by Jane Bow
“Coming about!” She pushed the tiller away from her but she had not been paying attention, thought that because the wind was lighter in here she was safe, did not know that westerly land winds are fickle, squalling then shifting directions, catching the back of a sail. Dancer tipped too much as she came up into the wind. Brigit leaned way out over the side.
“Release the jib!” She reached forward to yank the line free. The cleat did not give. The line slipped out of her hand. And now Dancer’s cockpit was vertical, perpendicular with the sea.
“Lean out!” She was pulling with all her strength, trying to bring the mainsail in, to come up into irons, to dump the wind out of her sails, to stop, when a new gust filled the jib.
Capsizing happens in slow motion. The boom skidded across the water, caught the top of a wave, pulled the mast down. The mainsail lay on the water, the bailing pail floating, tied on, thank God. Brigit lost her footing and slid down into the sea.
Down, down. Her rubber-soled runners, jeans, sweater, rubber rain jacket heavy as a shroud, dragged her under, deeper, eyes open, hair floating above her, bubbles mumbling upward. Deeper. But it was not too bad, not like the Pacific where, fall in and within two minutes your bones ached, muscles stiffened, brain ceased to transmit.
Her feet touched the bottom. Her knees buckled. She pushed off, popped up to the surface, Dancer’s cockpit teetering, vertical, above her. Ropes swirled in the water. The wind whined through the topside rigging.
Do not get tangled. Do not let the boat slam down on top of you. The lessons she had learned from Daniel came back. She kicked around to the other side of the hull. The centreboard was a horizontal step, just under the water. Gingerly she clambered onto it. Stood up, hanging onto the boat’s gunwale, bouncing on the board, trying to use her weight as a lever to pry the sail on the other side off the water’s surface, to right the boat. Dancer was too heavy and the sail was stuck to the water and all she could hear as the wind beat against the upturned hull was the short ragged intakes of her own breathing. Her feet slipped. She hung on, tried again, again. Again. But the swell was too high and the mast was underwater now.
Should she swim back around to the other side in all these clothes, scrabble around under the teetering cockpit, in among the ropes, to find the flares Vanessa kept in the emergency kit somewhere in the bow? How did you light a flare? Or should she leave Dancer and swim to shore? Oak Island was only a few metres away.
A skipper never leaves her boat.
A skipper who does not leave her boat will die of hypothermia in Mahone Bay in June.
“Ahoy there!” An elderly man was standing in the water at the shore, his pant legs rolled up to his knees. “Are you all right?”
“I think so, yes.” Brigit was treading water, not easy in clothes and running shoes and rubber pants and jacket.
“You’re not far off-shore,” the man had to shout over the wind. “Can you manage to tow her in to me?”
Brigit blinked the water out of her eyes. Cold was seeping in through the rubber now.
“Okay.” Two minutes later the sea bottom was under her feet, the warmth of the man’s hand steadying her as she waded in. Together they hauled Dancer into the shallows, righted her, then Brigit pulled up the centreboard and they beached her.
“Why not leave the sails up, to dry?” The man’s accent was British, from the north, Brigit thought. He was not much taller than she was, a stolid gnome of a fellow, the remains of his hair, wispy grey, usually combed across his baldness, now flying in all directions. And there behind him, looking impossibly different — younger, rosier — in brown slacks and a sweatshirt with a multi-coloured native print on the front, shifting nervously from one new-looking white running shoe to the other, was Mlle Durocher.
“Brigit, my dear!” She held out her hands. “May I introduce Robert?”
In a clearing just behind the beach, where Brigit had seen the splash of color, freshly cut saplings were scenting the air. The tent was surrounded by a carton of food, a camp stove on legs, a bundle of dry firewood, two fold-up camp chairs set out in front of a newly dug fire pit with rocks laid carefully in a circle and twigs stacked in a teepee around scrunched-up paper.
“Why don’t you light the fire, Lily, and put on some logs while I get Brigit some dry clothes.” Robert disappeared into the tent, then came out to hand her a pair of faded red track pants and matching sweatshirt still creased from the package, and woollen socks, then held the tent flap for her to go in. “You won’t win any fashion prizes, but you’ll be cozy enough, I reckon.”
Vanessa ran up to the bow, pulled her T-shirt over her head and, holding onto the jib stay, climbed the yacht’s railing. The skipper was anchoring out of the wind behind Borgel’s Point in Chester Basin.
This was where Brother Bart’s pirate ship had anchored. His burial pit must have been right there on the bluff. There were cottages on all sides now, most of them empty this early in the year.
“Hey doll!” Sanger had just reached the deck. But poised on the ship’s rail wearing nothing but her blue silk bra and thong, arms outstretched, toes gripping the polished wood as the air chilled her midriff, Vanessa felt a rush of joy. The clouds were so close; if she reached up she could touch them. Twenty feet below the sea was playing with the remains of the pink and mauve early evening light, winking at her. How long since she had felt so feather light, so free of thought—
“Vanessa!” He was moving toward her when her body rose, balancing on the balls of her feet while her eyes picked their point. Then her knees flexed, sprang and she was flying. Time stopped. Until, arcing now in descent, she pointed her fingers, thumbs hooked together, and cut cleanly through the surface of the sea.
She came up gasping, rolled over onto her back, grinning, ignoring the water’s icy fingers.
Up on the deck Sanger and the skipper were leaning over the railing, looking worried, annoyed.
She laughed. “Come on in!”
Her stomach, as she turned over again to swim, was numb — it was, after all, still early in June — but the shore was no more than a hundred metres away. She began to stroke, face in — it was faster — head turning, reaching for breath. But now her arms were stiffening in the cold.
She could no longer feel her feet. Her pace slowed.
Brigit had been fine in the water, all her attention keyed to surviving, but now, sitting on a log by the fire, Robert’s faded red sweatshirt down to her knees, his track pants bunched at her ankles, she realized she could not feel her feet. Smoke swirled up into the wind as Mlle Durocher poured water from a pot she had boiled on the camp stove into three mugs of hot chocolate powder. Brigit could not get over how different she looked here.
“So there I was, standing up to my waist chopping saplings when I looked up.” Across from her in one of the camp chairs, Robert was wearing his pyjama bottoms, his ankles white above running shoes that looked as new as Mlle D.’s. “And there was a sailboat, heeling, heeling. ‘It’s Dancer!’ Lily cried. We watched you go over.”
“Vanessa is not with you?” Mlle Durocher handed them each a mug.
“No, she’s … out cruising with Sanger.” Brigit pulled her knees up, hugged them. The fire crackled, flames dancing crazily in the wind.
She started shivering again as above the trees the sinking sun painted the bottoms of the clouds a dusky, last-minute pink. The shadows were deepening. She got up.
“There’s something I came to do.” She looked apologetic. “Now, before it gets dark.”
Mlle Durocher and Robert walked with her down to the beach where Dancer was chattering in a wind that cut through Brigit’s sweatshirt. She looked out at the darkening sea. Vanessa was out there somewhere, but what could she do about that?
“Would you allow Robert to walk with you?” asked Mlle Durocher.
Brigit looked embarrassed. Mlle Durocher smiled, understanding.
“It is all right. He will not speak if you don’t want him to, isn’t that right, mon
amour? I would just like you to be safe.”
Brigit was afraid she would cry.
The treasure hunter’s boat was not in Joudrey’s Cove. They walked up through the twilight, past his bungalow.
“Vanessa says this land used to be swamp, till they drained it,” Brigit said. Robert was so gentle. It was nice to chat. “When they did, they found all kinds of things: part of a wooden runway, what might have been an ancient gold branding iron, the hinged piece of a chest, part of a ship’s gunwale, drilled stones and markers, even a heart-shaped stone. But you probably know all that. This can’t be where the treasure is, though.” She glanced around into the twilight. “Still, the guy who bought this land from the original finders of the treasure shaft, Anthony Graves, lived right here. He never took the slightest interest in treasure hunting but Vanessa says he paid for his groceries with doubloons. Interesting, eh? What I’m looking for is a place where the limestone part of the island ends.” She pushed into the undergrowth. “Come on, I’ll show you the headstone.”
Scents of spruce and sea and the coming night accompanied them. Brigit walked ahead of Robert, slowly, stopping, listening, and then walking on, her body a diviner’s rod now, quivering, pointing, the images so vivid, so clear by the time they reached the headstone. She knelt, one hand caressing the stone.
The skin on the hands that had chiselled the headstone was rough, reddened by chilblains, fingers not short. It was the whole hand that was small. The whole man was short, dark, smelling of pine resin, a man from an era much older than Brother Bart. He was concentrating, worried.
Alone. There was something near here; she could feel it. But not right here.
Robert was standing a few feet away when Brigit stood up, turned her head toward the east, then toward the west, along the lines of the cross’s arms. East-west: the axis of the mind. East led to Joudrey’s Cove. West?
Swamp, trees thick now, fir, spruce, oak, beech, aspen. Alders, chokecherries crowding between them, blooming white. The trace of a path wove through the shadowy undergrowth. Mosquitoes and no-see-ums buzzed past her ears, landed on her neck. A road, overtaken in places by weeds, wound along the shore behind South Cove, on the island’s landward side. To their right, just down the shore near the causeway, the lights were on in the treasure hunter’s bungalow.
The sea lapped at the stony shoreline here. And now Brigit heard the rattle of bygone bulldozers, men in hard hats moving rocks, behind them other smaller men disappearing into the sea: a chaos of images superimposed.
Robert stood on the rocks pointing along the shoreline to where a cedar was tilting toward the water, its roots straining to keep it from falling in.
“Erosion.” He looked at Brigit. “I wonder how much it has changed this shoreline in the last four hundred years.”
“Erosion?” Brigit looked stunned. And then saw, suddenly. “Erosion, of course!”
Cedars, pines, birch trees lost their footing in a wind, uprooted the earth. Snakes, crabs, beetles, worms toppled with them into the water. Winds and the rising and falling tides teased them loose until finally they floated off to some other beach where they became white sun-bleached tree bones. You could see them on any of Vancouver Island’s beaches.
No longer anchored, the earth and stones they had left behind slid down into the water. New green shoots sprouted in the opened earth.
Hundreds of years ago what was now sea would have been land.
“You there!” Two men were standing on the road near the treasure hunter’s bungalow. Robert pulled Brigit back into the undergrowth.
The skipper must have recognized the signs of hypothermia and lowered a dinghy because now Vanessa was back in the cabin. Edward must have taken off her dripping underwear, towelled her down, ordered an electric heating pad — her skin was cold as a corpse — tucked her into a bed in the bow, given her something to drink, because everything, voices, memory, thought, fears, all her senses were muffled now, as if by cotton batting. She closed her eyes, saw a knight riding a horse, a white tunic with a red cross worn over his armour, visor down, face hidden: a saviour or a predator?
And now, look! Here were Carlita, Paco, Adrian and Santi hiking with her a few days before Vanessa’s family had left Spain, up a stony path that led through the olive grove on the lower reaches of La Montaña, the rib of rock behind Altamira. A few people still lived in La Montaña’s creases, in caves, their painted wooden window frames and curtained doorways set into the dusty mountainside. Faded blue and red and white cotton shirts and pants and nightgowns flapped on lines stretched between poles set into the hill as they passed by.
“Donde van? Where are you going?” a grandfather, crooked as the branches of his olive trees, called out from his stoop.
“To the stone hut at the top.”
“Cuidado, niños.” It was August. “The temperature is high enough to fry an egg on the rocks.”
The heat wrapped itself around them. Sweat trickled down past their ears. No one spoke. The path, a narrow goat track, crisscrossed the face of the mountain as they climbed. A donkey and a few skinny goats munched on the tufts of grass struggling for sustenance among the rocks and dust and a few scrub bushes.
Finally Santi and Adrian, who were in the lead with Paco close behind, called a halt. The path ended just above them at the foot of a ten-metre tower of yellow-grey rock. All you could see beyond it was the sky.
Far below in the ancient Altamira market square, ant-sized people were milling about. Down by the harbour the fishing nets were spread on wooden frames to dry. There, drawn up at the end of the beach was Carlita’s Grampa’s red wooden dory, also the others, blue, green, brown, that had gone out on the tide at dawn while the sea, azure against the sky, broke into innocent lacework at the shore. Vanessa imagined the galleons laden with treasure lying just offshore, and Santi’s and the other great-who-knew-how-many-times-great grandfathers rowing out in their dories under the cover of night.
“Why do the boys always think they’re so great?” Carlita was sitting down, licking her finger to paint a face in the dust on the canvas top of her running shoe.
“What?”
Carlita spat on her finger, started on the other shoe top.
“They always think we’ll do exactly what they decide, even if it’s stupid.”
She was right. When they were alone Paco would come and take Vanessa’s hand, make a present of his smile. But as soon as the other boys were around it was as if Vanessa did not exist.
“We don’t need them,” said Vanessa. “The stone hut must be up behind that rock.” To their left the pitch was nearly sheer. To their right the scree was steep, but a few bushes had found purchase. Tiny white flowers held the ground between the stones.
The idea came to both girls in the same instant. Jumping up, they edged out onto the scree.
“Don’t look down,” said Vanessa.
Carlita called to the boys. “What are you waiting for?”
Vanessa was concentrating, digging the inside edge of her soles into the shale, testing her weight, Carlita’s breathing close behind her, when a sickly sweet stench reached her. Thumping beat the air right over her head. She looked up as something huge, brown, swooped too close, its wings blocking out the sun, its talons dragging, glistening sharp. Vanessa flung up her arms to cover her head as two of the largest birds she had ever seen sailed out over the mountainside toward the sea.
“Owls,” said Santi. Their brown tails were fan-shaped, tipped with white.
“That smell,” Carlita wrinkled her nose.
“Rotting flesh — mouse carcasses probably, or rabbits. They’ll pluck up a baby, then bring it back and rip it to shreds—”
“Stop it!” cried Vanessa.
“Their nest must be up there, behind the cliff.” Adrian made his way to the girls, watching with them as the owls paused over the valley, riding the updrafts. Such grace!
“They must be hunting,” said Adrian.
But the owls were not hunting. The
y were circling back, coming in straight and low, so fast, their wings silent, so close suddenly that instinctively Adrian shoved Carlita and Vanessa down. Both girls lost their footing, began to skid, half sitting down, hands scraping across the scree, faster, rolling onto their stomachs, searching for something to hold onto, until finally their running shoes hit the path at the crisscross below.
They were standing, bent at the waist, knees, hands, chins scraped when Adrian slid down to them.
“Nessy, Carlita, I’m so sorry! Are you hurt? I didn’t want them to get you.” He looked as if he would cry.
Vanessa searched the sky. There was no sign of the birds.
“Owls.” Her father confirmed, sitting on the end of her bed while she told him about it.
“They were beautiful.”
“Predators usually are.” He had sounded so tired.
Now Vanessa wriggled deeper under the duvet in the yacht’s master bed, safe now, as long as she stayed asleep. She would just wait, ride this bed to wherever it was taking her.
When Mlle Durocher’s white Oldsmobile pulled up to the house, Sanger had the key in the lock. His free arm was around Vanessa, who was standing but looked limp. Brigit slammed the car door.
“Excuse me!” She pushed past him to face Vanessa. “Van, are you all right?”
“Brigit?”
“What happened?” Brigit opened the door. Watching as Sanger brought Vanessa in and deposited her in Gran’s wing chair, she was unaware that, her hair standing in salt spikes, her red sweatshirt three sizes too large, she looked like a demented pixie.
“She took it into her head to go for a swim.” Sanger’s voice was polite. “God alone knows why.”
XIV
THE DAWN’S FIRST GLOW SHOT across the silver-black sea and was gone as Sanger jogged down the Stewart Hall driveway. He turned right onto the coastal highway toward Chester.
Vanessa Holdt was a beautiful maniac. Certifiable. Not. Sanger turned right again, off the highway down toward Chester’s Back Bay. She’s been playing you, Teach, coming to dinner, dancing with you, letting you know she will be yours, just give her time. Coming to you in the night even, wearing that sexy nightie. To screw with your mind, man. Calculating, cock-teasing bitch. Champagne, sunset, big bed bobbing on the evening tide, she had been interested. Oh yes, he’d been around long enough to know a woman’s pleasure when he smelled it. And her body was so smooth, so ready—
