The Year of Broken Glass

by Joe Denham

  Drinking, Alone

  THEY HANG OFF the hook in Neah Bay at the mouth of Juan de Fuca Strait to sleep for a night before the sailing begins, before the revolving watch schedule they’ve agreed upon alters their biorhythms, before leaving land behind. Under normal conditions, most sailors on this route would top up their fuel and water tanks, but the marina has been decimated, and they’d thought twice of even using the bay as anchorage for the night given its shallow waters and the boats inevitably sunken beneath. Just past midnight, the strait uncommonly calm as the winds slackened before backing, they threw caution to the wind, so to speak, Francis squinting into the black water off the bow with a bright hand-held spotlight while Miriam, eyes trained to the digital sounder, steered them slowly in. It was a first test of their compatibility as crew hands, co-sailors, and they passed.

  In the morning, first light, they pull up anchor and round Cape Flattery, past Tatoosh Island and Hole in the Wall. The southeasterly is still flowing through so they motor into it, despite their every inclination to conserve the precious, finite diesel. The pull to move with every moment closer to Hilo Bay is just that much stronger, their sense of urgency trumping any common sense of frugality.

  They have decided they’ll share mornings at watch. From six until noon they’ll work the helm and the galley together, sharing breakfast and coffee, sunrise, and each other’s company. After lunch they’ll each work a three-hour wheel watch while the other sleeps, then a couple hours together again for dinner, then two more five-hour shifts traded off between sailing and sleeping. All weather and other variables depending, but it’s a blueprint to build the days by. It’s no small task for two to sail a vessel the size of Princess Belle on such a crossing, but the time of year couldn’t be better, and they are both, in their particular ways, proficient at sea.

  Just past noon the wind finally veers to the northwest, so they raise the main and jib and cruise with the gathering wind abeam on a gentle angle from the coast, heading two hundred degrees south-southwest, each hour taking them only slightly farther from shore. Miriam fixes a meal of miso soup, rice, canned salmon and canned peas after her late afternoon nap, and brings it out to the cockpit with a bottle of red wine to share with Francis. The wind is a light ten to fifteen knots, but with the spinnaker now hoisted the hull cuts quick and smooth through the water. The evening air is chilly as they sweep through it, but they dress warmly, Francis in one of Horace’s many merino wool sweaters still folded and stowed neatly in the locker of the aft stateroom. “We’ve got food for a good sixty days on board, but I can’t say it’s the most appetizing fare,” she explains as she hands him his plate.

  “I’m not fussy,” he says, which is true. Francis would eat almost anything, gobbling it down with such haste it’s a wonder he tastes it at all. Anna has always insisted he’s host to some voracious parasite, but Francis has always refused to be tested. In consequence, she’s insisted he submit to various fasting and purging regimes over the years, masticating bowls of raw brown rice and wincing back vile concoctions of wormwood and black walnut, resulting always in his dropping in weight and gaining in irritability, but never in any decrease in his appetite or change in his desperate-dog style of eating. It is this same tendency to gorge and guzzle which has led to his tumultuous relationship with the bottle, which gives rise to Miriam’s confusion and disappointment now as she offers him a glass of red.

  “I don’t drink,” he says. “The other night, that was a mistake. Other than that I’ve been sober for almost five years.” Over their meal he tells her of the drunken accident, the cries of those two little girls calling through his concussive unconsciousness, and the narrowly avoided catastrophe they signify, those cries, how they haunt him still, and keep him on the straight and narrow.

  “Don’t you think that’s enough, drunk or not, to keep you from making that kind of mistake again?” she asks, spooning the last of the fish from her plate.

  “It’s not that simple,” he says, and pauses, wanting, and not wanting, to say more. This is the nature of what it is to be out on the water, alone with just one other person on a boat. The need for communication, for companionship, and the sense that the world is dissolving down to the single point of the self and the other onboard, awakens in one a desire to spill forth all the secrets and stories of one’s life. Sea yarns. So all that is needed is the quizzical look she gives back to spur his explanation on. “I can’t trust myself,” he continues. “When the liquor gets in me it’s like a little flame, and I’m a tinder box. I can’t keep it contained and the next thing I know, anything goes.”

  “Are you sure the liquor’s the flame?” she asks. “Maybe it’s just the bellows.”

  “That’s irrelevant.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe your thinking belies a deeper notion. What if the flame’s already inside you, Ferris? What if you are, for whatever reason, keeping it so suppressed that it flares with the smallest fuel, only one of which is alcohol? What if your focus on the booze as the source, your attending AA and whatnot, what if that is missing the point, keeping you from the truth, from real happiness?” Miriam says this knowing it’s pushing the boundaries of what is comfortable between them, but she has a strong sense that she is right, and knows that no matter what she says they are stuck together on this boat now, which shifts the point of leverage.

  Francis answers her question with a long silence, looking back to land for a time. She waits him out. “It doesn’t matter, that stuff,” he finally says. “Because the day-to-day reality for me, in my life right now, is that I’ve got work to do, bills to pay, mouths to feed. I can’t say how much you know of what that’s like, though it seems that if you ever did there’s a good chance it was long enough ago that you’ve probably forgotten.” He waits for a moment, expecting from her some sort of rebuttal that doesn’t come, then continues. “Anyway, what it comes down to is this. However it works, whatever explanation you or I or anyone can come up with, the fact is I can’t drink, because I can’t trust myself when I do. The easiest way to deal with that is to just not do it.”

  “But that still leaves you as a man who can’t trust himself, entirely, and if you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?”

  Which is a good question, Francis thinks, because if you can’t even trust yourself, if you’re that suspicious of and estranged from even your own heart and intentions, what does that say about how alone you really are? But he doesn’t feel completely alone in his life, not now, and therein he finds her answer. “Jin Su,” he says. “I can trust her.” Though even as the words pass through his lips the day is darkening swiftly to night—it does this on the open water—bringing with it many of the doubts and questions not considered in the light of day, and he is beginning to wonder.

  Calm as Glass

  THROUGH EACH DAY they tow two things off the stern of the boat. On the starboard side, attached to the taffrail, is a small generator with thirty feet of line spooled off it, a small propeller at its far end. The prop spins in the wake, the line spins with the prop, and the generator spins with the line, sending a small trickle charge to the battery bank below so they can light the cabin and deck, run the in-line water pump and the autopilot, and use the single sideband to radio into the Pacific Seafarer’s Network, report their position, receive the weather forecast, and hear any other news of relevance.

  In this way they’ve learned over the past two days the extent of the damage which has occurred throughout the Northern Pacific Rim. Mount St. Helens, Mount Pinatubo, Mount Fuji and the Mauna Loa have all erupted almost concurrently with a plethora of minor volcanoes. The Aleutian Trench is in spasm. Tsunamis have decimated the Asian coastline as well. There has occurred an unthinkable seismic chain reaction. All air traffic at the few airports still functioning throughout the region has been restricted to relief efforts. People are desperate, world leaders are overwhelmed, and seismologists are baffled. All this while Miriam and Francis sail the coastline in light winds and the luxurious comfort of t
he Princess Belle.

  On the port side they tow a nylon fishing line with a hoochie and a double-barbed hook. They’re cruising thirty miles offshore, skimming the line where the cold northern water flowing downward along the coast, the western edge of the North Pacific Gyre known as the California Current, collides with the warm waters of the greater Pacific. This is where the feed fish thrive, anchovies and sardines, where the tuna run. Just past noon one strikes, a ten-pound albacore, and Miriam reels it in with little effort. The tuna trolling is her thing, sport fishing being something Francis has never had the time or inclination for, it being the last thing he wants to do when not out on the crabbing grounds. But Miriam has a long-standing love for trolling, reaching back to her days on the Misty with Yule, and today she decides to forgo her nap in order to watch the line and nurture the flow of their conversation, which picked up first thing in the morning where it had left off last night.

  Francis speaks of his newfound love with Jin Su, their daughter’s birth, and his plans to leave Anna. He recounts the disintegration of his and Anna’s life together, their love’s failing, and of the shame he feels in that failure, in his infidelity and deceit. How he’s come to often avoid his young son, a mirror he can’t bear to look into.

  Now they’re above deck in the cockpit again, it’s past 9 p.m., and the schedule they’d decided upon just two days previous has already devolved into nothing but a loose itinerary, a basic intention. The wind has fallen slack, the boat making no more than two knots an hour under sail by the time they decide to fire up the diesel and cruise under power through the night. The diesel’s steady drone and the streaming stern-wash sets a background to their conversation, like the light din of chatter at a dinner party, so their talk is candid and fluid. Miriam has had another bottle of wine over dinner, rice with the tuna she caught earlier in the day, and she’s feeling again like it might be time to push Francis further into her confidence.

  “Why do it then, really? Why go to another woman after all that time, after everything you’d been through and built with Anna?” Miriam wants to know, honestly, because as much as she had thought to leave Ray all those years, and considering how easy, how un-messy it could have been just to pack some things, take her girls and leave, she didn’t.

  “Springsteen has this song,” Francis starts. “Are you a Springsteen fan?”

  She answers with a smile. “I’m more of a Nina Simone kind of gal.”

  “Anyway, the song’s on his Ghost of Tom Joad album. Around the time I met Jin Su it was the only CD in my truck, so I’d listen to it on the long drive to and from Vancouver every week when I was delivering my crab. This one song, ‘Dry Lightning,’ has this verse: You get so sick of the fighting, you lose your fear of the end. But I can’t lose your memory, and the sweet smell of your skin. I listened to that song over and over until it sunk in just how sick I was of our fighting—and I mean fighting, not just bickering—and I started longing to be the guy in that song, alone with my melancholy and my memories, you know, without anyone in my face. Then I met Jin Su, she pursued me, and I felt I had no reason not to be with her because I’d already decided on finding a way to leave Anna. Though I certainly didn’t think it would lead to what it has. It was just sex at first, before she got pregnant. Which believe me was the last thing I saw coming.”

  “And you don’t think the exact same thing will happen in your relationship with Jin Su?”

  “No, I don’t. I think we understand each other better, we’re more compatible. Anna and I were young when we met and had Willow. We didn’t really choose each other, it all just sort of happened. Jin Su and I have though. When she got pregnant we decided to have Emily because we’re two adults who know themselves, and so know what they want, and what we both want is each other.”

  “But how can you be so sure if the only life you’ve ever lived together is this one in the shadows, hiding from Anna and your son? How do you know it won’t turn out the same in the end?”

  “I just know. For instance, the way Anna and I fight. Jin Su and I don’t do that, we never have. Anna’s an angry, confrontational person, she always has been, and so we’ve always fought, about everything. I mean, we’ve fought ourselves out to the point that Anna’s had to resort to the most ridiculous and petty things, anything she can find, to fight with me about.”

  “Like what?”

  Francis has to think about this for a few moments, not because there aren’t examples, but because there are so many it’s like a fog in his mind, a million little particles of memory clustered together to form the one monolithic storm cloud of Anna’s anger.

  “Okay. I like to take a bath in the evenings. So does Anna. It’s so important to us that the first thing we did when we rented the house we live in, before we’d even unpacked all our stuff, was to replace the old standard tub with a really nice sixty-six-inch clawfoot. Anna’s always working in the evenings once Willow’s gone to bed, and she likes to go to bed later than me. But she refuses to have a bath after me. She wants the fresh water before I soak in it. It’s something that started when she was pregnant, and it seemed reasonable then, you know, hygiene, but she’s upheld it as a rule since, even though there’s no real reason for it now other than that she doesn’t like the bath once I’ve dirtied it up. Anyway, most nights I get tired of waiting for her to come out of her study and have her bath, so I draw one for her to move the whole thing along. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Often whatever she’s doing on the computer is just too important for her to put on hold. So the bathwater goes cold—unless I nag her, which is asking for a fight—and she refuses to add more hot because it’s an energy waste. Of course this is my fault. So I started some time ago filling the tub with only scalding hot water, adding no cold, so it would take a long time for it to cool. It seemed the best solution, seeing as there’s no way to get through to Anna about the fact she might be in some way to blame for those cold baths, that she might consider my side of things. But it didn’t work. She started complaining about the bath being so fucking hot on those nights she’d actually go to get in right away. How she’d have to let some of the hot water out in order to make room for the cold she’d add to cool it down. That this was a shameful waste too. I couldn’t win for losing. So then I’d tell her she should consider herself lucky she has a husband that goes to the trouble of drawing her a bath at all, let alone one who waits for her while she has it first. Which would always lead to an argument, to her railing about how I don’t appreciate what she does around the house, and to me railing about how she’s inconsiderate and wholly incapable of sharing a home with others. At least not in any harmonious way, everything always having to occur on her time, how she likes it.”

  “That doesn’t sound too out of the ordinary to me Ferris. You know, I’ve been married three times, and each of those marriages has had its share of my-side-of-the-bed-your-side-of-the-bed kind of conflicts.”

  “Sure, but get this. A couple of weeks ago Anna has a headache, so she draws the bath for herself early, as soon as Willow’s gone to sleep. She’s at the sink flossing her teeth, still wrapped in her towel, when I get into the tub. It’s the perfect temperature, and I say so as I sink in, in an isn’t-this-luxurious kind of a way. She turns to me and says something like, That’s ’cause I fill the thing properly, in this nasty tone. She just digs in, and I’m so tired of her spewing her anger onto everything, even a pleasant moment such as that one, that an anger rises in me to equal hers, and by the time it’s all over we’ve been yelling at each other for half an hour, we’re in the kitchen with towels wrapped around our waists, the floor is littered with broken glass from the Mason jars Anna has thrown across the room at me, and Willow is in his pyjamas, crying in his mother’s arms, his bare feet bleeding from the glass he stepped on when he came running from his room, crying at us to stop.”

  Of Different Worlds

  TO THE SOUND of the little diesel resonating through the hull, Miriam sleeps through the early hours an
d dreams of dreaming beside Yule in the fo’c’sle of the Misty. She wakes with the scent of him, salt water, fish blood and tobacco, the slightest base of grease and diesel, as though caught and lingering in a dream-cloud around her. There is that pain to the left of her abdomen again, both dull and sharp at once, radiating upward through her body, and she wonders if it has something to do with the onset of menopause, with the fallowing of her ovaries. The boat is bucking a bit with the waves, so she knows the wind is up, the rigging chiming above deck.

  She fixes two bowls of instant oatmeal, the default breakfast each morning, neither of them too keen on the dehydrated egg powder. Out in the cockpit, Francis is dressed in a full flotation suit. Through the night the rising northerly wind cleared the sky of the high overcast cloud cover that settled in when the wind died yesterday, and the temperature has dropped dramatically.

  “Cold night?” Miriam inquires, handing him his bowl. The sun has risen now over what they can still see of Oregon’s coastal mountains and the volcanic ash hovering above them, the upper ridges and peaks forming a thin, obscured, blue-green band on the horizon. The day is just beginning to warm beneath the cold northerly bite. “You might want to put a couple sweaters on if you’re going to stay up here. Did you get some sleep?”