sailing predate his teen years on the water. It goes back to a game he played by himself as a child. He’d lay a blanket on the floor, then with a tiny plastic man in a tiny boat made of Legos, he’d set off across that fabric ocean. Every wrinkle of the blanket offered a new dilemma, another potential calamity. Again and again, he found his way through the trouble. As much as anything, it was this solitary pursuit that gave him practice for the programming he would enjoy years later and then, to his surprise, prepare him for deep-water sailing.
When he looked back to Sarah, she was smiling, handing him a mug of green tea. He thanked her, then blew across the steamy surface and thought of mist rising from morning water. “What will happen, you ask? I expect Lillian will snap out of it. Our little accident triggered something—some issue about safety and I don’t know, it really threw her.”
“Is that what she said—it threw her?”
“She’s not talking to me, remember?” He took a sip and winced as he burned his tongue. Again he glanced out the window. Sarah’s boat was charming, as far as houseboats go, a two-story cabin painted moss green, with a striped canvas awning over the portside deck, potted ferns and lots of sunlight in the front room, a creaky cedar floor with a rosy patina, a stained glass transom over the front door—a tidy, arty little house, not really a boat. He preferred his Alberg with its aged, amber-colored paneling, its graceful lines, its readiness for sea. There was nothing ready about Sarah’s old boat.
What do you need to be ready for? Lillian had teased him more than once. He tried to explain: you can’t take good weather for granted, not when you’re on water. You owe it to your boat to keep it always in top form. If a storm blows in suddenly, you can get away from the dock quickly and moor in open water.
Oh, my sweet pea, Lillian said, I didn’t realize Meredith had damaged you that much! You’re so cautious!
Was he so cautious, he who would sail the Pacific alone? He who nearly drowned Bailey?
“Why don’t you like Lillian?” he asked Sarah.
“I’ve never met her, how could I dislike her?” She cupped her steamy mug with both weathered hands. Cooper liked that Sarah was always working on her boat.
“It seems you’re pushing me to get angry at her.”
Sarah arched her bushy eyebrows. “You’re not angry?”
“I’m frustrated. I’m confused. I’m hurt,” he said. “I don’t know that anger is part of it.”
“Not even when you recall Lillian blaming your for the fiasco with Bailey?”
Cooper slouched in his chair and tried to let the gentle bob and rock of Sarah’s house sooth him.
What about pirates? Lillian had asked him.
Pirates?
I’ve been doing research on line. They say you should travel with a grenade launcher to ward off any approaching boats in the open seas.
We’re not going to see any pirates, Lil, not where we’re going.
But there are pirates!
Well, sure, and sharks too. And water spouts. And giant squids.
Are you trying to scare me?
Come on, you’re pulling my leg, right?
Then Lillian laughed and he was relieved. She said, If any brigands board, I’ll cut their gizzards out with me kitchen knife! He loved her for that.
Was it all an act, playing brave because that’s what you do in love until intimacy or circumstance outs you and, at last, you’re exposed for the coward you know you’ve always been?
“I thought she was excited about our adventure,” Cooper said. “But now I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s just cold feet?”
“It’s your adventure, Cooper, not hers, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but she loves me and wants to share it. I’ve got a twelve month contract. Then I’m back stateside. Sailing out there isn’t really a big deal.”
“For you.”
“I signed a contract,” he said. “I can’t break it. This is the chance of a lifetime.”
“Taking the trip or taking the work?”
“Both!”
“You could take the work without sailing out there, couldn’t you?”
“Oh, I see,” he said. “Lillian wants to dump the sailing adventure and jet out there?”
“No, I don’t think that’s it,” Sarah said. “It sounds like she wants to dump you.”
“Whoa! How’d you come to that?”
“You leave in three weeks and she’s not talking to you? She says you nearly drowned her daughter? She says you don’t know your limits—isn’t that how she put it?”
“She was angry when she said those things.” Cooper set down his tea. He was sweating, trickles streaming down his spine and rib cage. “She loves me!”
Sarah nodded an irritating, knowing nod, as if to say, What does anybody truly know of love?
“What the fuck, Sarah?”
“We’ll call the Army,” Thomas says.
“You mean on Kwajalein?”
Kwajalein, a three-mile crescent with an airfield at one end: it took the Marines four days of bloody hand-to-hand combat to wrest the Island from the Japs in 1945. Now it’s home to a civilian community of engineers and programmers like Cooper, all of them working on missile defense systems.
“The U.S. Army controls everything out this way,” Thomas is saying. “I imagine they can do a difficult rescue.”
Rescue? Only now in this unreal world, as the Marshallese stare at him curiously, is Cooper’s humiliation becoming real to him. Eventually Lillian will hear of his failure, his need of rescue, and she’ll shake her head in dismay and perhaps pity too, reassured that she made the right choice in dumping him.
And Cooper, well, he had no choice but to sail without her. But it was for the wrong reasons—he sailed away with anger and bitterness and the selfish satisfaction of leaving her behind. By the second week, far from landfall, the Lickety Split roller-coasting on twenty-foot swells, nothing in sight but a silver-blue sky, he heard himself whimpering like a wounded animal.
He longed for the chatter and crowd of people in his daily life: he missed humanity, and Lillian most of all. He was no recluse! Already he was talking to himself nonstop—loudly and with great animation, as if he were on stage. Surely somebody was watching, the sky nothing more than the single open eye of God. It was too easy to see how a lone sailor could go mad. You had to be careful. You had to ration your interior resources. Don’t panic! That was the first thing he told himself. It rang in his head like a mantra.
From the footlocker in his cabin, he fished out one of his T-shirts that Lillian had worn. Burying his face in it, he could smell her honeysuckle perfume and the mild mushroomy odor of her sweat. It was like dope! He tied the T-shirt around his neck and wore it day and night, wiping his face with it, weeping into it, kissing it, clutching it, until it was in tatters and still he wouldn’t let it go.
Occasionally he would spy a ship plying the horizon: a delicate, white miniature that looked like a cake decoration. The sight of it would make him catch and hold his breath and stifle the urge to wave and yell.
When seven birds, small as tea cups, found him and roosted for two days on the wire lifeline, he sat near them and derived some comfort from their clucks and yawning trills. One afternoon he fed a gull his dinner of ramen just