Where Dreams Are Born (Angelo's Hearth)

by Buchman, M. L.

  Cassidy stared at the waves digging angrily at the rocks. Spray slashed sideways by the wind dragged tears from her eyes even as she struggled to blink them dry. She hadn’t cried in a long time and she was damned if she was going to start now simply because she was cold and there was a hole in her heart.

  Seven days. She’d looked away for a one moment seven days ago and he was gone. Christmas morning. He’d hung on long enough to tell her of his last present, hidden in plain sight in the used X-ray folder on the side table. A long list of crossed-out names had shuttled films back and forth across Northwest Hospital. Last used by someone named Barash. No meaning for her whatsoever.

  I bought this calendar the day you moved back to Seattle. Marked in all the “dates.” Now I know that I won’t get to go with you. I’m sorry to leave you so young.

  “I’m twenty-nine, Daddy.” But it felt young. Her birthday gone unremarked because he’d never woken that day so close to his last.

  The hole in her heart was so broad that it would never be filled. He’d only been gone a week. Cremated, waked, and ashes spread on his beloved vineyard by the permission of the new owners. They’d owned his vineyard for five years, but still, they were the new ones. It still wasn’t right, them living in the place where her father belonged. She could still picture him striding among the vines, rubbing the soil in his palm, showing his only child the wonders of the changing seasons, the lifecycle of a grapevine, and the nurturing of honeybees.

  For our first “date” I will just tell you how proud I am of you. My daughter took a vintner’s education and turned herself into the best food-and-wine columnist ever.

  He always believed in her. Always rooted for her. Always cheered her on. He’d been the same way with her boyfriends. Always welcoming them when they arrived. Always consoling her when they were gone. No judgment, not even on the ones she should have avoided like a bottle of rotgut Thunderbird.

  The wind rattled the paper, drawing her attention back to the letter.

  You are so like me. You figure out what feels right and you just go do it, damn the consequences. I could never fault you for leaving. I always did what I wanted, too. Saw it and went right for it, no discussion needed. All the while wearing perfect blinders that blocked out everything else. You got that from me. You come by your whimsical stubbornness honestly, Ice Sweet.

  She wasn’t stubborn, years of careful planning had led her this far. Even her move to Seattle to be with him had been calculated, though she never told him about that. She shifted on the hard rock that was in imminent danger of freezing her butt.

  Her father kept apologizing for all the wrong things. Seattle had ended up being a great career move, or was becoming one as she’d hoped. In New York, she worked as one of a thousand food and wine reviewers. Okay one in fifty, maybe even one in twenty-five, she was damn good, but there were only three women at that level. The other twenty-two were members of longstanding in the old boys’ club.

  “We’re looking for someone with a more refined palate.” Read as someone who was “male.”

  She’d let go of her sublet in Manhattan when she’d found out he was sick. Bought a condo in Seattle to be near, but not too near him on Bainbridge Island. Helped him move into the elder-care by Northgate when he couldn’t care for himself any longer and from there to Northwest Hospital where she’d lived out his last two weeks in the chair by his bed.

  The Village Voice dropped her the day she left Manhattan. That had hurt as they’d run her first ever review, a short piece on Jim and Charlie’s Punk and Wine Bistro. Jim and Charlie’s was still there, partly thanks to that review that was still framed and hung in the center of bar’s mirror.

  But in Seattle she was rapidly rising to the very upper crust of the apple pie. Her reviews ran in every local paper. The San Francisco Chronicle had picked her up for their Travel section the next week making it difficult to stay grumpy about the loss of The Voice. Then AAA took her national with their magazines. From there, it hadn’t been a big step to national syndication. Six more months in New York and she’d have still been grinding her way up from the twentieth spot to the nineteenth. She was going to bypass the lot of them by skipping right past the de rigueur hurdles and sitting at the head table herself.

  Her father’s cancer had brought at least that much good.

  Now if only it hadn’t taken him with it.

  And she wasn’t whimsical no matter what he thought. Her dad had always described her mother as the organized one. And Cassidy had done her best to be just like her. You didn’t become a top columnist by following the wind all willy-nilly.

  If she didn’t hurry, she was going to freeze in place. She chafed at her legs with one hand and then the other, but it didn’t help. She was cold past any cure less than a piping hot tub bath. She peeked ahead, just two and a bit pages. She turned to the second sheet.

  I started the vineyard after my tour in Vietnam. Got signed off the base and walked out of San Francisco right across the Golden Gate. No home, no job, no one to go back to. Headed up into the hills, don’t even know why or where I was. Walked and hitched ‘til dark, slept, woke with the light, and kept moving.

  One morning, I woke up in a field, leaning against a rotting, wooden fencepost, looking at the saddest little vineyard you could imagine. Poor vines dying of thirst. I found an old bucket and started watering them from a nearby stream. Old man came out to lean on the fence. Watched me quite a while, a couple hours maybe. I didn’t care about him. Those vines were the first thing I’d cared about in a long, long time.

  “You want ‘em?” the old guy asked. “Five hundred bucks and they’re yours.”

  I don’t even remember how it happened. One minute my final pay was in my pocket, then his. Other vets drifted in. I charged them fifty bucks to join. Five of us worked the land, recovered the vines. That was the start of the thirty acres of Knowles Valley Vineyard.

  She’d never heard how his first vineyard started. Didn’t even really know where it was, somewhere in the hills of northern California. Though he might have ambled all the way to Oregon for how much she knew.

  Walk the year with me. Let’s take our time. My past is mine, but your future is not. That’s only up to you. I leave you to walk alone, it is a rough trail often over rocky soil. But keep your head high and you’ll go far.

  Whatever happens, know that I love you. I’m so proud of you.

  Love you Ice Sweet,

  Vic

  Vic. He always signed his letters “Vic.” Never what she’d always called him. “Daddy.”

  “I could never fault you for leaving.” Yet between the lines that’s just what he did. Nothing on the backs of any of the pages. She worked to refold the pages in the wind.

  “No, you’re imagining things, Cass. You think too much. Get your head out of your own butt.” And she mostly did. One of the many gifts Vic Knowles had given her, the ability to be clear about her own actions and reactions.

  He’d financed her dreams of getting away from the rain capital of the Pacific Northwest. He’d paid for her college in full and cooking school after that. It was only cleaning up his papers this last week that she saw how close it had come to breaking him. He’d just made it a natural assumption that she’d go to college and he’d pay. Just like her Mom who had a degree in economics from Vassar. He’d always talked about how smart Cassidy’s mother was. How beautiful. How much he missed her.

  He hadn’t gone to college himself, not even high school. His past was little more than a few facts she’d winnowed over the years. His dad had left before he could remember. He’d dropped out of third grade to help his mother run the grocery store. They were desperately poor when she died. Then gone to Vietnam at eighteen as the only way to make a living wage. And walked to a vineyard. But he gave Cassidy that gift of education as if it was nothing to him.

  Did he now begrudge her that past? The future he never had.

  No. That didn’t make any sense. He hadn’t thought about th
e money, he’d invested in his dreams for her. She was just going nuts from missing him so much and angry at him for being dead.

  “Useful, Cass, real useful.”

  To prove her sanity, she forced the rumpled letter back into the envelope, as neatly as possible in the midst of the maelstrom, and she forced that back into her leather pack.

  Her father, the self-educated man, also the most well-read man she’d ever met. But she’d learned early on to do her math and science homework before he came home from the fields. His frustration at being unable to do them had always been a strain.

  Cassidy’s mother was a single solitary memory. She’d been standing in the open doorway of the house, leaving on a stormy night to answer a call to the hospital. The wind at the door blew her hair across her face as she leaned on her father’s arm. Cassidy’s only memory of Adrianne Knowles, a woman with no face. Then Bea Clark rushing in from next door to sit with her.

  She and Daddy did talk about the books though. He had sharpened her mind as they puzzled out the books together. Ayn Rand piled next to Shakespeare, Heinlein and Hugo, Dickens and a biography of Jimi Hendrix. Their house was always awash in books. And the massive collection of wine books, thumbed again and again by both of them, the only books to have a proper bookcase, had sat in the place of honor in the living room. Everything else jumbled into stacked wooden crates, mounded on tops of dressers, and enough on the dining table to make it a battle to find room for two plates.

  The chill spray of a particularly large wave spattered her with a few drops and the next with a few more. The tide must be coming in.

  She scrambled from her hiding place and rose back into the wind which threatened to topple her down into the roaring waves. She forged her way back up the hill. The wind tore at her backpack and thumped it against her spine. The camera. Right.

  She squatted to get out of the wind and pulled out her trusty point-and-shoot. The wind nearly blinded her when she turned back into it. Her hair swirled about her head.

  A sailboat. Two lunatics in a sailboat were off the point of land. A cobalt-blue hull climbed out of one wave, pointing its bow to the sky, and then plunged down and buried its nose in the front of the next wave before rising again in a great arc of spray and green water. Huge, maroon sails snapped in the wind, loud enough to sound like a gunshot above the roaring surf.

  Whoever the captain was, he and his buddy were crazy. They must both be male because no woman in her right mind would ever go out into a storm like this. But if they wanted to sail right into her picture, she wasn’t going to complain; it was a beautiful boat. At the perfect moment she snapped the photo then turned for the woods and the long trail home.

  # # #

  “Hey Angelo. Take the helm.” Russell had to shout to be heard above the sharp crack of the dark-red mainsail.

  “Got it, Captain.” His friend grinned at him as he grabbed the tiller and they slid across the waves off the West Point lighthouse.

  He let out a whoop as they rode high over a crest, paused, and went weightless as they plunged into the next trough. The Lady Amalthea had been built for weather like this. At first Russell had been afraid of the weather. His parent’s boat, Julia, a twenty-eight footer they kept at the summer place on Fire Island, would have had a very tough time in this sea. At fifty feet long, the Lady just ate it up; she practically flew over the wavetops.

  He ducked below and grabbed his camera. Belowdecks would definitely need some work. Okay, a lot of work. The only decent thing in the old gal was the forward stateroom. Russell could hardly wait. The marine surveyor had pronounced both the hull and mast sound and that was all he cared about. The interior just needed to be torn out and redone. He’d have to figure out a better system for diesel than the old beer keg strapped to the engine room wall. Get her plumbed for fresh water and wired with more than an old car battery charger. But she really had potential. Most importantly, the Lady sailed like there was no tomorrow.

  He scrambled back on deck and started snapping pictures. Angelo posed in his foul weather gear, the yellow slicks and orange float jacket making him look as much like a clown as a sailor. He made some foolish faces to go with it and Russell captured them for posterity.

  Then he aimed at the lighthouse and snapped off a couple dozen images. He didn’t even bother to check the LCD, they’d be good. The lighthouse perched on the rocky edge of Discovery Park was too photogenic a place for bad pictures. He bracketed the exposure and focus just to be sure. It was perfect. Steep, wooded cliff rising up behind the pristine white and red of the squat lighthouse. He’d crop the image to avoid the sprawl of the treatment plant just around the rocks to the north.

  He tried to get the rhythm of the lighthouse’s flash. Alternating white and red every ten seconds. He got them both then stowed the camera away.

  “Ready about?” Angelo called from above.

  Russell scrambled back on deck, checked the lines, and preset the port jib sheet next to the winch. The line felt oversized but solid in his hand, the rope was a half-inch thick just to handle the sail, the same size as the anchor line on his parents’ Julia.

  “Ready.”

  “Helm’s a lee!” Angelo threw over the tiller and the Lady lifted up her bow and spun like a dancer.

  Russell waited until the last second before releasing the starboard line and heaving in on the port one. Moments later the line snapped taught and would have flipped him overboard if he hadn’t let go at the last moment, a rope burn creased his palms with searing heat.

  Angelo was laughing his head off. “And you, Mister Great Sailor, are going to solo around the world?”

  “Shaddup, Angelo. It was your idea.”

  “I gave you a hundred ideas Christmas Day, I figured you wouldn’t listen to any of them like usual, especially not this one. What about being a scuba instructor off Fiji, lot of cute tourists?”

  The boat slammed over another wave like she was skating on glass.

  “Nah! Not for me. Don’t like getting my hair wet.”

  He saw Angelo twitch the tiller, but he didn’t move fast enough. A wave plowed into his face, freezing rivulets of seawater running right past the tight collar of his float jacket and down his back underneath. He lost the line for the jib sheet again and the line whipped away. The jibsail luffing with sharp slaps and cracks.

  He sputtered and spat as Angelo pointed the boat’s bow back into the wind.

  Russell retrieved the sheet and hauled it back in, passing it several times around the winch as he did so. Angelo eased back off the wind before they lost all forward way. Russell grabbed the winch handle and ratcheted in the last few feet of line.

  ”She’s bigger than Dad’s Julia.”

  “Duh! This one sail has way more area than both of the hers.”

  True. He’d bought a big boat. But she flew so sweet, he knew he’d made the right choice. And only a nut would try crossing an ocean in a twenty-eight footer. He’d looked at a sixty-five footer, but it was more boat than he wanted to wrestle with. That really would need two people and he didn’t want to count on that.

  Russell looked back at the lighthouse.

  “You know they wanted to automate her in 1979. The lighthouse keeper begged them to let him keep running it, at least until her hundredth birthday. On her centenary in 1981, the keeper climbed up to the outside of the light and sprayed a bottle of champagne over the outside of the light. Legend has it he also danced a hornpipe up there. He stayed another four years before they kicked him out.”

  “A good choice for the January lighthouse.” Angelo pointed ahead. “Where are we going?”

  Russell ducked low to peek under the sail. The western shore of the Sound was a half-dozen miles off. Some rain was moving in, but they were dressed for that. It was too perfect a day to turn back for the marina yet. He waved ahead.

  “Thatta way. The isle of Tortuga.”

  “Aye, Mon Capataine.” They both laughed. Nothing like a good pirate movie quote when you were of
f sailing. The crazed French accent made as much sense from his short, Italian friend as had did from a tall, English Basil Rathbone.

  Russell let the main out a bit to get better air flow across the upper third of the sail and then headed forward to inspect the boat under way. The tail end of the jib halyard had slipped free and was snaked all over the deck. He checked aloft. The halyard ran clean up to the top of the mast, over a pulley at the top and down to the top of the jib sail. Damn that was a tall mast. Sixty-five feet from water to masthead, sixty from where he stood on the cabin roof. He looped the line into a neat hank and hung it back over the cleat. The lines would have to be routed back to the cockpit so that he could single-hand her in rougher weather. That meant longer lines. He glanced aloft again.

  “Well, I’m gonna have to climb you someday. Just like a six-story walkup back in Manhattan so I should be okay.” He didn’t feel so certain looking up at it whipping back and forth across the sky as she leapt over the next wave.

  He made an inventory as he walked forward. New hatches, these were old and leaking despite their layers of duct tape. Most of the rope rigging would have to go. Some of the wire too. Bits of it were still okay for puttering about in the Sound, but definitely not good enough for an ocean crossing.

  His heel found another of the squishy spots in the decking. He’d have to rip off the bubbled fiberglass covering and deal with any rot under there. Actually, the whole deck needed to be torn up and redone, not a task he was looking forward to. And the bowsprit. The safety lines simply ended at the bow. The sprit stuck out another six feet, a narrow round chunk of wood over the emptiness of heaving waves. That would take some thinking.

  A thirty-five pound anchor rested in the split and worn mahogany of a deck chock. The Julia’s anchor weighed fifteen. When he’d unearthed the fifty-pound storm anchor under the forward bunk with another twenty-five pounds of chain, he felt a little humbled. No wonder the boat had an anchor winch. That would be a beast to lift from thirty or forty feet down.

  Leaning against the taut jib sail for support, he stepped out onto the slender bowsprit. At least the last owner had painted non-skid on its narrow top surface. He grabbed hold of the wire forestay that rose from the tip of the sprit and soared to the top of the mainmast. He added, “make it a double stay,” to his mental list.