Safe Harbour

by Christina Kilbourne

  “What’s this for?” I ask suspiciously.

  “I dunno,” she laughs. “Does it have to be for something? Can’t I just get you a present?”

  I look at the present in my lap and then at her.

  “Just open it already,” she says and bumps her shoulder against mine. “You’re worse than Tuff Stuff. Suspicious of everything.”

  “I wish Tuff was here. He won’t get to say goodbye. Starlight was his home, too.”

  “I know. It feels wrong not to have him along. But he’s in good hands at home with Lise. And Bean won’t let him mope around for even a second.”

  “It’s going to be a long week. But I know I’ll be glad I did it in the long run. You know, for closure.”

  “You made a brave decision coming down. But I’m glad you did. We’ll both get some closure. And then we can start fresh.” Her voice weakens, catches. It sounds like she’s going to cry. Then she clears her throat. “Would you just open that present? Please?”

  The box is wrapped in blue paper with white clouds and tied with a navy-blue ribbon. It’s almost too pretty to open, but I slowly untie the ribbon and unwrap the paper. Inside is a new iPhone, the latest model, already protected by a LifeProof case.

  “I wasn’t expecting a present. But thank you. For this and for coming down with me. For everything.” Now it’s my turn for my voice to catch on the tears pooling in the back of my throat.

  I lean over in my seat and give her a tight, awkward hug.

  “Just so you know,” Aunt Jackie says, tapping the phone in my hand, “it’s charged.”

  I haven’t had a phone since I smashed mine in the library, but I haven’t much missed it either. Without Dad I haven’t needed one. I mean, I only really know Lise and Aunt Jackie and I’ve seen them both every day. As I power up the phone, future Harbour flashes through my mind and I see my contact list with dozens of names. I see an inbox full of messages from friends — school friends and work friends and maybe even Erica.

  “It’s not really about the phone. It’s more about what’s in the phone,” Aunt Jackie says as she opens her packet of snack crackers and sips her Coke.

  I flip through the icons while my brain tries to puzzle together the meaning of the phone in my hands. What’s in the phone, I wonder? I look up the contacts and see she’s inputted hers and Lise’s numbers. I see she’s set the ringtone and test it only to discover it’s a recording of Tuff and Bean barking. I go to the photos and see pictures of Lise and Tuff, Jackie and Bean, and then the dogs romping through the park. There’s even a photo of Aunt Jackie’s house on Amelia Street.

  “Thanks,” I say again, with more sincerity.

  “Try the videos,” she suggests.

  I scroll to the video icon and my breath catches deep inside my chest when I see a file called “E.D. Mandrayke’s Ukulele Serenades.” I look at Aunt Jackie to be sure there’s no mistake.

  “Lise saved your memory card. They’re all there.”

  I open the folder to be sure she’s telling the truth. And although all the videos I ever recorded of Dad are there, listed alphabetically by song name, I’m still afraid there’s going to be a glitch that ends in disappointment. My hands tremble worse than my voice.

  “Do you want to see one?”

  “Of course. I loved your dad’s singing. He was so talented.”

  I pick “Here Comes the Sun” and watch with a pounding heart while Dad shows up on screen, crunched into as small a space as he can manage with his ukulele. Seeing his face is like having a fifty-pound weight lifted off my chest. When he finishes the song and the screen fills with a beautiful cloud-streaked sunset, I can barely find the words to say thank you again.

  “I didn’t think I’d ever see these again. This is the best present ever. Ever.”

  “Lise is the one to thank for rescuing your memory card.”

  “She’s the best friend ever. Ever. EVER.”

  Aunt Jackie smiles, almost sadly, then turns her head to look down the aisle. While she’s turned away I wipe a tear from my eye and try to decipher the expression I just witnessed. Was she sad for me? Or for Dad? Or maybe for Mom?

  “Do you think Dad sent me to you in some roundabout way?” I ask when she’s facing forward again and leaning back in her seat.

  “I do. Somehow through all the confusion in his world, he kept you safe.”

  My step-uncle’s house backs onto the Intracoastal near Jupiter, and I know exactly where we are before we’ve even climbed out of the rental car. I scan the neighbourhood and wonder if my long-ago playmate still lives next door. I wonder if he remembers me.

  Aunt Jackie comes around to the passenger side of the car and opens my door at the same time as a tall man steps out the front door. He’s wearing cargo shorts and a golf shirt, and he has short, grey hair. There’s an awkward moment in the driveway while we decide what introductions need to be made. Finally Aunt Jackie steps forward with a hug.

  “Dennis! You’re looking well. I’m sure Harbour has changed quite a bit since you last saw her.”

  My step-uncle smiles warmly, turning from Aunt Jackie to me and back. “It’s great to see you — both — again.”

  The sun is hot on my shoulders and I feel the faint tickle between my shoulder blades as a droplet of sweat rolls down my back. Six months in Canada and already I’ve lost my tolerance for the Florida sun. My father was a pure southern boy. He never could have survived the Canadian cold.

  “Please, come inside for a cold drink,” Dennis says as he gestures to the front door.

  I step forward and lead Aunt Jackie into this house I’ve only ever known from the outside looking in. Cool air envelopes us and I shiver slightly as the sweat at my temples meets the air conditioning. We kick off our sandals in the foyer, then follow him through to the kitchen where a bank of windows reveals an impressive view over the pool and dock, and, beyond, the Intracoastal Waterway.

  “You have a beautiful house,” Aunt Jackie says as she accepts a tall glass filled with ice and lemonade.

  My step-uncle acknowledges the comment graciously, but in a way that makes me know he’s heard it plenty of times before.

  I glance around the house and it is beautiful. It looks like a picture from a home decorating magazine, with a Southern Florida kind of vibe. There’s bamboo furniture with floral cushions, shell-filled glass lamps, a seagrass carpet, and a banana leaf plant in the corner.

  “Please sit down,” Dennis says as he motions toward the family room. I take an armchair by the window and study the view. He and Aunt Jackie sit on a couch across a glass coffee table from me and exchange a few comments about our trip before turning the conversation back to me.

  “You’ve really grown up since I last saw you, Harbour.”

  My mind scrambles for something appropriate to say, but I get caught trying to decide how I’m expected to address him, this man who obviously has clear memories of me even though I know him only through stories told by my father.

  Uncle Dennis? Step-uncle Dennis? Dennis? Mr. Whatsyourlastnameanyway?

  He’s undaunted by my silence. “Last time I saw you, you were maybe five or six. It was before your mother passed away. You look so much like her.”

  Passed away makes my mother’s death sound infuriatingly passive, but I know he’s just trying to be polite by not using the word murdered.

  I sip my lemonade, then clear my throat. “When did you last talk to my dad?”

  Dennis leans back and crosses one leg over the other. He stretches an arm across the back of the couch toward Aunt Jackie.

  “Oh, it was over a year ago now. He called to say you were going to sail to Canada and spend some time with your Aunt Jackie. At first I thought it was a, well, ridiculous plan, sailing all that way. But then I thought maybe it was a blessing in disguise. I’m sure a break from that boat would have done you both a world of good. And I could never get him to come here, no matter how many times I invited him.”

  My mind travels back to t
he month we spent tied to his dock, swimming in his pool, using his deck furniture. Is it possible he never knew about the time we spent here?

  “Did you talk to him often?” I finally manage to ask.

  “Not too often. Maybe a couple of times a year. He’d call me out of the blue and leave a number that would work once or twice, then it’d be out of service when I tried it the next time.”

  “He wasn’t very good about keeping track of his phone,” I offer.

  “You’re right there. I think he spent half his income replacing phones and fixing Starlight.”

  I must look confused because Aunt Jackie rushes to fill the awkward silence.

  “Dennis has been managing your father’s finances since you moved onto Starlight.”

  I look at Dennis and size him up. For some reason my father trusted this man, so I probably should, too.

  “I was the executor of his will, too. Did you know?”

  I shake my head.

  “Of course he left everything to you. And so he should have. But I tell you, I was relieved when your aunt contacted me. There were so many loose ends I couldn’t tie up. Until now.”

  “He left me Starlight?” I ask.

  “Yes. Although she’s suffered some serious damage. But he also left you the house on Pelican Way and his share of the radio stations.”

  “We still own the house?”

  “Yes. There’s been a family renting it since you moved out. Your father never mentioned this?”

  The glass of lemonade feels heavy in my hand so I put it on the coffee table in front of me. Then I wipe the condensation onto my shorts.

  “He didn’t like to talk about those days, from when we lived in Stuart.”

  “The rent money goes into a trust fund for you.”

  “Would you like to go see it?” Aunt Jackie asks me.

  I shake my head. The house on Pelican Way feels like another life, like someone else’s life, and it’s not someone I want to revisit. I have what I can remember of my mother tucked safely in my head and that’s all I need.

  “I just want to see Starlight.”

  At first glance Starlight looks pretty much the same as she always did. Her mast is broken and there’s a nasty crack in the hull by the forward deck, but otherwise she’s still Starlight, still strong and proud, and inviting me to climb aboard. But as I get closer I’m unnerved by her sitting, raised, on metal jacks. Hidden behind the leaves of an overhanging live oak tree, the sun casts a green hue on her white deck. She lies still, drained, motionless without the sea to animate her. I’ve never seen her out of water and it makes me sad, the way it’s sad to see an elephant doing tricks at a circus.

  I walk around her slowly. Dad hadn’t kept up with the barnacles and now they cling stubbornly to the propeller and keel. He always said the hull of a boat had a story to tell and I look at our story now, at nine years of adventure and mishap. Each patch tells of a time ashore that for me meant new friends and freedom. There are also the inevitable nicks and scrapes in the hull — some that I recognize and some that I know are new, chapters of the story that were written after I left.

  I hear the coast guard captain talking, outlining the details of their search-and-rescue mission: how the report came in, how they located her, how they towed her back to port. He talks mostly to Aunt Jackie, but directs certain comments my way, as if my reaction will help him piece together the clues into a finished puzzle.

  “She was still floating, partly submerged, when we located her. She had a broken mast.”

  I listen but I don’t react. Instead I run my hand along her hull like I’m comforting a stranded whale.

  “She’d been drifting for a couple of weeks. That’s just an estimate, of course, based on her condition and that of the deceased, as well as some accounts from other sailors. It could have been longer. There was no sign of any distress signal having been made.”

  The deceased, I think. Dad has been reduced to one impersonal word.

  “Where was my father?” I ask, looking back to where the captain and Aunt Jackie are standing near the stern.

  Aunt Jackie recoils slightly from my question, but she doesn’t stop the captain from answering.

  He speaks without apology and this brings me comfort. “He was below, in the forward cabin. It was still dry.”

  The forward cabin. My cabin. The last dry place. I find it odd that he should include this last observation, as if his being dry makes my father’s death easier to accept.

  Despite the message he has to deliver, the captain’s voice is kind and soothing. I can only imagine how he might have dreaded my arrival. Nobody, not even a professional coast guard captain, wants to tell a kid how her father spent possibly weeks adrift, unnoticed, dead.

  No matter how I try to figure it out, I can’t come up with a scenario that would account for how Dad — and Starlight — ended up that way.

  “He must have got caught up in some bad weather, maybe the tail end of that hurricane. Winds that strong could snap a mast. If he was stranded in weather like that …”

  The captain’s voice drifts off and I look to see what interrupted him. But he has just lost the end of his sentence or thought. He looks down at his feet, then up at the sky as if in prayer. His uniform speaks of authority, which I find calming, although Dad would resist being impressed if he were here. He was a rebel at heart.

  I don’t contradict the captain, but I know it’s impossible that Dad got caught in a storm. Dad started sailing with his father when he was just three years old. And my grandfather started sailing with his father at birth. Dad knew too much about sailing to get into trouble. He knew the sea, he had sailing in his blood and, above all else, he respected the weather. There are many unanswered questions, questions I will have to live with the rest of my life. But there is no question in my mind about Dad making a mistake on a sailboat. Something happened to Dad down below, inside Starlight, and the mast broke after he was already dead. And what did it really matter what happened? The end of the story is the same and I know I can live with uncertainty.

  The captain offers me a hand when I start to climb up onto Starlight, but I scramble past him and survey the cockpit. It’s scattered with debris and tangled ropes. I take a deep breath and steady myself for what I’ll find inside.

  Although the hatches are open, everything inside Starlight smells like rot and I have to cover my nose to keep from gagging.

  “Are you okay in there?” Aunt Jackie calls from below on the ground.

  “Fine,” I call back. I need to be in Starlight alone, just for a few minutes, no matter what I find.

  The aft cabin is a mess. It’s scattered with scraps of paper and cardboard that have incoherent notes written in Dad’s shorthand. There are several maps of the United States, unfolded, crossed with lines and arrows. There are dates, calculations, and random numbers etched in the empty spaces. What puzzles me most are the bits and pieces of debris he must have found floating in the ocean over the past few months: a faded life ring, a plastic milk jug, a cracked buoy, numerous hunks of driftwood with pieces of rope tied to them. I scour the cabin for something that acknowledges me or Tuff, but there’s nothing to indicate we were part of his plan, sane or deluded, or that we were even on his mind.

  In the galley there are empty tuna and soup tins and crumpled sleeves of crackers. It doesn’t look like he restocked from when I left him in July. July, I think to myself. It’s only been six months since I left Florida and yet everything has changed.

  I’ll never forget the day I saw Dad for the last time and let it play in my memory, just a few frames in case I remember something I should have noticed, a warning or a sign.

  “Four, five weeks tops,” he’d said to me on our last afternoon. “Unless there’s a low-pressure system on the east coast. It’ll go by so fast you’ll hardly notice we’re apart.”

  I nodded and forced myself not to cry.

  “I’ll meet you down at Ashbridges Bay,” he said for the thous
andth time. Then he pointed to the map on my phone, exactly where he was going to arrive and see me again.

  “Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Any questions?”

  “Nope. I got it all here on my phone.”

  “And your reading list?”

  “Right here on my phone, too.”

  “No slacking off just because I’m not there to remind you.”

  “No slacking off. I promise.”

  He manoeuvred the boat until we were hovering just inches from the pier.

  “Ready to jump?”

  “Ready.”

  “Tuff, come say goodbye, then go with Harbour.”

  He hugged Tuff and gave his ears a good scratch. “You take good care of my girl.”

  I didn’t resist or hesitate. I couldn’t. He’d been planning and rehearsing every detail with me for months. Tuff and I jumped onto the pier at Bayside Marketplace. It was so intricately planned, I even knew where to buy my lunch that first day and which city bus would take me to the Greyhound terminal.

  “Call me from the bus terminal,” he called out before he put Starlight into reverse and pulled away from the pier.

  “I will,” I called back and hoisted my backpack onto my shoulders.

  The only instruction I disobeyed was that when he dropped us on land, I didn’t turn and leave immediately. Instead, I watched him motor away, his back first, then Starlight, shrinking in the distance as he headed out toward Key Biscayne. I watched until he vanished in the glinting water and then I watched a bit longer to be sure I wasn’t still seeing him. It had been a brilliantly sunny day without a cloud in the sky. We hadn’t been able to see Mom’s face that morning. Maybe that had been the sign. Maybe it wasn’t an all-clear signal after all.

  My head hurts thinking back and seeing what I couldn’t see then. My heart feels tattered. Why did I leave?

  I let the memory fade and bring the present into focus again. The forward cabin is the only place not crammed with junk. It looks the same as it did when I left. The sides of the hull are still covered with my artwork and old photos of Dad and Mom and me. My clothes are still piled in the drawers, my polka-dot bedding is still on the mattress. He must have been sleeping here because it was the only uncluttered surface left. In fact, the only sign Dad was using the space at all is his Miami Dolphins water bottle and his ukulele, which is tucked into the cubby above my bunk. I pick up the ukulele and turn to leave. Then I stop and take down all of the photos and my artwork, and I tuck them into the ukulele case.