by Jen Malone
He clears his throat and my attention returns to the screen.
“Yeah, somehow it’s not as funny in real life,” I say. “Between the gasoline smell when we run the generator to cook or charge our laptops, and the scent coming off that tank, I’m about to send away for some of that stuff that medical examiners put under their noses when they do autopsies. And maybe you could have ‘the talk’ again with Drew, about puberty and the body odors that accompany it? At home it was easy enough to steer clear of his bedroom, but when his ‘room’ is the same cabin we all have to live and eat in . . .”
I wrinkle my nose once again.
“Hey! I heard that!” Drew calls from the other side of my closed door.
“Drew, leave Cassie alone to talk to Dad.” Even though my mother’s speaking at her normal volume, I can hear her as clearly as if she were right next to me. I suck in a breath.
There is no such thing as privacy on this stupid boat! I’m suddenly embarrassed about opening up to Dad. I didn’t stop to consider I’d have an audience.
“Dad, I should hang up. Certain people just can’t help being nosy.” I speak loudly for my mother’s benefit, but it’s not like I even need to raise my voice. This boat is the worst.
“Pictures. Two a day. I’ll be expecting them in my in-box.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“And, Lassie? New mantra to inform all decisions going forward: ask yourself first, ‘Would my dad want me doing this?’ Answer yes to eating raw cookie dough from the package but no to making anyone who gave birth to you walk the plank. Got it?”
I roll my eyes at him.
His voice grows serious. “I was trying to give you a little space to work things out on your own, but my leniency stops now. This is your opportunity to get yourself under control, and I expect that to happen. We clear?”
I grimace but nod, and his face relaxes.
“Good. Love you, baby girl.”
“Love you too, Daddy.”
I sign off Skype and wish for the millionth time that he were here. If he was and this were last year, before everything went down, this trip might almost feel like an adventure. Even though we’d have a whole other body taking up space, his Dad-ness would make the quarters feel more cozy than cramped, I just know it.
The very last thing I want to do now is face my mother, so I turn my attention to Instagram. Tara’s posted pictures of Omar Abergel’s pool party, and I spend way too much time poring over them, trying to keep completely in the loop despite my physical absence. Tara, Jess, and I did a whole preparty lead-up text session yesterday. I’m about to group-message them to find out how the blue streaks in Jess’s hair went over when a primal yell from outside sounds across the water, followed by the noise of a motor roaring to life.
Garbled screamed words follow, and as I run from my room to investigate, I practically crash into Mom and Drew. We all jockey for position on the steps. When we get above deck, it’s just in time to see Christian dive off his boat, anchored about a hundred feet from ours. He swims at a furious pace across the inlet, but if he’s trying to chase down the dinghy that’s tearing toward the open water at top speed, he’ll need Aquaman’s fins for that. A few strokes later, he stops and treads water, shouting Spanish words into the sky that I’m guessing are not PG-rated. Drew’s probably taking notes to add to his arsenal.
“Christian? What’s going on?” my mother calls to him. He glances over at us, seeming to suddenly remember his surroundings.
“I am so sorry. I—I just—” He gestures helplessly at the faraway Zodiac before paddling over and swinging a leg onto our platform, easily pulling himself from the water in one fluid motion. My mother’s jaw drops open as he stands bare-chested and dripping water like some romance-novel cover model. I give her a sharp look and she snaps her mouth shut, then opens it again to ask, “What’s going on?”
Drew tosses him a towel that was draped over our side rails, and Christian dries himself off, all the while staring darkly into the distance, where the dinghy disappears around a bend.
“I believe I have been both robbed and deserted.”
9
“So your deckhand took your watch and a wad of bills and peeled off in the getaway, er, dinghy?” Drew asks.
“And a few bottles of very, very expensive wine I was saving for the right occasion,” Christian adds.
“Should we try to go after him?” Mom asks.
Christian ventures a dubious look at Minecraft. Next to his sleek Zodiac, custom-outfitted with a high-powered engine, we might as well have Huck Finn’s log raft tied up behind us.
I follow his gaze. “In your yacht, then?”
Christian looks confused and Mom fills in quietly, “Something as small as the Zodiac, with such a powerful motor, could be miles away before we even got the anchor raised on any of our boats.”
Oh. Well, I never pretended to know the first thing about this sailing stuff, so . . .
Mom turns back to Christian. “What if we radioed the authorities?”
“He’ll be long gone before anyone could even take a report. It’s likely he has an accomplice waiting for him. He’s been on his phone quite a bit over the last few days, but always out of earshot, and always hanging up any time he spotted me. I should have suspected something like this.”
Out of earshot. What would that be like? Christian’s yacht must be at least double the size of ours. I guess that kind of square footage buys you privacy alongside floor-to-ceiling closets and a freezer housed in the actual cooking space, where kitchen appliances rightly belong.
Tommy seemed nice enough when he and Christian gave me a ride back to Sunny-Side Up the night Tara, Jess, and I explored Florence. Guess you never can tell.
Drew stares at the spot on the horizon where the Zodiac was last visible. “Wow. We’ve been living next door to an actual pirate and I barely even got to know him.”
“Next door?” I raise an eyebrow and Drew slugs my arm.
“You know what I mean.”
“Drew, I hardly think this situation needs romanticizing,” Mom warns.
Christian pulls the towel tighter around his shoulders. “I should have trusted my intuition about him. He knew far less about sailing than he claimed to in our email exchanges before the trip.”
“I really am so sorry,” Mom repeats. Her hand hovers over his shoulder before she reconsiders and withdraws it. “Can I get you anything? Do anything?”
I cut her a dark look. What does she have in mind exactly? Mom squints at me, puzzled, and I relax. Her thoughts don’t seem to be in the gutter with mine.
“You are very kind, but no. Luckily, he didn’t touch the safe in my bunk, and I have cash in reserve there. The rest are only things I’ve lost, and items are easily replaced. My trust, on the other hand . . .” He hands the towel back to Drew. “Thank you for your kindness. I’d better go fill Amy and Miranda in on the situation, as this changes things a bit for all of us.”
Changes things?
Mom says, “Amy radioed earlier to say they were taking the girls to build a fairy garden in the woods.”
Christian’s lips turn up in the corners. “So sweet.”
“Um, excuse me, you said this changes things?” I can’t help asking.
He turns to me with a rueful smile. “I’m afraid I can’t handle a yacht the size of Reality Bytes on my own. But I will try to procure a new deckhand right away.”
The words vibrate through my head as I grasp their meaning.
“Does that mean we’re . . .” I can’t even speak the next part out loud.
“Stranded here even longer?” Christian apparently can. “I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid so, plantita.”
He’s taken to calling me “little plant” after my obvious enthusiasm for my bonsai tree, but no silly nickname can redeem this situation. Snatching the towel from Mom’s hand, I run below before balling it up and stuffing it against my mouth. It only partly muffles my scream.
I never co
nsidered how much about living on a sailboat would be basic survival stuff.
Aside from being completely at the whim of the weather, our space is so limited we can only store enough fresh food to feed three people for a couple of days. So if we don’t want to be stuck eating canned tomatoes and soup for every meal, we need to stick near to land. And not just any land, but close enough to a town to make grocery shopping possible.
And then there are the matters of the poop tank needing periodic emptying and of having enough fresh water to drink, shower, flush, and brush our teeth with.
On day eight of our trip, we’re running low on all those things. Plus, for six days in this remote inlet cove, we’ve had the same scrubby patch of dirt “beach” to stare at, the same grating bird calls to listen to, and the same marshy smells to inhale. I’m running low on hope we’ll ever finish this trip and get home.
Cabin fever? It’s no joke, y’all.
Yesterday and today I emailed Dad a picture of our location on the map, showing us in the exact same spot both times. For the good ones, all I could find was a shot of Drew drooling in his sleep and another of the starry sky, unblemished by any nearby light pollution. To be honest, the stars are pretty fantastic out here. But that only goes so far.
I tried texting Tara and Jess to rescue me from monotony. To hell with Mom’s threats—how much worse could she make my life anyway? But Jess’s mom doesn’t want her putting too many miles on their car, since it’s a lease, and Tara doesn’t have her driver’s license. She’s convinced that she’ll be finding an apartment in New York City two minutes after graduation, so what’s the point of learning to drive? We all know she’s actually just freaked out at the thought of operating heavy machinery after a slight incident with a riding mower in middle school.
I’m also sensing that after two rounds of heartfelt, tearful good-byes, it’s becoming a little anticlimactic when I keep reappearing again a couple of days later.
My whole life is stalled, and no one seems appropriately sympathetic.
Drew’s been keeping busy teaching himself common boat repairs, and he can still play his multiperson shooter games remotely with his friends on his laptop (which is mostly all he ever did at home anyway), so he’s perfectly content.
Mom’s worked her way through The Essentials of Living Aboard a Boat (item number one of which should read: a reliable deckhand who won’t leave your whole boating party at a standstill when he steals away in broad daylight) and has now resumed submitting résumés to every halfway-promising bank job posting within a certain radius of Pleasant Hill.
Me . . . I’m still spending most of my time on Instagram, trying helplessly to keep up with everything at home. I even go to Heavenly Licks’ website several times a day, just to smile at the logo. Who would have thought I could ever miss dishing out ice cream? My left bicep (my scooping arm) used to be bigger than my right, but after being off work for less than two weeks, it already feels like it’s shrinking.
I feel like I’m shrinking. What if nothing is the same when I get back? What if I never get back because it takes us ten years to sail down there?
I’m lying on the bench in the cabin, tossing a tennis ball up in the air, when the radio screeches to life, startling me.
Christian’s voice echoes in the small space. “Grocery run, anyone? Over.”
Drew grabs the transmitter before I can even react. “When? Over.”
“You should have asked where,” I say. “There’s not a town for, like, twenty miles. Believe me, I’ve researched.”
“Seven miles,” Drew corrects.
Meh. Seven, twenty. Either might as well be a hundred.
“Now. Planning to bicycle slowly if you’d like to jog alongside, Drew. Over.”
“Mom?” Drew calls. “I could use my skateboard.”
“I guess if you’re going with Christian, it’s fine,” she answers. “I can drop you both ashore in the dinghy.”
Drew finalizes plans with Christian and replaces the transmitter before spying my doubtful expression.
“Seven miles is nothing,” he tells me. “Before we left, I was running ten miles a day on Mom’s treadmill to get ready for basketball.”
And that’s another thing. Drew is dying to go out for JV basketball at our high school. He was training. What fourteen-year-old trains for a team he’s not even on yet? Yes, we’ll be back in time for tryouts, but does Mom even realize she stole four months of practice time from him? He can’t dribble on a slanted deck and we’re not likely to encounter many hoops at sea. Did Drew even speak up about that?
“Seven miles each way,” I point out. “And half of it while carrying groceries balanced on a skateboard. Are you crazy?”
“Crazy for Cocoa Puffs.” When I make a face, he adds, “Or anything that doesn’t come in a can. And milk that isn’t powdered.”
Oh god, just the thought. “Okay, you might be onto something. Fresh bread . . .”
“Chocolate chip cookies,” he says.
“Swedish fish. Strawberries. Salad. Slurpees.”
“Are we going alliterative now?” Drew asks. “Okay. Potato chips, pumpkin pie, pancakes, and . . . uh . . . peaches!”
“A: totally unintentional on my part. B: I’m impressed you know the word alliterative and can pronounce it. C: you cannot convince me that you, of all people, are dying for anything as healthy as fruit. And D: a thousand times yes to potato chips. Get many bags of those.”
“Twenty-five percent increase in allowance to anyone who brings me real cream for my coffee,” Mom adds from behind her bunk door.
“I would have done it for fifteen!” Drew answers.
As soon as they leave in the dinghy, I retreat to my berth, so I don’t have to engage with Mom once it’s just the two of us. I’m deleting old messages off my phone when she returns, but happily she ignores me and goes right back to her bunk.
Shockingly enough, it doesn’t take long to clean up years’ worth of text threads, even when you’ve never bothered to do it before. I’m sprawled across my bed, waiting for a better boredom buster to present itself, when my eyes land on a hanging bag.
There’s one other survival necessity we’ve been neglecting: laundry.
It’s not like I’m trying to impress anyone out here—I’ve mostly been living in yoga pants and sweatshirts—but there’s still the matter of my, um, delicates. I can rough it as well as the next girl, but I have my limits, and clean underwear is one of them.
Even if I wanted to hand wash in the sink and hang them up in my room, my berth is so damp, they’d take a year to dry. Not to mention it also serves as my brother’s closet and changing room, so . . . no. And anyway, we’re on the strictest of rations until we can get to a marina and refill the bladder tanks that store our fresh water supply. Who knows when that will be, since the closest one is days away by boat.
We’ve been meeting on Reality Bytes after dinner most nights—and sometimes for dinner, since (until now, I guess) Christian has way more provisions, and the space to store them. He’s also been nice enough to let Amy and Miranda shower the girls there, since their boat is even tinier than ours, with smaller tanks and more people. But even his giganto-yacht doesn’t have a washer-dryer.
Although thinking of his boat reminds me that last night when we gathered post-SpaghettiOs, Amy mentioned a nearby stream she’d found while hiking. If I can reach it relatively quickly, I should have plenty of time to rinse out my things and let them dry in the sun before the dinghy would be needed to bring groceries to the boat.
I don’t know how long fourteen miles on a bike and skateboard will take, but I’m guessing somewhere between three hours and the length of time between Avengers movies.
I quietly gather up my stuff and leave a note for Mom, because the fewer words I have to exchange with her the better, and sneak off to the dinghy. I don’t want to alert her to my exit, so instead of starting the engine, I grab the paddle from underneath the bench seat and work my way over to Tide
Drifter.
“Hallllll-oooo?” I call up softly.
Abigail’s face peers out of an open hatch.
“Did you come to play with us?” She looks hopeful.
“Maybe later, okay?” I think it’s totally barbaric of Mom to force this trip on me against my will, but is it borderline abusive to make two little kids live aboard a sailboat? I mean, there’s barely any room to move around. What about their developing bones and stuff?
“Okay! We’re doing an obstacle course! You have to get all the way through the cabin and up to the bow following one piece of rope and you can’t let go EVER! Grace figured out how to somersault through a knot on Mommy and Mama’s bed. You should see her all twisty like a pretzel! You could try it if you want.”
So much for calling Child Protective Services.
“Hey, Cassie!” The edge of Miranda’s face appears in the hatch next to Abigail’s. “Wanna come in for a bit? Promise not to make you turn yourself into a human bowline knot. We’re breaking soon for science class anyway. We found some moss on the creek bed yesterday and we’re gonna see if we can use it to make live graffiti.”
Okay, seriously. How do they manage to make a childhood at sea seem so magical?
“Thanks, but I was actually hoping Amy could give me directions to that creek. I need to do some laundry.” I gesture at the bag beside me in the dinghy.
“Sure thing! Hey, could you bring back more moss with you, in case our first attempt is a flop?”
“Check on our fairy garden too!” Abigail says.
I agree to both conditions, and Amy points out the clearing in the trees where the path to the stream begins. It takes me less than ten minutes to paddle over and land the dinghy on a small bank of dirt.
As I step onto the first patch of land I’ve stood on since going out with Tara and Jess in Florence a week ago, the earth sways under me. Or rather, it doesn’t. My body has gotten so used to subtly balancing out the constant rocking motion of the water—gentle in this protected cove, but still there—that not having it underneath me feels like that first moment after exiting the Tilt-A-Whirl at the state fair. I have to grab on to a tree trunk while I wait for the sensation to pass.