The Great Offshore Grounds

by Vanessa Veselka

  “We’re going to have to go pretty far out on the tops’l yard too,” said Marne. “I can wake someone up if you can’t do it, but you have to tell me now.”

  Everyone was getting less than three hours of sleep a day. The idea of waking someone up because she was too scared to do what they did was something Livy could not manage.

  Marne held out a harness.

  “It’s not a bad night for it,” she said. “The moon is out so we’ll be able to see.”

  Livy followed her through the shadows cast on deck by the main and topsail to the starboard edge of the ship. They began to move out. Livy paid attention to her hands and her grip. She tested the ratlines with each foot before putting her full weight on them. The wind was gentle and steady. She made it to the fighting top and paused.

  “You good?” asked Marne.

  “I’m good.”

  Livy looked up to where the shroud met the mast on both sides. Above that was the crosstrees, a small arc of metal to stand on, no more. It was only thirty-five feet above where she was but she would have to climb the futtock shrouds.

  They started again. The wind changed above the topsails. There was more of it to catch and less cover. It buffeted her jacket and stray hairs tickled her face. As the shroud narrowed to attach, the footholds were so small she could barely get a toe in. She was now at the base of the futtock shroud. The web moved up and out from the mast before wrapping around the crosstrees.

  “It works best if you just do it fast,” said Marne. “And when you’re climbing, think of pushing the ratlines away with your feet, not down. You don’t want to end up dangling. Momentum is what will keep you on the shroud when you’re upside down. Once you start don’t stop.”

  Marne scrambled up the shrouds, out and over the side of the crosstrees until she was standing again on the strip of metal.

  “Like that,” she said. “Go.”

  Livy went. With strong quick movements crawling backward, eyes glued on nothing but where she was grabbing hold. Shaking, she was upright on the outer shroud again and could swing to the inside where she found footing.

  “I’m not sure I can do this,” she said.

  “You can.”

  Livy did what Marne asked, keeping her eyes on her hands. The whole time, fear like a chatter. When they were done on the t’gallant Marne climbed down to the topmast.

  “When you step out,” Marne pointed to the line of rope dipping in scallops beneath the yard, “you have to warn anyone out there because they’re standing on the same line so you say ‘laying on’ and wait till they answer. Same when you’re coming back to the crosstrees, you say ‘laying off.’ Gives them a chance to get hold of something if they’re not clipped in. This,” she slid four fingers under a thick line across the top of the yard, “is the jackstay. That’s what you hold on to until we get to where we’ll clip in. I need to work closer in so you’re going to have to go out first. Just keep hold of the jackstay and I’ll tell you everything else as you go.”

  “Laying on,” said Livy.

  Marne waited for Livy to get used to standing on the line.

  “Laying on,” she said.

  Livy didn’t answer.

  “Say ‘laying on.’ ”

  “Laying on,” said Livy.

  Marne moved out onto the yard. As soon as she stepped on, Livy felt the line pull taut, lifting her slightly, shaking her from underfoot. A small gust came and she fought the urge to hug the yard. Marne told her to just hold on to the jackstay and push her legs out like a drawn arrow in a bow.

  Once halfway out, they clipped in and went to work. Marne told Livy to reach into the sail and grab any loose lines and gasket coil them to keep them out of the way. A reef point on the tops’l had been sucked into the t’gallant sheet block. Marne got out her marlinspike. She worked deep into the sheet, prying on a tangle of lines to try to get things free. At times it seemed her feet were higher than her head and when she came up her face was red from the blood flow. They moved farther out until they were only a few feet from the end of the yard, which was now below Livy’s center of gravity and at her upper thighs.

  “We’re almost done.”

  “There’s nowhere to step,” said Livy.

  “There is. Just doesn’t seem like it.”

  Livy couldn’t get the terror in her body to stop her from shivering. She waited for a moment of steadiness between tremors then found the loop with her boot and stepped.

  She was seventy-five feet up and thirty-five feet out on the yard, no longer over the boat but over water. Looking down she saw that Raleigh had returned. Strolling in the fall of white light, turning on his corked heels, she felt the centuries slip.

  “I’m going to send you another line,” said Marne. “Don’t drop it or we have to do all this again.”

  At one point, trying to catch a line, Livy dove into the sail, kicking her feet out until she almost went headfirst over the yardarm. Righting herself, she passed it through where Marne told her. They were done and she turned to move back across the yard but Marne didn’t move.

  “Stop. Stop, look around,” she said. “That’s what someone told me the first time I came up here. Don’t forget to look around.”

  Livy forced herself to do it. It was stunning.

  Moonlight lit the glaciers, the current in the water, the sails, their hands; there was frost on the bowsprit and the yards ticked and cracked against the masts—Bring me before the docket. Ask. Do you believe things happen for a reason? No. I don’t. And I never will. But inside Livy shame blazed. Because she was better now than she had been before. Whatever life the morning-after pill could not kill had taken hold, and she felt joy kick inside her, something new in the world.

  An undulation of color caught her eye. Livy had seen the northern lights many times because, even in summer, a green curtain could ripple across the Alaskan sky if it was cold and clear enough. She had never seen them like this, though. A whip tail of pale yellow appeared from behind the mountain forest, and within minutes, flags of turquoise and fuchsia, of lime and violet fanned out across the stars. It was so remarkable that the starboard watch actually woke the portside watch. They came above, one by one, wrapped in sleeping bags and whatever layers they could find and stood in clouds of frozen breath, staring. It went on for hours, all night. Color like a shower of stars flung down on the rocky shore. Astral shards among the kelp. Like in summer, she remembered walking past stranded jellyfish, in red and yellow and purple, pulsing while they drowned in sand. She wanted to show this world to Sarah. Maybe the hardest thing to see straight is love. It’s not the view through the window but the frame around it, and the glass is gone.

  55 Salamander

  ONCE OVER WATER, and again over Kansas, Cheyenne wondered if going back to North Carolina was the right thing to do. But what were her options? Move onto Kirsten’s couch and wait weeks just so her sister had a bigger audience for her misery? And then they would both be there taking turns on the couch waiting for it all to blow up, which it would. Better to speak first then come home if Livy wanted her. In the meantime, she’d spend those weeks in silence. A boon to everyone, no doubt.

  * * *

  —

  The small one-person yurt Justine had set up for Cheyenne’s silent retreat was made for desert not swampland. The yurt’s skin was like an old army tent, not breathable; it was cold and damp in the evenings and there was no electricity, but through the crown circle at night, Cheyenne could watch stars pass between the branches of the trees.

  She got up at dawn, started the fire at Justine’s, and sat in meditation. As she listened to Justine and the people who came to see her, they began to seem less like trust-fund refugees and more like masters. They decided what got to affect them, framing and reframing their advantage, and maybe that wasn’t wrong. Perhaps who she thought she was or what she thought she owed pe
ople was only indoctrination. Maybe it was never her at all but a limit set by Kirsten out of her own limits. Cheyenne had taken it on like it was real. An aerial view began to take shape.

  After the dhamma talks, she returned to her yurt. Sometimes she waded through or walked around the swamp. Sometimes there was work fixing, building, or carrying things, which was a gift because her mind attacked her day and night. Repetitious horror shows of failure. Even her memory changed because time is made of memory and lifetimes are made of time and her memory was a glacier that, broken up, left behind a pristine lake with icebergs in a slow current, and it was this current that brought things to mind. Child thoughts bashed against each other in the faster waters. A broken bunk-bed ladder. The smell of a sink filled with soap high above her head. Disappointment because Livy had scarlet fever and still was not scarlet. Kirsten braiding her hair in the hospital because it turned into meningitis. Falling asleep her first time on Ecstasy and feeling cheated. An abandoned lot where she used to watch skaters that was now a high-rise for millionaires. Then blood rushed to her face and to her heart. She couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t get the feeling of freedom from people back. She thought of Livy and lost her mind sobbing.

  Justine didn’t ask about Livy when she got back but Cheyenne told her anyway. No one knows where she is, she said. On a boat somewhere between Alaska and Seattle. Cheyenne did not say, she’s your daughter, even though every day the likeness became more and more unavoidable—but anyway, how exactly do you forgive yourself for your first thirty-three years and where do you start? Someone gives you snow and a woodstove and the title “wife.” Your name on the blackboard, your name on the waiting list at the abortion clinic, your name in the prayers of people you don’t like. Even if she had been able to speak she would have made no sense to anybody.

  She remembered a line from Justine’s letters.

  Everyone has scars. People make too big a deal about them.

  How could she have done the things she did to Livy over the years, to Kirsten, to Essex and Jackson? Stirring beneath the debris, she saw the real monster. Maybe she had never cared. Maybe whatever sticky thread wrapped people into the web didn’t quite stick to her.

  Burn down the structures around you, burn away the agreements…you talked about greatness. I sense a greatness in myself…

  It had been three weeks.

  Cheyenne knew every puddle and every snake. She knew the tree limbs individually by the sounds they made when they rustled. She watched the world as she never had. There was a mud salamander that lived in a burrow a foot from the step up to the yurt. She’d seen it once in the daytime. Its jelly-seed eyes under the cover of a leaf when a beetle passed. It must have eggs in the burrow. Under a full moon one evening, she watched it eat a smaller salamander, a salamander that probably also had eggs in a burrow somewhere. She didn’t feel anything but curiosity. Even when she thought of Livy getting raped, her feelings were dampened. There’s no way this kind of clarity can be wrong.

  Sitting on the step of the yurt at dawn with an edge of light through the trees to the east, she watched a beetle trundle haplessly over a patch of rotted leaves and started crying. It had a two-tone shell, black with a scarab-blue sheen. Legs included, it was no bigger than the nail on her pinkie finger. How many species of beetles did they say there were? Three hundred and fifty thousand? Why couldn’t she stop crying? The beetle stopped an inch from the edge of the salamander burrow. She saw the salamander blink in the burrow or thought she did. She had the urge to save the beetle. But you can’t. That’s the point. And the mother salamander needs to eat too. Three hundred and fifty thousand species of beetles, hundreds of eggs, all potential. Was that why she was crying? Let the salamander eat the beetle. How we feel about our lives doesn’t matter. Because everything can’t stop creating even when you wish it would. Grief can’t catch a breath in this world.

  * * *

  —

  That afternoon Cheyenne spilled coffee on her jeans and tried to wipe it off with swamp water but needed soap. She went to Justine’s yurt, stripped off her pants, and scrubbed them in the sink. Justine came over and touched a thick scar on the side of Cheyenne’s leg.

  “Bike accident?”

  Cheyenne started to respond but Justine put her finger to her lips.

  “Don’t say anything.” She laughed. “Torturing people in silent retreat is a guilty pleasure.”

  Cheyenne started to cry.

  “It’ll get better,” said Justine. “This is how we grow, isn’t it? In stages.”

  She handed Cheyenne a towel to dry the wet spot on her jeans.

  “I’ll be buying my ticket to India in a week or two. We can take up a collection for your ticket if you want to come. We’ve done new-student scholarships before. I think it would be good for you, like I said. Think about it. I don’t leave for another month.”

  Justine touched her leg again and guilt flooded Cheyenne.

  “No bicycles for you, though,” she said.

  In the bright un-patterned mind of a child Cheyenne remembered the feeling of tumbling down concrete stairs on her tricycle. Like now. Without context.

  At dusk she waited for the little salamander. She wanted to apologize to it. She scanned the twilight leaves for wayward beetles it might be after and saw none. She’d blown it. Her birthday was coming, which meant Livy’s birthday was coming, and she didn’t know where her sister was. She started crying again. Everyone has scars…but it didn’t feel like a stage. What you said about the importance of holding your head up? I do, always…Rolling over I won’t celebrate…I can stop crawling and walk out of here teeth and all…This is my first birthday. I came out all new again…She ran her fingers over the scar on her leg. She and Livy had gotten a tricycle for their third birthday and failed to take turns. After a fight, Cheyenne drove it off the edge of the second-floor apartment stairs. That was the scar.

  Something in her mind clicked. She got out the letters. She needed to see if there was one from December of the year she got the scar. There was.

  Everyone has scars. People make too big a deal about them.

  She put the letters in order, writing out the dates on a separate piece of paper. As she did, her life and Livy’s life began to take shape. All Justine’s talk—of holding your head up, rolling over, crawling, teeth, walking, feeling like today is your first birthday—she was never making some deep statement on consciousness. Each letter from Justine was written a week or two after all the major events of the girls’ lives. Cheyenne put the letters down. In her raw state a cascade of information hit her in a dark wave of enlightenment.

  Kirsten had told Justine everything. Every milestone. Every accident. When something happened to either of them, Justine got a letter. Their first day of kindergarten. Livy’s meningitis. Every crisis of their high-school years. Cheyenne’s marriage. Kirsten made sure Justine didn’t miss a single major event. What had Kirsten said when she gave her the letters? All the letters are there. In thirty-three years Justine had never asked about either of them.

  The girls’ karma is their own. If they’re meant to find me they will.

  * * *

  —

  Cheyenne found Justine reading a book by the woodstove.

  “There’s something wrong,” said Cheyenne.

  Her own voice after weeks of silence was a stranger to her. She cleared her throat.

  “You never asked me about Livy’s rape.”

  “You told me about it,” said Justine.

  “Only because you didn’t ask. You never asked about Alaska. You could have asked me how it went in Alaska.”

  “How did it go in Alaska?”

  “My sister is the toughest person I know. I don’t know where she is. I can’t stop thinking about what it would mean for her, specifically her, to get forced into something.”

  “We all face demons.�
�

  Cheyenne’s mouth started to tremble. “She looks exactly like you. Exactly alike and anyone could see it. I saw it. Essex saw it. It’s obvious.”

  Justine set her book aside and shrugged. “She’s my daughter.”

  Cheyenne felt like she had in Joshua Tree when the drugs had hit.

  Justine laughed. “Did you think I didn’t know?”

  Cheyenne couldn’t put anything together.

  “I’m going to make some coffee if you want it.”

  She passed by Cheyenne, almost touching her.

  Cheyenne’s head twitched. Her voice began to change in her throat.

  “If she’s your daughter and you knew it, that just makes it worse.”

  Justine smiled. “You’re both my daughters. Ask that nurse, Margaret. I’ll bet she and Kirsten are still in touch. She’ll tell you.”

  Justine wiped the counter with a sponge.

  Cheyenne’s body went numb.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “People forget that it happens, but babies die all the time. Kirsten’s did. I had twins.” She rinsed the sponge in the sink. “She almost died too. She barely remembered anything about her labor. I’m not sure she ever knew what happened. I never said anything but Margaret must have told her at some point.”

  Cheyenne didn’t believe it but couldn’t think of a single reason Justine would lie about it. She started to cry. Justine came over and took her face in her hands. Cheyenne could feel Justine’s breath on her wet cheeks.

  “I’m offering you a kind of freedom,” said Justine softly. “Take it.”

  She let go of Cheyenne’s face. Cheyenne stared, trying to understand what she was seeing and what it meant. Justine’s expression shifted from one complex emotion to another, landing nowhere. Was this the compassion she’d talked about?