by Trish Doller
In fury.
In anguish.
For the man I lost.
For the man he’ll never be.
I howl until my throat is raw and my voice is a scratch.
“I hate you.” I’ve said those words to Ben’s memory before, but this time I don’t let guilt try to snatch them back. “Fuck you for leaving me. Fuck you for dying.”
The stages of grief are not linear. They are random and unpredictable, folding back on themselves until you begin mourning all over again. I have bargained with a universe that is not listening. I have cried myself hollow. I have leaned into the belief that I can’t live without Ben Braithwaite, but kneeling here in the sand on a beach four hundred miles from home says maybe I can—and that terrifies me.
a place to land (14)
Keane is asleep when I return to our campsite. The fire is a pile of crackling embers and the remains of our lobster fest are gone. I’ve been away longer than I thought. I crawl into a tent that used to be the right size for two people, but now feels too small.
“Hey,” Keane says with a yawn. He shifts his arm to make a space for me beside his body. The rage that had almost burned itself out flares up, sparking an impulse to throw myself at him. Kiss him. Fuck him. Use him. Not to soothe a lonely little ache, but to slash at Ben’s memory. Except it didn’t work in Bimini. And it isn’t Ben who would have to deal with the fallout. Keane and I would be the ones left with the scars.
“I’m a fucking mess.”
“I don’t mean anything by it,” Keane says. “I just thought you might need a place to land.”
So I land, stretching out beside him, my head on his shoulder, as he holds me. There’s something about Keane Sullivan that makes me want to burrow inside his chest and live there, safe and warm, but I’m afraid to move for fear he’ll think I want something more from him. I close my eyes, thinking instead how far sound carries. How much did Keane hear? “I’m sorry I left. I—”
“You don’t owe me an explanation.”
“Will you tell me something?”
“What kind of something?”
“Anything,” I say. “Just talk until I fall asleep.”
His chest quivers beneath my cheek as he laughs. His shirt is soft, and his fingertips are warm on my arm. “This shouldn’t take long at all.”
I close my eyes and he begins a story about how his mother picked his confirmation name because she didn’t trust him to choose for himself.
“To be fair,” he says, “I was heavily under the influence of American rap at the time, so my suggestion of Tupac was not well received.”
I’m too tired to laugh, but I smile. “What name did she give you?”
“Aloysius.”
“That’s pretty awful.”
“It is,” he agrees. “Killed my career as a rapper before it even—”
“Keane?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
His lips press the top of my head. “Go to sleep, Anna.”
My heart rate slows, and I focus on the steady thump of his heart as everything in me quiets. I wake some time later, still tucked against him; my arm wrapped around Keane’s torso. I should let go, but I don’t.
“Are you awake?” I whisper.
“No.”
I laugh as I sit up. Gold gathers along the horizon and the sky is early-morning blue when I unzip the tent screen to watch the sunrise. “Did you sleep at all?”
Keane sits up beside me, shaking his arm and wiggling the life back into his fingers. Sunbeams play in the air around him. “A bit.”
“Please tell me I wasn’t snoring.”
“No,” he says. “I just didn’t want to move for fear of waking you.”
“You stayed up all night because—” I rub my hand over my face and blink back tears. “Could you possibly be any nicer?”
He’s silent, and when I sneak a glance from the corner of my eye, his mouth seems to be wrestling with itself. I look away. He clears his throat. “Actually … I could.”
The tent shrinks even smaller. Three years with Ben did not make me invisible. I recognize attraction when I see it and I understand what Keane meant. I just don’t know what to do about it. It’s been ten months and—My heart free-falls in my chest as I realize I’ve lost track.
“I don’t know about you,” I say, scrambling out of the tent, “but I could use some coffee—and breakfast.”
“Breakfast,” he echoes. “Right.”
Keane and I strike the tent, and as we motor away from the beach in silence, our equilibrium is off.
* * *
When it’s time to leave, Keane pulls up the anchor and guides me out of the harbor. I’m still afraid, but I focus solely on the channel in front of me and trust the sound of his voice, altering course only when he calls out an adjustment. We make it through the cut without incident and last night’s red sunset proves itself true—it’s a gorgeous day for sailing. A downwind sleigh ride that will push us closer to the Turks and Caicos.
“So, what’s the plan?” Keane asks, taking first watch at the helm. It’s early yet, so I sit with him, Ben’s chart book spread across my knees. San Salvador Island is believed to be where Christopher Columbus first set foot in the western hemisphere, but according to Ben’s handwritten note in the margin of the map, Mayaguana may have been the actual landing spot. “I guess I can see why Ben might want to go there.”
Keane doesn’t offer his opinion.
“It seems pretty desolate,” I say. “Kind of like Samana.”
His mouth pinched into a straight line, Keane only nods.
“Clearly you have something you want to say, so say it.”
“Mayaguana is very undeveloped,” he says. “And Christopher Columbus? He abused the indigenous peoples, introduced them to any number of lethal diseases, and paved the way for the transatlantic slave trade.”
This trip is not going the way I expected. Everything is different. “Are you saying we should go straight to Providenciales?”
“I’m not saying anything. But if I were, that’s what I’d be saying.”
I set aside the chart book and laugh. “Okay. Fuck Christopher Columbus. We’re going to the Turks and Caicos.”
“Grab the helm.”
I take over the tiller, and he disappears into the cabin, returning with the bag containing the spinnaker, a sail Ben and I never used. On the foredeck, he secures the sail bag to the side rail. As he moves, it’s clear Keane has done this hundreds of times—maybe thousands—and it makes me sad that the people who once valued him see his prosthesis as a hindrance. The spinnaker crackles like tissue paper as it goes up, fluttering in the wind, flashing bright primary colors on a field of white.
“Now head dead downwind,” Keane says, rolling up the jib and trimming the spinnaker. The belly of the sail fills with air and the boat surges forward. Fast becomes even faster and it feels as though we’re flying.
“I won’t ask you to do that.” He takes over the tiller and I shift so he can sit. “Unless you want to learn.”
“I don’t know.” The fat, colorful sail snaps in the wind, the edges curling in and billowing out. “I might.”
The hours stretch out like other crossings we’ve made, long and slow, despite the boat racing through the sea at seven knots, and we fill the time as best we can. Sailing can be romantic. It can be exciting. But it can also be mind-numbingly dull. I find the deck of cards and we play a few rounds of War. When we tire of cards, I bring up the travel Scrabble board and we argue over whether banjax is a real word.
“In Ireland it is,” Keane says. “It means to make a mess of things, usually by being incompetent.”
“We’re not in Ireland.”
“Well, we’re not in the United States, either, but I reckon if you’d just played a twenty-two-pointer with a triple-word score, you wouldn’t be arguing.”
“No, I’d be winning.”
His shoulders shake as he laughs so hard that I star
t laughing too. When I finally get my breath back, I say, “I have a question.”
“Ask it.”
“Do you have a home? I mean, like an apartment somewhere in the world where you keep your stuff?”
“I wasn’t joking about traveling with everything I own,” he says. “I suppose my permanent address is back in Tralee with my folks, but I’m a vagabond. A chemineau, if you will.”
“Is that what it means?”
He nods. “I looked it up.”
“Do you ever get lonely?”
Keane is quiet for a few beats. “Sometimes, especially when I’m at home in Ireland, when I see my siblings with their families. I wonder if I’m missing out.” He adjusts the trim on the spinnaker. “But companionship is easy enough to find, especially for a handsome bastard like me.” He glances at his watch. “You’ve still got about an hour before my shift ends.”
I don’t have anything to do, but I feel like I’ve been dismissed. I go down into the cabin, grab my comforter from Keane’s bunk, and crawl into the V-berth. Once I’m stretched out, the wind and waves send me straight to sleep.
* * *
“Anna.” Keane’s voice burrows into my sleeping brain. It’s time to wake up, but I’m not ready. After a long night of sailing, it feels as if I’ve only been asleep for a few minutes. “Anna.” His voice is low, but there’s an urgency that pulls me upright. “Come here. There’s something you need to see.”
I climb up on deck, expecting dolphins or sea turtles, but we’re being followed by a small pod of humpback whales. Keane turns the boat into the wind, bringing us to a stop, and the whales surface a few yards from the boat. A large barnacle-crusted head rises out of the water and pushes air from its blowhole, sending a puff of salty spray over us like a misty rain.
“Oh my God.”
The whale holds there, watching us until it sinks below the surface. We scramble to the foredeck and sit on the port rail while the boat drifts. The dark bumpy bodies arc through the water, their stubby dorsal fins appearing and disappearing. The large whale moves closer to the boat, rolling over to reveal its white underside and long pectoral fins.
“I think it’s showing off.” I don’t know why I’m whispering, but there are no other sounds except the splash of their huge bodies, and the moment feels too sacred to disturb.
“I reckon you’re right.”
“This is”—I push away a tear with the heel of my hand—“this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I have a mate who lived in Martinique for a time.” I appreciate that Keane keeps his voice low too. “A few years back we were hanging out on the beach after doing some surfing when a pod of about four humpbacks happened past. They were breaching and lobtailing—that thing where they slap their tails against the water—and it was a spectacular sight, but nothing like being this close.”
Two smaller whales seem to be playing a game of how close they can come to the boat, swimming right below our dangling feet, but the large whale is nowhere to be seen. Suddenly, in the distance, the surface explodes, and the large whale leaps out of the sea. The huge body crashes back into the water, sending an enormous white spray up and out, in every direction. The boat dances on the ripples, but neither of us speaks. I don’t even know what to say. We sit in silent awe. And when the whales are gone, we let the boat drift.
“I wish—” I stop myself from saying Ben’s name, and feel conflicted about that. I still wish he were here, but this experience is perfect without him. It belongs to us—to Keane and me—and all the wishing in the world can’t make Ben part of this. “I wish they’d stayed a little longer.”
“We could linger a bit,” Keane says. “See if they come back.”
I shake my head. “That wouldn’t make this any more perfect.”
He douses the sagging spinnaker and unfurls the jib as I bring the boat back on course for Providenciales. We’re still about four hours from the island, but we’re in the home stretch.
“I’m going to have a short sleep,” he says. “And after, I’ll make breakfast, okay?”
“That would be great. And thank you for not letting me miss the whales.”
“Seeing them without you wouldn’t have been nearly as good.”
the next anna (15)
Providenciales brings a dock and real showers. It brings a break from sailing. Dry land for legs that have forgotten how to walk. I head to the customs office at the marina for a new round of paperwork, and my bank account shrinks as I pay the cruising fee and dockage. When I get back, Keane raises the Turks and Caicos courtesy flag and we collapse. Even though we took turns sleeping on the passage from Samana, we’re worn out from two straight days at sea. Keane falls asleep stretched out in the cockpit and we eat ham sandwiches for dinner because neither of us feels like cooking.
The next morning Keane sweeps a small beach’s worth of sand from the cabin as I gather our laundry. His clothes feel different, smell different than mine, but I try not to let my brain make an issue out of it when I wash our clothes together.
“Did you just get to Provo?” The other person in the laundry room is an older white woman with frizzy graying red hair and sport sandals. She gives me a friendly smile.
“Yesterday. How can you tell?”
“The big bag of laundry gave it away,” she says. “That’s the first thing we do when we reach a new port. I’m Corrine.”
“Anna.”
“My husband, Gordon, and I are on the Island Packet down the way,” she says. “It’s called Patience.” I’m constantly surprised by how quickly cruisers invite you into their personal lives, as if having a sailboat makes you part of a secret society. Or maybe days at sea leave them hungry for human contact. Either way, I’m half-expecting Corrine to hand over her email password before long. “We’re from Ontario, Canada.”
“I have the Alberg,” I tell her, which launches her into a story about her husband’s first boat being an Alberg before she wanders off on a tangent about how they were high school sweethearts who married other people but reconnected after their spouses died.
“We married, retired, bought the boat, and now we live aboard full-time,” she says as Keane enters the laundry room, his hair damp and spiky, the two days’ worth of scruffy beard now shaved back to stubble.
He offers to stay with the wash so I can take a shower. I introduce him to Corrine, who begins her introductory spiel all over. Keane is so much better at this than I. He doesn’t just have impeccable manners, he has a genuine interest in other people. Keane is a bonder. The next time Corrine meets someone new, she’ll likely have a story about the nice young Irishman she met in Provo.
I slip away unnoticed and head for the shower, where I strip the salt from my body. Samana cracked me open. I left a girl-shaped skin on that midnight beach and as I wipe the fog from the mirror, I see the next Anna revealed. Limbs darkened. Hair streaked white by the sun. Unfamiliar and recognizable at the same time. She looks healthier and, maybe, happier.
I dress in a dusty-pink skirt scattered with white polka dots and a navy-blue tank top. Put on makeup. Rub half of it away. By the time I return to the laundry room, Keane is folding our dry clothes and Corrine is gone.
“Win another member for the Keane Sullivan fan club?” I pick through the pile for my underwear. I can’t let him fold the holes and period stains and hanging threads.
He laughs. “We’ve been invited to dinner tomorrow.”
“Of course.”
“You look very pretty.” He tosses the compliment out, his eyes on the shirt he’s folding, but the back of his neck has turned pink. My face gets warm. The whole thing feels like a scene out of a high school dance. His sincerity is so much more potent than his casual charm.
“Thank you.”
He clears his throat. “We’ll need to hire a taxi to get to town. I’ll make the call.”
Our marina is on the rocky southern shore of the island, very different from the northern beaches that stretch
out like a wide golden welcome to the Atlantic. The resorts and villas are upscale. Places where celebrities are caught canoodling in the ocean.
Keane and I aren’t heading anywhere so glamorous. No infinity pools or private balconies for us. Our destination is the IGA to stock up on foods that will be easy to prepare on the big crossing if the weather is bad. Cup Noodles and pop-top cans of Chef Boyardee. Cold cuts and canned tuna. Cheese and crackers.
On our way back to the marina, the taxi is stalled in slow-moving traffic when we pass a tiny shop with a couple of Jeeps for rent. Keane flings open his door. “I’m going to hire a Jeep.”
Before I can say anything, he bolts from the taxi and traffic moves forward, leaving him behind. I’m unloading the groceries from the trunk when Keane rolls up in a bright yellow topless Jeep. He pays the taxi driver, and hands me the keys to the rental. “Want to take it for a spin?”
“Sure.”
“I was thinking I might varnish the teak, so if you’d like to explore the island on your own for a bit…” He trails off, rubbing the top of his head and looking slightly uncomfortable.
“Is that a euphemism for masturbation?”
Keane laughs. “It could be, but no. What I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t feel obligated to hang around with me if there’s something you’d rather be doing. The teak on the cockpit benches could, in fact, use a coat of varnish and I’m happy to do it.”
“Then I guess I’ll take you up on the offer.”
We unload the groceries, and I tuck my ID and some cash into the pocket of my skirt and tie my hair back in a ponytail. Keane hands me a business card with his cell phone number printed on it. “In case you need bail money.”
Having never driven on the left-hand side of the road, I spend the first mile feeling like a head-on collision waiting to happen. When I reach a roundabout, I sit too long, afraid to merge into the circle. The car behind me honks impatiently, then cuts around me. Eventually I work up the nerve and take the exit that leads me to the main highway. I drive until I come to a smaller road that runs along the Atlantic coastline—a more rustic version of A1A back home—and stop when I reach a waterfront restaurant called da Conch Shack.