Maia and Davies tread down the uneven stairs to a small room in the back corner of the basement. It appears to be a storage closet, filled to the ceiling with rows of wooden crates.
“There’s no food in here, so don’t bother searching.” A look of pity crosses Davies’s face. “You’ll have less visitors that way. You can’t be found, Maia. I made a deal with your father and I am a man of my word.”
He leads her into the farthest corner of the room, between the last two rows of crates. There, a few wooden boards have been placed across the lowest crates against the wall. A blanket hangs over the opening like a curtain, forming a small hidden nook underneath. He walks over to it and pulls the curtain back, revealing two folded blankets next to a small bowl of water. Just like a dog.
“I’m not sure how long this trip will take, it’s different every time,” Davies mumbles as he shakes his head. “At least a month. I hope you’re hardier than you look.” He walks towards the door and then hesitates without turning around. “There’s a bucket there if you need to be sick. It can get rough out there. And use the toilet before dawn.” He closes the door, enveloping her in darkness.
The boat rocks from side to side. Maia listens for any barking outside, praying her beloved pup remains quiet. Then she crouches down and shoves her pack inside her nook.
The basement air feels dank, the smell of mold burning her nose. A chill bites at her bones. She pulls out her grandfather’s ashes and holds them in her hands, then crawls into her new home and curls into a ball in the corner. Gripping her little sack of ashes, she stares into the suffocating black around her.
Back on land, blanketed in darkness under a tall pōhutukawa tree, a man with a crooked beard stands watching. And, sitting high up in the branches, a little black fantail.
Twenty-Two
Maia’s body rolls from side to side, waking her to a chorus of muffled yelling and heavy footsteps pounding the floor above. She slowly peels back the blanket, squinting against the sunlight flooding through a small window located near the ceiling of the room. Exhausted, she pulls herself upright and rubs her eyes. Water splashes against the glass of the window and her body rocks forward. Moving. They are moving.
Her heart sinks. She quickly jumps to her feet and peers behind the half-dozen rows of crates that stand between her and the door. It’s latched shut. Keeping her eye on the door, she crouches down and runs across to the window, immediately breaking Davies’s number one rule.
She climbs up the shelving to peer out of the glass. New Zealand sits tranquilly in the distance, a hazy crown of clouds resting above it. She reaches her hand to the glass as tears fill her eyes.
She searches for her grandfather’s ashes back inside her pocket.
No matter where you go, I am always with you.
This is it—no turning back now. She stays on the crates and grips the slivered wood as New Zealand slowly slips from the horizon.
Shaking, she lowers herself down and surveys her surroundings. Wooden crates fill the small room to the ceiling where large spider webs have claimed their territory. Her spot in the corner is surrounded by crates, mostly hidden by anyone who may enter the room. A cockroach scurries across a few rat droppings along the wall. Rats. If there is anything she hates more than cockroaches, it would be rats.
A small plate with a cooked potato and some vegetables has been placed just around the corner from her hiding spot. She grabs it and crawls back to her blankets, slowly forcing down the food. She hasn’t eaten since her father showed up a few nights ago, her adrenaline and fear chasing away any hope of an appetite. She slurps down the large bowl of water and curls back into a ball, pulling the blankets over her head as she shivers—more from shock than from cold.
The next few days come and go in a dismal blur. In her deep state of exhaustion, Maia spends more time passed out than awake, often crying herself to sleep after being sick in her bucket from the rolling sea. Everything rocks, everything creaks, and footsteps constantly pound the ceiling above her. At times she can hear the men’s muffled voices, sometimes laughing, oftentimes yelling. If they get too close to her door, she pulls her blanket high above her head and trembles until they pass.
In the middle of the night, she lies wide awake as the ship’s rats scurry around her, repeatedly praying they don’t come too close. She passes out for what seems like brief stints, waking up time and again to tears streaming from her eyes.
In the darkness, she cannot escape the images of everything she’s loved—everything she’s lost. Her visions play out across the black screen before her. She walks around their cabin deep in the quiet woods, turning to see her grandfather’s smiling face and outstretched arms. And then, like a nightmare, his pyre engulfed in flames flashes before her.
She and Huck run through the woods. She tilts her head back laughing as he kisses her face. Then his tail drops between his legs as he whimpers at the shore with Davies’s gun pointed at him.
And then there’s her mother. Maia searches her dreams to see her again, for some sort of confirmation that she is doing the right thing and she didn’t just give up everything for an illusion. But her mother doesn’t come.
There is only blackness and teardrops.
Twenty-Three
Lying on her back, Maia stares idly out of the small window at a thick covering of clouds stretched across the sky. She breathes deeply, gently rocking with the ship.
After nearly a week of sleeping with the ghosts of her past, she has grown tired of waking to a black room, desperately holding on to a life she no longer owns. She had allowed herself to slip into a muddy amalgam of depression and exhaustion, but can now no longer tolerate her own weariness.
A few sporadic footsteps pound the floors above her and a muffled voice vibrates through the ceiling, but overall, the ship is quiet—a stark contrast to the previous days. Today must be Sunday. Davies had mentioned Sundays were mostly a day of rest for the men.
“I’m not sure how long this trip will take … at least a month.”
Maia reaches into her pocket and pulls out her knife, then twists to the nearest crate to carve a large S over a tally of six markings.
Grandpa said the most important thing you can do at sea is have a purpose. She pulls back her curtain and glances around. A dead cockroach lies on its back with its legs in the air next to her empty bowl. Damn. She has quickly learned that mornings are a race between who can get to the food first—Maia or the rats. After waking more than once to creatures devouring her limited food for the day, Maia has started getting up before dawn.
Now, when Davies comes in, he slides a small bowl of food across the floor and waits as she slides the last empty one back. Neither one says a word, and he leaves as quickly as he comes. Her bowl usually has some sort of dried meat and preserved fruit or vegetable, sometimes a crumbling biscuit or boiled, soggy potato. Except today. Today she has nothing. She stares at the empty bowl as her stomach growls.
The floorboards creak just outside her door. She drops her face to the ground and rips her curtain closed.
“Lucas! Grab some netting while you’re in there!”
She peeks out from under the blanket, watching as a shadow appears in the space beneath the door.
“Yes, okay,” he yells back.
Lucas. She has heard the men calling down to him before. He must be the sailor in charge of stock in the basement. She often hears him moving around, whistling and sometimes mumbling to himself. His voice is deep, his words foreign. When he speaks English, he uses an accent she has never heard before.
The door swings open. He is wearing brown leather sandals today. He stands for a while at the entrance of the room, then walks around the corner from her and pulls a few crates down, setting them on the floor while rummaging through another. After a while, he re-stacks the crates, grunting from the weight.
Then he stops.
He walks over to Maia’s empty bowl and picks it up, mumbling something in a foreign tongue. She holds
her breath. After a moment, he sets the bowl back down and exits the room, slamming the door behind him.
Exhaling, Maia remains frozen. He couldn’t see her nook from where he was standing. She knows this—she’s tested it out. But the bowl? Her mind races. Does she pick it up? Or leave it now that it has been seen? “Worse than death.” That’s what awaits her if she’s found. Petrified, she keeps her head to the cold ground, focusing on the space beneath the door. She stays like this all day until the light from her window fades into evening.
Maia floats in the space between sleeping and awake when the floorboards creak outside her room. Her heart skips a beat and she grips her knife beneath the blanket. The door swings open, flooding her room with light. She recognizes Davies’s feet right away. A new bowl slides across the floor and she crawls out from beneath her blanket to slide the old one back. He picks it up and quietly closes the door behind him.
She breathes a sigh of relief.
Blindly searching the dusty floor for her scraps, she grabs hold of her bowl, then crawls on her knees back under her nook. Her fingers softly prod around the contents of the dish, meeting a cold boiled potato and what feels like green beans. No meat this time. She sits hunched in the pitch black, shoveling the food into her mouth like an animal. The ship groans around her. She licks the bowl clean.
Twenty-Four
Twenty-one more notches have been carved into the wooden crate next to Maia’s head. She has now memorized the ship’s routines, sounds, and creaks, giving her a sense of familiarity deep within the dismal basement.
Assuming the days of the week, she has started her own routine to pass the time. Every morning while she waits for Davies, she starts her day with prayers of gratitude to keep her spirits high. She finds the smallest thing—anything—to count her blessings. A bowl of water. This ratty blanket. The small window high on the wall, letting in sunlight to warm her weary soul.
This alone has helped her crawl out of the hell in which she has found herself, seeing her new undertaking hiding in the murky bowels of a ship as her destiny towards a new and better life versus a risky and possibly fatal decision to escape a lonely existence in New Zealand. She holds on tightly to her father’s words and repeats them like a prayer:
“Davies says it does exist, Maia, that something is up there.”
Closing her eyes, she relives the life she left behind. She talks to her grandfather next to the fire and places her head on his chest. He calls her darling and she can nearly hear his voice echo in the cobwebs. She smiles alone in her nook.
After breakfast, Maia performs a short round of stationary exercises to avoid losing too much muscle yet conserve as much energy as she can. She still sleeps as much as possible throughout the day—mostly out of boredom.
After dinner, she drags herself out from under the curtain to stretch her cramped and knotted muscles, allowing her blood to flow freely once again. It also proves to be a valuable warning to the ship’s nocturnal creatures that she is not just another lifeless fixture in the room.
A few storms have passed through, whipping the ship across the ocean’s angry waves. Maia holds tight to the tied and netted crates, jumping up and kicking her feet as rats race back and forth with the rocking of the ship. She wraps her arms around the wood and hums childhood songs through the night until the storms pass. Then she wearily pulls down her things and places them back inside her nook, fixing any fallen crates close by to avoid too many visitors the next day.
Maia stares anxiously out her window, biting her nail down to a stub. The sunlight unravels extended shadows across the room, painfully reminding her of time. She checks her grandfather’s watch for the hundredth time: three p.m.—far from dusk when she can run to the toilet. She slept past her opening this morning and is now excruciatingly full—and bordering on the brink of insanity. Normally, she could relieve herself in her bucket but that was confiscated during the cleanup from the last storm.
She crawls on her hands and knees down her aisle of crates and peers around the corner towards the closed door. The ship is mostly silent, which is normal for a Sunday. The men have been drinking since morning. They’ve already had lunch and must be deep into their afternoon naps by now. She listens for a few more minutes to the placid, creaking boat. She has no choice but to risk it.
She slowly unlatches the handle of her door, cringing as the metal lock noisily clicks open. This is her first time seeing the basement in daylight—it’s much bigger than she thought. The large open space is filled with more boxes and crates. A few storage rooms sit tucked in the corners. Many of their doors are latched open, making her journey to the toilet even more risky, but a puddle of urine will most certainly lead to discovery.
She curses herself for her neglect.
After listening for any noises, she pulls the door all the way open and slides out, letting it softly latch behind her. And then she runs.
When she finishes, she cracks open the bathroom door and peers out from its slivered opening. A breeze flows down the back steps, leading up to what appears to be a small deck. The stairs are drowned in a deluge of sunlight. She opens the door a bit more, closing her eyes as she inhales the salty ocean air.
She pines for those sundrenched stairs. Only a few steps separate her from the sun’s heat. She glances at the door to her room, then back to the stairs. She hasn’t felt the sun in nearly a month, and that ocean … what she wouldn’t give for just a moment out there. Her bones ache for it. She looks up at the ceiling and listens for movement. Surely no one would be doing chores at a time like this. She glances back to the stairs.
Just a peek—just for a moment.
Her foot slides out from behind the door, drawn to the bright and inviting staircase. She slowly tiptoes across the floor to the stairwell, lured by the flood of sunlight radiating down. As she reaches out her hand, her fingertips are bathed in the glow. She takes another deep breath and smiles.
How I’ve missed you.
Maia creeps up the stairs, glancing back with every step. She knows it’s risky—deadly even—but after spending week after week alone in a damp, dark room filled with roaches and rats, her desperation for the airy, sun-drenched deck surpasses any logic that may stop her.
At the top of the staircase, she grips the railings with both hands, overwhelmed with gratitude. The ocean looks just like her dreams—endless, calm. A few downy puffs of cloud float serenely in the middle of the infinite sky. She looks around the back of the boat; she must be in the loading area. She inches towards the end of the deck and holds the warm metal railing.
Not so long ago, she was lying on her living room floor covered in ash. Alone. Hopeless. She would spend the rest of her life up there. She had locked the library, given up on her dreams. And now? Now she stands on the back of a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on her way to The Old Arctic Circle … on her way to something. Either way, she made a choice for her life, and she won’t stop until she finds it.
She grips her grandfather’s ashes in her pocket. “Grandpa,” she whispers as a smile spreads across her face. “I’m really doing it.” She pulls out the sack and pours a pile into her hand. A few ashes float away in the breeze. She casts the rest into the sky. “So that you may taste freedom.”
Feeling a deep sense of relief, Maia steals one last moment to breathe in her new life. She no longer has to end each day staring at the horizon in wonder, no longer awaken every morning to a life she does not belong to. She smiles.
Instead of staring at the horizon, she is part of it.
She backs up and tiptoes softly, slowly, down each step. A large crash sounds from inside one of the open rooms. Lucas’s voice yells out a chorus of foreign words.
Maia stops and looks around, quietly rushing back up the stairs. A loud creak sounds from her weight and she nearly loses her footing in panic. The breeze sweeps her hair across her face. She frantically wipes it away. Where to hide? A large stack of netted crates sits tucked in the corner. She squeez
es between it and the back of the ship and crouches down.
After a moment, Lucas walks up the steps onto the platform. Maia slides farther behind and watches him from between the wooden slats. In the unhindered light of day, she can see him clearly for the first time. He stands at the railing, gazing out across the water. The wind tousles his dark curly hair, falling in short ringlets framing his face.
Besides Davies bringing rations of food, Lucas has been Maia’s only visitor over the last month. It must be his duty to monitor the stored stocks and replenish supplies for the sailors above. He generally visits on a daily basis, each time causing terror to flood her veins. Unmoving, her sharp bones often dig into the ground sending a throbbing pain through her joints. The sound of her breath is amplified in her meager nook, so she holds it in and lets it out in controlled and restricted bouts. Even the most short-lived visit from Lucas leaves Maia exhausted for hours.
He shifts towards her and she drops to the floor, scrunching her eyes closed like a child. She sits frozen for a few moments, holding her breath as she strains to listen to his movement. It is silent. She keeps her head towards the ground and peers out.
Lucas is still standing at the railing with his back towards her, gazing across the horizon. He is tall, his shoulders broad. He is younger than she thought, possibly in his thirties. A few deep lines curve out from the skin around his eyes. His chiseled jawline is speckled with a dark shadow of facial hair. A green, yellow, and blue braided bracelet is tied around his tanned wrist.
He turns towards her and she flinches back. His elongated shadow slides from the ground up the wall as he moves closer to the crates. His feet shuffle around the side and then he stops. She holds her breath. A few steps closer and he will find her, cowering in a ball on the ground.
The Weight of a Thousand Oceans Page 13