by Jen Malone
I roll my eyes and sneak a quick peck.
As we approach Point Arguello, about ten nautical miles before Point Conception, the wind speeds increase, and between the two points they ramp up again. The seas go from calm to confused and the wind gusts reach as high as thirty knots, which is serious stuff. The waves are the biggest I’ve seen this trip and a couple even crash onto the deck, wetting our feet as we move around the cockpit. That, coupled with the spray from breaking crests, has me grateful I put my rain gear on.
But otherwise, it seems . . . manageable. We all have jobs to concentrate on and we’re working in unison. I’m way less out of my element than I thought I would be, even when Jonah and Mom decide to reef the mainsail (don’t ask me why they can’t call it what it is: lowering the big sail partway and attaching it in a different way) and I’m assigned to gather the dropping luff (plainly put, the sail we’re lowering) while Jonah stands at the mast and secures something called a tack cringle into a tack horn. (Why, nautical terms, why?)
I follow all instructions both Mom and Jonah give me, and I have to admit, it feels good to help beyond just offering moral support. I like being part of things and getting treated like an equal. And Jonah’s right, it is more exhilarating than scary, particularly with a task to focus on.
“There’s the tip of the point,” Mom finally yells, pointing off our port side. “Get ready to say hello to Southern California!”
I’ve been told that SoCal is the promised land for sailors. The water temperatures jump from the fifties into the mid-seventies, and the sea turns from rough and gray to glassy and aquamarine. I like the sound of all that.
Jonah whoops and barrels down the stairs. A few seconds later the Beach Boys singing “Catch a Wave” blares over the remaining wind. He returns to the cockpit with three sodas and we wait for the moment we round the bend to toast with them.
As soon as we’ve sipped, my mom grabs the cans and puts them aside before tugging me into her arms.
“We did it!” she yells, swinging me around. For once, I don’t fight to break free. I laugh and let her dance me across the cockpit. When we bump into Jonah, he catches me and she releases me into his arms. I nearly forget and kiss him, but I stop myself just in time.
It’s dramatic how quickly the conditions return to calm, flat waters on this side of the peninsula. Jonah heads down to the cabin to check on the others via radio, and Mom and I slump side by side onto one of the benches. The adrenaline finally starts to wear off and we’re companionably quiet for a few moments, listening to the garbled voices from the radio downstairs.
That is, until she asks, “So when are you going to tell me about you and Jonah?”
Oh crap. I am so not in the mood for an argument right now. I sigh heavily. “Look, I know you don’t—”
Mom interrupts me with a hand on my knee and a smile. “Relax, Cass. I can admit when I’m wrong.”
She—what?
“It was amazing watching him teach you to sail today. And I’m not blind to how much happier you’ve been the last couple of weeks.”
She steals a glance at me, then adds, “I think maybe Jonah’s good for you.”
“God, Mom, he’s not a multivitamin.”
She laughs, further blowing my mind. “I know that. But he is a nice kid.”
I listen to make sure Jonah’s still on the radio before saying, “What about the whole grotty-yachty thing?”
Mom winces. “I may have been projecting a personal experience there. Jonah’s been nothing but respectful and helpful, and like I said, I love seeing you like this. I may be old enough to be your mother, but—”
“Mom, you are my mother.”
“Exactly,” she says, grinning. “But that doesn’t mean I’m too ancient to remember what a vacation fling feels like.”
I smile tightly and pick at my cuticles. It’s not as though Jonah and I have labeled what we’re doing, but I hate how dismissive “fling” sounds when she says it out loud. Below us the radio noises end and the music resumes, cycling through the starts of several songs as Jonah searches for one he wants to play.
“Oh . . . ,” Mom says softly when I don’t respond. “Maybe not just a vacation fling?”
I shrug. Jonah and I are so new that I don’t have any expectations about our future, per se, but I don’t exactly enjoy thinking about what’s going to happen when we reach Land’s End. I’m sure my mother will relish lecturing me on how impractical even the thought of anything long-term would be.
She shocks me again by saying, “Well, you can’t fight feelings, right?”
Is she talking about me and Jonah or her and Mr. Whatever His Name Might Be? The reminder of her mystery guy sets me on edge, but before I can get worked up, she follows with, “Also, you never know what the future holds. You both have a lot of flexibility in what comes next for you, so maybe you’ll be one of those lucky couples who finds a way to make things work.”
I—can’t believe my mom and I are talking like this again. If this were last summer it wouldn’t even be noteworthy, but now?
I glance at her and her eyes are soft. “I just want you to be happy, honey. I know you don’t believe that, but it’s true.”
Where was that attitude when she was considering this trip in the first place? Although I can’t deny that, at the moment, I am happy to be here. And I’m kind of beyond words that my mom is being, well, the way she used to be. The only ones I can think of are “Thanks, Mom.”
I whisper them just as Jonah returns. In reply, she squeezes my knee.
She stands and moves to the opposite bench, gesturing at Jonah to take the seat next to me. When he sits, I snuggle against him, much to his surprise.
Mom puts the binoculars to her eyes and pretends to be very absorbed in studying the coastline, but I can see the smile dancing on her lips.
For the first time in a long time, it doesn’t annoy me.
28
I’m reveling in my newfound sailing abilities. To be honest, I’m totally pissed at myself for not trying it sooner. It’s possible I could have screwed myself a little with my own idiotic stubbornness, but I’m determined to make up for lost time now.
Case in point, I’m currently helping Drew get the boat ready for our midmorning departure for Catalina Island. It will be another overnight, and once again, we’re planning to swap deckhands so Jonah can sail with us. Not because we’re expecting any conditions, but because Drew adores everything about helping to sail Christian’s yacht and, well, I love everything about the idea of a quiet night with Jonah by my side. Mom too, but I conveniently forget to include her in any of my daydreams. I’m hoping she’s feeling extra sleepy tonight, and I have an evil plan to promote lots of wine drinking on her part to help ensure this.
I work with Drew to check the deck for any gear that could come loose under sail and to identify possible snag points for our lines. When I finally climb down into the cabin to declare us nearly prepped, I find Mom staring off into space, her computer open on the table.
“Cass,” she says quietly. “We need to talk.”
I bypass her and turn into my berth, calling behind me, “Okay, but first lemme just email a paper to my teacher before we get under way, so I’m free to help with—”
“Cassie,” my mother interrupts, appearing in my doorway. “Honey, I got some news today.”
I’m swiping aside some laundry and leaning across my bed for my laptop, but when the tone of her voice finally penetrates, I freeze, fingers clenched around a folded T-shirt. “What news?”
An acrid taste fills my mouth as I wait.
“It’s about the family subletting our house. They’ve been spending the last few weeks seeing every home on the market in Pleasant Hill and, well, it turns out they want ours.”
I turn to face her. “I don’t get it.”
She puts a hand on my knee. “I guess they’ve really settled in and our house has everything they have on their wish list. They’ve made Dad and me an offer.
A very, very generous offer.”
My breathing is shaky. “But it’s not for sale!”
“I know, sweetheart, I know. It’s an unexpected development. And under ordinary circumstances, it probably wouldn’t be anything I’d consider, but other than that one disastrous phone interview, the résumés I’ve been sending out since we left haven’t yielded even a single nibble, and the money we’d make on this sale would end our financial woes for a good long time. The housing market is hot right now, and we’ve owned so long we’ve built up a lot of equity in that place. With you off to college next year and, well, with Dad gone too, maybe it makes sense to downsize. It’d be crazy for us to not at least consider it, Cass.”
“So what, they’d just . . . stay? What about our stuff? Where do we go when we get back?”
I thought things were genuinely getting better between us, l really did—but now my old familiar anger rushes right back in, like it had only been taking a quick commercial break.
“We’d have to work all those details out, Cass. I know this is a lot to process,” Mom says. “But I wanted to keep you in the loop. I’ll be telling Drew as soon as he’s done up there, and I also emailed Dad. He obviously has a say in this too.”
But clearly I don’t. Keeping me “in the loop” is light-years away from that. I never seem to have a say. Which shouldn’t keep surprising me, but goddamn it, I’m so tired of having the ground drop out from under me.
It’s my fault. I let my defenses down, dared to relax and be happy . . . and she struck again, out of the blue.
I’m not hanging around to hear her hollow reassurances. I jump up and push past her, climbing the stairs two at a time. I don’t answer Drew when he calls to me from the bow of the boat; he’ll be “in the loop” himself soon enough, though I can’t count on him to be in my camp when nothing else has seemed to faze him like it has me.
It’s only when I have the dinghy untied from the platform and the engine started that I let the tears flow. I zoom off with no particular destination in mind, just away.
There’s a lump in my throat as I picture my house, with its cheerful yellow siding and the black window boxes I fill every year with trailing ivy and annuals to match the season. The handprints I made as a three-year-old are in the concrete by the basement steps, and my first hamster, Sir Alfred Buckminster Wellington, is buried in my second-grade High School Musical lunch box by the back fence. I learned to roller-skate, bike, play hopscotch, and shoot with a hockey stick in that driveway. I snuck my first and only cigarette, with Tara and Jess, on the flat roof over the garage, back when we coveted a training bra above all other possible possessions.
Every root I put down, I put down there. Both literally, in the garden I love with all my heart, and figuratively.
The last place that really represented all that my family once was—that held all of our best memories—is going to have strangers living in it when I get home. What will we do, tiptoe around them to pack up the rest of our things? Like we’re intruding on their space? I imagine a perfect, happy family unit waving to us from the brick front path as we pull away from the curb, reminding us of all that we’re not anymore.
Once again, my future blurs and shifts.
Is this how it’s always going to be from now on? Don’t get comfortable, Cass. Don’t let your guard down because the hits, well, they just keep coming.
I don’t trust that I’ll be able to land the dinghy on shore, given the size of the breakers hitting the beach, so after circling the anchorage area once, I do the next best thing and steer to Reality Bytes. At first all I can think about is finding Jonah and letting him wrap me up in his arms, but it’s Beatriz waiting to greet me when I dock. I climb aboard, sink onto the deck, and bury my face in her fur.
“What would a bad day be for you, hmm, Bea? No kibbles in your bits? No seagulls to chase on the beach? You ever had anyone sell your doghouse out from under you?”
“Sprite?” Jonah crosses the deck, an expression of concern on his face as he takes in my tear-streaked cheeks. He slides down next to me and puts his hand over mine on Beatriz’s fur. “What’s going on?”
“Where’s Christian?” I ask, not wanting anyone else to see me like this.
“Ashore grabbing a couple last-minute supplies he forgot. What happened?”
When I fill him in, he tugs me close. I keep one hand on Beatriz and turn my head into his warm chest; his sunshine-and-fabric-softener smell is familiar now, and comforting. As distracted as I am by thoughts of home, it doesn’t escape me that being back there in any form means not being with him, and my mood nosedives even more. Why does everything have to be either-or? Why does everything have to end? Why can’t anything just stay like it is?
Jonah wipes a few of my tears away, sighing deeply as he does. He waits for me to drag my eyes to his before saying. “You know how you told me last week that it’s easier to get some distance from the divorce out here, because it doesn’t feel like real life?”
I drop my eyes and nod.
“Maybe it’ll be that way in a new place once you get home,” Jonah says.
“It won’t be home; it’ll just be a house, and a constant reminder of all that I lost will be right across town.”
He sighs again and is quiet, stroking my hair. After a minute he says, “Maybe you can find a way to take home with you.” He rummages in the pockets of his shorts and pulls out two Ghirardelli chocolates, unwrapping one and passing it to me before turning his attention to his own. “Case in point?”
I hand mine back. “It’s not that easy. That house, the garden behind it—those have been my safety nets my whole life. Even after everything that happened, that was still the one place I felt most me. Can you take safe with you?”
Jonah folds and refolds the wrapper in his hand before saying, “I feel like, maybe . . . I don’t know, you have to make yourself the safe place. No one can ever take you away from you, right?”
Even if I believed him, I wouldn’t have the first clue how to do that—make me the safe place.
I resume scratching Beatriz. She rolls and squirms closer to offer me full access to her belly and I can’t help but crack a small smile at her antics.
Jonah seizes on it. “Maybe it could end up being a good thing. Like this trip turned out to be?”
I sniffle and wipe my cheeks with my sleeve. “Maybe. I guess.” I’m quiet before adding, “But I’d still feel like . . . It’s just . . . the divorce was only the first instance, but since then, it’s everything coming at me without warning . . .” I collect a ragged breath before continuing. “I don’t want to always be wondering what’s waiting around the corner to knock me over. I just want to feel like nothing can get to me.”
Jonah traces a circle in my palm and speaks softly. “To really feel that way, you’d probably have to be an agoraphobic, shut up in your house.”
I pull my hand from his and stand, needing to breathe and move. I pace for a few seconds before leaning my stomach into the railing. Beatriz rolls and scrambles to her feet next to me and I rest a hand on her head, stroking her silken ears.
“Plenty of bad things can happen to agoraphobics,” I say. “Home invasions, grease fires, carbon monoxide poisoning. You could get a stupid splinter that gets infected because you won’t leave to go to a hospital and then you contract gangrene.”
Jonah rises and steps next to me. “You’re basically proving your own point. No one ever knows what’s coming next. Look, lots of those unexpected things are gonna be crappy, but some of them are gonna be unbelievably amazing.”
He grabs my face in his hands and says, “Like this.” The kiss he plants on me is really, really not safe. It leaves me breathless, and I can tell that’s just what he intended by the satisfied look he gives me when he releases me.
“You’ve just gotta let go of the stuff you can’t control,” he says.
I’m still wobbly from his kiss, but also annoyed that he’s boiling my biggest fears down to such simplistic t
erms. “What, so you think I should just accept the unknown? Let the current carry me wherever?” If I wanted to hit low, I could point out that it’s basically what he’s doing with his life right now. But I’m not willing to go there. Instead I ask, “Doesn’t that basically make me a sitting duck?”
He shrugs. “Not if you’re smart about it. You can still take precautions to help tame the unexpected. Check the deck for snag points, get your routine checkups, wear seat belts in the car—but, beyond that, I don’t think you can lock yourself away and let the what-ifs keep you from living your life. It’s just a matter of doing it with the expectation that it’s all subject to change.”
Beatriz nudges my hand with her wet nose and I resume petting her absentmindedly. “I’m not so good with ‘subject to change.’”
He’s smiling softly when I glance up. “You didn’t expect to meet the devastatingly handsome Pirate Sexytimes in the woods, and that’s a change that hasn’t been terrible, right?”
Despite myself, I snicker. “You really need to let the Pirate Sexytimes thing go.”
He laughs, then sobers. “How about I let go if you let go.”
“If I let go of what?”
“No. Just let go. Stop fighting to keep things the way they were, and embrace the future, with all its unknowns, good and bad. Instead of looking back at what you once had, move forward to what you could have instead.”
The lump in my throat grows to epic proportions and I can’t force out any words, even if I knew how to answer him. Is all of this me holding on to the past too tight?
“If I let go, isn’t that like saying the things that are the most important to me aren’t worth fighting for? My family, my home?”
Jonah watches me for a second from the corner of his eye, then drops one of his hands to mine and squeezes. “I don’t think those are the things you’re fighting for, Cass. I think it’s what those things represent. Safety, comfort, a place where you can be yourself, people who will love you unconditionally. You can still have all those things—they just might come in a different package. Your family doesn’t look the same now, but they’re still the same people and they still love you just as much.”
