Float Plan

by Trish Doller

  Between Paradise Island and New Providence, Nassau Harbor is filled with boats of every size and variety, including five cruise ships that mean the nearby streets will be busy with tourists. We skirt the cruise docks and pass under the two bridges that connect the islands before reaching the marina. Keane hands over the tiller and prepares the lines, while I bring the boat alongside the dock. I’m too far away—afraid of a repeat performance of Miami—but he tosses a line around the piling and pulls us close.

  stinging mark (7)

  Nassau is every bit as disappointing as it is familiar. Aside from driving down the left-hand side of the road, it’s a lot like Florida. The main shopping drag is lined with the same types of tourist shops, chain restaurants, and upscale retailers as Key West. Ten bucks will get you three cheap T-shirts, exactly like the beach shops back home in Fort Lauderdale. There’s a Starbucks. Burger King. KFC. And with all the pale Americans flooding the sidewalks, it sounds like we’re in the United States too. I understand why Ben didn’t want to come here. There’s nothing wrong with Nassau, but there’s nothing really special about it either.

  Our first stop the following morning is the marine supply store for the items on Keane’s list, along with a heavier anchor, extra propane for the stove, and a canvas tarp to tent across the boom to provide shade when we’re at anchor. Ben was going to have a Bimini top installed over the cockpit, but he never did.

  We have lunch at a Bahamian restaurant that serves stewed conch with tomatoes and peppers, then take a cab to Nassau’s version of Walmart to restock the galley, and as I collect receipts, I worry that I won’t have enough money to finish the trip. Ben left a decent amount in our shared bank account, but there are still so many miles, so many islands, between here and Trinidad. So many things that could go wrong. And when it’s over, I need to get home.

  After everything is unpacked, I head to the marina bathroom to take a shower. I return to find Keane parked in front of a small laptop, a scowl etched into his usually sunny face. He slaps the computer shut without acknowledging my return, grabs his bathing supplies, and stalks off the boat. While he is gone, I break out my own laptop and connect to the marina Wi-Fi to find an email from Carla.

  Anna,

  A small part of me is pissed that you left town without telling me. We’ve been best friends this long for a reason. I mean, you can trust me with your shit. But a bigger part of me is happy that you finally stepped back into the world. Be brave but careful. Be smart but also reckless once in a while. If you have sex with a stranger, use protection. And don’t sink the boat.

  Love,

  Carla

  I send back a brief reply, letting her know I’m in Nassau and that I’ve hired a guide. Someday I’ll tell her how I met Keane Sullivan, but for now it’s just too weird. I’m about to email my mom when I get a message from Rachel.

  Did you steal that boat?

  What?! No!

  Ben left it to me.

  His mother has been trying to

  contact you. Because she’s

  contesting Ben’s will,

  she says you’ve technically

  stolen the boat. She’s giving you

  the chance to return it before they

  get their lawyer involved.

  That’s not right.

  My name is on the title.

  Do you have proof?

  Yes.

  Scan it and send it to Mom.

  Okay. How’s she doing?

  I’m surprised you care.

  Don’t start.

  Just send proof you own the boat.

  I frown, waiting for her to say something else, but she’s gone.

  Keane hasn’t returned, so I leave a note that I’m running an errand, and hide the hatch key under the buffing sponge inside an old Turtle Wax tin. The tin is nearly as old as the boat and it’s one of those products that’s so common, no one would even think to look for keys inside. Still, I’m a little nervous and consider waiting for Keane, but I need to find an internet café before it gets too late.

  The café is a short walk from the marina. I scan the title, attach it to an email to my mother, and return within half an hour. Keane’s red towel hangs over the lifeline, but he’s nowhere to be found. When I think about our afternoon in Nassau, I can’t pinpoint anything I might have done wrong. I bought everything on his list without complaint and spent more money than I’d intended. Something—or someone—on his computer must have set him off.

  I watch a movie on my laptop while I wait for him to come back. Fix a salad for dinner with some lettuce that’s starting to go brown and the leftover fried mackerel. Make up Keane’s bed and mine. Try not to worry about someone I have no business worrying about. All around me, Nassau is wide-awake and pulsing with energy. People are laughing and talking throughout the marina. Even when darkness falls, boats motor up and down the channel. I distract myself with a book until my eyes get too heavy to stay open.

  A boat-shaking thump jolts me awake, my heart hammering in my chest and my brain automatically assuming a boat thief or worse.

  “Fuck.” The word is loud, clear, and Keane. I let out a shaky breath and climb up into the cockpit, hoping he hasn’t woken up the entire marina. I find him sitting on the floor, rubbing the back of his disheveled head.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fuck.” He mutters it this time. “I didn’t mean to wake you. Had a bit of a crash landing, is all. Anna—”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Aye, but, Anna—”

  The alcohol fumes rolling off him are strong enough to light on fire. “Exactly how much did you drink?”

  “Only four shots of Jameson.” He holds up two fingers and squints one eye, making me wonder if he’s so drunk, he’s seeing double. His accent is deeper, more Irish than usual. “But I lost count of the pints somewhere after eight.”

  “Eight beers? Why aren’t you dead?”

  “I’ll surely be asking myself the same in the morning, but, Anna, listen,” he says, his voice serious. “There’s something I need to tell you. It’s of critical importance.”

  “What?”

  “Swimming with the pigs is a terrible plan.”

  The next destination in Ben’s chart book is Big Major Cay, an island in the Exumas inhabited only by wild pigs. Ben and I had loved watching videos of people swimming with the pigs and camping overnight on the beach. At the grocery store, I told Keane I wanted to go to Pig Beach. He’d simply nodded and grabbed a sack of potatoes so we’d have something to feed them. So I’m confused—and a little pissed off. “No, it’s not.”

  “It is, Anna.” Keane lies back on the cockpit floor as if too drunk to stay upright. “They may well be fucking adorable with their wee snouts”—he gestures above his nose—“but they’ll eat all your spuds and want nothing more to do with you.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I’m more than a little pissed off now. “This is something Ben wanted to do, so we’re doing it.”

  “Well, Ben was stupid,” he says. “Stupid for wasting his time on bloody fucking pigs and stupid for leaving you behind.”

  His words leave a stinging mark on my heart, the way skin feels after it’s been slapped. I wait for him to apologize, or to say anything at all, but the silence is punctuated by the drunken snore of a sleeping man. The better person inside me wants to remove his prosthesis so his skin won’t get irritated, but I’m not the better person tonight. Keane Sullivan can go to hell.

  I leave him lying in the cockpit and wonder if he thinks this whole trip is one big joke. If he’s humoring the silly runaway American girl to get himself a free trip to Puerto Rico. Except my thoughts catch on the last part of what Keane said—about Ben being stupid for leaving me behind—and I wonder what, exactly, he meant.

  * * *

  Keane sits up, groaning and blinking in the sunlight, as I step out on deck with my morning coffee and a bagel. He runs his hand over the back of his head. “Jesus.” He pulls his fingers away
, examines them as if expecting blood, and looks up at me. “How big an apology do I owe you?”

  “What makes you think you owe me one?”

  “Because you’re looking at me as if you’ve found me stuck to the bottom of your shoe,” he says. “And if I didn’t, you’d probably have brought me a cup of coffee too.”

  “Maybe even a bagel.”

  “Ouch. What exactly did I say?”

  “That swimming with the pigs is a terrible idea.”

  He takes a deep breath and blows it out slowly. “Well, to be truthful, it’s turned into a bit of a tourist trap, but I should have kept that opinion to myself. It’s not my place to question your decisions. You’re the boss.”

  “You also said Ben—” I stop. Putting Keane on the spot will be embarrassing at best. At worst, he’ll be forced to admit something he might never have said while sober—something I don’t want to confront. “You said Ben was stupid for wanting to waste his time on pigs.”

  “Christ.” He tips backward until he’s lying on the deck again. “I’m a useless bastard and you should probably put me off the boat immediately. I am so sorry, Anna. I reacted badly to some disappointing news and it was wrong of me to take it out on you. Can you forgive me?”

  “We’re going to Pig Beach.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “You should probably clean up,” I say as he slowly gets to his feet. “You’ve been wearing your leg all night.”

  Keane returns from the shower dressed in an olive-green T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. He smells like sunscreen instead of whiskey. “I have one more errand before we go,” he says, dropping off his toiletry kit and a different prosthetic leg that has a web of white plastic. The socket is blue with a raindrop pattern that suggests this is some sort of waterproof leg. “Shouldn’t be more than fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  True to his word, he’s back on time and carrying a small outboard motor on his shoulder. Just about the right size for a dinghy. “I’ll have to build a bracket for it”—he holds up a plastic shopping bag—“but now we won’t have to row.”

  An outboard for the dinghy was another thing Ben never got around to buying. He could have afforded a brand-new motor, but one of his favorite games had been finding deals online, so I know how much outboards cost. “I can’t—I don’t have the money for that.”

  “I know a guy,” Keane says. “And this one was a steal because it doesn’t run. Yet.”

  I try not to smile, but I can’t help myself. It’s a thoughtful gesture and, although I don’t know him well, buying a broken engine as an apology seems like a very Keane Sullivan thing to do. “Are you sure you can fix it?”

  He shrugs. “About eighty-two percent.”

  A laugh escapes me. I can probably forgive him. “Thank you.”

  “No, Anna, thank you.”

  “Shut up,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.”

  a small fire (8)

  Nassau at our backs, the Alberg finds a six-knot groove and soars toward the Exumas. We return to deep water, rich blue and rolling, and the rush of waves along the length of the boat is music. Wind and water come together like a song. Pleasure and guilt weave a vine around my heart when I try to conjure Ben, but there’s nothing like this in our history. I will never create another new memory with him.

  I escape into the cabin, trying to keep Keane from seeing me cry. I’m wiping my eyes on my T-shirt when I hear him say my name. “Bring the bucket when you come, will you?”

  His tone is calm, so we’re not sinking. I don’t think there’s any need to panic, but I grab the bucket and quickly climb topside. Something shoots past my head and splashes back into the sea. Scattered around the deck are half a dozen flying fish, in various stages of death. Some of the little silver bodies are unmoving—dead on impact—while others heave, their gossamer wings spreading and fluttering as though trying to take off.

  “Scoop them up,” Keane says as another fish flings itself into the cockpit. “We can have them for dinner.”

  Flying fish are not a new phenomenon for me. Ben and I encountered them once, but keeping one was purely accidental. It flew right past us, through the open companionway, and we didn’t find it until we got back to the dock. I’m not sentimental about these little kamikazes, so I gather them into the bucket.

  “The fillet knife is in my sailing bag,” Keane says. “You’ll want to gut them before you put them on ice.”

  “Me?”

  “Why not? This is the perfect opportunity to learn. I’ll talk you through it.”

  The bucket wobbles in my hand as the fish flop around inside. They’re so much smaller than the mackerel, and I can see myself slicing open a finger. I hold the pail out to him. “Never going to happen. I will happily cook them, but if you want these fish for dinner, you’re going to have to clean them yourself.”

  Keane looks at me. His eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, but the corners of his mouth twitch like he wants to laugh. Finally he grins and accepts the bucket. “Fair enough.”

  I take over the tiller.

  “So, Anna,” he says, slicing open the belly of a fish no longer than his hand. He’s brutally efficient, yet somehow gentle. “Do you mind my asking how old you are?”

  “Twenty-five. You?”

  “I’ll be thirty at the end of the month. On the thirtieth, in fact.”

  “My mom always called those magic birthdays. When your age is the same as the date,” I say. “Mine happened when I was five.”

  “And was it magic?”

  “Well, I got everything I wished for,” I say. “My grandma made me a cake with purple roses, I got a princess doll with a light-up tiara, and my dad took the training wheels off my bike. It seemed magical at the time, but in retrospect, my expectations were pretty typical for a five-year-old.”

  “On the other hand, you’ve had twenty years of believing that certain birthdays hold magic,” he says, and a beat later: “I’d wish to be twenty-five again.”

  There’s a note of something in his voice that keeps me from asking why. He does nothing to fill the uncomfortable silence as he finishes the fish. Even after he comes back from putting them on ice, Keane sits in the cockpit, staring off toward the horizon. We sail this way for miles, running along the Exumas chain, until it looks like the sun is touching the ocean. If the red sky in Bimini was the work of an angry artist, this one is messy purple fingers dragged slowly through gold.

  “Christ,” Keane finally mutters. “Aren’t we a gloomy pair? You, missing your Ben, and me, all maudlin over the shite hand I’ve been dealt. Then this sky happens, and I think it must be God asking me how I dare wallow in self-pity when he’s giving me this gift.”

  “You still believe in God?”

  He shrugs. “Of course. Don’t you?”

  “He hasn’t done me any favors lately.”

  “I can see how you might feel that way,” Keane says. “But moments like these remind me how much worse my life could have turned out.”

  “Worse than losing your leg?”

  “Aye,” he says. “I could have been the guy who did this to me.”

  I want to know what happened, but I don’t want to pry, and Keane doesn’t elaborate. Instead he stands. “Think I’ll go fry that fish. Hungry?”

  “I told you I would make dinner.”

  “I’m feeling restless.”

  He leaves me on deck as night settles and stars populate the sky. Pans rattle and Keane whistles a nameless tune while he cooks. Ben and I never got comfortable using the stove when we were underway. The pitch and yaw of the boat made conditions too unpredictable. We almost always brought picnic foods so we could avoid cooking. But Keane seems unbothered by the wind and waves. It’s maybe an hour later when he brings up a citronella candle and what’s left of the bottle of wine I opened in Bimini, then returns with plates of flying fish with steamed potatoes and cabbage.

  He takes the helm and I fork off a bit of fish. The outside is crisp, while the insid
e is delicate, not fishy at all. “This is better than anything I could have made,” I say. “I’m feeling pretty spoiled.”

  “Remember it with fondness,” he says. “Because when we’re making the passage from the Turks and Caicos to San Juan with no land in sight and the possibility of eight-to-ten-foot swells, you’ll be wishing for something other than instant soup and noodles.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It can get ugly.”

  “God, I would never have been able to do that by myself,” I say. “I barely made it from Miami to Bimini.”

  “But you made it.” Keane takes a drink from the wine bottle and offers it to me. Putting my lips where his have been seems too personal, but I push the thought aside. It’s only wine. “Even I wouldn’t want to do a solo passage to San Juan, though.”

  “Do you think I’ll be able to sail the Caribbean by myself?”

  “Absolutely,” he says. “You’ll be island hopping again, so you’ll make good time unless you run into bad weather. Since it’s nearly winter, there’s always a chance of that.”

  “What should I do if there’s bad weather?”

  “If you’re sailing, keep going,” he says. “But if you can wait it out, stay where you are and drink a little more rum until the weather improves. It always does.”

  We polish off the fish and as I’m finishing the dishes, Keane calls down that it’s time to make the tack that will take us to Pig Beach. It’s dark, so I won’t be able to visit the beach until morning, but a rush of excitement bubbles up inside me as I think about fulfilling one of Ben’s goals—and seeing the pigs for myself. I go out on deck and we make the tack.

  With the boat on course, we finish the bottle of wine, passing it back and forth. By the time we reach the island, the alcohol has banked a small fire in my belly that’s warm and content. In Bimini, I was drunk and out of control, but tonight I enjoy the peace.