The Great Offshore Grounds

by Vanessa Veselka

  “I don’t want to hear about magic,” she said.

  Michael leaned forward. “I’m telling you, Livy. We could go out there with nothing and still come back with fish. This trip is blessed. I’ve seen it in dreams.” Michael grabbed her forearm. “You were there. That’s why I asked you to come. We were on the deck of the Jani Lane sailing over a copper bay and our whole boat was flashing silver with salmon. Destiny.”

  Livy heard Cheyenne’s voice. Wait. What’s the difference between fate and destiny? Give up? A six-pack of beer! It was her sister’s favorite joke in high school. It’s stupid, Livy told her. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not funny. Except that it was.

  They got back to the boat around midnight. Michael’s uncle was nowhere so Livy felt weird about going below. Instead they stretched their bedrolls out between the trash bags and lay down under the lilac sky. A month from now she would be out of debt to the coven. In two months, she’d be back to where she was before Cheyenne had shown up.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the small tides. She felt something hard in her pocket. It was the little black tourmaline marble Michael had given her on their way back to the boat. To help with her negativity.

  “They met in rehab,” said Michael.

  “Who?”

  “Aunt Jennie and Uncle Jeremy.” Michael scooted closer and propped himself up on his side. “In Juneau when they were teenagers. Uncle Jeremy was a speed freak then. They got kicked out of rehab for messing around but it was extended care and she was already six weeks pregnant so they got married to keep things cool but she miscarried and they broke up anyway. She was going to file for divorce but the day she went to do it the woman at the clerk’s office had to leave early because she had a restraining order on her own ex and had seen him across the street so she didn’t want to leave at the regular time so she told Jennie to come back the next day but Jennie couldn’t because she was leaving for Angoon the next morning. Turned out it was better for taxes to be married so they just left it. Aunt Jennie hated paperwork. She walked into the woods in June. When we cleaned out her place it was full of unopened letters and bills. Years of it. The night she died she appeared to Jeremy in a dream. She told him to go to Fish and Game first thing in the morning and file a claim for the fishing permits she inherited from her dad. She told him to make sure he applied for an emergency transfer through widows and orphans, or sole survivors, or whatever they call it now. Then he called me because she told him to take me fishing. Take care of my nephew, she said.” Michael’s voice broke like a wave over a rock on the word care. “And when I got the call? I was lower than I’d ever been. I’d spent my dividend on my girlfriend right before she left me. Then I found out all the appliances were rented. They took the fridge. Wheeled it out in front of me. Threw all my frozen food on the lawn like I could just go buy more. I had nothing, Livy, nothing, and that very night, Aunt Jennie comes to Jeremy in a dream and tells him to take care of me. That very night. I hadn’t even heard about her dying but I swear I felt something. I don’t care what you call it—Jesus, Eagle, Odin, Anubis—I have absolutely no fear left, and that’s all I had before. It was magic. Fucking total magic. I mean, even you have to see a hand of greater purpose shaping everything. This thing goes so far back. She took care of me. I have no more fear and Livy, that was all I had before. It was everywhere, and now it’s gone.”

  Livy rolled away but Michael kept talking. She held the little black marble up to the sky between her fingers and moved it slowly over the moon. Even you, Livy, even you, he said, even you have to know this is bigger than us. Even you have to see that none of this should be happening. But it is.

  20 Athens and Sparta

  LIVY WOKE when Uncle Jeremy stepped across her body to piss over the side of the boat. She was sitting up when he turned around.

  “Pump’s dead. Head’s fucked.” He yawned and stuck out his hand.

  She shook it.

  “Livy, right? Let’s get this fucking trash off the boat.”

  Grabbing a yard bag full of debris he lobbed it onto the dock.

  Jeremy wasn’t terrible, just surly, a trait Livy generally trusted in a skipper. But everything on the Jani Lane needed work. They had fooled themselves if they thought they were going to sea, or that they could have possibly sailed yesterday. The engine had problems, the electrical was a mess, and there was rot beneath the waterline. As the tide went out farther, it exposed a sizable hole in the fiberglass hull. Binge-watching YouTube for guidance, Jeremy had tried twice to patch it and failed. Over the next few days, as word got around about the size of the hole, the Jani Lane became a punch line in the bars. The jokes fell on Livy and were all about letting women drive. Hey, what was the last thing they said on the shuttle Columbia? Oh, I don’t know. Look at the stars?

  She counted down the hours until they could leave.

  The only encouraging thing was that Bristol Bay, where they were now headed, was having a record-breaking salmon run. Everyone down to the green deckhands were making bank. The idea that in just a few weeks she would be able to pay the coven back and still have money to get her through winter, and maybe beyond, buoyed her and made whatever stupid things people said meaningless. But first they had to get there.

  The daylight was never quite gone. Working within the limit of the tides they moved to a twenty-four-hour clock. Up at 3:00 a.m. to take apart the bilge or change oil, down for an hour, up for an hour, sleep for two. In some sense, they were already at sea.

  Livy’s phone buzzed all the time with texts from Cheyenne, who apparently had her own phone now. At first the texts were angry rants. Then they turned into statements of fact and metaphysics. Being here is perfect! I should really thank you for dumping me on the Massachusetts Turnpike. You’re an instrument of the Universe. Livy never responded, but it didn’t matter. Cheyenne’s messages continued, morphing into delicate haikus of manipulation. I don’t think pennies have real copper in them…There’s a plywood coffee table on the corner and people are just passing it by…Did you know they don’t call it food stamps anymore? How the hell did I miss that?…After one particularly bad day the phone buzzed and Livy threw it as hard as she could on the concrete. But the phone was too cheap to break. Hey Livy, I made this one for you. What’s the difference between an Athenian and a Spartan? I don’t know. A six-pack? Years of counseling!…I wrote the roshi a thank-you letter and signed it from both of us. Livy texted back. You do not speak for me. Hitting Send, she realized what she’d done. The phone was buzzing in seconds. Livy walked into the nearest bar and sold it.

  The day they were to leave she was walking toward the Jani Lane when she heard the sound of a chainsaw’s high whine, downshifting when buried in wood. She saw Michael.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “I guess there’s a length limit in Bristol. No boats over thirty-two feet,” he said.

  She looked at the thirty-six-foot Jani Lane and realized Jeremy was sawing the extra four feet off the front of the boat.

  He was already three feet into the bow. The weather rail kept him from getting into a good position so he couldn’t get the angle of the cut. Livy jumped forward but not fast enough. The chainsaw kicked back.

  “My fucking face!” screamed Jeremy and dropped the twitching chainsaw.

  He buckled over with his head in his hands. Blood ran between his fingers.

  Michael dropped the line and was on deck behind Livy.

  Jeremy was rocking back and forth.

  “You’re going to have to let us see it,” said Livy.

  Michael grabbed a T-shirt he’d been using to clean the engine. “Get some pressure on it.”

  They waited for a few minutes until the blood flow slowed enough for them to get a look. He’d missed the eye. The main cut was short and deep and came from some kind of shrapnel, not the blade.

  Jeremy kicked a nearby bag of su
pplies. “I’m not going to pay any damn ER when I’ve got a drawer full of Neosporin and superglue.”

  They worked the rest of the afternoon and evening unbowing the boat. When they were done they faced a new problem because there was two tons of scrap.

  Jeremy came above.

  “Leave it!” he yelled. “I don’t care if we get banned from this port forever.”

  At that moment, neither did Michael or Livy.

  By 11:30 they were aboard and ready. Despite the fact that crossing the gulf in a boat like the Jani Lane was a terrible idea, Livy could not fend off joy. They were leaving. The moon, that great and reliable force, brought the bigger tides and raised the boat. She bobbed under a rose sky, streaked with lavender and pale blue lines. Jeremy with his superglued face backed them off the grid and out into the harbor.

  Livy stood beside him in the wheelhouse. He was flushed and chatty in a way she hadn’t seen before. Jeremy rolled a cigarette. Something else she’d never seen him do. She wondered if he might even be a little drunk. But his speech was clear and fast, his attention to detail, sharp. He couldn’t stop cleaning and saw dirt on the dashboard where there was none. Livy’s job was to fish. The rest she didn’t want to know about. She took a spot on the sawn-off bow by the half-cut weather rail. The deck was covered in sawdust, broken chainsaw teeth, and twisted drill bits. She swept them over the side with her feet as they motored out into the channel past the rubble-mound breakwater and out into the open ocean.

  21 The Unicorn of Feminism

  SITTING ON THE EDGE of her bed, Kirsten faced the bookshelf. It was a particleboard piece of junk she had painted gold when the girls were toddlers. The shelves sagged, the back was missing, the gold had all but chipped off, but Kirsten couldn’t let it go. It was the first piece of furniture she had owned that wasn’t donated. On it, she kept the books that made her who she was—Spiritual Midwifery, Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex, The Power of Myth. She’d carried them from apartment to apartment. Looking at them now, she saw nothing worth crating around.

  The world she’d tried to make for the girls had blown up. Cheyenne was gone again and Livy was somewhere in the Bering Sea. Cheyenne’s absence wasn’t new, nor Livy’s fishing trips, but this was different. It was a fundamental rejection of everything she’d built. Neither of them cared fuck all for metaphor; they had no interest in growing, only in surviving. And they were barely doing that. The very thing she’d created, the myth of the North Star, had not led to a transformative understanding of what matters but had made everything more petty and desperate instead. Even Essex would be gone soon, also dragged down by the search for Ann.

  Kirsten pulled a shoe box off the bookshelf. They were the only photos she had and she wanted to see her younger face. Sorting through the pictures she found only one of herself. It had been taken right around the time she’d first told the girls about Ann. She’d been thirty-one. Her hair was long and her skin was duskier. She still had fat in her cheeks. That was it. One photo. She wasn’t camera shy; there had just been nobody else around to take pictures.

  She’d never expected Cyril to stay. She’d outgrown him even before she found out she was pregnant. Ann, she expected to stay. Not literally but emotionally. Kirsten sighed and tears of rage came to her eyes. She was mad at no one but herself. She couldn’t fully blame Ann for cutting ties. Hadn’t she also cut ties? At the time they knew each other, Kirsten had truly believed she was creating something new in the world. I feel like we’re explorers, she’d told Ann. No one has been here before. We get to make it all again.

  Disgusted, she tossed the photo of herself onto the floor and went back to the bookshelf. Pulling each book off the shelf, boxing them up, she went outside in the blaring noon. Someone probably needed this shit, but it wasn’t her.

  She saw a dented blue Chevy by the chain-locked trash containers. The car belonged to a teenager she often saw crying and chain-smoking in the stairwell after fights with her parents. She went down to the Chevy and tried the handle. The door was open like most cars in the lot—better to lose a cheap stereo than face a deductible you can’t afford and have to drive around like a jerk with duct tape and cardboard over your window for a year. The backseat was full of laundry and water-logged textbooks. A fast-food uniform was carefully laid over the headrest. Kirsten put the books on the floor by the gas pedal. Her shift at the parking garage would start in a couple of hours. She wondered if Ann worked, and if so, how many hours and for how much.

  Two hours later in her own uniform, she patrolled a row of identical hybrids. She had to ask what the hell she was doing. How had she ended up here? It’s not like if she came upon someone trying to break into a car she was going to do anything about it. She kicked the nearest tire. What allegiance do I have to you? She closed her eyes and listened to the echo of sounds off concrete and voices outside on the street. Her stomach hurt. She was sick of everything.

  * * *

  —

  The clinic Margaret had started in a run-down neighborhood thirty years ago, once the site of transgressive midwifery, was now as sterile as a coffee shop, all butter-colored walls and black-and-white portraits of pregnant mothers and babies nursing happily. Kirsten looked at a photo of a young bearded man cradling a newborn with downy thatches of hair and unfocused eyes. She imagined the effect real photos of birth on the walls would have. Women covered in blood and feces. Faces swollen in pain. Eyes wide with fear as an Apgar score turned out poorly.

  Kirsten let the receptionist know she was there. She hadn’t seen Margaret in several years and wasn’t entirely sure why she was there now. Going to the midwife when something was wrong was an old instinct more than a considered decision. And Margaret was also partly to blame for all this because she was a part of who Kirsten was. She glanced at the photos and shook her head. She suspected she and Margaret still shared things in common. Like an awareness that the new world they thought they were creating had never been born. Kirsten took a seat. So what if the pathologizing of birth was replaced by the demand that it be pretty. Who cares what other people do? She flipped through a magazine and put it down.

  Margaret appeared in the hallway. She looked the same as she had the last time Kirsten had seen her. Her curly Sephardic hair was no more silver than it had been then. She had the same color to her face and way of standing that made her seem taller. She still wore black cotton pants and button-down shirts. And she still made Kirsten feel like a teenager.

  Margaret led Kirsten back to her office and turned on a white noise machine. Kirsten sat in a wide cushiony chair.

  “Your practice is crazy busy. Is that weird?” she asked.

  “I’m used to it. I don’t get to attend births much but I don’t miss being up for days.”

  “There are stupider reasons not to sleep.”

  “Undoubtedly,” said Margaret. “How are the girls?”

  “Livy’s in Alaska and Cheyenne is back East with Jackson. They’re not together. I don’t know what she’s doing. We don’t really talk. Cyril gave them Ann’s address so they were running around trying to find her for a while.”

  Margaret drew her chin back. “How did that go?”

  “They didn’t find her,” said Kirsten.

  She looked out the window, avoiding Margaret’s eye.

  “You didn’t give them an address?” said Margaret.

  “Don’t lecture me,” said Kirsten.

  Margaret clicked her tongue. Kirsten let her gaze wander. She noticed Margaret’s hair was still thick whereas hers was dull and thinning. Margaret’s voice was shakier than it had been. Something rich was missing from the timbre, though you could barely hear it. Kirsten wondered if her voice had changed too.

  “Kirsten, why are you here?” asked Margaret.

  Kirsten tried to say it but couldn’t. My stomach hurts. It can’t be ulcers. I’
m not a receiver, I’m a giver. I think the psychic sponge in my gut that soaks up all the bad in the world is finally saturated. I don’t know.

  She took a breath and looked Margaret in the eye. “I still believe the Universe is talking to me but I no longer like what it’s saying.”

  22 The Storm

  THE STORM that hit the Jani Lane two days later nearly sank her. Gusts of wet wind blasted the wheelhouse, whistling in the duct-taped seals, and water ran down the walls in the steering room and pooled in the corners. Ocean came through the hatches and tin seams of the sutured hull.

  They were farther out from shore than they should have been. The coastline was gone. Livy thought of the cracked preservers, the ancient GPS, and their single survival suit. The radio had already shorted but that wouldn’t matter much if she went over. She had gone over once in a drill in Puget Sound. It was a sunny day with waves under a foot tall yet she could not see the boat. The green deckhand who pulled her aboard was more shaken than she was. We could barely see you, he kept saying, you were nowhere. It was so clear. You were nowhere. She quickly learned what no sailor or fisherman wants to know, that if you go over there’s usually jack-all chance.

  Skipper Jeremy was trying to drive the boat back into the waves but it was getting harder. A large swell two points off the starboard bow crashed over them and knocked Jeremy sideways. One hand for yourself, one hand for the ship! Drilled into her brain, and thank god because she was almost thrown down the ladder to the cabin.

  “Where’s the fucking key!” Jeremy yelled. “Look for the fucking key!”

  The ignition switch was stripped and the key had fallen out. With his left hand on the wheel, he dropped to his knees and felt the floor for the key ring. Another wave hit and he lost the wheel.

  “Drive the fucking boat!” Livy shouted. “You drive the fucking boat!”