Before the Wind

by Jim Lynch

  I stole her away to my boat and set her up in my best sleeping bag in the most comfortable bunk. She was groggy the moment she got horizontal. When Mario started telling me for the second time that she was his one and only, I resisted informing him that he’d have to date a billion women to be sure. Then I left him there to watch her sleep.

  Returning to Shangri-la, I found Rem fishing off B Dock and whistling off tune. Then Georgia leaned over the stern of her big catamaran and dropped a crab pot that somebody had given her years ago. She used sharp cheddar as bait, her theory being that no living creature can resist good cheese. And half an hour before midnight, Noah finally made an appearance.

  “Good to see you!” Georgia shouted. “Oh, quit looking so glum. Can’t you at least find a little humor in all the doomsday bullshit?”

  “What if God’s into irony,” Cara mused, her voice husky from singing, “and messes with us by sending up the nonbelievers?”

  “Did you shave?” Georgia asked Noah. “Now isn’t that presumptuous? You want to be all proper for your ascension, don’t you?”

  Noah forced a grin. “Hedging my bets,” he said, then noticed the nudist couple toweling off after some skinny-dipping. “As the sunlight begins to disappear at the end of their fifth year,” he said, reviving, at last, his Morgan Freeman voice-over, “and the warm days begin to cool, they too will climb out of the water. And they will march just as they have done for centuries ever since the emperor penguin decided to stay, to live and love in the harshest place on earth.”

  Trent didn’t laugh along. He still resented Noah calling him a meth head to his face when he hadn’t done any meth in nine goddamn months. “Why are you always quoting that sappy movie?” he demanded now. “It’s not like it’s Caddyshack or Pulp Fiction or some other classic.”

  Noah looked away. I was about to defend him when he said, “Because I can’t quite get over those penguins, Trent. Minus-eighty degrees, and they still waddle seventy miles across land to try to make a family. Okay? Have you ever even seen it? When the mothers go off to fatten up so they’ll be able to feed their unborn babies, the fathers wait with the eggs between their feet for up to a hundred and twenty-five days without a single meal. It’s love and family and sacrifice. If you think all that is sappy, I pity you. And there’s this one scene…” Noah stopped, bunched his lips and took a deep breath. “This one scene where a mother’s trying to wake up her dead chick. And she’s shrieking a bit and poking at her. And you’re invested in both of them by this point. And, ah shit. They’re so resilient, those fucking penguins.”

  Trent turned to me, wiped imaginary tears and lip-synched, Those fucking penguins. “Take it easy, Noah,” he said. “I’m just saying it’s not The Notebook or Schindler’s List.”

  From here the drinking snowballed and the head counts got trickier as people retreated to their boats without letting anybody know. Those of us still standing stared up at the clearing sky, which is why I noticed the bright dot flying overhead like a very slow shooting star.

  “Grady,” I shouted. “The space station again!”

  I’d never seen him move so quickly, scrambling across the wheelhouse to his ham radio.

  “Whiskey Zero Sugar Victor callin’ November Alpha Sierra Sierra.”

  Turning to me, he said, “I found their call name on the Internet.”

  “Whiskey Zero Sugar Victor,” he repeated into the radio, “come in November Alpha Sierra Sierra.”

  “Whiskey Zero Sugar Victor,” responded a strange voice, “we’ve got you loud and clear. Welcome aboard the International Space Station.”

  We cheered.

  “November Alpha Sierra Sierra,” Grady nearly shouted, “the humble people of the Pacific Northwest salute you and your crew!”

  A chuckle crackled through the speaker. “And we, the crew of the International Space Station, salute you as well, sir.”

  “What should I say?” Grady asked the remaining drunks. “Peace be with you!” he yelled. After no response, he shouted, “Namaste!”

  When midnight finally arrived, nothing overt happened other than more people slinked off to bed. Eventually, everybody but Noah and I had either surrendered to sleep, drowned or—unbeknownst to us—ascended.

  “Mathematically speaking, according to my father, believers should be going up by now,” Noah said.

  “Maybe just not from our docks,” I told him. “We’re a small sample. And mathematically speaking, according to my mother, I should have found the love of my life by now.”

  —

  Shortly after daybreak, two tugs showed up and helped tow the marina back to where it belonged. Meanwhile, Grady and I organized boats with working engines to tow the powerless ones to temporary moorages.

  By the time I finally got Ruby to shore, she was pleading with me to quit worrying about her. “My doctors are great. I’ve got so many friends nursing and helping me already, it’s absolutely exhausting. I’m gonna be just fine, Josh, better than fine.”

  “But don’t you want some breakfast,” I stalled. “You’ve got such a long drive. Why can’t you just hang around more often?”

  “C’mon, I’m right here right now. Who just gave you a surprise visit? Who played some halfway decent jazzy piano last night just for you, huh?”

  “I love you, Rube.”

  She laughed. “You think I don’t know that by now?”

  “I don’t think you have any idea.”

  She gave me a long smile. “Pull yourself together, soldier.” Then she left me with her pimp walk, arms swinging behind her, spinning her head back to make sure I was watching. Then my bald sister slid inside a small station wagon with BEAUTIFUL BRITISH COLUMBIA plates (she’d finally got a license, passing the test on her third try) and turned the wrong way out of the marina. I stood waiting until she’d executed a clumsy U-turn and drove back past with a parade wave as Mario pulled out and followed.

  DATE NUMBER 35

  Five weeks after the doomsday storm, the boatyard had resumed its seasonal mania with fresh rounds of manifest-destiny couples, naïve ocean goers, delusional captains and feverish boat shoppers. Wait till October, we’d tell them, and the prices will drop with every inch of rain. But no, these people needed boats now.

  Amazingly, Noah bounced back to his old self after his father’s public apology for getting the date wrong again. In hindsight, he told the smirking media, he’d miscalculated. What he’d been calling “the end day” was actually the beginning of its six-month prelude; the true ascension would occur on December 24. All of which made him fodder for yet another day’s news cycle. Then it all went mercifully quiet, and Noah spoke to him for the first time in five years. “You know,” I overheard him say comfortingly, “there was one hell of a storm here that night. Completely unexpected, too.”

  Lorraine had quit the yard to head out with Marcy in her Catalina 27, at least for an Alaska adventure. We were all delighted that Rex was no longer in the picture. But Lorraine? Are you two together, the boys desperately wanted to ask when the two of them said good-bye. We launched Sophia, Blaine Stanton’s Pearson 36, that same afternoon. He looked more exuberant than ever with his rebuilt heart. There weren’t enough hands for him to shake for all the expensive and irrational labor we’d done for him.

  Then Sunita the sailmaker surprised me the following evening at Sunrise when she strolled up to let me know she was fitting sails for some old Morgan 36 on G Dock, but that she’d be willing to look at my sail inventory if I was still interested in maybe ordering a new jib. She said she had called me.

  “Dropped my phone in the water last Wednesday,” I explained, knowing it sounded like a lie, “and haven’t replaced it yet.” I couldn’t look her in the eyes for long. I hadn’t broken down all day and didn’t want to in front of her.

  “I’ll pass on the sails for now,” I said, my eyes roaming, my heart thumping. “I’ve gotta help a few liveaboards with some things right now.”

  Her head bobbed beneath the
North Sails hat. Finally, she said, “I’ll check back when I’ve finished up.” I shrugged like it was fine either way, but she couldn’t have picked a worse day to track me down.

  When she next found me, I was upside down inside Cara’s lazarette, drilling holes for screws to brace a tiny fuel pump for the diesel heater I’d installed. I could hear her on the pier talking into her phone when I called up to Cara, asking for a screwdriver I’d left in the cockpit.

  After finishing that project, I didn’t see Sunita anywhere as my liveaboard posse trailed me to Remy’s yawl, where he was cursing a new leak behind the engine that kept setting off his bilge alarm. I squeezed my head between the engine and the cockpit until I was far enough back to shine a flashlight on the puddle beneath the shaft seal. I dried everything off a few times and at last located the pinhole leak beading near the shaft.

  Resurfacing, I blew my nose and saw Sunita from the back on the far side of the dock, chatting with Cara.

  Awaiting bad news, Rem paced in tight circles on the pier. He didn’t have the cash to pull the damn boat, he explained, and couldn’t sleep with the bilge alarm going off every two hours.

  “It’s not the seal,” I told him. “It’s a hairline crack near the shaft log.” I grabbed a tub from my bag and mixed up this special epoxy that can cure in water. Breathing poorly, I hastily mixed the adhesive, then dried and slathered the pinhole. It took every inch of my fingertips to work the goo into the right spot. I lay there, head pinging, and waited. The leak actually stopped—for now.

  Scraping my scalp climbing out, I dabbed at the blood. Sunita was still there with several liveaboards lurking and muttering, Hey, Josh, hey, man.

  I indulged every question because only work kept me together these days. But finally she stepped up and said, “Could we talk?”

  Following her down the dock out of everybody’s earshot, I said, “I’m sorry, but I really don’t know when I’ll be done here. I’ve been putting these people off way too long.” When she didn’t respond, I lost control of my words. “And if for some crazy reason you’re the slightest bit interested in me, I really don’t have the patience to wait for you to figure out that I’m geographically undesirable, don’t own a car, look like a stray dog most of the time, occasionally drink coffee out of Styrofoam cups, might make out with your sister in your dreams and have four goddamn planets in Scorpio.”

  “Josh.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry.”

  “I love stray dogs and Scorpios.” She smiled. “I also like guys who fix other people’s problems in their spare time and who are too shy or guarded to just look me in the eye and ask me out.”

  How’s it possible I’d barely noticed her that first time she came into the boatyard? Having been a resident of this planet for thirty-one years, I’d seen thousands of women and witnessed countless forms of beauty. Not immediately noticing hers was like failing to notice that a hummingbird defies the laws of flight.

  “Will you go,” I began carefully, “and I know this sounds weird, but will you go with me to my sister’s funeral a week from Sunday? It’s really a wake, is what it is, but I realize that’s a very strange first date. And if you—”

  “Oh, no,” she whispered.

  “Oh, yes.”

  Somebody called her name, probably the irritable podiatrist whose boat she was working on. He shouted “Sunita!” again. She ignored him and, after what seemed like a very long time, finally said, “I’d be honored.”

  Then she didn’t so much hug me as get in between my arms. I was fine until that happened.

  THE IMMORTALITY OF SAILING FAST

  There were no ashes.

  The sweaty man who ran the Squamish Chapel & Crematorium told me this was a rare occurrence, though not unheard-of, particularly with infants. Sometimes, he explained, the process is so efficient and the remains so small there’s little or nothing left behind.

  Ruby had lost a lot of weight, but she was much bigger than any baby, I said, to which he had no response other than to blink excessively and stutter that there would be no ch-ch-charge.

  I didn’t know how to make sense of this, or explain it to the family. Had Ruby left no ashes because she wasn’t made of carbon and oxygen like the rest of us? Was this just her final believe-it-or-not stunt? Had we collectively imagined her altogether? Or had one of her farm zealots simply stolen the ashes?

  There was no Bernard around to investigate. He’d left so abruptly after Swiftsure, mumbling only that he was teaming up with some people down south, that we had no way to let him know he was now sisterless. The rest of the family didn’t have much to say about the ash mystery, as if they’d expected something inexplicable from Ruby, even now.

  “At least they didn’t try to pawn off somebody else’s ashes,” Mother said, then shared a creepy story about a pathologist who’d absconded with Einstein’s brain, cut it into two hundred and forty thin slices and stored them in Mason jars for thirty years.

  Though Ruby’s doctor never returned my calls, his caffeinated nurse told me the only surprise about my sister’s passing was that she’d lived so long. Initially, they’d diagnosed it as noninvasive breast cancer, but an April ultrasound showed three large tumors on her liver, too. “We knocked it back as best we could with chemo, radiation and stem cells.” The tumors were too large and aggressive for an operation, she explained, and Ruby wasn’t a strong candidate for a liver transplant. She handed me an envelope Ruby had asked her to mail once she’d died. “You said you were driving up for the ashes and all, so I thought I’d make certain you got it.”

  Dear Family,

  Sorry I didnt tell the full truth about how sick I was but I didnt fully know yet and theres always been way to much fuss about me. I didnt want to exit like that to. Im not ready for this life to end but in the time Ive had how could anyboddy hope for more? Even though Ive ben gone so long Ive never left any of you and never will. All my love to all of you. Ruby

  The unanswered questions mounted as I drove off. Why wasn’t she a strong candidate for a transplant? Would her treatment have been better in the States? And the saddest ones: Why had she insisted on battling this without her family? Why hadn’t she let her scientist momma and her fix-it brother try to help?

  —

  So many people packed into the Sons of Norway Hall it got pass-out hot. There were friends, sailors, locals of all ages and Canadian farm workers, too, with people dressed in suits, overalls, dresses and cutoffs. Mario Seville was there in all black, sniffling like a widower waiting to be comforted.

  Father stood to speak but couldn’t stop blubbering about his Ruby and sat back down. None of us had ever seen him even tear up before. Then Grumps sang an Icelandic song about fate and coincidence before breaking down himself. Mother started with a dry chronology of Ruby’s life before veering off script. “She was extraordinary, oh yes. We all hope to feel glory and make sense of the chaos, don’t we? Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, forest fires, liver cancer. Why Ruby? She never even drank. People lose perspective at moments like these. Yes, Ruby was a miracle. But so are all of you. And so is an earthworm. Let me leave you with a suggestion and a tip: study nature to better understand the gift of your life. The most amazing thing you can ever encounter is what’s going on inside of every single cell in your body.” She looked at everyone and recoiled, as if shaken by all the intent faces. Steadying herself, she said, “I’ve always been honored and flattered to be Ruby’s mother. And I always will be.”

  Finally it was my turn. I struggled to explain what it was like to watch her sail, then shared stories that showed her goofy humor because everybody desperately needed to laugh. “Another unusual thing about my sister is that she’s always been more vivid in my mind than most people are in person.” Then I closed my eyes and described her, really fast and very specifically.

  “A thin pink birthmark on the underside of her neck curls up beneath her right jawbone. She has a laugh versatile enough to fit any moment, and a left foot that is
a full size bigger than her right, and a belly button that is neither an innie nor an outtie but a flush-decker, and a mole the size of a pencil eraser behind her left ear. Her fingers are almost twice as long as they should be. Her eyes are a pale shade of green that can be found nowhere else. And if you watch closely, her hair color shifts with her moods.”

  I don’t remember much else other than this huge unwashed Canuck lifted me off the floor when I walked from the microphone toward Sunita.

  —

  Within a month, our Star fleet would quit racing due to shrinking turnouts, and Mario Seville would never be seen on the bay again. The boatyard boys would unceremoniously scatter as well. Mick got a job near his brother in a Bay Area yard. Big Alex left to work on truck diesels, where he was far less likely to get stuck in engine compartments. Jack, who the boys always speculated was making a bundle supervising us, suddenly retired to a trailer park to live off disability. Noah went home to Boring, Oregon, to care for his father after he fell and cracked three vertebrae.

  Later that same week I left, too, motoring north out of Sunrise Marina toward Seattle at daybreak. For a full hour I had the planet to myself, my wake fanning out some mysterious message across the glassy inlet, the sky and trees more vivid in reflection than in reality. Then, so swiftly, the mirror faded, and the harsh sun illuminated the humdrum of yet another day, I-5 droning in the background.

  Grumps was beyond thrilled when I asked if he’d share his room with me. So I moved back in and slept above him on Bernard’s old bunk. I made the Bobos breakfast in the mornings and helped them work on a comfortable and original boat that Grumps had designed for a repeat customer. And on my second weekend home, to my father’s disbelief, I jacked up the sagging corners of the Teardown and replaced sections of rotten beams and posts with fresh wood and new joists. Dropped tennis balls no longer rolled toward Olympia.