Blue Water Page 6

“Well,” Eli finally said, “I better take a look at that water maker.”

  “Need a hand?” Rex asked.

  “Won’t say no.” He was already in the cockpit, tossing aside cushions and hatch covers, lifting the bench seat to reveal a wide access hole. With amazing agility for a man his size, he slithered down into it. Rex followed, moving deliberately, holding his right arm close to his side.

  “Looks like he messed up that shoulder pretty good,” Bernadette said.

  Up close, I saw she was younger than me, her pretty face weathered by wind and sun. Eli, on the other hand, seemed ageless. He could have been thirty-five, or sixty. The dreads, the tattoos, the excess weight: each was its own disguise. He reminded me, a little bit, of Toby. It made me like both of them all the more.

  “Might have been worse, I guess.”

  “Yes.” She responded seriously, as if I’d said something insightful, unique. “No matter what it is, it can always be worse.” She glanced at the sky. “I’m baking. Let’s get into the air-conditioning.”

  I must have looked surprised. “Rubicon has air?”

  “You bet,” Bernadette said, unlatching the doors to the companionway. “I told Eli from the start, I’m not going anywhere without AC.” A puff of cool air hit my face, along with the faint, familiar odor of bilge, and something else, something I couldn’t quite place: pungent, fruity, unpleasant. Immediately I thought of the dog. But there was no sign or sound of any animal as Bernadette led the way down the stairs.

  Despite Rubicon’s rough-looking exterior, her salon was comfortable, homey, fitted up with custom cupboards and shelves. There was a teak dining table, a desk with a computer, satellite TV. The couch was crowded with homemade pillows and stuffed animals. Framed watercolor island-scapes, signed by Bernadette, were affixed to the bulkheads. Somewhere aft of the galley, a generator hummed, powering the blessed air conditioner. If it weren’t for the sounds of Rex and Eli at work—the growl of the water maker, dropped tools, muffled curses—I could have imagined I was back in Fox Harbor, sitting in the living room of somebody’s ranch house. That, and the slight gliding feeling of the hull.

  And the peculiar smell.

  “Have a seat,” Bernadette said, heading for the galley. “What would you like to drink? Apple juice okay?” Again, that flash of grin. “We seem to be low on water.”

  “Apple juice would be great.”

  I sank onto the couch. The smell seemed stronger here. I could almost place it; I fought the urge to squint, as if that might help me see. And then, there it was: Cindy Ann Kreisler’s house. Not the grand place where she lived now, but the farmhouse she’d grown up in, four square rooms off a shotgun hall, divided by stairs that led to the second-story bedrooms, the attic. At the back of the kitchen was a pantry Dan Kolb had converted to a room for four-year-old Ricky, who couldn’t climb stairs, who couldn’t walk, in fact, without holding on to a walker. Shelves lined the walls above a chipped countertop; below, there were cupboards, overstuffed with clothing, toys, stickered with Tiggers and Winnie-the-Poohs. A wall-mounted can opener still jutted from the space to the right of the doorway.

  “How about crackers and cheese?” Bernadette called.

  It was then that I noticed the wheelchair, secured behind the table with floor locks.

  “Juice is fine,” I said.

  It was smaller than any wheelchair I’d ever seen, with a strangely torqued back, a single footrest. A complicated web of embroidered straps formed a makeshift harness attached to the seat. Beside it sat a teak chest, high as a bench, roughly the size of a coffin. It, too, was affixed to the floor, its cover sealed with latches, a blue and white cushion resting on top. I was leaning forward to study it more closely when Bernadette came with our drinks.

  “It’s a bathtub, actually,” she said, and she tapped the box with her toe. “Though it doubles as a bench. Eli built it that way. He built all these shelves and our table, too. He even built Leon’s wheelchair.”

  “Leon?” I was beginning to understand.

  “Our little guy,” Bernadette said. “Our son.” She gestured toward a closed door. “He should be up from his nap pretty soon. You folks have kids?”

  Perhaps for the first time since Evan’s death, the question caught me off guard. I felt my face flush. “Not really,” I managed; then: “Not now. No. No kids.”

  If Bernadette thought this was odd, her expression revealed nothing.

  “Leon’s eleven,” she said. “He nearly died at birth. He can’t hear, but he feels vibrations. If the engine isn’t running right, he’s always the first to know. Actually, I’m surprised he hasn’t noticed you’re on board.”

  With that came the sounds Rex and I had heard over the VHF, followed by a series of scuffling thumps against the bulkhead. Bernadette laughed. “What did I tell you?” She got to her feet, then paused, considering. “It takes awhile, getting him up. You want to come and meet him?”

  I was surprised to discover that I did. Back in Fox Harbor, I’d gone out of my way to avoid other people’s children. Now, after so many weeks of isolation, the thought of seeing a child, even the child of a stranger, filled me with tenderness. Already, I was regretting the lie I’d told. Already, it seemed too late to take it back.

  “It won’t upset him?” I asked. “Seeing someone he doesn’t know?”

  Bernadette shook her head. “He loves people. Especially kids.” More thumps against the bulkhead; she crossed the salon, motioned for me to follow. “That’s why we want to make Houndfish Cay. He’s got friends there, real friends, boys his age. They come over on their parents’ skiffs, hang out with their Game Boys, listen to music. Boat kids, you know, don’t judge like kids onshore. I guess they’ve seen enough of the world to accept when someone’s different.”

  Her steady blue eyes found mine.

  “Everyone’s accepting out here,” she said. “Everybody has their story.”

  Before I could feel the need to reply, she opened the portal to Leon’s stateroom.

  I remembered Ricky Kolb, the smell of his room off the kitchen, close-walled, dark. Leon was naked, except for a diaper, lying on his side. Not much bigger, at eleven, than Evan had been at six. His skeletal limbs wrapped around themselves as if he were made of a single muscle, everything clenched into a fist. Thick blond dreadlocks, like his father’s, covered his head, but the wide-set eyes were Bernadette’s. When he saw me, tremors of excitement nearly jolted him free of the thick foam wedges that propped him up, supporting his chest, cushioning his knees. It occurred to me that I was looking at the child Evan might have been, had he survived the accident. Your son would not have been himself. Doctors had stressed this, family and friends had alluded to it, Rex and I had repeated it to each other like a prayer. Better for him to be at peace than endure a lifetime of disability and pain. You grasp at such comforts the way a drowning person might reach for a piece of barbed wire. Because it is there. Because it is all you have.

  “Sweetheart,” Bernadette said, leaning forward so the child could see her mouth. “I’ve got a surprise for you. This is Meg.”

  “Hi, Leon,” I said, leaning forward, too, and then, to Bernadette. “What incredible hair.”

  She nodded, sweeping it off his forehead with the flat palm of her hand. “It was like that from the moment he was born. Just as thick.”

  I wanted to tell Bernadette about Evan’s hair—dusty-blond fuzz that had all fallen out, then grown back in, months later, darker than my own. I swallowed the words, tried again.

  “He must have been a baby, still,” I said, “when you and Eli went to sea.”

  Bernadette had already changed Leon’s diaper, flipped the wet one into the diaper pail. Here, then, was the smell I’d remembered: hand-laundered diapers, hand-laundered sheets. A flushed, wasting body like an overblown rose.

  And, in this case, a broken water maker.

  No rain for weeks.

  What would have happened, I wondered, if Rex and I hadn’t drifted into vie
w? But I was learning you simply couldn’t think that way. Not out here, where everything, it seemed, was a matter of chance, random luck.

  “He wasn’t quite two,” she said, tugging a T-shirt over his head. “Everybody thought we were crazy.”

  I couldn’t imagine it myself. “Weren’t you scared?”

  “I’m always scared,” she said. “But he’s outlived every prediction. And he’s happy. That’s what’s important. Right, guy?” She bent to face him again. “You’re a survivor, isn’t that so?”

  Leon jerked his head. Once again, tremors ran, like ripples, through his body. I glanced at Bernadette, concerned, but she was smiling broadly.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” she said, jutting her chin at the portal overhead. “He always knows.”

  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.

  Four

  we ate dinner at the round teak table: 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.