He wondered if he had overreacted earlier. A panic had been building in him ever since he’d received an email from the family lawyer two months ago. The subject line—Bad news—undersold the contents. It turned out that his father, Walter Aslet, director of the family foundation and trustee of a series of funds set up by Harold’s late mother, had been outed as a fraud. Millions of dollars were missing. Millions more were owed. And Walt himself was gone, too—the United States would try to have him extradited if they had any idea where he was. The compound in Montauk had been seized by the bank, including the house Harold and Faye had been living in and were now renting out to tenants.
But though the title was seized, the renters had not been evicted. And whether through oversight or error, the rent money was still being transferred into Harold’s personal account, though he had no idea how much longer that would last. Only the boat was theirs outright. Even if they wanted to go home early, they couldn’t. Worse, he had yet to confide the bad news to Faye, whose ignorance he now found touching, like a quaint souvenir from a bygone era. After almost five years away, his wife had fallen out of touch with most of her Montauk friends. But it was only a matter of time before she found out the truth.
Soon he would have to reveal they had no home to go back to, and then they would have to decide what to do next. He wasn’t sure they could even afford to complete their sojourn in Australia and the last leg of the journey home.
And now Annie was dead, and Faye had caught him crying at the computer. Even though she had never said anything, Harold had sensed that she knew about the affair. His wife’s antagonism registered more as a kind of absence than anything else. It was possible that one day Faye would have removed so much of herself from their relationship that he would suddenly find himself alone. But for now they were together, never further than a few feet apart.
The affair with Annie had been sixteen years ago. It had lasted a year. A little longer if you counted the time they’d known each other professionally before they gave in to the attraction that Harold, at any rate, had felt right from the start. Annie had done some art dealing for his parents and arranged the sale of a Chagall sketch that his mother had left to him in her will. She lived in a college town somewhere in Massachusetts, where her husband taught, but often travelled to New York and the Hamptons for work. She was slight and pale, with the kind of translucent beauty that wouldn’t survive long on deck, hauling lines under a tropical sun. But she was charismatic enough to sell a Picasso to a pauper, and had a better sense of humour than Faye—she could laugh at life’s dark absurdities.
Soon after they’d broken it off, he’d heard she was pregnant. He’d worried a bit about the timing—he couldn’t help doing the math—but Annie must still have been sleeping with her husband, too, at the end of their time together.
Faye had fallen pregnant with Domenica not long after. A lucky coincidence given how he’d felt himself drifting away from her. The pregnancy brought him back to himself, to the life he had chosen. To Faye. And it was the choosing that had made the difference, that was going to redeem him in the end. He had to believe that.
Harold checked the radar and updated the hourly log. The rows of handwritten entries painstakingly recorded by him and Faye stretched down in neat columns on page after page. No balance sheet, yet he knew that every entry brought them closer to a final reckoning. But, for now, Harold returned on deck and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.
* * *
As a kind of protest against her parents and her whole frustrating, constricted life, Domenica would only speak to Emma when it suited her. And it usually only suited her when she was sick. As Buona Fortuna sailed through the second bout of stormy weather between Fiji and New Caledonia, Domenica found herself laid low again, her bare knees bruising against the cool bathroom floor.
“Do you know about Annie?” she said, taking a tentative sip from the glass of water Emma handed to her. While her sister was despicable for her absolute insusceptibility to sea sickness, she really was helpful during the times when everyone else was incapacitated.
“No. Who’s that, Dom?” said Emma.
“The ghost of Buona Fortuna.”
“Buona Fortuna doesn’t have a ghost.”
“We do, too.” Now that Emma’s jaw was set and resolute, Domenica began to warm to her story. “Annie was a friend of Daddy’s. A good friend, if you know what I mean.” She noticed the growing blankness of her sister’s face, an empty canvas she could never resist. Domenica liked to make an impression. She plunged on. “She came over once when Mummy had to go out. And she was nice—she brought us presents. You got a book about the Pied Piper that you were obsessed with.”
“What happened to her?”
“Daddy had to hurt her.” Domenica’s face was solemn. “He had to hurt her to make her go away.”
Emma was studying her closely. “No, he didn’t. Daddy wouldn’t hurt anybody. Not on purpose.”
“Yes, he would. To protect his family.” Inspired by her own performance, Domenica felt tears pricking her eyes. “Daddy was jealous that I liked her so much. She said I could stay with her instead of going away on the boat.” Despite the absurdity of the story she was telling, Domenica broke out into an unexpected sob. Every once in a while, she uttered a lie she almost wished were true. It was so unfair to be stuck on a boat with no friends and nothing to do, while her life was passing her by. She folded her arms over the toilet seat, laid her head down, and cried, shaking with a genuine misery that even her sister could not mistake.
“So what did he do?” asked Emma.
Domenica took in a shaky breath and looked at her with pity. “You’re just little, Em. Are you sure you don’t want me to stop?”
Emma opened her mouth, then paused and shook her head.
“Annie came over to talk to Daddy late at night while Mummy was at a fundraiser for the opera.” Domenica stared off into the distance, conjuring the scene in her mind’s eye. “She had long dark hair and a blue dress and was as beautiful as Mummy’s print of the nymph that’s hanging up in the galley. Annie brought me a pop-up book about Cinderella. Then Daddy drove us all to the marina. You were there, too, but you were only six.”
Domenica closed her eyes and remembered her father kissing Annie on the deck of Buona Fortuna when he thought that she and Emma were both waiting in the car. It was a passionate, consuming kiss—the kind of kiss she had rarely seen between her parents. If ever. She cleared her throat. “And then, when they got down to the water, Daddy pushed her and she fell in.” Domenica shuddered. Her own imagination was sometimes a terrible place to be these days.
“No.” It was Emma’s one small protest, but it lacked all resolve.
“Yes,” said Domenica. “Daddy had to do it, to keep us together.”
“No, he didn’t. He didn’t do it!”
Domenica allowed her sister’s determined glare to persist for a moment longer. “And he never even tried to get her out. And so she drowned. Everyone thought it was an accident, but it wasn’t.”
“Poor Annie!” cried Emma, her voice rising to a wail. “But Dom,” she said, “couldn’t she swim?”
“Don’t you remember Daddy’s pirate bat?” said Dom. “It’s come in handy for all sorts of things.”
Domenica’s stomach was calm now. The story had allowed her mind to move along with the swells of the ocean. She felt nimble. Light as a bird. “I’m going to bed,” she announced, muting her triumph somewhat in deference to her sister’s misery. She rose, rinsed out her mouth at the sink, and washed her face with a pink washcloth. She took one step over her sister to reach the door, then paused. “Don’t ask Mum and Dad about this, Em. It’s a sore point between them. Mum doesn’t like thinking about Annie and everything that happened.”
Emma only nodded, her knees pulled tight to her chest under her turquoise nightie. Domenica left her like tha
t, a small huddle on the floor.
* * *
—
By the next morning, Emma felt compelled to substantiate some part of the horror that her sister had told her.
Eventually, she found it, tucked away in the sail locker between the pantry and her parents’ cabin. The fact that the bat was hidden away seemed to support Domenica’s story. Emma could only imagine that Daddy must feel terrible about what he had done and didn’t want a daily reminder.
She peered at the bat closely to look for traces of blood or damage. Emma knew murder weapons were not always things like daggers and revolvers. She thought through the array of other death-dealing objects that figured in her favourite board game, Clue. The candlestick, the wrench, the lead pipe, the rope. Most of those items could be found aboard Buona Fortuna. But the bat did seem more potent than those precious miniatures. When she tried swinging it, it slipped from her grip and hit the floor of the locker with a loud thud.
“What are you doing in here, chipmunk?” asked a mild voice right behind her, causing Emma to drop the bat again and her mother to step back to avoid its falling weight.
“Playing,” she answered, as the bat clattered to the floor.
“Darling,” her mother said. “Tell me what’s on your mind. What are you worrying about?”
Emma’s eyes widened. She shook her head. Maybe it was best to just blurt it out. Domenica’s story could not be left unchecked. Emma tried to point to the bat, but she felt her movement was exaggerated, her elbow a massive hinge threatening to swing loose. Finally, she cleared her throat.
“Mummy, is our boat haunted by a ghost named Annie? A friend of Daddy’s who drowned?”
Her mother looked at her a moment before replying: “Yes.” Then, “Don’t you want to lend your father a hand in the cockpit? I’m sure he could use your help.”
Then her mother returned to her couch in the salon.
* * *
—
Faye could never understand why she helped to sustain Domenica’s lies. There had been other times when Emma had posed her a seemingly innocuous and random question, usually related to their life in Montauk, and Faye’s unwillingness to expose what she knew must be one of Dom’s fabrications had always resulted in a slip of the tongue, a yes where there should have been a no. Perhaps she only wanted to prolong Emma’s adulation of her sister a little longer. At times, her younger daughter reminded her of an exotic pet removed from its natural habitat. She worried that the girls, especially Emma, had been away from regular life too long.
She could not be certain what transpired between the girls late at night during the rough passages, when she was too focused on helping Harold in the cockpit, or occasionally too ill. But she suspected that Domenica must be trying to relieve her own passionate boredom. And Faye, who loved travelling but had grown to despise the sea, could hardly blame her.
And in this case, it was really only half a lie. Annie was haunting her as surely as any real ghost ever could.
She wondered exactly what Domenica knew or pretended to know about Annie. God forbid Harold had mentioned her to the girls. The online obituary he had been crying over mentioned a vibrant career in curation and art dealing. A bereaved husband, Keelan, and a daughter, Julia, who was the same age as Domenica. Annie’s ashes had been scattered in the Columbia River, near a wooded area that she had apparently liked to frequent as a young woman.
Faye thought of her often, this woman whose unexpected death had brought Harold to tears. And who had brought to Faye an unwilling awareness of a hesitation, a vagueness at the centre of a love that had once felt so secure.
So far she had kept secret her awareness of the affair for nearly as long as Harold himself had hidden it. Was that not its own kind of betrayal? However the lie had begun, she was now almost as complicit as Harold. As Annie.
Just last night Faye had traced the Columbia River on a map to see whether, in fact, its waters emptied into the sea.
* * *
It was first watch when Emma joined Harold in the cockpit. Small for so long, she’d at last begun to spring up into a coltishness that made her look scrawny in the summer clothes that she’d practically outgrown. The morning light revealed dark circles under her eyes as though she hadn’t slept, and Harold wondered if stress could be contagious, if his own disquiet above deck had diffused into his children’s bunks.
It was more of a burden than Harold let on sometimes, being the captain of a small vessel with his whole family aboard. Their lives were in his hands. And all their fates were tied to Buona Fortuna. His youngest daughter’s ease with sailing still made him nervous in a way he couldn’t quite explain. It made sense, after all, given she’d spent more than a third of her life at sea. She found endless enjoyment in using the depth sounder, the radar, and the compasses. She pored over any chart spread out on the table in the salon. But with WASPish logic, Harold reasoned that the best way to cultivate this sort of talent was to make as little of it as possible, treating her as he would a son, or a hired crewman. Probably what he was really afraid of—more than bad weather, more than any Y2K computer glitch, more than being broke, even—was that he would come to rely on her.
“Morning, Em. It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?”
Emma nodded, squinting her eyes and frowning in the sunlight. She could see the island nation of New Caledonia beckoning in the far distance. A haze of red soil and green trees. She longed to shout Land ahoy! the way she probably would have yesterday. Had it been an equally lovely day when her father hit Annie with the bat and pushed her into the water?
Her father glanced at her again, and Emma squinted at the face that was so familiar to her but now so strange. How mild he looked.
“Have you come to give me a hand?” he asked.
This time Emma shook her head. Her small brow furrowed as she thought of her sister’s tears, her mother’s terse confirmation, and the woman who had been sacrificed so that they could all live on the sea.
“You don’t need my help,” she said, hands pulling at the sides of her dress. “And you never listen to my weather updates. You don’t need me to take the wheel because it’s on autopilot right now.”
“Well, that’s not quite—”
Emma cut him off. “You know, Mummy could just cook breakfast and peek outside every five minutes and it would be pretty much the same thing.”
She watched her words register on her father’s face. Emma recognized her statements as true, but she could not remember thinking them before. She wondered how much knowledge it was possible to possess without knowing it. She had few memories of living on land, even though she had, for six whole years. Perhaps a part of her even remembered Annie—the part of her that was sad and, all of a sudden, a little afraid.
“Baby,” he began.
“I’m not a baby!” She swallowed to keep the tears from coming.
“No, you’re not. But you’re acting as nuts as your sister these days.”
This was too much for Emma and her eyes overflowed. The back of her throat ached, but only one sob escaped. She didn’t want them to say any more horrible things to each other. Some words, once heard, couldn’t be forgotten.
When Emma got below deck, her eyes were stinging. She curled up in her bunk, even though it amounted to hiding in plain sight. She used the end of a pencil on the inside wooden railing to sketch a tiny bicycle made of stars, the first constellation her sister had helped her pick out of the night sky. The bunk was the only refuge she had left. There were no nooks she could fit into any longer. There was nowhere to get away to when you were in the middle of the ocean. She wondered if people who lived on land knew how free they really were.
Her father had called her a baby, but Emma didn’t feel like a kid anymore. When she remembered things now, it was like looking back on someone else’s life. She remembered the first time the hot sand had burned the s
oles of her feet and how her mother had complained about her standing there and screaming instead of running to get off of it, as any normal person would have done. The skin on the bottom of her feet had blistered and peeled. What her mother didn’t know was how unfamiliar the ground had seemed that afternoon. How unsteady and dangerous, as the Earth heaved and spun around her.
That spinning on land didn’t happen anymore—mal de débarquement was what Daddy called it, after Emma had finally made him understand she wasn’t exaggerating. That was another sign that she was no longer a child.
* * *
—
As Harold motored Buona Fortuna into the anchorage at Nouméa, Faye was keeping a lookout, something her daughters usually liked to do when they made landfall. But both of the girls were sulking about something. She had left them below deck after extracting a promise they would do some homework.
Faye had spent most of the morning making contingency plans for Y2K, and her heart felt lighter the moment they dropped anchor. The squall they had encountered on the last passage had made her long for solid land and other people. It wasn’t normal for a woman of her age to be trapped for days on end with only her husband and her two children for company. At least, it shouldn’t be normal. With Domenica and Emma, she felt the need to remain parental, in control. With her husband, she felt compelled to fill all roles: shipmate, cook, wife, buddy. She had prepared so many miserable meals on their hotplate that Buona Fortuna’s anchor might as well be attached to her ankle, complete with its two hundred feet of galvanized chain.
Nouméa, the capital of New Caledonia, was very French, and Faye, remembering the glamour of the Riviera, dug out a dress that was less threadbare than most of the shirts and shorts she usually wore. Harold muttered something about needing to look for another alternator and stalked off without making plans to meet for lunch. She wondered whether his bad mood was really related to Domenica, or if it had something to do with Emma, who’d seemed upset earlier. It was a delicate dance, managing four personalities on a forty-two-foot boat. These days, she couldn’t be bothered.
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