The Great Wide Sea

by M. H. Herlong

  “Wait,” Dylan said.

  I opened the door and looked back. The light from the hall lay in a long rectangle across the room. I could see a duffel bag full of new clothes sitting on the floor.

  “I just signed on as crew for a yacht delivery to Hawaii,” I said. “We leave in the morning. I’m going to see Hawaii, Dylan. And maybe Tahiti. Who knows? It’ll be exciting. I’ll let you know where I am. I’ll always let you know where I am.”

  “You’re really leaving?” He pushed himself up on his elbows. “Don’t go.”

  As I walked out, the door closed soundlessly behind me.

  I walked the dark streets searching for Dad’s motel, and then there it was, low and dark with all the rooms opening onto a patio. Through the opened curtains of one window, I saw Gerry sleeping alone on one side of a double bed. Dad was gone. When I tried the door, it wasn’t locked. I slipped inside.

  Gerry breathed gently and steadily. When I bent over him I could smell the soap of his shower. When I touched his cheek, it was damp with sweat. Carefully I pulled Blankie off his neck and laid it across his open hands. In his sleep, he moved slightly, then closed his hands on the worn white cloth and raised it to his face.

  The floor was a mess. Several open duffel bags spilled across the straw rug. An unopened pack of Batman underwear lay beside one bag. A pile of little-kid books had fallen under a table. A box of markers and a pad of paper sat on Gerry’s nightstand. I picked them up to write a note, but I didn’t know what to say. In the end, I wrote three words, Good-bye, little Noogie. I signed it Love, Ben.

  When I turned away from Gerry, the door was open and Dad was standing just inside the darkness. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “The other bed is yours, and that bag of gear.” He pointed across the room to a large, unopened duffel bag.

  I crossed the room and unzipped it. On top lay five magazines, the latest issue of every car magazine there was. I felt around inside. Two adjustable caps, clothes, and on the bottom some kind of electronic game and CDs. I couldn’t tell exactly what it all was just by feeling, but I knew Dad had brought me everything I needed for my new job. I hoisted the bag to my shoulder and shoved past Dad into the cooler air of the night.

  “Wait,” he said, following me and closing the door quietly behind him. “We have to talk.” He sat in one of the chairs on the patio and gestured for me to take the other.

  I put my bag on the table and stood in the dark.

  “Dylan had the nurse call from the hospital,” he said. “You can’t do this, you know. You can’t just—”

  “You can’t stop me,” I interrupted.

  Dad closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead hard with his fingertips. “Ben,” he said, “I didn’t try to kill myself. Why would I do that?”

  “Why would you do a safety check in the middle of the night?”

  “I was stupid.”

  I shrugged.

  He drew in breath slowly. “Okay.” He looked away. “I did think about it—killing myself, I mean. Right after your mother’s accident, I thought about it a lot.” He closed his eyes. “When I went overboard, I knew all I had to do was let go of the EPIRB. It would have been easy.”

  He looked up at me and his voice turned hard. “But I didn’t let go. I didn’t want to let go.”

  I shifted my weight in the dark. I wondered if there was blood on the ledge where Dylan had lain. I wondered what had happened to the life jacket Dad had been wearing when he fell into the sea. I wondered who was riding Mom’s bicycle these days.

  “And you think what happened to your mother is my fault,” Dad said. “I know what you mean by that, and it’s not fair.” His fingers marked the width of the chair arm. “It took me a long time to figure that out,” he said. “But I did, and I can tell you it’s not fair.”

  He looked at me again. “I loved your mother, Ben. I love her now. Her face. Her voice. The way she laughed at me.” He shifted his gaze to the bushes at the edge of the patio. “The way she needed me,” he went on, “sometimes just to hold her.”

  He looked at his hand gripping the chair arm. “The way you reach for the wall sometimes,” he said, “just to steady yourself—like when you stump your toe and the pain makes you dizzy.”

  He let go of the chair arm and breathed in deeply. “And I needed her,” he said. “When she died, there was nothing to hold me up, and I fell.”

  He paused then looked up at me. “You’ve been so brave. You saved them.”

  “We saved each other,” I said.

  “Dylan told me everything. And Gerry’s been asking for you all night.”

  I reached for my bag. “I’ll be writing them,” I said.

  “But you can’t leave them. They’ll miss you.”

  “They’re tough. They’ll be okay.”

  “And you’ll miss—”

  “No,” I said quickly. “No, I won’t.”

  Dad sat still in his chair. I fingered the strap on my shoulder. The sounds of the sleeping town rose up around us. Car tires crunched on the street. A door shut somewhere in the hotel. The breeze pushed an old palm frond against the side of the building. We watched it slap the concrete helplessly with one worn brown leaf.

  Dad stood. “One more thing,” he said. He reached into his pocket and held something out to me.

  I put the bag down again and took it. It was a soft, silky square. Like a tiny pillow. I turned it over in my hands. A faint scent came off it. Mom. Mom’s sachet.

  “Where did you get this?” My voice was sharp.

  “The boxes.”

  “Where are the boxes?”

  “At my place.”

  I breathed in the fading perfume. I swallowed. “You didn’t give away her stuff?”

  “Of course not. Why would I do that?”

  “I thought—” The scent was making me dizzy. “Why did you bring this to me?”

  “I brought one for each of you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I couldn’t bring your mother.”

  I turned my back on him and walked away.

  As I walked, the sidewalk tilted up and down under my feet. I felt the lump of silk in my hand and the shaking inside me. I found myself again beside the sea. I lay down on the little sandy beach and the trembling stilled. I held the sachet to my cheek.

  The stars were swimming in the sky. I blinked again and again, and they came into focus. I had them memorized. I could see them from the bow of Chrysalis, from the beach of our island, from the bottom of the dinghy. The pinpricks of light glittering like broken glass, spilling in mysterious patterns across the night sky.

  Dylan had finally made me understand that the stars don’t change. We do. We see them from a tilting, spinning earth circling the sun. We can see them only when the sun is behind us. And even then we see only that tiny portion of the vast universe that is directly above the pinpoint of space we are pointed toward at that single moment in time.

  The earth had shifted and I could see Orion again with his belt of three brilliant stars. There were the Pleiades too, shining together like a dusting of silver on the sky.

  Pleiades means “the sisters.”

  We never had any sisters. Mom said once that someday our wives would be her daughters. She told us to love them because without love, she said, you are just another person. But with love, you are a power. I remember she was holding my hand on one side of her and Dylan’s on the other and Gerry was sitting in her lap. She had been trying to explain about the baby who had died, the brother who would have come after Gerry. Then she was telling us about how much she loved us and Dad. And then she was holding our hands and crying a little, and we were watching.

  What if she knew about it all? I thought. What would she say? What would anyone say? It had been awful, but it was over. We had survived. Tomorrow Dad and Dylan and Gerry would leave on a plane, and I would leave on a boat. Finally I would be free. I would be alone and empty and free.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

 
WHEN I WOKE up, I was wet with dew and sticky with sand. I sat up in the early sun, still holding the sachet, and realized I had left the duffel bag sitting on the patio table. My big dramatic exit, and I had screwed it up. I would have to go empty-handed. As I walked up to the marina, I saw the taxi driver standing by his cab and sipping coffee from a white mug. Just as I recognized Gerry’s blond head in the backseat of the cab, Dad walked out of the marina office.

  “There you are!” Dad said when he saw me. His face was tight. I could see he hadn’t slept all night.

  Gerry turned and looked through the open window at me.

  “Hi, Ben,” he called, his face breaking into a happy, little-kid grin.

  I smiled back.

  “We’re going home today,” Gerry said.

  I nodded a little. The cabdriver slid back into his seat and shut his door.

  “The ambulance is already on its way to the plane,” Dad said. “Once Dylan’s out of the hospital, he needs to get to Miami right away. We can’t wait. We have to hurry.” He shook his head. Then he turned to me. “Please, Ben,” he said.

  I looked away.

  “It was a mistake,” Dad said. “I should have—”

  The sun grew hotter. The silence stretched thin.

  Dad pulled the duffel bag out from beside Gerry and handed it to me. Gerry watched. The smile on his face was changing.

  Dad took out his wallet. He gave me four hundred-dollar bills. “That might be enough for a plane ticket,” he said. “If it’s not, I’ll wire it. Just telephone. I’ll—”

  The halyards rang like bells and the dockworkers called to one another. I shoved the money into my shirt pocket.

  “Please,” he said again.

  I looked at the road.

  “Shake?” Dad finally asked, and held out his hand.

  I took it. He held my hand a long, long minute.

  “Good luck,” he mumbled. Then he climbed quickly into the cab beside Gerry. He spoke to the driver. The car started.

  Gerry spun in his seat and looked at me out the back window as the car drove away. “What about Ben?” His mouth turned into a black square. “What about Ben?” He pressed his hands flat against the inside of the window. His palms went white. “What about Ben?” he cried, and the car slowly turned a corner on crunching tires.

  Then I was standing alone on the dock with my bag hanging on my back. I touched my shirt pocket. It was stiff. That was the money—and Mom’s picture. She didn’t look as good as when I first stuck her in the pages of my diesel engine book, but she was still there. I took her out and looked at her while I held the sachet to my cheek. I noticed she had Gerry’s eyes and Dylan’s mouth. I was the one who looked like Dad.

  I squinted my eyes against the sun’s glare and felt my insides swell with missing Mom. We never got to tell her good-bye. We never got to say how much we loved her. Now all I could think about was how bad it hurt to have lost her. I closed my eyes and stretched my jaw and slid Mom back into my pocket.

  And then, like turning a book of blank pages and suddenly seeing a picture, I saw the golden day again. I felt that cool breeze and heard that gentle ocean and saw my brothers’ bunny butts hopping off into the water while I sat there watching them and trying helplessly to remember something. My stupid brain had been like an engine trying to start, trying to turn over. A chug and silence. A chug and silence.

  Then standing there in the painful sunshine with my new ship in the harbor and slipping Mom’s picture into my pocket under the crisp bills, I felt the engine start, and the sound I heard was Dad. I heard Dad on the night after the baby died.

  I had given up getting a drink and had left Mom crying and Dad murmuring in the dark kitchen. When Mom slowly climbed the stairs and went to bed, I lay still, pretending sleep. Even later, I listened as Dad checked the doors downstairs and then came up himself. I heard him look in on Gerry and then come into our room. I heard him adjust Dylan’s covers and stand quietly for a moment by his bed. Then he came to me. He touched my hair. I turned over and saw him standing there in the half dark.

  He sat down on my bed and looked out into the lighted hallway. “You know, Ben,” he said, “I didn’t want children.” He turned and looked down at me. “I wanted freedom. At least that’s what I said.” He touched my arm. “But really I was afraid.” He picked up my hand. “How can anyone be a dad? How can you do all the things you need to do—all day every day for a lifetime?”

  He put my hand down and patted it. “And I knew,” he said quietly, “there would be days like today. From the day I first held you, I have been afraid of a day like today.”

  He leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes. “I heard you on the stairs,” he said. “You saw us in the kitchen tonight, didn’t you?”

  I nodded on my pillow.

  “You saw us crying. You know we’re sad.” He paused. “I’ll tell you a story.”

  He folded his hands in his lap and I closed my eyes.

  “Once upon a time, there was a man who was afraid. He felt safe in his study, but he was lonely. On an island nearby lived a beautiful woman. Sharks circled her island night and day, never resting. The man had a choice. He could close his door, learn not to think of her, and stay lonely. Or he could go outside and jump. He jumped.”

  Dad stopped. I opened my eyes and waited.

  Then he went on. “It’s been that way with each of you,” he said. “The knowing about the sharks and the jumping anyway. Tonight and for a long time to come, your mom and I will be hurting. But we are not sorry we jumped.”

  I turned slightly under my covers to face him. The light from the hall cast his silhouette in strong relief. He looked toward me. He took my hand again.

  “When you are a man—” he began, then stopped.

  “What?” I asked. “Will I jump?”

  He put my hand down again and stood. “I don’t know, Ben.” He bent and kissed me lightly on the forehead. “That’s your part of the story.”

  Then he walked away, and I lay in my bed, listening to Dylan breathe until I finally fell asleep.

  Now, standing in the sun, I heard Dad again. My dad. My only dad.

  The CDs broke as I dropped my bag on the cement dock.

  Then I was running.

  And that, I tell Gerry, is the end of the story. We went home. We found a new house. We unpacked the boxes.

  And when April came around again, we bought a new boat. We docked it at the lake, and now every chance we get, we take it sailing.

  Just us—skimming the lake, riding the wind.

  A boat. A dad. And three brothers.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Don K. Haycraft, Stephen and Ann Marlowe, Captain James E. Herlong, Dr. Stephen W. Hales, and Captain Cliff Block for generously sharing their expertise and support as the adventures of the Byron family unfolded.

  —M. H. Herlong