While Gabe considered it his sacred duty to teach the twins sailing, barbecuing and lifesaving skills, the Castaway ‘mamas and papas’ competed to impart alternative snippets of wisdom to their growing charges.
From Cindy Rogers, who dreamed of making it big someday in Nashville, Tennessee, Jess learned to sing and Jude to play the blues on a beat-up Gibson guitar.
Leonie told them how to treat a burn with tepid water, honey and lavender, and how to stem an arterial bleed.
Ricardo showed them some karate and boxing self-defence moves.
Al gave them a dramatic education in the art of extracting an angry Burmese python from a toilet cistern. It wasn’t a lesson the twins were anxious to ever repeat.
Carly taught them the names of migrating birds.
Saskia advised them what to do in the event of a frying-pan fire or a jellyfish sting.
From Lucille (tattooed, brawny, Harley-Davidson-mad, heart of gold), Jude learned motorcycle maintenance. To Jess, Lucille revealed that it took twenty-eight days to make or break a habit.
‘My advice? Don’t get bad habits in the first place,’ Lucille confided from the kitchen steps, where she sat smoking and downing chocolate Hershey’s Kisses. ‘Eat your greens. Keep your nose clean. Stay away from ice cream.’
When Jess cast a sceptical glance at Lucille’s overflowing ashtray and pile of candy wrappers, wondering why she didn’t take her own advice if it was so easy-peasy, the Castaway’s best waitress barked: ‘Don’t do as I do, girl. Do as I say.’
Before the twins were ‘knee-high to a turtle’, Regina taught them how to cook. When Jude complained that he’d rather be out fishing or messing about on a boat, Regina set him straight on life’s priorities.
‘Don’t you be that boy who can’t cook and expects his sibling or parent to do everything for him. When that boy grows into a man who expects his partner to do the same, he shouldn’t be surprised if that partner slings his sorry ass out on the street.’
Jude, who was only eight at the time, was shocked. ‘Gabe says cussing is wicked.’
Regina laughed till she cried. ‘Ass is not a cuss word, Jude. Nor’s booty, bum or bottom. A good behind is a gift from Almighty God. Now, taking the Lord’s name in vain, that’s cussing. So’s using hating words or hurting ones. If you’re having a bad day or a sad day or you’re just plain mad, I’d recommend sugar, godfather, fiddlesticks, gosh darn it, drat or poo. My own personal favourite is sardine.’
‘Sardine?’
‘You got it. If I drop a brick on my toe, a stinky “Sardine!” is the only thing that’s gonna make me feel better.’
Jess didn’t believe her but, two days later, Regina actually did that very thing. She dropped a cast-iron skillet and almost broke her foot. True to her word, she hopped around on one leg shrieking, ‘Sardine, sardine, dang and blasted SARDINE!’
When she wasn’t giving lessons on how to swear politely, Regina taught the twins cooking 101. ‘Every chef needs a repertoire. Those are the meals you can whip up on autopilot, when you’re so sardine exhausted you can barely recall your own name.’
Thanks to Regina, the twins left Bantry Creek, Florida with enough cooking savvy to prepare any dish on their mentor’s recommended menu:
Breakfast:
Eggs (scrambled, cheesy, over easy,
and sunny-side up), Grits, Hash Browns,
Pecan Pancakes and Banana Waffles
Lunch:
Caesar Salad, Grilled Cheese,
Sweetcorn Chowder
Dinner:
Mac ’n’ Cheese, 3-Bean Chilli,
Fish & Chips, Mexican Burrito
So, over the years, they had learned a lot. But it was the gaps in their learning that kept the twins awake at night.
Their own history was a mystery.
In notably short supply was information about their parents.
About their real dad, they’d heard only two details: his name was Jim, and he’d given his life to save his best friend.
‘Where did this happen? How did it happen? Who was his best friend?’ the twins had asked Gabe and the waitresses as they grew older. Eventually, they had to accept that those questions might never be answered.
All they knew about their mum, Ana Davis, was the romantic tale Gabe had spun for them.
That Ana had blown into his life like a hurricane, on the wings of a storm. That he’d been on his way to the diner after securing the boats in the marina when a Greyhound bus had wheezed to a halt across the street.
The boatyard was at the end of a pot-holed road. Most customers arrived by water. Greyhounds were rare enough that Gabe paused to watch the passengers disembark. There was only one. When the bus pulled away, there she was, so slight and ethereal he’d thought she was a trick of the light.
As he stared, the rain had come driving in like a monsoon. He’d expected her to bolt for cover or for a friend to materialize and drive her away, but she just stood there motionless in the deluge.
‘Something told me she had no place to go. Don’t ask me where I found the nerve, but I headed on over and informed her that the Castaway made the best coffee and maple pecan pancakes in all of Florida. Said I’d consider it a personal favour if she let me buy her both before she was blown to Alaska by the storm.
‘Her only luggage was this itty-bitty backpack that was soaked through, and we were both half drowned, but her smile lit up the marina like sunshine. She said, “Oh, where I come from, this is just a breeze.” I asked, “Where’s that – Outer Mongolia?” She just giggled and said, “Maybe I’ll tell you; maybe I won’t.” But she never did. The nearest she ever came to it was telling Cindy that she’d travelled so much, she thought of herself as a Citizen of Everywhere.’
By the time Gabe had persuaded Ana to accompany him to the diner, she was turning blue with cold. From there, Anita and Cindy took over.
By the following morning, Ana Davis (not, they suspected, her real name) had a job waiting tables and a room above the diner. Both turned out to be crucial. What no one but Anita guessed in those early days was that Ana was two months pregnant.
Before the hurricane moved on, Gabe knew two things: a) he was besotted with her, and b) that her heart belonged to her late husband.
What happened to him and why she’d fled her home and/or country with little but the clothes she stood up in, she refused to reveal.
‘The past is past. That’s all I’m going to say.’
Over the years, Jess and Jude had begged Gabe and their Castaway family for even the most miniscule details the adults had gleaned about Ana’s background. But, although they’d lived and worked alongside her for six and a half months, nobody seemed to have intuited anything.
The diner staff couldn’t even agree on her accent. While Carly said it had been Australian, Ricardo insisted it was South African. Patsy was sure Ana had been Canadian or a New Zealander. Cindy said that it had been obvious that she was British or maybe Dutch.
Al had made up his mind that she was a posh New Yorker trying to hide her roots.
Given time, Ana might have trusted Gabe or Anita enough to tell them the truth about her past. But time ran out for her one cold November day. Gabe had rushed her to the hospital when she began bleeding heavily. The twins were born three weeks prematurely. Before they were two hours old, their mother had been cruelly taken from them.
‘She lived just long enough to hold you both in her arms, name you and tell you she loved you,’ Gabe told the twins when they were old enough to understand.
At the hospital, the midwife and nurses had assumed that Gabe was Ana’s partner. She’d deliberately not corrected them. As a consequence, Gabriel Carter was named as the twins’ father on their birth certificate.
Afterwards, when Ana’s room was cleared, the waitresses found no passport or identifying papers. Her social security number had turned out to be fake.
Ana’s worldly goods numbered just two: a little oil painting with a chipped, gold-painted fra
me; and, oddly, a horseshoe. Jude was given the horseshoe for good luck, though heaven knows their poor mother hadn’t had too much of that. Jess, who loved drawing, became the caretaker of the painting.
Growing up, Jess had spent hours wondering why the picture had been so special to her mother that when she’d left her old life, it and the horseshoe were the only things she’d kept. Was the painting a cherished gift from the twins’ father? Was the artist a favourite? Or was the scene it depicted a special place to them?
And where had the horseshoe come from? A gift shop? Or had it belonged to a horse one of them had ridden and loved? Jess supposed they’d never know.
Gabe and the waitresses had been the best substitute family ever, but now they were a thousand nautical miles away. On Monday night, as You Gotta Friend tugged at her mooring near Ginger Island, which Jude had chosen for its solitude, Jess longed for a mum or dad to comfort her and tell her everything would work out all right.
She wondered, a little desperately, if anything would be all right ever again. Whenever she tried to imagine herself and Jude wandering the oceans like lost spirits for months or years to come, despair threatened to swallow her up.
For now, You Gotta Friend was a sanctuary, but Jess ached to have a real home of her own, one with walls, doors and windows and, most importantly, bookshelves.
Home wouldn’t be home for her without books.
And where would that home be? Over the years, Jess had asked herself that a thousand times. The answer was always the same.
Not Miami or San Francisco or New York City.
Not Paris, Rome, Melbourne or even Cambridge or Oxford.
Not a mansion with a swimming pool, or a gleaming glass-and-chrome penthouse.
No – home, to Jess, was the home in the painting. A simple white-washed cottage with a grey-tiled roof and two dormer windows, overlooking a sandy beach and glistening blue bay. It had a picket fence with poppies and cornflowers out the front.
But where was it?
As with her mother’s accent, opinions on the location of the cove in which the cottage was situated had been many and varied. Some were positive it was Northern Ireland, the Eastern Cape or Scandinavia. Others were certain it was Iceland or Nova Scotia.
There was no artist’s signature and only one clue. On the back of the painting, scrawled in faded ink, was written Dolphin Dreams.
Nestling into her sleeping bag that night, Jess willed the painting to come to life. She pictured herself walking through the front door, taking her coat off, and settling down in front of a crackling fire. Jude and Sam would be lying on the fluffy rug beside her.
A table would be spread with homemade soup or stew and local bread. An apple pie would be baking in the oven, a jug of cream or custard at the ready.
The owners of the cottage were hazy figures in Jess’s imagination, but they’d be warm and welcoming. It would turn out they’d been expecting the twins all along.
Her reverie was interrupted by a yell.
‘JESS! Jess, come quick. Listen to this.’
For once, the news on the radio was free of static, relayed by a sombre reader: ‘The body of an unidentified white male has been found by fishermen near the Cowrie Sands resort. Police are appealing for witnesses. A postmortem will be carried out—’
Jess let out a sob. ‘It’s Gabe, isn’t it? Jude, it’s Gabe.’
‘Sure looks that way.’
Jude’s voice sounded tinny and remote in his own ears. He sat down before he fell down. He’d thought he could handle it, but somehow having a stranger all but confirm the death of the only father the twins had ever known made him feel as if he were falling into an abyss with no bottom.
The smallness of him and Jess, their aloneness in the big, wide world, was impossible to absorb. Jess slumped down too, and the dog squeezed between them. He licked away their salty tears. This time, there was no comforting them.
6
LOTTERY
Two days later, on November 25th, the twins sailed to Virgin Gorda, the island Gabe had planned on taking them to before he disappeared.
They felt guilty for thinking about supplies and cash so soon after their guardian’s passing but had no option. The food cupboard was bare and their water reserves almost gone.
The previous evening, they’d held a memorial service for Gabe on a deserted beach. The weather had played its part too. The sun had gone down in a blaze of glory, leaving the sky streaked with violet and rose-gold. There were few things that Gabe had enjoyed more than a theatrical sunset, and it made Jess smile to believe that nature had laid on a dazzling display especially for him.
That afternoon, Jude had caught some mahi-mahi, Gabe’s favourite fish. While Jess laid out a picnic rug and brought paper plates and other bits and pieces from the boat, her brother built a fire in a circle of rocks. The twins barbecued the fish over the coals.
When it was ready, Jess set a place on the picnic rug for Gabe. The fish was sweet, smoky, and sharp with lime. She served it with the last of their jasmine rice.
Afterwards, Jude fashioned a boat from coconut palm leaves. Jess filled it with gifts of gratitude to the man who, for twelve years, had been the best father he could to a couple of kids who were not his own. A man who might have lost his life trying to spirit the twins away to a safe harbour.
Among their offerings to him were a parrot feather, a card drawn by Jess, beeswax candles, and a photograph of Gabe’s dad in his US Marines uniform. At the last minute, Jude added his precious horseshoe.
‘Sure you want to part with that?’ asked Jess, knowing how much it meant to him.
‘Yes, because it’s kind of a double gift. Mom would want to thank Gabe for everything he did for us.’
‘A triple gift, then,’ said Jess, understanding. ‘If the horseshoe belonged to our dad, he’d want Gabe to have it too.’
When it grew dark, they lit the candles and pushed the palm boat out to sea. As the flames twinkled bravely into the night, Jess read a poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye, which she’d found on the shelf beside Gabe’s bunk. It had been tucked into the memorial sheet from his own father’s funeral, so they guessed it had been special to him.
The poem was called ‘Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep’, but Jess found it near impossible not to break down as she read its moving lines. She’d realized that Gabe had borrowed from the poem many times over the years to help the twins’ come to terms with the loss of their parents. He’d always told them that when a person passed, they weren’t in the ground or in an urn. Their spirit lived on in a ‘thousand winds’, or the ‘gentle autumn rain’, on the wings of birds, or in the ‘diamond glints on snow.’
Despite the poem’s entreaty, Jess and Jude couldn’t help crying.
At that point, they decided that Gabe would prefer them to celebrate his life, not mope about it. Jude dug out the CD player and turned up the volume on one of Gabe’s beloved Greatest Hits of the 80s.
They danced beneath a crescent moon, with Sam barking and trying to join in, until all three of them were too exhausted to move another step. Then they fell asleep in a huddle on the beach, wrapped in the picnic rug as the fire burned low.
Now they were at Virgin Gorda on a mission to get fuel and supplies. Jess was also determined to buy the birthday books Gabe had intended her to have, and both twins needed some cold-weather sailing gear.
‘Nothing too expensive,’ cautioned Jess as they strolled through the scarlet-roofed Leverick Bay Resort. Under different circumstances, she’d have been dazzled by the sophisticated shops and colourful markets. The heady mix of sun, sea and glamour had earned the island a reputation as a billionaires’ playground. But she felt guilty enjoying herself when Gabe was dead and his disappearance an unsolved mystery.
It was Jude who convinced her that the best way for them to honour Gabe’s memory was for them to see the places they visited through his eyes.
‘He’d have been complaining that Leverick Bay was a rip-off and too flashy
while secretly having the best time,’ said Jude. ‘He’d have been blown away by the superyachts and by the North Sound. I am. Admit it, Jess – you are too.’
Jess confessed she was. She could see why the North Sound was considered one of the world’s greatest harbours. The colour of the water alone was a happy-making triumph of nature. The showers at the marina erased days of dirt, worry and sadness. A smiling man at the laundromat promised to transform their foul bag of laundry into clean-pressed clothes just hours later.
Gabe’s cash bought them a fabulous brunch. They enjoyed French toast and caramelized banana at a table overlooking the bay. Colourful Hobie Cats, paddle-boarders and kiters dotted the turquoise waters. To Jess, everyone seemed to be having the time of their lives. She wondered if she’d ever feel that way again.
The French toast was definitely a step in the right direction. By the time she’d finished, she felt a great deal more positive. Sailing round the world without Gabe started to feel possible. It might even be fun. If the New Zealand-born Dutch sailor Laura Dekker could circumnavigate the globe alone, aged fifteen, the twins could surely manage it together.
To cover up the fact that she and Jude were dining alone, without any adults, Jess assured the waiter who took their order that they were being joined by their uncle later. Then she told the waitress who brought their bill that their uncle had been held up.
The lie was surprisingly easy. That was the thing about lying, thought Jess. It was seductively straightforward to begin with, but one fib led to another, and it became harder and harder to untangle yourself if it all went wrong.
They’d come ashore armed with Gabe’s credit card.
‘Feels wrong,’ said Jude, twisting the silver card in his hands. ‘Like we’re stealing.’
‘I know what you mean, but we have to be practical. Gabe’s gone and we need money.’ Jess checked her watch. ‘Our laundry won’t be ready till two. Let’s go to the bookshop.’
Wave Riders Page 4
