“I want to see!” cried Noah.
“Come on then.”
It was when he was with Noah that Sarah took the most interest in Owen, as the boy seemed to bring out a touch of whimsy in the writer. After they’d safely motored into Chub Cay that night, Owen announced he had a surprise for them both. He disappeared into his cabin, then returned with something behind his back.
“I’ve been expanding my artistic horizons.” He held up a large rectangle of white Bristol board decorated with thick black lines outlining a star and two border stripes. “We’ll fly it to signal our quarantine.” He glanced up at her, anticipating her objection. “I know about the Yellow Jack, but that flag means you’re quarantining with someone sick aboard. And the yellow Quebec flag is a request for authorities to board and give your vessel the all-clear. But so far there’s nothing to signal that we’re a healthy boat choosing to keep a safe distance from others.”
The flag was cleanly done, with straight lines and even proportions. “When did you design this?”
“Bit by bit over the last few days in Bimini.” Owen showed Noah the colours for each section and smiled at Sarah as the boy began filling them in with a jagged scribble.
Later, Owen perfected Noah’s scrawl with calm, close circles: yellow field, blue star, red stripes. When the flag was finished, he slipped it into a large plastic sleeve he seemed to have brought for the purpose and, stringing it onto the rigging, ran it up the flagpole. Then he blogged about its creation and meaning. He was hoping it would take off among the other cruisers.
* * *
There was never quite enough space for privacy, a fact that pleased Owen but seemed to grate on Sarah. He found himself confiding his every thought to his shipmate, whether it was how work was going on his new manuscript or what he’d learned scrolling through the NextExtinction.com message board that day. The lost intimacy of his marriage, restored. And for the first time in his life, he had nothing to hide.
She’d laughed at him when he showed her photos sent in by fans who had likewise taken to the sea, flying the flag he’d designed. “You’re like a proud papa.” Her laughter was a relief, a boon. It also felt like progress, evidence he had helped. He was sure she laughed more than she used to.
The only time he kept his own counsel was when he logged into his email to check if Rachel had written back, though he told himself not to expect it and she never did. But since Wi-Fi coverage was spotty in the Bahamas, they hadn’t done more than cursory satellite email checks and uploading blog posts since Key West. For that reason, they’d planned a stop in the capital, which was regarded by many cruisers as overly crowded but a necessary evil for restocking supplies and buying replacement parts.
In Nassau, they dropped anchor and flew the flag. When they were close enough to shore, Owen booted up the computer and searched for a network.
“We’ve got a good signal here. We’re connected.”
Sarah nodded, a quick jut of her chin. She made no move to get up, and Owen knew why. After a few weeks with no real updates, logging on to the internet was an exercise in dread, of all the bad news they feared to learn.
“I’ll do it,” he said, taking a seat. He clicked through to his email, but there was nothing from Rachel. He checked the latest WHO outbreak reports against their planned route, but their itinerary remained clear. Then he did a quick scan through the New York Times and The Guardian.
“The Secretary of State is sick, hospitalized. Egypt declared a state of emergency. The mayor of Omaha died and so did a Fox News anchor. And the singer from Dove Suite…quite a few weeks ago now, actually.”
“Let me read it,” she said. She touched Noah on the shoulder. “Go play with your cars, sweets. I’ll call you when it’s time to Skype with Uncle Elliot.” The boy ran off, and Owen gave way at the desk. Sarah clicked through in silence, and he watched as she skimmed two or three news stories before opening her email. There were tears on her cheeks.
“I knew Stu Jenkins at school,” she said. “Did you ever meet him there?” Owen’s mind was blank, but he furrowed his brow as if dredging his memory. “We lost touch, but he was kind.”
So Owen downloaded the new Dove Suite single, and they listened to it as they continued catching up with the state of things on land. Power outages were creating disturbances up and down the East Coast, likely another casualty of understaffing due to sick workers. A friend of Sarah’s had forwarded her a cellphone video of a scuffle outside of a Home Depot offering a sale on backup generators.
“It’s not just that we’re safe from the virus,” said Sarah, watching the grainy footage that juddered like a low-budget horror movie. “We’re protected from joining in the panic. Do you know what I mean? If we’re not there, we won’t be tested. We can’t get it wrong.”
Later that night, he mixed them drinks after Noah was asleep. Whisky and soda for him, rum and coke for her. She took it from him with a blooming grin, and for once their silence felt easy, as though whatever remained of their niceties had been wrung out over the last few passages. She reached up to remove the clip she used to keep her long red hair out of the winches. Owen considered that she was a woman of great beauty, without the hardness of one used to wielding it: pale skin, thick wavy hair, a Pre-Raphaelite painting in jeans and a faded shirt. But her awareness of her loveliness was like an open wound, a target on her back. Rachel had worn her beauty carelessly, as if it hadn’t mattered. Sarah dragged hers around as though uncertain of its value and wary of the kind of attention it might bring to her. Owen noted that the urgency of the fortune teller’s injunction had faded the further he got from home. But surely by going away he had done his part? At sea, he could only sin so much.
“How many times have you flown over this ocean?” he asked.
“A few.” She listed them: family sabbatical vacation, class trip, a vague back-and-forth to and from South America.
“How many times have you swum in it?” He stripped off his shirt and reached to turn on the underwater lights, sneaking a glance at whether she was gawking. She was not.
“I’ll get my bathing suit,” she said, slipping off the bench. She came back wrapped in a towel that she only removed a moment before clambering down the boarding ladder and splashing in.
And so, through trial and error, he learned that Sarah would not relent towards him in that way, and though at first this seemed to him to be a simple misunderstanding, a primal error that he attempted with increasing urgency and diminishing dignity to remedy, once he accepted the fact of her rejection, he relaxed. He found that he wanted to please her, soothe her, keep her happy. They fell into a routine of meals and watches, boat maintenance, and playing with Noah. Once they’d dropped anchor, they were a jurisdiction unto themselves, far enough away from any schedule besides the tides, the sun, the stars. Sometimes they ate spaghetti or ravioli out of the same can on the deck at night, passing it back and forth, the pasta sauce cold and thick and sweet, its oil glistening in the moonlight. Perhaps, Owen mused, keeping things platonic was akin to keeping things Platonic; he wondered if he’d entered a higher plane. The clean and totally novel feeling of a life free of lies.
* * *
—
Noah was a constant source of wonder. Living far from his Midwest nieces and nephews, Owen had little occasion to spend time with children. He’d dreaded and avoided them, and later he’d resented them as contributing to the downfall of his marriage. And he’d written about them, at first in a fit of creative anger, and later with a deliberate minimalism, avoiding opportunities for a misstep that would reveal his nearly total ignorance. But the little people he’d sketched in his novel were nothing like the solemn and curious child with whom he now found himself. He was often taken aback by the boy’s easy affection, which he was sure he’d done nothing to earn. While Sarah sailed them to Rose Island, he spent time showing the boy pictures of the marine life swimming in the dept
hs of the water below: pancake batfish, white-spotted catshark. Their names made Noah giggle and he loved to repeat them.
Their second day moored on the banks of Rose Island, Noah rushed on deck full of excitement.
“Mommy! Come and see! I found a secret.”
Sarah got up, followed him down below. A few minutes later she came back smiling. “Do you want to go and see?” Owen lowered his book only slightly. For the boy, every new locker or cabinet was an undiscovered country. But Sarah said, “Go. You’ll like it.”
Owen followed the boy to his berth in the bow of the boat.
“You have to lay down,” said Noah. “And look kind of sideways with the light on. I never saw it before when it was dark.”
Owen lay his head down on the pillow, turned this way and that until he saw it—a little pencil drawing of a bicycle, made out of joined-up stars, sketched onto the wood panelling.
He touched his fingers to the grain. “It’s magical.”
* * *
Sarah tried to describe the isolation of their journey when she wrote to her brother. Now I understand why you were crawling up the walls when you were in quarantine. And I’m not even here alone. She hadn’t realized how much it had mattered to her: the affable friction of other lives bumping up against her own. A trio of girls laughing at a café, exchanging recipes and dark confidences with the same easy freedom. A baby fussing in a stroller with tears like jewels on her apple cheeks. A clump of teenagers talking too loudly at the back of a bus after school, so wrapped up in their own dramas they didn’t notice the glares and smiles of the other passengers. She had always taken comfort in these small glimpses of the lives lived all around her, balancing her worries and fears against the collective anguish of nine million souls grappling with their own private woes. It was a way to keep perspective, to prevent her misgivings from ballooning out of control. But at sea, her concern for Elliot found no natural limits. She had emailed her parents, begging them to convince him to join them in Lansdowne. Then, once he’d left the city, Sarah felt better for a while, until her parents reported the rumoured arrival of ARAMIS in town.
Later, her mind was drawn back to the trust fund she’d helped Owen set up for his ex’s son, and how the boy and his mother might be faring. But when she asked about Rachel, Owen only shook his head.
“No word.” It was like a light behind his eyes being blown out.
Luckily, there was a respite from thought in action, something Elliot had discussed with her more than once. Sarah cooked, she swam, she played, she taught. Very occasionally, she wrote. Often it would be Owen reminding her that something was due to Shillelagh. She was grateful for the days when they moved between anchorages and the sailing required nearly all her focus.
Living as humbly as they were, she liked to imagine that the privilege she’d always shied away from had finally sloughed off like a second skin, even though she knew—sequestered offshore on a yacht in the tropics—that it was never more in effect than at that very moment. But she had always been attracted to the simple life. At Living Tree, it had been paired with hard labour, renunciation, and guilt—heaping scads of it, before breakfast and after dinner via sharing circle. (“Shaming circle, more like,” Elliot had said when he’d heard about it.) Over time, Sarah came to realize that she was not the only one who had joined the commune out of a sincere desire to atone for some past wrong. There were former addicts, people who had cheated on spouses, and those who had fallen out with a close relative who died before a rift could be mended. They were encouraged to remind one another of why they’d come, and to comment on each other’s progress on the journey to purification. The struggle in the river with Jericho was often referred to by the leaders when Sarah was called upon to share. She could see the others scrutinizing her, sure they were wondering why anyone would try to kill themselves over her—what could possibly be special about her. But on the boat, the minimalism of their life only pared away the extraneous concerns, the paltry vision of herself reflected in the eyes of others. She felt as free as the dolphins that sometimes trailed in their wake, living lightly on the planet. The past no longer lashed her to its unlived possibilities, and the unknown future had ceased to paralyze her. She faced the wind and the weather as they came. Inside, she felt stronger, surer, more herself than she had ever been.
* * *
—
They’d been anchored off of Rose Island a week when Owen came on deck looking so dazed that Sarah was sure something terrible had happened on land, some cataclysmic upset related to ARAMIS, and her fear for Elliot and for her parents seized her with a full-body panic.
“What’s happened?” she said, almost screaming even though Owen had not yet said a word. “What? What?”
Noah was next to her, strapped into his harness. Tuning into her fear, he began whimpering.
“Rachel’s dead,” said Owen.
The most natural thing to do was to put her arms around him, so she did, even though it was at odds with the boundaries she had taken such pains to establish. But as she reached out, he sank to his knees on the deck, so she joined him there, as did Noah, and her son hugged Owen’s back while he leaned his head on her shoulder and wept.
When Owen finally raised his head, Noah came around to inspect the writer’s face. He dabbed at it with his shirt sleeve for what felt like forever. “All better,” he declared. Then he returned to the cockpit where he’d been playing with figurines.
“I betrayed her, over and over,” said Owen, when the boy was occupied. “I cheated on her. I lied. I thought that because she was the only woman I loved, it didn’t really matter.”
Sarah’s mouth felt dry. “As in, what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her?” It was like a sharp cramp, remembering how easily, how thoughtlessly, she could have been one of those women.
“She’ll never forgive me now,” said Owen. He could barely get the words out.
His honesty was ugly, even if it came as a bit of a relief: there was something real behind the facade. “So this is about you,” said Sarah. She didn’t feel like relenting just yet. “Whatever story you’ve told about yourself.”
“No.” He paused. “At least, I hope not. But what will happen to the boy now?”
She knew from Owen that Rachel had no other family. “She should have been on this boat,” said Sarah. “Not me.”
Owen drew his hands across his cheeks and stood up. “I wouldn’t even have made it out of the harbour without you. You’re the closest thing to an angel I’ve got.” And for a moment Sarah felt a warm flush of comfort. Then a pang of worry that it would be wrong to start trusting him.
But together it was their job to create and convey the selfless wisdom and generosity of his online persona—a complete fiction except insofar as the profile seemed occasionally to inspire Owen with thoughts of living up to it. After the news came about Rachel, they threw themselves into the blogging they’d been neglecting, and Sarah found she had faith in the Owen Grant she had helped create. She thought he did exist somewhere, if not exactly within Owen himself. The fact that people believed in him did make him real, in a certain sense. And their confidence in his ability to protect them also gave Owen something to hang on to in the aftermath of Rachel’s death, during which he seemed to fluctuate between anguish and a kind of giddy heedlessness, as though the worst had already happened and there was nothing else to fear.
* * *
For Owen, the days took on a kind of suspended reality, reinforced by the crystalline beauty stretching out in every direction. The islands seemed like a strange place to feel sad. Their third day in the Exumas, Sarah slipped and fell on her way to retrieve a thermometer. She snapped at him for leaving water on the companionway. And since a harsh word on their calm boat felt like a profanity, he rose and followed her to the forward cabin, where Noah lay in his bunk, feverish but uncomplaining.
She answered his unspo
ken question. “There’s no cough or dizziness.” She spoke at a normal volume, but Noah gave no sign of hearing her. His eyes were closed, his face screwed up with pain. “It isn’t presenting like ARAMIS, but he’s definitely sick.”
“It can’t be the virus. We haven’t interacted with anyone for days. Well, the customs official, I suppose, but we were careful.”
“What about the bonefish we caught?” said Sarah. “Or the shearwater that landed on deck? Maybe they were carrying it.”
Owen made a non-committal sound and retreated to the computer station. He checked the message boards and sent out a few queries over the radio. He learned that the local hospital had reported several possible cases of the virus, though the facility wasn’t equipped to carry out definitive diagnostic tests. Between the static and the silences, he was unnerved by the sound of Sarah crying in Noah’s cabin. But for once in his life, a woman was weeping and it was not his fault. He was almost grateful, yet his relief was monstrous.
Owen considered their first-aid supplies. For all the contingencies he’d prepared for, he somehow hadn’t considered this one: that the little boy might catch the very virus they were trying to outrun. The sun was going down, so Owen reefed the mainsail and checked the tides. He prepped the cockpit for an anchor watch, then returned to the boy’s cabin, where Sarah did not even seem to register his presence, crouched as she was over Noah, whose face was flushed. Owen withdrew before she could notice him. He wanted a moment alone.
Returning to the computer, he considered the original plan. Three months sequestered in the Bahamas to wait out the pandemic. If the virus hadn’t abated by then, they would choose another remote anchorage with a generous tourist visa. It was ludicrous to sail a thousand miles only to expose themselves to infection at the first sign of any illness, yet surely the hospital at Georgetown would be better equipped than they were to treat someone with ARAMIS. But every interaction with the outside world was a source of risk. Feeling muddled, Owen’s head buzzed like an out-of-range radio, with unwelcome thoughts intruding upon his resolve at every frequency. He imagined Rachel dying alone in Lansdowne, her boy kept away for his own protection.
Songs for the End of the World Page 38
