by Trish Doller
He holds my face lightly, tenderly, and kisses me. “Count on it.”
* * *
The next morning we take a series of buses to Fort-de-France, where we rent a car. As we head back south, Keane won’t tell me where we’re going, only that there is something he wants me to see. At the top of a bluff overlooking the ocean, near the town of Le Diamant, he brings me to a cluster of twenty concrete statues arranged in the shape of a triangle.
“In 1830, after slavery had been abolished in the islands,” Keane says, “a trader ship was bringing a secret cargo of slaves to Martinique. The ship was improperly anchored in the harbor and crashed into Diamond Rock”—he points to a lone rock jutting out of the sea—“drowning forty slaves, shackled together and chained to the hold.”
There is a defeated stoop to the shoulders of the statues, their brows carved heavy with sadness and their mouths turned down. They stand in a grassy field above the vast blue of the ocean, frozen in mourning, their sorrow eternal, and tears fill my eyes.
“The statues were arranged to symbolize the triangular trade route from West Africa to the Caribbean to the American colonies,” Keane says. “And they point a hundred and ten degrees toward the Gulf of Guinea. Toward home.”
I’m crying in earnest now.
“We build memorials to honor the memory of those we’ve lost, and to remember the tragedy of humans treating other humans as property,” he says. “I’ve been considering what you said about not knowing how to stop thinking about Ben and—well, I’d never ask that. You’ve already built a place for him in your heart, but if you’ve got a bit of room to spare…”
My face is wet, tears clinging to my lips, when I kiss him and whisper, “There is so much room for you.”
Back at Les Anses d’Arlet, we spend the afternoon sitting at a plastic table under a party tent, drinking Lorraines and listening to reggae. The locals do not speak English and Keane’s attempts at high school–level French make them laugh, but we get by. Queenie allows a group of children to bury her in the sand. When they’ve finished, she gets up and shakes sand everywhere, making them laugh and scream.
“This boat needs a name,” I say when we’re back aboard the Alberg that evening. “What about … Braveheart?”
Keane crinkles his nose. “As in William Wallace? ‘They’ll never take our freedom’? That’s a bit … Scottish. Of course, it’s your boat. Far be it from me to tell you what to do.”
“Yeah, you’ve never done that before.”
He laughs. “Whatever you choose will be perfect.”
“As long as it’s not Braveheart?”
“Exactly.”
I shift, straddling his lap to face him, kissing his mouth as I telegraph the message with my hips that I want him. “Doesn’t need to have a name right now.”
“No.” This time his laugh has a sexy, wicked edge and his lips are against my neck when he says, “No, it does not.”
There are other boats in the harbor, but the boom tarp is low enough that we don’t bother going down into the cabin. Keane rolls on a condom and I take off my bikini bottoms. No foreplay. No sweet words. Just need against need, fast, hard, and gasping. And when it’s over, I press soft kisses all over his face and whisper with each one that I love him.
The difference between Keane and Ben, I am realizing, is Keane belongs to me in a way Ben never did. Ben loved me, but he always had an exit strategy. Keane is mine for as long as I want him. I can feel it in everything he says, everything he does.
tiny fissures (28)
Our time in Martinique feels endless as we spend days exploring every part of the island.
We pack the tent and drive up to Presqu’île Caravelle, a peninsula on the east side of the island with a wild coastline and an abundance of surfer beaches. We search for the dive shack where Keane met Felix and Agda, but find only the abandoned husk, reclaimed by nature, the rafters inhabited by swifts. We camp on the beach for the night and spend the next day learning—or relearning, in Keane’s case—how to surf.
Another day we drive to Saint-Pierre, a town destroyed in 1902 by the eruption of Mount Pelée. A portion of the ruins remain, foundations of buildings dragged into the sea. Sainte-Pierre is a much smaller town now, having never fully recovered, many of the buildings boarded shut and a Catholic cathedral standing empty. I am reminded of Montserrat. Of how inconsequential my problems are in comparison. I’m a visitor who gets the best of paradise instead of the worst.
We are into our twelfth day on the island before we bring up the subject of leaving.
“Let’s not,” Keane says over breakfast in the cockpit. “We can squat in the dive shack. Fix it up. Raise some chickens and goats and grow our own vegetables.”
I smear guava jelly on a slice of baguette. “Okay.”
“You’re an easier sell than I thought.”
“I love Martinique,” I say. “And not just because of the sex.”
“No, but I’m always going to have the best memories of this island now.”
Being with Keane is effortless. There’s no guesswork involved with his moods, and I love how often his heart comes out of his mouth. I smile. Tell him to shut up, even though I love every word. He turns on the VHF and we listen to the weather forecast on a station broadcasting from St. Lucia.
“Our window is now,” he says. “Otherwise, we’ll get the front and have stay two or three more days.”
“I want to stay anchored here in this harbor forever.”
“What about Trinidad?”
At some point, Trinidad fell so far off my radar that I almost forgot about it. Following Ben’s course doesn’t matter so much anymore, but I need to see this trip through to the end. I need the closure. The only way to free ourselves from the tractor beam of this island is to go. I sigh. “Let’s leave in the morning.”
We take a long afternoon nap in the hammock. We buy a fat lobster for dinner from one of the local fishermen, and after the dishes are washed, I play with Queenie on deck while Keane checks his email.
“Anna.” There’s gravity in his voice, but light in his eyes when he looks at me. “I’ve been offered a spot aboard a sixty-five-footer during Barbados Sailing Week with an eye toward becoming permanent crew.”
The corners of his mouth twitch, wanting to smile, and as Queenie drops the ball into my lap, I consider how to respond in a way that won’t reveal the tiny fissures in my heart. Keane and I have talked so much about doing something new, something together, but this is his dream. He’s trying not to let it show, but he wants it. “That’s excellent.”
“And yet I’m not really getting a happy vibe.”
“I am happy.” Except there’s a catch in my chest at the thought of him leaving. “This might be the break you’ve been waiting for.”
He nods. “The owner wants me to join them for the round-the-buoys portion of the regatta, then do the Barbados to Antigua distance race.”
His excitement is too big to be contained, and his smile makes me wonder if this is the last smile his other girlfriends saw before the wind gods carried him away. I blink, trying to hold back tears. I feel foolish for thinking he belonged to me.
His smile falters. “You’re crying.”
“Yes, because I’m selfish.” I scrub my eyes with the heels of my hands. “I let myself believe we were going to build something together. I hoped that maybe I was enough to make you want to stay.”
“You are, but—”
“The worst part is that you don’t have to explain. I understand.”
“Come with me,” he says. “We’ll sail to Barbados together and you can explore the island while I’m racing.”
“What happens when you leave for Antigua? Or when the owner wants you to stay on for Key West or Tasmania or Dubai? Barbados was not part of Ben’s plan, and it’s certainly not part of mine.”
“This doesn’t have to be the end, Anna,” Keane says. “I’ll come back.”
“When?”
“I …
I don’t know.”
“I can’t be your contingency plan,” I say. “I have a victory lap to do on a beach in Trinidad, and even though I love you more than I could have ever imagined, I can do this without you.”
“So, what are you saying?”
“That we both have somewhere we need to go. If we’re meant to be together … we’ll find our way back.”
When he kisses me, I sink into it because kissing him has become as natural as breathing. When he is inside me, my body begs him to stay when my words don’t. Later, when he is asleep, and I am on deck alone in the dark—his scent lingering on my skin and the echo of his fingers in my hair—I cry myself to sleep.
* * *
We’re pretending that everything is okay as we walk the length of the town jetty to the open doors of Saint-Henri for Sunday Mass. I tell Keane I want him to be happy. That I don’t want him to live with regret. That we’ll never be more than a phone call or email away. But the lie in the middle is that I want him to change his mind. I kneel in the pew beside him, listening to him recite the prayers he knows by heart, and I pray for a miracle.
Again and again I stop myself from asking him to stay. It would be selfish. He is selfish. I am selfish. To the point where we cancel each other out, and we’re just humans, bumping along the dark walls of our lives, feeling for the switch that will give us light. Hoping we don’t fuck everything up.
When it’s time for Keane to go, he takes the rental car. He kisses me a million times on the jetty. Until he has no more wiggle room to get to the airport on time.
“I love you, Anna.” He kisses my forehead and it’s almost my undoing. “I hope you know that.”
“I do. I love you too.”
I don’t watch him drive away. I walk down the jetty and motor out to the Alberg without looking back. In some ways, I am back where I started—alone and miserable—but I am also changed. Stronger. Unafraid. Maybe Keane and I will be together someday, but I won’t lose the ability to function at the loss of him. And if that’s the legacy of our relationship, that is enough.
pirate queens (29)
I come out on deck the next morning to new neighbors—a large catamaran and a fifty-foot charter sailboat—and settle into the hammock with guava toast and my laptop. Among my emails is a note from my mother, complaining that Rachel and her brand-new boyfriend have already started talking about living together.
It’s too soon, Mom writes, but Rachel has never been very smart about men.
I laugh. Maybe none of us are very smart about men. Except that’s not true. Our timing may not have been perfect, but Keane was not the wrong man.
My mother doesn’t need another thing to worry about, so I don’t tell her I’m sailing alone again. Instead I fill my reply with Martinique, describing the slave memorial and the Mount Pelée eruption, the surfing and the camping. I take a picture of myself with Queenie, with Les Anses d’Arlet as our backdrop, letting her see that I am fine.
So she won’t feel sorry for me, I withhold the truth from Carla, offering the vague explanation that Keane had a job offer. I tell her I’m leaving Martinique soon, and that I should reach Trinidad in about a week. The finish line is so close. I have traveled more than 1,300 miles.
Queenie and I set sail at dusk. The breeze is stiff and the distance to St. Vincent longer than the crossing from Miami to Bimini—but I’m more confident than I was then, and my autopilot will give me some relief.
It’s a little boring without Keane. I listen to music, finish the book I’ve been reading through the whole chain of islands, and put out a fishing line, but I don’t catch a thing. While Queenie crunches her way through a bowl of kibble, I make myself a sandwich. I’m taking my first bite when I hear a rustling sound and look up to find the mainsail slumped on deck, blocking the companionway.
“Oh shit.”
I scramble up the steps and push past the fallen sail. The boat is still moving, but at a slower speed with only the one sail. Nothing else is broken—just the halyard that holds up the main—but I can’t climb the mast alone to fix it. And even if I could, I don’t know how.
“What the hell am I going to do?” I ask Queenie. She tilts her head, unhelpful.
Keane would have a solution and I consider texting him, but I have no cell signal and I need to figure this out on my own. I need a makeshift halyard.
“Halyard. Halyard.” I repeat the word over and over, as if saying it will manifest the answer. And it does. Because clipped to the lifeline is the spinnaker halyard.
I disable the autopilot, head the boat into the wind, and fasten the halyard to the top of the mainsail. The main doesn’t go all the way up the mast, but it buys me enough sail area to get to St. Vincent.
St. Lucia slides past in the night and I sleep in twenty-minute increments, scanning the horizon for potential disasters before setting each alarm. Dawn bursts in pinks and yellows across the sky, and St. Vincent looms ahead of me. I am bone-tired and hungry, but happiness fizzes up inside me like a shaken soda bottle and I dance around the cockpit until Queenie barks. I pick her up and snuggle her.
“We did it,” I tell her. “We are the pirate queens of the Caribbean.”
Ben would be proud. Keane too. But most important, I am proud of myself.
* * *
The first St. Vincent boat boy, Norman, is lurking offshore in a little pink skiff as I lower the sail and motor toward Wallilabou Bay. He hails me on the radio, offering his assistance with mooring, and I radio back that I will take care of it myself. Undeterred, Norman runs up alongside the Alberg, insisting he can help.
“Throw me a line,” he shouts. “I will take you to a mooring ball for just twenty EC.”
“No, thank you.” I try to keep my tone pleasant yet firm. Twenty Eastern Caribbean dollars is about $7.50. It’s not an unreasonable amount, but I don’t need help. Except Norman won’t go away.
Another hail comes over the VHF, another boat boy, Justice, offering a guided tour of Wallilabou and the sites where some of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were filmed. “After I help you moor, I can take you there.”
“I am not interested, thank you,” I respond, but he also comes out to meet me. They remind me of remora fish that swim with sharks, waiting for the flotsam that falls from the sharks’ mouths, but I don’t feel like the fearless predator in this scenario. Especially when Norman and Justice begin arguing with each other, their accents incomprehensibly thick and their boats drifting too close to mine.
A third skiff approaches, and a fourth, and they all clamor over one another to get my business, asking me to throw out a line, asking me to buy things, and peeking into my boat in a way that makes me incredibly uncomfortable. Norman grabs my lifeline, staking his claim over the others.
“Please take your hands off my boat.” My voice gets lost amid their arguing. I reach into the cockpit locker and take out the flare gun. Load it. Climb up on the cabin top and scream, “I don’t want a fucking mooring ball!”
The men go silent, their eyes round.
“I don’t want a tour. I don’t want a necklace.” My voice is as big as I can make it, and I point the flare gun at the bilge of Norman’s skiff. I would never fire it, but as long as he thinks I will, I have the upper hand. “I want you to take your hands off my boat and go away.”
He pulls his arms up in a sign of surrender and makes an I wasn’t doing anything wrong face at the others. These men are only trying to support themselves and their families, but their aggression is too much.
“All of you. Get the fuck away from me.”
They mutter to one another as they leave. Look back over their shoulders as if they expect me to beg their return. Call me a crazy white bitch. My hands shake as I climb back down into the cockpit, turn the boat around, and motor away from Wallilabou Bay.
My eyelids are heavy with exhaustion—so tired, I could cry—but it’s only four or five more hours to Bequia, the next island in the Grenadines chain. A hysterical laugh escape
s me when I realize five more hours at sea no longer fazes me. I hug the coast of St. Vincent until I am calm enough to raise my jury-rigged sail and kill the engine.
* * *
The water in Admiralty Bay is so green and clear that I can see my anchor buried in the sand at the bottom. I dive in from the stern rail and Queenie splashes down beside me, dog-paddling in circles around me as I float on my back under the sun. My belly is filled with pancakes, and in the cool water, St. Vincent washes off me like sweat. We take a long nap in the hammock, go ashore to check in at customs, and stroll the Belmont Walkway, a narrow strip of pavement that runs along the seawall. We eat lionfish pizza at a little blue hut. And stop at Daffodil Marine Services to drop off my dirty laundry and hire someone to fix my halyard. Daffodil—a self-made businesswoman who raised her boat boy game to a marine service empire—guarantees both will be done by tomorrow morning.
Back on the boat, I doodle a sketch of me and my dog as pirate queens—Queenie with an eye patch, and me with crossed cutlasses behind my head—and write State of Grace O’Malley beneath. Long stretches of time pass without me saying a word. I sit with myself and am satisfied in my soul. Even missing Keane doesn’t change that.
The harbor is lively with yachts, fishermen, and ferries from other islands, and a white woman from the nearest sailboat calls across the distance. She introduces herself as Joyce Fields from Port Huron, Michigan, and after I call my name back, she invites me to come have a drink. I put Queenie in the dinghy, and barely a minute later a glass of rum punch is pushed into my hand.
“Come, sit.” Joyce is an apple-shaped woman wearing a strapless bathing suit that seems perpetually on the verge of falling down. Her tan is leather dark, and I wonder if my skin looks the same as hers. I don’t know if it’s because of the rum, the island, or a combination, but she is shiny-happy. “Where are you from, Anna?”