by Trish Doller
“I’ve never been there,” Willa says.
“I’m not going through the Welland Canal or sailing on Lake Ontario,” Taylor says. “So if you want to go to Niagara Falls, we’ll have to take a bus from Buffalo.”
“What if I want to sail Lake Ontario?”
“Then maybe you should have shown up sooner.”
Willa’s eyebrows arch. “It doesn’t matter when I showed up. I’m here now and it’s our trip. You don’t get to make all the decisions.”
Taylor moves to her side of the cabin, drops onto her bunk, opens a tattered copy of Outlander, and pointedly ignores Willa, who moves on to the next clue. ‘Time travel whenever possible.’ This one is so vague that it could refer to anything in any town along the way. She slips the list inside the Captain Norm book, as irritated with Finley as she is with Taylor, and feeling sad about both.
Willa steps into her flip-flops and walks down to the junior barn, where she and Finley spent hours hanging out on the battered old couch, drinking Gatorade and playing Uno with the other kids on the sailing team. Her chest aches as she thinks about how her life came full circle two summers ago, when she and Finley taught sailing to the kids from the Boys and Girls Clubs.
“I was one of you guys,” Willa told them at their first lesson. “The closest I’d ever been to a boat was seeing one out there sailing in the bay, but right here at this club, I discovered that anyone can learn how to sail.”
There was a little girl in the class named Aaliyah, who idolized her. If Willa wore her hair in a bun, Aaliyah would show up the next day with her hair in a bun. She was delighted that her light-brown skin was the same shade as Willa’s skin. She listened with a fierce intensity when Willa talked, and when the class finally hit the water, Aaliyah was determined to be first in all things. At the end of the week, she sobbed as she gifted Willa with a red and purple friendship bracelet that she’d made herself.
“I’m going to miss you so much,” Aaliyah said, her face buried in Willa’s neck. “But I’ll come back next year and all the years after that until I can be a teacher like you.”
Willa touches the woven bracelets circling her wrist, Aaliyah’s among them—the colors faded from water and sun—and wonders what happened to that little girl. She didn’t return the following summer, and the director of the Boys and Girls Club said only that Aaliyah had gone to live with her grandma in Cleveland.
“She might not remember your name forever,” Finley said. “But you left an impression on her that will never go away.”
Willa didn’t believe it at that time, but now she knows that someone can leave you with an indelible mark that will change you forever. Finley’s mark burns hot enough to make her want to scream sometimes, to rage at a God who would take one of the sweetest human beings on the earth, while leaving murderers and rapists to do business as usual.
All the lights are turned off when Willa returns to the boat, and Taylor is asleep with Pumpkin curled in the hollow behind her knees. Willa bunks down on her side of the boat, and through the open hatch she can see a handful of stars. She doesn’t know if she believes in heaven anymore, but all the same she whispers to Finley, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Taylor
THE NEXT MORNING THE SUN is missing in action and the clouds are swollen with imminent rain. It seems like a bad omen to Taylor, who is reminded of the day her family was returning from a long weekend on Kelleys Island when a storm whipped up on Lake Erie. The sky was nearly as black as night and the wind howled as her mom hustled the kids belowdecks, leaving Taylor’s dad to battle the weather alone. In the stuffy confines of the cabin, with the boat pitching on every wave, Taylor felt her insides churn. She made it to the galley sink in time, but she threw up and threw up and threw up. Her mom dosed her with Dramamine and a can of ginger ale, and eventually Taylor fell asleep. Now, as she stands in the cockpit of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot with the first sprinkles peppering her cheeks, her stomach coils.
Taylor checks the weather radar app on her phone, the forecast calling for all-day showers. No big winds. No thunderstorms. But she knows how quickly conditions can change.
“Do you think we should wait out this weather?” she asks, stepping back inside the cabin, where Willa is making up her bunk. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours and already Taylor’s side of the boat is a wreck. “It’s supposed to rain all day.”
“It’s just water.”
“It should clear up by tomorrow.”
“If we’re going to make it to Key West before school starts, we can’t waste time,” Willa says. “We need to leave today.”
“It’s just one day.”
“Look, Taylor, this whole trip was meant to be an adventure, and that includes the weather. Suck it up. We’re leaving.”
“Just last night you said it was our trip, so if I don’t get to make the decisions, neither do you.”
“Fine.” Willa snatches a coin from the plastic bin filled with quarters for doing laundry. The quarters were a gift from Taylor’s grandparents. “Heads, we leave. Tails, we stay.”
Taylor nods. Willa flips the coin in the air, and Taylor holds her breath as it spins and falls. Willa catches the quarter, then opens her fist.
Heads.
“Shit.” Taylor’s shoulders sag. “Fine.”
She jams her arms into her foul-weather jacket and stomps off the boat. Taylor knows she’s being petty, but she doesn’t want Willa to know she’s afraid. When her dad brought them safely home from Kelleys, he’d had a lifetime of experience and Taylor had no reason to be frightened. Seasickness was the worst thing that could happen to her. Willa might be a good sailor, but Taylor doesn’t trust that Willa will know what to do in gale-force winds or ten-foot seas.
Taylor stands under the awning of the clubhouse porch and phones her dad. “It’s raining.”
He laughs a little, but not in an unkind way. “That happens sometimes.”
“I keep thinking about that time at Kelleys.”
“I saw the forecast that day, Taylor, and thought I could outrun the storm,” he said. “I made a mistake. But today the weather is not like that. It’s just rain.”
“But what if—”
“Trust me,” her dad says gently. “Go.”
They exchange I love yous and goodbyes, and Taylor is tucking her phone into her pocket when Brady rolls through the front gate in his big putty-colored Buick Riviera. Ever since he bought it, his friends call him Grandpa Guerra, but Taylor loves the car because it has velour seats, fake wood trim, and a cassette player. One Saturday they went to a bunch of garage sales, looking for cassette tapes.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, sliding into the passenger seat.
“Were you just going to leave without saying goodbye?”
“No. I mean, I was going to call you.”
“Really?” he says. “Because you’ve been kind of hard to reach lately.”
Ever since Finley died, Taylor has felt like a big empty hole. She doesn’t know how to explain to Brady—or anyone, really—that there was no one in the world she loved more than Finley. Or that she is lost without her.
Twelve years ago, Taylor didn’t understand what she felt the first time she saw Finley, with her swingy brown ponytail and pink backpack with her name embroidered across the pocket. Taylor remembers being overcome with an intense yearning to be Finley’s best friend, and when Finley asked her to read Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! in the bathtub reading nook, it was like a wish come true. It wasn’t until she was at a birthday sleepover a few years later—when the girls started giggling about the boys they liked—that Taylor’s kindergarten yearnings suddenly made sense. But when Finley confessed that she liked Dominic Vaccaro and DeAndre Grant, Taylor understood that her feelings for Finley went one way and she kept them to herself.
A few more years later, in freshman biology, Taylor and Brady were looking at plant cells through a microscope when he asked if she wanted to get ice cream with h
im sometime. It wasn’t the most romantic invitation ever, but Taylor didn’t mind. Brady has been an easygoing boyfriend. Funny. Sweet. Uncomplicated. He’s bigger and taller than Taylor, so she felt small wearing his football jersey on pep rally days and she felt special wearing his face on a badge on her jacket at games.
“I think we should break up,” she blurts out, looking at the fake burl-wood glove compartment so she doesn’t have to look at Brady’s adorable, earnest face.
“Do you want to date other people or something?” he asks.
“No.”
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No.”
“Then I guess I don’t understand,” Brady says. “What’s going on?”
“I just need—”
“Please do not say you need space, because that’s a bullshit excuse.”
“I miss Finley so much I can’t breathe,” she says.
“And breaking up with me is gonna fix that?”
“Probably not.”
He sits there for the longest time, softly drumming his thumb against the steering wheel. Finally, he sighs and says, “Okay.”
That one little word rips Taylor open as though Brady is the one doing the breaking up. Tears trickle down her cheeks as she opens the car door and rain batters her face. “I’m sorry.”
Brady doesn’t look at her, but he nods. “Me too.”
As Taylor walks down the dock, she isn’t sure she made the right decision. There’s so much she’ll miss about Brady, like picnics on the rocks at the Marblehead lighthouse. Sharing an armrest at the movies as they held hands. Kissing him in the driveway until her dad flickered the porch light to signal that it was time to come inside. But Brady deserves someone who loves him as much as Taylor loved Finley.
Willa notices her tears as she comes into the cabin. “Are you okay?”
“I just broke up with Brady.”
“Wow.” Willa blinks with surprise. “Do you, um—do you want to talk about it?” The sympathy in her voice touches a raw nerve. Taylor is not used to sharing such personal things with anyone other than Finley.
“Let’s just go.”
“Sure. Okay.” Willa is already wearing her foul-weather overalls, but she pulls on her jacket and twists her curls up into a bun. “For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry.”
There are no other boats on the bay as they motor through rain and sloppy waves past Cedar Point and beyond the breakwall into Lake Erie. Willa turns the boat toward the east, keeping a healthy distance between them and the shoreline. Sometimes, on a clear day, you can see hints of the islands to the north, but today the lake disappears into a gray haze. At the dock, the boat seemed sturdy and safe, but now it feels vulnerable, and all of Taylor’s fears slam into her at once. The bagel she ate for breakfast comes back as a puddle on the cockpit floor, but Willa doesn’t even spare a glance in her direction. As the rain slowly washes the vomit down the scupper holes in the floor, Taylor tucks herself into the smallest shape she can manage and tries not to cry.
She grows accustomed to the relentless rhythm of the waves after a couple of hours and some ginger ale to calm her stomach. Taylor is able to go into the cabin long enough to make sandwiches for lunch, but Willa does all of the driving. Willa is the one who stands on the wet deck to adjust the sails, the one who keeps the compass pointing in the right direction.
By car it would have taken them a little more than an hour to drive to Cleveland.
It takes them the entire day to sail there.
“Can you get some dock lines ready?” Willa asks as the lights of Edgewater Marina come into view. Aside from a terse thank you when Taylor brought her food, these are the first words she’s strung into a full sentence all day. “Or you can drive and I’ll do it.”
Maybe on a sunny day, Taylor wouldn’t be afraid of falling overboard, but the deck is wet. “I’ll drive.”
Willa tells her to aim for the Terminal Tower, an easily recognizable landmark on the Cleveland skyline. As Willa moves steadily across the cabin top, tears blur Taylor’s vision. It was unrealistic to think she could have done this by herself. She doesn’t love sailing the way Finley did. The way Willa does. Taylor struggles to keep the boat pointed toward the lights of the skyscraper.
Willa, she thinks, must really hate me right now.
Once they pass the breakwall into the protected marina, the waves subside. Taylor’s mother and Mrs. Donoghue are waiting on the dock, huddled under giant golf umbrellas. Taylor rushes to tie the dock lines, wanting to get off the boat as soon as possible. She tumbles into her mother’s waiting arms, leaving Willa to double-check the knots.
41.4993° N, 81.6944° W
Music is good for the soul.
Willa
“WILLA, HONEY, COME GET OUT of the rain!” Mrs. Donoghue beckons from under her umbrella. “We’ve got dry towels and a table reservation.”
“I’ll be right there,” she calls back, retying a knot that Taylor got wrong. The fingers on Willa’s right hand are cramped from nine hours of holding the tiller, and her bladder is about to burst. All she really wants is to collapse on her bunk and sleep, but it would be rude to refuse. And the cherry on top of this shit sundae is the fact that Willa was the one who wanted to leave Sandusky in the rain. Would it have killed her to wait one more day? Would it have killed her to be nice? She wipes her face with a wet hand, jumps off the boat, and runs to catch up with the others.
The dining room inside the yacht club is warm, and Willa feels practically naked after wearing her weather gear all day. Her curls have become a wild mass, and she envies Taylor for having the kind of hair that dries straight without any styling products. It’s not that Willa doesn’t like her curls, but she’s never been able to walk into school with wet hair and have it look great by second period.
“So, what are you girls doing tomorrow?” Mrs. Donoghue asks. “Will you keep moving, or spend the day in Cleveland?”
Willa waits for Taylor to tell them about the list of clues—she’s never had the feeling that Finley meant for the list to be a secret—but Taylor seems preoccupied with the steaming bowl of clam chowder in front of her.
“We, um—we’ve thought about going to the Rock Hall,” Willa offers, hoping Taylor will jump into the conversation. She has always been better at talking to Finley’s mom.
Near the end, whenever Willa and Taylor would stop by to visit Finley, Mrs. Donoghue would give them their privacy. She’d ask the hospice nurse to take a break so they could be normal teenage girls. At the end of every visit, Finley’s mom would hug them too long. Tears would glisten in her eyes as she said, “Thank you for being such good friends to Finley.”
Taylor let Mrs. Donoghue’s hugs go on as long as necessary, but Willa never knew how to buoy up Finley’s mom when Willa felt like she was the one who was drowning.
“That sounds like fun,” Taylor’s mom says, and the table falls into an awkward silence, punctuated only by the clinking of spoons against bowls. Finally, Taylor looks up at her mom.
“I can’t do this,” she says. “I want to go home.”
“You have got to be kidding me.” Willa keeps her voice level, not wanting to cause a scene in public, but she’s one deep breath away from going off. “You’re bailing after ten hours?”
“I just—it’s too hard.”
“Hard is having to do all the work by yourself.” Willa removes the paper napkin from her lap and places it on the table beside what’s left of her soup. “How nice it must be to just give up, knowing everything will be fine for you. I wasted my college savings and quit my job.”
“You could come work at the stand,” Taylor says, throwing a glance at her mom, who offers an encouraging nod.
The Nicholsons own a huge farm in Perkins Township that’s been in their family for generations. Every summer people flock to their farm stand—which has grown over the years into a full-blown shop—for homegrown fruits and vegetables. Their tomatoes and sweet corn are legendary, and you’
re not doing autumn properly if you don’t go to Nicholsons’ Farm for pumpkins, hayrides, and fresh-pressed cider.
“That’s not the point,” Willa says.
“Today was terrible and I hated it.”
Willa ignores Taylor and turns to Mrs. Donoghue. “Thank you for coming all this way to buy us dinner. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go call my mom.”
If Willa were to look up, she would see slivers of clear sky and a few stars peeking out from between the clouds that plagued her all day. But she keeps her head down, her footsteps in concert with her head—I hate her, I hate her, I hate her—as she walks back to the boat. She climbs aboard and sits on the cabin top as she punches the speed-dial button for home.
Her mom is working tonight and usually silences her cell phone while she’s on the clock, but Willa wants to leave a voice mail to warn her that she’s coming home. Except someone who is not her mom answers on the second ring. Steve. The guy who sleeps over at their apartment whenever he and his on-again/off-again girlfriend are off. Sometimes he stays a night, sometimes several, but he always leaves.
Willa doesn’t dislike him. In fact, she can tell he was kind of cute in high school because the outline of his eighteen-year-old self is still there. She understands why her mom likes him, but what Willa can’t understand is why her mom is content to be someone’s backup plan when she deserves to be someone’s first choice.
“Willa? You there?” His voice is gravelly, and in the background her mom sings along to an old Foo Fighters song.
Not at work.
Something inside her cracks open and Willa is just . . . done. Done worrying about the car repairs. Done making sure the bills are paid on time. Done being afraid her mom will lose her job (again). Willa pivots her arm and flings the phone as hard as she can. It arcs high before it drops into the water and disappears. She feels a surge of panic as she realizes she will have to pay for a replacement, but Willa is done worrying about that, too. It’s her mom’s turn to worry.
