Songs for the End of the World

by Saleema Nawaz

  “Harold, are you listening? We need to take some precautions.”

  “My dear, it’s a computer bug.” He made a mental note to cut more plastic tubing to protect the rode where it came around the bow of the boat.

  “What if our autopilot goes down?” said Faye. “Or we lose our GPS?”

  “We’ll handsteer. We’ll navigate by the stars. We’ll do as the sailors of yore. Not to mention we’ll be in Sydney by then.” They still had three weeks to make the journey to Australia, though they ought to have had six. They had tarried too long in Bora Bora, then again in Tonga. He resented how their itinerary still tormented them like a bad dream, even though they had agreed in principle that they needed to remain flexible. Boats that didn’t account for vagaries of the weather ended up at the bottom of the ocean. “With any luck we won’t have to be steering or navigating at all.” Just last night they’d reviewed the plan: one week to New Caledonia, four days at the marina, then another week to Australia, with three days to spare before New Year’s Eve and the millennial midnight countdown. The weather was the biggest variable, but Harold was feeling good about their chances. It was pretty much the only thing he still felt good about.

  “Don’t talk to me about luck,” said Faye. “I mean it.”

  He turned to her. Her brows were knitted together and there was an edge to her voice. He couldn’t tell if there was more to her anger than her usual pre-departure unhappiness. “Do you want to double-check the provisions? We could go get some lettuce before we set off, if you like.” Faye got temperamental the longer she was deprived of fresh produce.

  His wife made a face, then nodded and headed for the galley.

  * * *

  —

  Faye counted the remaining cans and dried goods, all the pre-portioned meals double-bagged against moisture. She didn’t actually need to count them, because she had a running tally of everything stored on the boat—food, batteries, books, Christmas presents, birthday presents. She kept the master list tucked away in a series of protective Ziplocs, but at this point she had it memorized. And she knew that what her husband really wanted was for her to go away. Sometimes it surprised her, how she knew more about that man than she could ever have imagined. But she had been majoring in Harold 101 ever since “Silly Love Songs” by Wings was a Billboard hit.

  She’d met and fallen in love with Harold during an exchange year to Syracuse—his handlebar moustache and polyester slacks notwithstanding. They’d bonded over Lasers and catamarans, as Faye was from a sailing family, too, back in England. She’d cheered him on at every regatta before cooking him savoury rice and lamb dishes in a tagine. Eventually, their love of Moroccan cuisine led them to travel through Casablanca and Fez. Then it was kaeng phet pet yang and a month in Thailand, where Faye took a cooking class and shopped for rambutan and fingerroot in the public market.

  They married after graduation and settled down in Montauk near his parents, who had a summer compound they’d taken to living in year-round. When Faye hinted to Harold that he could make himself into more than just a shareholder in his family’s company—more than a frequenter of his parents’ grand weekend house, a member of their yacht club, and captain of his father’s racing sloop—Harold said she was right. So he bought a full-keel, forty-two-foot cruising yacht of his own. It was a rejoinder, of sorts, though not the one she was looking for.

  They named their boat and their firstborn while Faye was still in love with Italy—when she still served grappa at dinner parties and kept an Italian guidebook in their peach and white bathroom, on top of Harold’s stack of back issues of Cruising World. They sailed around Sag Harbor on Buona Fortuna almost every weekend when the weather was nice, and Domenica was an angel who slept through all of their dinner parties.

  When Emma was born, they made a plan for a five-year circumnavigation that would take them from Panama to Australia to South Africa and back again, with time built in for sightseeing, relaxation, and boat repairs. The girls would come and Faye would homeschool them. She had laughed out loud when she’d heard that part. It was a crazy plan, Harold’s insane dream, and one which could be endlessly refined and discussed—and delayed. She was terrified of taking her children to sea, but with every year that went by, she watched her husband’s good humour dwindle as the course of their lives inevitably narrowed. She wondered how much longer she could stall before he began to resent her, and the calculus became one of a known unhappiness balanced against an uncharted bliss. And then, even after they’d decided to pick up and go, it took time to make the arrangements: sailing lessons for everybody, calculating food storage, educational materials to keep the girls on track with school, and refurbishing Buona Fortuna to make her seaworthy for a cruising family of four.

  It wasn’t until Domenica was ten and Emma was six that Faye was finally ready to quit her job at the travel agency, rent out their house, and leave the comforts of home to begin circumnavigating the globe en famille. And now, after nearly five years away, in the final stretch of their incredible journey, she longed for home more than she had ever imagined possible. Hearing Annie’s name again had been like a cold bora wind stirring up waves. Maybe she had been naive to think that the sea could save them. How could the two of them stay the same when the ground was ever-shifting beneath their feet?

  When Faye calculated that she and Harold had each been alone long enough to shed their mutual irritation, she went back on deck and poured herself a drink of rum over crushed ice. Ice was the great commodity of Buona Fortuna, doled out even more frugally than their stores of eggs and fresh veggies in between anchorages. The tinkling of cubes in a glass could still thrill her with anticipation of the spiced relaxation to come.

  Then she gave the girls her usual speech about sea crossings: stay in the cabin, look after each other, and don’t bother me or your father with trivialities. “And I want you to actually do your lessons for once,” she added.

  Fiji had not been a great place for making headway in the workbooks. There was too much to see, too many unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for first-hand learning, just like everywhere else they’d travelled. But the girls were keeping pace, more or less, with other children their age, and that was all that really mattered, Faye thought. She had enough to worry about in terms of staying afloat. Every day that they had tarried in Fiji, waiting for the weather to change, she became more anxious about making it to Australia before Y2K. Plenty of people said that intervals of calm weather in November and December were some of the safest times to make the passage to Sydney, but they would have done better to avoid cyclone season altogether.

  She struggled at times under the burden of all her research and knowledge. Always install netting on a yacht with small children. Always have children clipped into tethers when a boat is underway. Always have at least two methods of communication available in case one should fail. All children in personal flotation devices at all times. Never swing the boom while a child is above deck. Never set sail without checking at least three different forecasts. Never step out of your role. That was how everything could fall apart.

  And though Faye had more than once confided to Harold over the past few months that she was ready to pull the plug on their trip and go home, he had insisted with a strange intensity that they stay the course. He said if they went back to Montauk now, they’d live to regret abandoning their dream. They shouldn’t give up just because it was harder and less luxurious than the life they were used to. He had shown a mettle and resolve she hadn’t known he had when they set out. It was possible he’d changed. Maybe they both had.

  She remembered something their friend Luisa Hall had said when they were anchored together in the Galápagos. They were exchanging war stories of broken alternators, leaking hulls, malfunctioning autopilots. “It’s a slog sometimes,” Luisa told them, “and it can be scary as hell. But it’s an adventure that we’re so lucky to be able to enjoy.”

&n
bsp; But was an adventure really an adventure if it was only an escape? Somewhere along the way, Faye thought, she and Harold must have blurred the line.

  As she finished her drink, she noticed the girls kept right on reading their books as though she hadn’t spoken.

  “I’m serious,” said Faye. “Math worksheets. Now.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Domenica.

  Yeah, yeah. Faye’s nostrils flared. Everything with that girl was “yeah, yeah.” As though now that she was fifteen she’d suddenly heard everything before.

  “Yes, Mummy,” said Emma.

  Faye heard an apology for her sister in the primness of her younger daughter’s response. As in, please don’t get mad right now. She wondered how much the girls had noticed the tension between her and Harold, and their not-always-coded conversations about the itinerary and planned ocean crossings. She could scarcely sleep from imagining their boat in a storm off the coast of Australia, foundering on the reefs, unable to call for help because Y2K had crippled their communication systems.

  So she refrained from getting mad and biked to get groceries instead, while Harold checked the lines. Emma and Dom didn’t bother pretending to do their homework until their mother came back, by which point she didn’t care anymore either.

  * * *

  —

  Later that evening, Emma and Domenica were confined to the cabin as Harold raised the anchor and Faye assisted him in casting off and motoring out of the harbour. In the galley, Domenica heated up a bean and pasta soup with buttered rolls for supper.

  Emma could hear her father calling above deck: “Hoist the spinnaker on my call! I’m bringing her about.”

  “Why are boats always girls?” she asked.

  “Because captains are always men,” said Dom, wrinkling her nose in distaste.

  As they moved out to sea, Emma used her spoon to tap on a floating piece of pasta that reminded her of Buona Fortuna with the wide, wild ocean beneath it. She took turns counting how many taps until the little shell submerged for good.

  After they’d eaten, Emma sat poised in the salon with her pencil and her calculator, her workbook open on her lap and her eyes on the window. They had set off to make the crossing with reassurances of fair weather from both the satellite map and the forecast roundup they’d picked up off the SSB radio, but Emma could see dark clouds on the horizon signalling a squall.

  Her father liked to say, “Buona Fortuna has already weathered more storms than we could ever face as a family.” She was made of steel and came from Holland, where she had first taken to the water on the blustery North Sea, proving herself to be a sailor well worth her salt. Emma knew every inch of her, from the chain locker in the bow, to the rigging at the top of the mizzen mast, down to the storage area below the cockpit. When Emma was very small, she had hidden there while playing hide-and-seek with Domenica during an ocean crossing. She still measured herself against the canny little boat nooks she used to squeeze into. Her mother called her a chipmunk, and her father joked that one day she’d get stuck and he would have to pull her out by the hair with his heavy-duty pliers.

  As Emma watched, the cabin windows became painted with a film of raindrops. She turned on a reading light as the sky darkened, abandoning her math lesson to flip through a book about sea adventures. In every story the captain was a man, just as her sister had said. Dom was stretched out on the narrow salon couch with a vampire novel, having already given up all pretence of studying.

  Although Domenica had described what regular school was like, Emma couldn’t imagine so many children assembled together in one place. Most of the other yachties they met were retired, or young couples without children. But there had been a few memorable friendships: Mireille, a red-headed girl from Nice whom she met in Sicily; Steph, from North London, with whom she had tried to speak to an enormous sea lion in the Galápagos; and Jacqui, whose parents had let her dye her hair purple and whose boat, Rain Dog, had been anchored next to Buona Fortuna in the Azores. These friendships had been both sanctified and spoiled by their fleetingness. Most alliances were created out of convenience, and Emma longed for a friend she could really choose and who would choose her. Her mother had promised that once they arrived in Australia, they would stay put long enough to enroll Emma and Domenica in regular classes, starting in January. This was what was going to sustain Emma during the days they would be anchored in New Caledonia, waiting out the storms that lay between them and Coffs Harbour in New South Wales. Cyclone season was upon them, and they were already supposed to be en route to Australia. Now they were aiming to get there in time to ring in the new millennium in Sydney Harbour. Mummy had promised fireworks, the biggest ones they’d ever seen. And then, at the end of the school term, they would finally return home.

  When Emma was younger, Domenica used to entertain her by making up new constellations or telling her stories of life on land. Emma was six when they left Montauk to sail around the world, and she had only vague memories of living in a house. She didn’t remember what it was like to not always be slathered in sunscreen, or to run around on grass like it was no big deal, or be sheltered by trees instead of forever gazing ahead into the dazzling, endless distance of the ocean. Solid ground was as novel to her as the swaying of the moored boat was to their occasional guests at the marina.

  Domenica, she knew, did not feel the same way. There were things that her sister missed—memories she now only spoke of during the most difficult crossings. The corner store that sold sour gumdrops. The playground. Her friends from school. Emma remembered some of these things, too, but they did not feel real to her. They were like pictures in a storybook: bright and flat and static.

  As the waves picked up, Dom went to the toilet to be sick. Emma brought her a glass of water and a Dramamine from the medicine cabinet.

  “Tell me about our house, Dom,” she said. It was her favourite story, the one that never got old. Emma could listen to her sister talk straight through a whole night of rough seas, while her parents took turns manning the wheel and throwing up. Usually Domenica would have to throw up, too.

  “Our house had, like, a dozen rooms,” said Dom, when the rolling of the ocean was less intense. “And we had a ping-pong table in the basement. And we were happy. Mum and Dad—they were happy then. I wish we’d never left.”

  Emma felt a tightening in her stomach, the same ache she always got whenever her sister started talking about their life on land. The fact that Domenica knew more than she did—about things that Emma herself had said and done in the time before she came into possession of her own memories—gave her an uncomfortable sensation she felt compelled to seek out, like a kind of irresistible torture.

  “What’s a ping-pong table, Dom?” she asked, even though she already knew. And as the sea churned beneath them, Emma held back her sister’s hair and prodded her to continue her story in between her retching. There was something to be said for having her sister’s undivided attention. Dom wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and spoke about ping-pong, and their lost backyard with its tree swing and the herb garden, and the heady, sweet smell of the lilac bushes that used to catch on the breeze and waft straight up through their bedroom windows.

  After Dom told her about the lilacs, Emma went to her cabin and wrote a poem. It read: Like Mummy’s perfume on the shelf. / Like the memory of purple itself. / A flower in the spring / doesn’t mean anything / on the ocean.

  The next morning, her mother made pancakes, Emma’s favourite, so she knew that everything was going to be okay. When the weather was bad, nothing got cooked at all. Emma had eaten crackers for breakfast at least a dozen times that she could remember.

  Faye turned on the SSB to listen to an amateur broadcast that was a family favourite. It was a show about cruisers: other yachties like them who were making a life aboard their vessels and travelling the world. During a crossing, the radio felt like the only thing still lashing
them to shore and the rest of the human race.

  The first news reported was that the Maggie Mae of England, a vessel owned by Mark and Luisa Hall, had been attacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia.

  It was a boat they knew well. Faye and Harold had had the parents over for drinks when they were moored together in Panama and again in the Galápagos. Emma and Dom had spent hours sifting sand on the beach and counting sea lions with Steph and Katie, Mark and Luisa’s children.

  The family had been taken hostage and brought ashore, and though they were rescued a few days later, the Maggie Mae had not been recovered. The Halls had returned to London, cutting short their planned three-year trip.

  “At least they’re all alive,” said Faye. Her voice was tight.

  “The poor kids,” said Harold. “It must have been terrifying for them. Well, for all of them really.”

  “What if pirates attack us?” asked Emma. She was scared, but everyone knew that the Indian Ocean was where most of the pirates were, and Buona Fortuna had already crossed the Gulf of Aden in a sort of impromptu convoy with seven other cruisers. Though there were other places in the world where yachts had been preyed upon.

  “I have a baseball bat for emergencies,” said her father, with unusual vehemence. “I’ll hit the pirates on the head until they’re dead.”

  “Harold,” said Faye.

  “Until they can’t hurt us anymore,” he amended, relaxing into a smile. “Better?”

  But Emma had seen the dark glint in his eye and the determined strength in the curl of his fist, and she was frightened all over again.

  * * *

  —

  Harold always took the first and last watch on a night crossing, and Faye in counterpoint put the girls to bed and woke them up to a cooked breakfast. It was good for him and Faye, he thought, to have the time apart. Night watches were the only solitude to be found once the boat was underway.