Captain Chandler had his wheelchair alongside the catamaran and was helping Beck with the rigging. It tugged at Jet’s heart to see Captain Chandler on the edge of what he loved and was no longer able to do. Jet turned her attention back to the Saga. She prepped the site of the hole while Kai cut a patch of fiberglass to size. The resin had a sharp metallic smell. She held the patch in place while Kai painted the resin on. He was easy to work with—careful to get things right but cheerful, too. He laughed at himself when he forgot and used the Japanese word for brush or rag.
They were starting on the second patch when Beck walked up.
“Hey, guys,” he said, a little shyly.
“Hey,” Jet answered. She was glad to see him but wary. Roland never missed a chance to put her down, and Beck never took sides. It was hard to know where she stood with him.
“So you’ll be able to fix her then?” Beck asked.
“Yup,” Jet said, still cautious.
Beck leaned in for a closer look at the patch. “Are you going to race?”
“Um, well…Beck, this is my cousin, Kai,” she said, to stall his question about the race. “He’s visiting from Japan.”
“Beautiful boat,” Kai said, nodding in the direction of the catamaran.
“Do you sail?”
“Yeah,” Kai said. “I had a wooden boat a lot like this one.”
“Is it gone?” Beck asked. “In the…er…I mean…”
Jet winced. She’d tried so hard not to make a thing of Kai’s troubles.
“It’s gone,” Kai said.
There was an awkward pause.
“I hear those Hobies can be tricky to handle,” Jet said.
“We nearly dumped it over twice on our first try,” Beck said.
Good! Jet thought. She resisted saying it aloud.
“We’re getting the hang of it, though,” Beck added.
I should say something nice, Jet thought. Nothing but wisecracks came to mind. It was almost like she was turning into the girl version of Roland. There was another awkward pause.
Beck looked down at his shoes. “I need your help, actually.”
“What’s up?” Jet said.
“It’s my dad. He’s a little bit—”
“Oh my gosh! Is he okay?” Jet said, imagining the worst. She turned to Kai. “Captain Chandler is a bar pilot, like Dad, but he got hurt last year, and now he can’t walk. But he will. He’s going to get new legs.” She spun to face Beck. “Right?”
“September,” Beck said.
“September? That’s forever!”
“I know,” Beck said. “And it’s killing him to wait. He keeps thinking he can do stuff. It’s driving my mom crazy, he keeps…”
“Falling?” Jet asked.
“This time he’s just stuck.”
Jet stood on tiptoes to look over at the red sailboat. Captain Chandler was lying on the trampoline deck.
“He really misses being on the water,” Beck said. “He got the catamaran because he thought the different kind of deck would make it easier for him to move around.”
“How exactly is he stuck?” Kai asked.
“Come look,” Beck said.
They walked over to the dock. Captain Chandler was lying on his back in a T-shirt and shorts. The ends of his amputated legs were covered with what looked like cream-colored knit hats. He had a cap pulled low over his eyes.
“Hi, Jet,” he called out as they came near. He turned to Kai. “Hey, you’re Lars’s boy! Per said you were over for the summer. I met your dad years ago.”
Kai nodded, stopping just short of the bow he usually gave his friends’ parents.
“Don’t you fret about the news, now. There is a solution to that reactor problem, and Lars is the man to find it.”
“He has a good team,” Kai said.
“The best, I’m sure,” Captain Chandler said. “Problems aplenty right here, though.” The trampoline deck sagged under his weight, making a hole he couldn’t climb out of. “I think what we need is a rocket pack,” he said with a wink. “Where’s Iron Man when you need him?”
“How about a construction crane?” Jet suggested. “Or maybe a catapult?”
“Artillery usually is the answer,” Captain Chandler said with a laugh. “Beck, get the national guard on the phone. We’ll blast our way out of this!”
“Dad!” Beck sighed. “Can’t we just—” He pulled out his phone.
“No need to trouble your mom,” Captain Chandler said quickly.
“Actually what we need is a big piece of cloth,” Kai said. Everybody turned to look at him. “You can roll, right?” he asked Captain Chandler.
“Sure.”
“So if we slide a sheet under you, then we can tug you to the side, where you can reach your chair.”
“I remember that,” Captain Chandler said. “A nurse did it while I was in the hospital. She was a bitty thing, but she moved me, no problem.”
“Let’s get the jib sail from the Saga,” Jet said. “It’s big enough.”
“Okay,” Beck said. “But how are we going to get him back in the chair?”
“That’s a problem.” Kai looked around. “We need him to be up higher than the chair.”
“If the boat was on the trailer, he would be,” Beck said.
“So we just need to get someone to drive the trailer down the boat ramp,” Jet said.
“No problem.” Captain Chandler fished in his pocket and tossed a set of keys to Beck.
“He lets you drive?” Kai and Jet said together, him with admiration and her with alarm.
“Only in reverse.” Beck flashed a broad smile.
He got in the driver’s seat and gunned the engine. Kai waved Beck down the boat ramp. It took him three tries to get the trailer lined up straightJet attached the bow rope to the windlass and cranked the handle to pull the boat onto the trailer. Oncethe boat was secure, Kai took over, showing Beck and Jet how the sliding-sheet trick worked. Beck wheeled the chair into place. Even with their best efforts, Captain Chandler fell the last foot or so into the chair.
“No blood, no foul!” he announced once the wincing subsided. “Let’s just keep this adventure to ourselves, shall we?” He gave his son a meaningful nod.
“Who’s telling?” Beck said, holding up both hands. “Do I ever tell Mom?”
“So, my hearties,” Captain Chandler said, looking from Jet to Kai. “Will you take your reward in ice cream?”
“Gosh,” Jet said. “Love to, but we had ice cream for lunch.”
“How about a sail?” Beck said.
Jet had been telling herself all through the rescue operation that the Viking wasn’t such a pretty boat, and it wasn’t one bit faster than her faithful old Saga. Lies. Jet’s shoulders slumped. She’d love to give the catamaran a try. But she should finish fixing her own boat. And she was grounded from the water. Technically her dad hadn’t said she couldn’t sail in someone else’s boat, but she was not going to push her luck.
“I’m sorry, Beck. I’m sort of grounded.”
“Oh.” Beck shrugged and started walking toward the van.
“Wait! Want to come over tomorrow and build something?”
“No thanks,” Beck said. “Roland and the guys are having a gaming thing. It goes all day.” He opened the side doors of the van and pushed the button for the wheelchair lift.
“Some other time then,” Jet said.
“Sure,” Beck said.
But Jet’s heart sank as they drove away. For a minute there she was close, but now she wondered if they’d ever be friends again.
JET’S ALARM WENT off the next morning. She rolled over and hit the snooze button so hard she knocked the clock to the floor. A beam of light poked through her drapes like an accusing finger. Jet pulled her pillow over her head.
She hadn’t talked to her dad last night. She’d had good intentions. She even knew what she wanted to say. And then Dad brought Captain Dempsey and a bunch of the other bar pilots over for dinner, along wi
th a sea captain from his last crossing. They sat out in the yard, feasting on crab and salmon and cucumber salad and home-brewed root beer. They talked up the moon. The mariners had been everywhere, through all the most difficult passages: the Bosporus, the Panama, the Suez. They had a thousand stories.
Oliver eventually nodded off in a lawn chair, still sticky from the marshmallows they’d roasted. Kai snuck inside to catch up on the news from home. But Jet got caught up in the storytelling as she always did, not even caring that the truth was showing a little wear, only knowing that she wanted sea stories of her own to tell.
Now it was morning, and she still hadn’t talked to her dad. Kai had been on the phone since sunup. Her mom had closed the living room door at first light. She’d tied up her hair in a bandana and turned on the Argentine tangos she always listened to when she was drawing a girl superhero. The rule was no disturbing her while she was drawing, but Jet couldn’t have disturbed her with the drum line from a marching band. When Mom was working she only stopped for coffee.
“Taking Oliver to swim lessons,” Dad trumpeted from the driveway. The van doors slammed, and off they went.
Jet crawled out of bed and got dressed. Kai went to the computer and gobbled up stories and videos about the tsunami like a starving man. There were Pop-Tarts on the counter and leftover pizza slices in the fridge, clear evidence that Dad was off his piloting rotation and had taken command of the kitchen. Jet snagged a cupcake and headed out to the barn.
What if her dad said no? She could do all the apologizing in the world, and he could decide it wasn’t enough to make up for running the Saga aground and nearly sailing into a shipping lane. Jet licked the frosting from the top of her cupcake. Forget the race. What if he never let her sail again, ever? What if he wouldn’t let her go to the Merchant Marine Academy?
She slid open the barn door. The far end of the barn was stacked with boxes and outgrown bikes. Once upon a time her great-great-grandparents kept a team of horses and a farm wagon. Family legend had it that during the Depression, her great-grandma had raised goats in the barn and kept the entire bar pilots’ association from starving with goat cheese and homegrown vegetables. The stalls were gone, but you could see the wear mark on the floor where the stall doors had swung open.
Her father’s desk stood against the wall of the barn, beneath his bar pilot’s license. It was the last in a row of seven framed certificates that belonged to grandfathers and uncles clear back to 1875. Per Ellstrom was up there twice, in 1875 and 1999. Grandpa Lars had a license from 1969. There were two Ivars and an Oliver.
Jet had pictured the eighth pilot’s license in that row a hundred times—Captain Bridget Jane Ellstrom—written in fancy type with gold curlicues around the edge and the red-and-white pilot’s flag at the top. A pilot needed a master mariner’s license and a bunch of years as captain of a ship, too. That would take time. But Jet also knew that on the pilot’s exam, she’d have to draw the entire nautical chart of the Columbia Bar from memory. She didn’t have to wait to start learning that.
She rifled through the drawers of the desk and turned up a few pencils, a pocketknife, and a pad of paper. The NOAA nautical charts were in the filing cabinet. She flipped through them until she found the one marked 18521—the Columbia from the Pacific Ocean to Harrington Point.
She spread it out on the desk and began with mile zero, the spot where the ships’ entrance range first met the full force of the river current. The waters off Clatsop Spit were deadly shallow, and the ship channel swung wide around them, and then narrowed to a space barely wide enough for two ships to pass side by side. Jet faithfully copied each buoy. A dotted line on the chart connected the entrance range with the Cape D lighthouse. Jet pictured herself on the bridge of a ship, guiding it into the river by the same light her great-great-grandfather used a hundred and forty years ago. She copied the names on her chart: Peacock Spit, Sand Island, Jetty Lagoon, Point Adams, the Desdemona Sands. She was so absorbed in her work, she didn’t hear the door open.
When Kai said “What are you doing?” she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Nothing,” Jet said automatically.
She flipped over her map and stood up to block his view of the desk. Except for Beck, Jet hadn’t talked to anyone about her ambition. For sure she didn’t want to talk to her cousin about it. Jet was pretty sure piloting was not a girl job in Japan; it was barely a girl job here.
KAI STOOD BACK as Jet strode past him to an old chest that stood out a few feet from the wall. Behind it was a metal-and-rope ladder that hung down from the shadows under the roof. She hopped on top of the chest and jumped for the ladder. It struck the barn wall with a thud. Jet scrambled up it, fifteen, maybe twenty feet above the barn floor. Kai could just make out a landing platform at the top no bigger than a fish-house pallet. Jet climbed up and sat, dangling her feet.
Was she hoping he’d go away or daring him to follow? It was hard for Kai to guess. There were plenty of athletic girls at his school. One of them had even run the Tokyo Marathon. But none of the girls were quite so…daring? Reckless? No, it wasn’t that. She was prickly as a puffer fish. Something was bugging her, and whatever it was, she didn’t want to talk about it.
Or maybe she did. Kai was relieved when Aunt Karin finally stopped asking him about his grandparents. But he did want to talk about them, to say what he remembered. He wanted to walk down to the market and talk to Obā-san’s best friend at the tea shop. He wanted to help Ojī-san’s friends work on their boats. He wanted to make Obā-san’s sushi rolls and pick herbs from her garden. It was lonely to live with people who had never known them. Kai gave the ladder a test pull.
“Can I come up?”
“Sure. This platform holds Dad, so for sure it’s going to hold both of us,” Jet said. She scooted to the edge as Kai made his ascent.
“Well?” she said.
Kai gave the ceiling a look. It was very cobwebby up there.
“So,” he said, “this ladder doesn’t go anywhere.”
“Dad uses it to practice,” Jet said. “Ever since Captain Chandler missed the jump, Dad got really serious about daily training.”
“The jump?”
“It’s how you get from the pilot boat to the ship you’re going to guide across the bar. The pilot boat carries you out and pulls up alongside a ship, and the pilot jumps from the deck to the ladder. Then he climbs up as quick as he can, so he doesn’t get crushed if a rogue wave bumps the pilot boat up against the ship.”
“You’re joking!”
“Am not. How do you think Captain Chandler lost his legs?”
“Beck’s father?”
Jet nodded. “He was transferring to one of those car carriers in a storm last November. The wind was really strong, and it shifted while he was at the bottom of the ladder.”
Jet looked past her dangling sneakers to the barn floor twenty feet below.
“He almost made it,” she said quietly. “He was climbing up when the pilot boat bumped into the side of the carrier. His legs were crushed. Lucky he didn’t die.”
“Isn’t there a safer way?”
“Most of the time they use the helicopter and lower the pilot on and off the deck with a cable.”
“Uncle Per does this?” Kai said. “He dangles out of helicopters?” Uncle Per did not seem like the dangling type.
“Nobody’s died from the helicopter so far,” Jet said. “But they can’t use it in fog or snow or freezing rain or winds over fifty knots, so when it’s really rough, they take the pilot boat.”
“You mean they only jump for the ladder when there’s—”
“Heavy seas, blizzards, lightning? Yup.”
“Lightning? Whoa!” Kai recalculated his estimation of his uncle’s courage.
Jet shrugged. “So good thing Dad practices.”
“And you’re climbing them because…”
“Well…”
Jet brushed away a cobweb. She went off on a tangent about spiders. It wasn’t li
ke her to hesitate. Well, her parents weren’t the most subtle people Kai had ever met. He chose his words pretty carefully around them, too. Aunt Karin was such a talker, and Uncle Per would make a joke out of anything.
“Someone has to be the only woman bar pilot after Captain Dempsey retires,” Jet said at last. “Did you know there’s only ever been one woman bar pilot?”
Kai shook his head.
“And only two women are pilots on the Columbia. That’s just not right! Somebody’s got to carry on the tradition. Or what’s the point of breaking the barrier in the first place?”
“You really love the ocean, don’t you?” Kai said quietly.
“It’s so…awesome!” Jet said. “How could you not?”
Kai had felt exactly the same for as long as he could remember. He and his dad had already talked about his college plans, his dad arguing for the US Naval Academy and Kai thinking about marine engineering. But now he could barely make himself look at the water. His grandparents’ shrine had been washed away. The ihai of his great-grandparents was lost. Obā-san had wept for them even as she ran for her life. The funeral tablets would have gone to his mother in time, and eventually they would have been Kai’s to protect and honor. But now they were adrift on the ocean, and the mist that hung over the water every morning haunted his dreams.
Even so, Kai missed being on the water. He and his grandfather had a working rhythm when they sailed. Kai loved the physics of how sailing worked, the simple pleasure of catching a fish, and the beauty of his home waters. Seeing his cousin so ocean crazy made him miss it more.
“You’ll be a great pilot,” Kai said. “Even my grandfather would say so, and he knows navigation.”
Jet smiled. She even blushed a little.
The sound of the van going past the barn and up the driveway reached them. Jet gasped.
“Quick! Down!”
The Turn of the Tide Page 7