Blue Water Read online

  “Isn’t it unlucky?” I’d asked. “Naming a boat after someone who was cursed?”

  By then, we’d found someone to rent our house. We’d sold Rex’s car and put mine on blocks, cashed in our mutual funds. We’d hired Lindsey Steinke to deposit checks, pay bills, keep an eye on our finances. Our personal items sat boxed in the attic, the flotsam and jetsam of twenty years of marriage: photo albums and clothing, a celadon vase from our trip to Korea, the tumbleweed that Rex had carried all the way home from New Mexico. Evan’s baby toys, folders of drawings. The story he’d been writing on the day he’d asked me to spell marsupial.

  “Maybe it was a curse in the beginning,” Rex said. “But, think about it, Meg. Suddenly she’s free to do whatever she wants.”

  Tears stung my eyes. We were on our way to the bank. In the morning, we’d carry the certified check to the airport, get on a plane, taxi to the marina where our new life waited for us.

  “I don’t want to be free,” I said.

  It took us hours to creep through the channel. By the time the fog finally lifted, the lights of the coast were out of sight. It was dark now, and cold. Rex was on watch. I opened my sleeping bag and lay down in the cockpit, too queasy to go below. The stars came out in misty sheets. Long, thin clouds trapped the moon’s narrow eye. With each tall swell, its pointed chin bobbled, nodded, until it seemed close enough to touch. Suddenly, I was a child again, staring up at my mother, who was bending over me. And then, I was a mother myself, looking down at Evan as he slept. The fine, downy hairs on his cheeks. The coffee-colored birthmark inside his elbow. A pane of clear glass stood between us; I reached out to push it aside—

  —and there were Cindy Ann Kreisler’s girls, sitting by the highway in the frost-covered weeds. In the distance, Cindy Ann was screaming, telling the officers she’d done nothing, I was the one at fault. The sky filled with purple clouds, arranging and rearranging themselves, spectacular and strange. I thought it must be a message, but when I tried to understand, something seemed to press down on my chest, and then there was the lurch of being lifted into the ambulance.

  My baby, I said.

  Don’t worry, the paramedic said. Jesus loves us all.

  I blinked up at him: had I heard him right? Black bits of razor stubble peppered his chin. A gold cross ticked at his throat.

  I awoke to see Rex’s dark shape at the helm. For a moment, I didn’t remember where I was. Then a wave splashed up against the bulwark, misting my forehead and cheeks. Oh, I thought. This.

  “What is it?” I said, wriggling out of my sleeping bag.

  A clean, white light shimmered on the horizon.

  “Tanker,” Rex said. “It’ll pass off our port side. Were you able to sleep?”

  “A little,” I said. The light seemed to be getting closer, but it was difficult to say. Above us, clouds hung in a loosely woven net, backlit by the waxing moon. “Do you think they can see us?”

  “Doubt it. We’re too low in the water to show up on their radar.”

  “I was dreaming about Evan,” I said.

  He looked at me. “A good dream?”

  I tried to decide. “Better than nothing,” I said.

  Lying in bed shortly after his death, flipping through channel after channel on TV, I’d discovered a cable show in which a man communicated messages from the dead to members of an audience. Is somebody here in this section, he’d say, who has a relative, an uncle? A father? Yes? I’m getting something about Andrea, Amelia…Angela? Are you Angela? Yes? Your father wants you to know about the kitchen door—does this make sense? Yes? He’s telling you everything’s all right now, you shouldn’t worry. Do you understand this message?

  I’d been raised on stories about the saints, visions of angels, the literal voice of God. After the funeral, after my injuries healed, after my parents returned to Florida and Rex went back to work, I’d been stunned by the mounting silence that followed, day after day, in which I saw nothing, sensed nothing; in which even my dreams were meaningless, gray. One moment, I was a mother, driving her son to school. A gulp, he’d said, and I was stripped to the waist, unable to turn my head. Somewhere else, someone else. Completely.

  Do you understand this message?

  Rex was squinting through the binoculars again. “Would you take a look at this thing?” he said. “Now it doesn’t seem to be moving at all.”

  I took the binoculars, forced myself to concentrate. It took me a moment to find the light, which was not a single light at all, but two lights, one red, one green. The green light shimmered on my right. Which meant—

  “Start the engine,” Rex said, in a strange, calm voice. “They’re heading right toward us.”

  Everything seemed to be happening very slowly. I climbed down the companionway, fumbled the key into the ignition. The motor coughed, caught. Even before I got back into the cockpit, Chelone was moving faster, sails snapping in the artificial breeze. By now we both could see the tanker clearly; it was cutting through the waves with remarkable speed. Moments later, it passed less than a hundred feet in our wake, its own wake rocking us violently. Then, it was behind us, a dwindling pair of lights. A single light growing smaller and small. A blip on the horizon.

  Gone.

  I turned to Rex, and he put his arms around me; I buried my nose in his neck. We stood that way for a long time, not speaking. His body against mine was both familiar and strange; he smelled of the ocean and, inexplicably, warm bread.

  “Kiss me?” I asked Rex, and then his mouth was on mine, salty, his chin stubbled and rough. We reset the autohelm and lay down together on my wet sleeping bag, carefully, trying to move with the waves, but it was a clumsy business, and we knocked elbows and foreheads and knees before finding a soft, slow rhythm all our own. Looking up into Rex’s face, I was struck by his beauty, his high cheekbones and almond eyes, as if I were seeing him for the first time. It wasn’t that we hadn’t made love since Evan’s death, but we’d done so perfunctorily, efficiently. It was like the meals we cooked and ate together, night after night, without appetite. The body had its needs and you met them. You put one foot in front of the other. You kept going, out of dumb, animal habit.

  Afterward, Rex pressed his lips to my nose and cheeks, my forehead, my eyelids, one by one. “What are the chances,” he said, “that two vessels should cross paths like that in the middle of all this space?”

  I shook my head to silence him.

  “I mean, if we’d started the engine even thirty seconds after we did—”

  “You can’t think that way,” I said.

  But of course, that wasn’t true. I knew it, and Rex knew it, too. The mind is built to think exactly that way, to move, serpentine, through every shadow of what might or might not have been.

  If only we’d charted a course one mile to the east, or to the west.

  If only Cindy Ann Kreisler had gone to bed early, if she hadn’t stayed up hour after hour, drinking wine.

  If only I’d kept Evan home from school one more day. If the power hadn’t gone out. If we’d left the house on time. If only I’d let Rex take him to school, for Christ’s sake, he’d even offered to! If only I’d kept my eye on the Suburban for just a few seconds longer.

  Or else, if I’d awakened five minutes sooner. One minute sooner. Even thirty seconds. You simply can’t bear not to think about it. Because the truth is this: it could have been enough.

  The days passed. The first week. The next. Twice a day, at dusk and dawn, we walked to the bow and back again, checking the condition of the sails, the sheets, squinting up at the mast. By now, the muscles in my upper arms and shoulders had knotted into a single steady ache; Rex groaned whenever he sprawled on the settee, one bent knee in the air. He was fifty years old that summer. I’d just turned forty-eight. We were physically fit, or so we thought, but we hadn’t expected how the constant motion would affect our backs, our knees. The damp salt air settled deep in our throats. We developed strange rashes under our arms, on the backs of ou
r knees. Bucket baths, dipped directly from the sea, only left us feeling itchier, greasier.

  Mothlike holes peppered our T-shirts, collars and hemlines unraveling.

  I thought of our claw-footed tub back home, the master bath shower with its twin showerheads, the stack of soft towels in the closet. I imagined slipping into my good silk nightgown, walking barefoot through the house and out onto the lawn. The cool evening dew against my sun-toughened feet. Evan and Rex filling jars with fireflies. Perhaps that very evening, Toby would stop by—without Mallory, as he sometimes did—to sneak a forbidden hamburger, watch a little TV. All of it seemed unreal to me now, like something I had dreamed. Like traces of a life I’d lived as someone who was not me.

  Hour after hour, I stared out at the swells, hoping to see something, anything at all. Whales, seagoing turtles, even the slice of a shark’s dark fin. For a while, there’d been schools of dolphins, surfacing so close to Chelone’s hull that I heard their little wet gasps of amazement, saw their expressions, which were strangely human: expectant, curious, kind. Like saints, I’d thought, remembering my childhood collection of intricately painted figurines. St. Francis had had those same kind eyes, brightly colored birds perched on his shoulders. But Rex and I had seen nothing living, aside from each other—and, inexplicably, a swarm of red-eyed biting flies—since leaving the Gulf of Maine and bearing southeast, into the open Atlantic.

  Once, something hit the fishing line we’d trailed behind the stern, but by the time I worked the rod out of its mount, there was nothing on the other end—not even the ten-inch lure.

  Once, as Rex fiddled with the single sideband radio, he tuned into a terse conversation in a language we did not recognize.

  Once, I spotted something in the water that turned out to be a jerry can, the red plastic faded to a valentine pink. I watched it through the binoculars, tracking it for as long as I could. When it finally slipped out of sight, I was ridiculously disappointed.

  Still, every day, I learned something new. How to drink from a glass without spilling. How to walk without falling down. How to cook simple meals on a propane stove. How to eat those meals when Chelone heeled over and our table became a forty-five-degree incline. It was as if we’d stumbled upon a strange, magical kingdom, a place where down was up and up was down, where the ground flexed and trembled while the sky appeared solid, fixed. Even our vocabulary changed. At first, I fumbled with the correct names for things: port (left) and starboard (right); bow (front) and stern (back.) Down the stairs (companionway), there was a kitchen (galley); a toilet (head); a main room (salon). We didn’t sleep in a bed, but rather, in a berth, which was located in a stateroom.

  “It’s like a foreign language,” I said.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Rex said. “Another few weeks, and you’re gonna be a regular Jack Tar.”

  “A who?”

  “A seasoned sailor, matey,” he said, giving me a fierce pirate scowl. “Salt water running through your veins.”

  But what ran through my veins was good, old-fashioned blood: I knew because I saw it constantly. My bare thighs were covered with bruises. I knocked my head on the hatch covers, stubbed the nail off my littlest toe. And then, one night, the barometer dropped. The healed-over break in my ankle seemed to glow, red-hot, beneath my skin.

  The following morning, we encountered a line of squalls that hit very rapidly, one after the next. Rex was trying to put a second reef in the mainsail—lowering it partway, then tying it off—when the boom swung free and knocked him off the cabin top. He hit the safety lines hard before tumbling to the deck. I started forward, but he got up again, waving me back.

  “Stay at the helm!”

  I could barely hear him over the roar of the rain, the crack of the flapping sail. A white crest of wave detached itself, and suddenly I was standing in water. The lenses of my glasses were drenched; I couldn’t see a thing.

  “You okay?” I hollered, feeling another wave crack against the back of my foul-weather jacket. It was like being shoved by a human hand.

  “Keep the bow into the wind!”

  By the time I’d wiped my glasses clear, he’d already returned to the cabin top, where he finished tying down the sail. A few minutes later, he crawled back into the cockpit, right arm tucked against his side. Another wave broke over us, achingly cold, replenishing the water that had drained away.

  “It could be worse,” he said. He was panting. I slicked my hair back from my forehead.

  “Worse how?”

  He forced a grin. “We’re making good time.”

  Almost as he spoke, a watery light broke through the clouds. The squall line passed to the east, slipping across the surface of the water like the shadow of some great, dark bird. The wind gusted lazily now: twenty knots, fifteen, ten. Above us, the sun swelled like a blister. Steam rose from the cockpit benches as Rex, moving slowly, took the reefs out of the mainsail. A raggedy clatter came from below; I pushed back the heavy hatch cover. Books and plastic dishes covered the floor, canned goods rolling to and fro, apples and potatoes scattered everywhere. We’d gotten careless, leaving things out, neglecting to secure locker doors.

  “That’ll teach us,” Rex said. One front tooth was chipped.

  “Your mouth,” I began, but he shook his head, peeled his wet T-shirt away from his shoulder to reveal a red and purple bruise the size of an open hand. I stared at it, appalled. It seemed to be getting larger, angrier, spreading from within, and I remembered, suddenly, horribly, seeing my face for the first time after the accident: two black eyes, a bridgeless nose, a protruding tongue. I hadn’t been able to recognize it.

  “It popped out of the socket,” Rex said, “but then it went back in. We’ve got some of those instant ice packs, don’t we?”

  “In the first aid kit.” I was already scrambling down the companionway. Rummaging through the mess, I couldn’t stop seeing, again and again, the arc of Rex’s body as it fell. Only this time, it missed the safety lines and landed in the water like a sack of grain. What could I have done to save him? Thrown him the life preserver we kept in the cockpit. Turned on the engine. Lowered the sail the rest of the way, secured the boom, brought the boat around. All the while keeping him in sight, because once you lose sight of something in the water, you’re not going to find it again. Especially in the midst of a squall, when you can’t see as far as the bow.

  The large, orange duffel with our medical supplies had been flung from the locker above the forward berth all the way to the aft chart table. I thought of the force it must have taken to hurl such a heavy bag thirty-odd feet, and then I sat down, covered my mouth with my hands. I remembered thinking, after Evan’s death, that I’d never be afraid of anything again. Suddenly, I understood how ridiculous that was, how childish, how petulant. We were still roughly four hundred nautical miles northwest of Bermuda. We might meet another tanker. We might be faced with more storms. We might strike a floating barrel or some other piece of rubbish, knock a hole in Chelone’s hull.

  “Why are you doing this?” people had asked in the weeks before we left Wisconsin: Toby, my parents, Lindsey Steinke, the parents of Evan’s school friends. Because there’s no reason not to, I’d say. Because this is something we talked about doing, years ago, before Evan was born. Because we want to escape all the things that remind us of what we’ve lost. At the time, each of these explanations had seemed perfectly reasonable. Now, I was asking myself the same question, and none of the answers I’d given made sense. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to turn the boat around, head back home.

  Instead, I cracked open two packs of instant ice, carried them back to the cockpit, held them against Rex’s shoulder. As it turned out, we were lucky. The bruise didn’t get any larger. He was able to move his arm. Soon it was clear that the bleeding had stopped.

  Still, Rex spent the afternoon slumped in the cockpit, shifting painfully, while I reorganized our supplies, stowed everything back inside lockers and hatches. Gradually, the winds died
down, dwindling away into random, lazy puffs. Without a breeze, the sails luffed; the bow swung to and fro. Water gurgled in and out of the through-hulls—the small, round openings at the waterline—and the sound was like a deep, plucked string, a hollow pop-pop-pop. With each rise and fall of Chelone’s hull, our canned goods settled and rolled.

  Thump, scrape, thump.

  Bang, luff, bang.

  At last, I lay down across from Rex, but it was too hot, too noisy, to rest. The ocean a molten circle around us. The very air shining, as if each molecule had caught fire. We had always been here, would always be here, in this small teak cockpit, the slow swells lifting us, dropping us, lifting us again.

  Thump, scrape, thump.

  Bang, luff, bang.

  A discordant waltz that went on and on. Like a heartbeat. Like the slow, steady pulse of grief.

  “Are you sure this is the hill you want to die on?” Toby said. He paused before a tank of angelfish, selected a net from the wall, and began to push it slowly, deliberately, through the water.

  “Nobody’s going to die,” I said. “Besides, lightning doesn’t strike twice.”

  Toby cornered the angel he wanted, trapped it against the glass.

  “Actually, it does.”

  It was early June, the first time I’d been to the fish store since Mallory’s letter had appeared in the Pilot. Toby didn’t let on that he was surprised to see me, but I knew, as I perched on an overturned bucket, that he, too, was considering just how long it had been. He was, and is, a bear of a man: broad-shouldered, heavy-boned, his face partially, deliberately, concealed beneath a lion’s tawny beard. When Evan was alive, we’d visited several times a week—Evan had loved the African fish, the piranhas and Jack Dempseys—and it was difficult, now, to look across the tank room and not see his determined little baseball cap gliding between the long rows. To keep myself from dwelling on this, I told Toby what Rex and I hadn’t told anyone else, not yet: that we’d found a tenant to rent our house. That we’d just signed a contract on a sailboat in Maine. That, if everything went according to schedule, we’d be living aboard by the end of the month. I also told him that Rex and I were withdrawing the civil suits we’d filed, including the one against Cindy Ann.