the other hand, was a wretched place, full of injustice and suffering. People were the problem. They were petty and vain and desecrated the beauty around them. Those were his exact words, and they had given Daniel a rare insight into his son’s heart. Quentin carried on his shoulders a burden greater than a person could bear. Like Atlas of old, he felt the weight of the world.

Then came the train wreck that was his junior year of high school: the Harvard-bound dancer who paid no attention to him, the senior computer whiz and wannabe anarchist who hooked him on first-person shooter games, and the drug deal that landed him a suspension and—but for his grandfather’s intervention—might have put him behind bars. It was in that place of abject humiliation that Daniel had conceived of the circumnavigation. It was a second chance, a radical departure, and the fulfillment of a dream Quentin had first voiced when he was six years old. Many had called Daniel crazy to leave his law practice and sail around the world with a troubled teenager. But the doubters had been wrong.
If only they could see him now
, he thought.
If only Vanessa could see him.

They rounded the Isle of Rats at half past nine and turned south on the course Quentin had charted. The deep blue of the ocean stretched out before them, as did the rest of their lives. His son was not the only one who had changed in 21,000 miles. Daniel felt like a different man, the man he could have become two decades ago if only he had taken the risk and followed his dream. He sensed them again—the rays of optimism breaking through the storm clouds of the past. The future was open. Anything was possible. Even with Vanessa.

He glanced at the GPS unit in front of him, checking depth and drift, and helped Quentin tighten up the sheets, bringing both sails closer to the yacht’s centerline and perpendicular to the wind. They were on a beam reach, making four and a half knots along the east coast of Mahé. At moments, Daniel was tempted to turn on the engine again and supplement the wind. But each time he let the thought go. They were on a timetable of sorts. They had to return to Annapolis by May so Quentin could prepare for college. But that didn’t mean they were in a hurry. If Mother Nature had seen fit to give them a decent wind, they would sail at her pace.