The Great Wide Sea

by M. H. Herlong

  “Sounds like a girl’s name,” I said. “Should be a perfume or something like that.”

  Gerry picked up his napkin, threw it again, and missed. “Sounds like Mom’s name to me,” he said.

  “For Pete’s sake!” I snatched up the napkin and threw it toward the trash can. “Make the shot, will you!” But I threw too hard. The napkin sailed right over the trash can and fell on the floor.

  “Missed,” Gerry said.

  “Shut up.” I lay back on the bed. I closed my eyes.

  Wind Racer, I thought. Now that was a good name. Or Sea Hawk. Wave Dancer or Free Time or Summer Dream. All of them were good names. All of them were much better than Chrysalis. Even no name at all would be better than that.

  The boat we had sailed on the lake at home didn’t have a name. We just called it “the boat,” and we sailed it every chance we got. Dad even talked about sailing it around the world. When I was little, I believed him. He made up stories about sailing through tsunamis and living off the land in Tahiti. We read Kon-Tiki and Dove and Alone Around the World. Then after Mom was pregnant the last time, he didn’t talk about it anymore. I decided he had never really meant it, and I was glad, because I wanted to play baseball and go to summer camp and get a car.

  But he had meant it, and he did not forget.

  About two months after Mom died, we got home from school one afternoon to see a FOR SALE sign in the yard. “Don’t worry,” I told Dylan and Gerry. “This house will never sell. Mom always said it was too small.”

  That night I called for Chinese again and the guy brought all the wrong stuff. I was just starting to make Gerry a peanut butter sandwich when Dad came home.

  “I guess you guys saw I listed the house for sale,” he said. “I was going to tell you first. I didn’t know the sign would go up so fast.”

  “Why would you want to sell the house?” I asked.

  “It’s a surprise,” he said. “I’ll explain over dinner. Sit down.”

  “I’m making Gerry a sandwich.”

  “Gerry has to learn to eat what’s on the table,” Dad said. “When we’re on the boat, our diet will be very limited.”

  We all looked at Dad, but he just kept on serving himself.

  “Boat?” I finally asked.

  “That’s the surprise,” he said. “But first, presents.” He pulled three books out of his briefcase, set them beside his plate, and then handed me the one on top. Boat Engine Basics, it read, With an Emphasis on the Most Common Diesel Models in Use Today.

  “Ben,” he said. “You like cars. Your job is to learn about engines, particularly diesel engines.

  “Dylan,” Dad continued, “you like the stars. You can learn navigation.” He gave Dylan the next book. Navigation was all the title said. Dylan took the book and smoothed the top with the palm of his hand.

  “Gerry,” Dad said. “Every boat needs crew. You can be crew.” The last book was a kid’s picture book: Sailing for Children . Gerry’s chin started to quiver.

  “It’s okay, Gerry,” Dad said. “I’ll tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a man named Jim and his three sons. They loved to sail.”

  “I don’t like to sail,” Gerry whispered.

  “That’s because you don’t know how,” Dad said. “You will when you learn.” He went on with his story. “One day, they all went to live on a sailboat.”

  “Dad,” I interrupted, “this is a stupid story.”

  “Okay, Ben.” He breathed deeply. “It’s not a story. It’s the truth. I’m going to buy a sailboat. I’ll be captain, you’ll be crew, and we’ll all go sailing. For a whole year.”

  “Dad,” I said. “We can’t afford that.”

  “That’s what I’ve been getting to,” he said. “We can if we sell the house.”

  I stared down into my empty plate. I saw I had the flowered plate that had been Mom’s favorite. “But what about your job?” I asked. “You can’t take a year off.”

  “Yes, I can,” Dad said. “My department head thinks it’s a great idea. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Relax. See some of the world.’ And you guys get to miss a whole year of regular classes. I’ll be your teacher. No schedules. No deadlines. For twelve whole months.”

  “But what about the boat on the lake?” I asked.

  “Oh, we’ll sell that too. It has to be cared for. And besides, we’ll have the good ship Chrysalis.”

  “The good ship Chrysalis?” Dylan asked.

  “Chrysalis,” Dad repeated. “She’s docked in Florida and she’s going to be ours. It’s like Christmas in June, boys—a big, beautiful sailboat and a year to cruise the Bahamas.” He paused and took a long breath. “Everybody I’ve talked to thinks it’s a great idea.”

  “But you haven’t talked to everybody,” I said.

  “Who else?” Dad asked.

  “Us,” I said. “You haven’t talked to us.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHEN DAD GOT back from the marina store, he couldn’t stop talking. He had seen Chrysalis. “Get up,” he said. “Get moving. We’re going sailing right now.” The owner was already waiting for us when we got to the boat. Dad hopped right on board and shook his hand, but Dylan, Gerry, and I just stood on the dock and stared.

  Dad was wrong. Chrysalis was not big or beautiful. She was only a few feet over thirty. Her white hull was scratched and dull, with a long red streak running almost the whole length of the port side. Sun and salt had bleached and roughened the teak. The joints were caked with black gunk. And there on the stern was her name, Chrysalis, in fancy, looping letters. It was awful.

  Dylan and I finally climbed on board, but Gerry wouldn’t move. “Come on,” I said, but he just stood there holding Blankie until I lifted him over the lifelines onto the deck. Down below, Dad and the owner hunched over the radio. “Open the hatches,” Dad said without looking around. Dylan and I went to work while Gerry planted himself on the starboard settee, his legs drawn up under him and Blankie bunched over his mouth.

  I opened the hatch in the head, but it was too small to air out the tiny, damp closet that doubled as a toilet and shower. Then I helped Dylan, who was struggling with the corroded latch on the large, overhead hatch above the forward V-berth. Several big orange sail bags lay piled on the berth mattress. The biggest sail, the number one genoa, was hanging half out of its bag. The smallest, the working jib, wasn’t in a bag at all, and the spinnaker bag had rolled onto the floor. I picked it up and threw it on the pile.

  Back in the main cabin, the owner knelt on the floor to lift up the hatch in the cabin sole and show Dad the bilge pump. Dad sat at the navigation table, handling a set of parallel rules, a compass, and several pencils. “Check the quarter berths,” he told us.

  The quarter berths were two long, narrow sleeping tunnels lying aft of the cabin and tucked in on either side of the center engine compartment. You got in by crawling—headfirst or feetfirst, depending on how you wanted to stay, because once you were in, you couldn’t turn around very easily. I crawled headfirst into the starboard quarter berth, opened the single hatch, then lay still on the damp mattress and looked out at the little square of marina I could see through the opening. Dad and the owner were talking sailboats. Waterline and draft. Rigging and sails. Engine and stowage. I tried not to listen, but then Dad started calling for me.

  “I’m here.” I inched slowly out of the stuffy berth.

  The cabin was empty except for Dad. He stood with one foot on the companionway ladder. “It’s time to take her out,” he said.

  “Wait, Dad,” I said. He turned to me. “This boat is old,” I said, “and dirty.”

  “We can clean it.”

  “The engine—”

  “You can tune it.”

  “The sails.”

  “We’ll replace some. Come on. Let’s go.”

  Then he turned and was up the ladder and I was alone in the cabin. When the engine rumbled, I finally followed him topsides. We took Chrysalis through every point of sail. We even raised th
e spinnaker, swinging the huge blue-and-pink sail out on its own pole and rocking along behind it, like the basket dangling underneath a hot-air balloon. After several hours, we dropped the sails, turned on the engine, and motored back. When I killed the engine, I turned to Dad again.

  “Dad,” I said. “This is crazy. Take us home.”

  But he didn’t hear. He was already following the owner to the dock. They stood talking and gesturing, pointing up at the mast and bending down to check the waterline.

  Dylan went back down below and sat at the navigation table, feeling around under the hinged lid, as if he might find something important. Gerry and I sat in the cockpit in the glaring afternoon sun and dripped sweat. Finally, I lay down and closed my eyes. The sun burned red against my eyelids. Diesel fumes filled the air. Engines snarled.

  Gerry started swinging his feet, thumping them rhythmically against his seat. “I’m hot,” he whined.

  “Fan yourself,” I said.

  “Mosquitoes are biting me.”

  “Swat them.”

  “You’re being mean,” he said, and turned away. He drew his knees up under his chin and hugged his legs. “You’re mean and I don’t like you anymore.”

  “So hate me,” I said. “I don’t care.”

  I opened my eyes again and looked up. Dad was standing on the dock holding a set of keys in his hand. The owner was walking away.

  “I hate you and I hate this boat and I want to go home,” Gerry said.

  “You’re there, Gerry,” I said. “This is home now.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I HAD TOLD DAD over and over I didn’t want to leave home. I wanted to spend the summer alone. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I just wanted to sleep, ride my bike to the lake, and sail away. I wanted to stay gone all day and then come home late, take a long shower, and go back to bed. But Dad wasn’t listening. About a month after the sign went up in the yard, he brought home four big duffel bags.

  “For our gear,” he said.

  “Dad,” I said. “You can’t get a year’s worth of gear in one duffel bag!”

  “We’ll manage with what we can fit,” he said, “and it would be best to do it today.”

  “Today!” I said.

  Then he handed Gerry a little-kid CD player and five little-kid CDs. “These will be fun,” he said to Gerry.

  “When are we leaving?” Dylan asked.

  “Not until the day after tomorrow. But the movers are coming tomorrow, and it will be too confusing to try to pack while they’re here.”

  “Movers?” I asked. “What movers?”

  “The people who pack up our stuff,” Dad said. “The new family won’t move in for another month, but I want to be here while our stuff is packed.”

  “The house sold?” I asked.

  “And the boat too,” Dad said. “They wanted both.”

  Dylan stood in the door. Gerry held the new CDs glistening in their cellophane packages.

  “You really did it,” I said. “You sold the boat and Mom’s house too.”

  “I’m going to pack now,” Dad said, and carried a bag to his room.

  The next morning, the movers came early and started hauling out the furniture and packing everything else into boxes. Dad kept walking around saying, “We don’t need that. Throw it away. Give it to charity.” He tossed out all his sailing magazines and about ten years’ worth of poetry journals. He put all the baby gear from the attic in a pile for the Salvation Army. He added the tricycles from the garage and a baby swing from the shed. Then I saw him rolling Mom’s bike to the giveaway pile.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, “that’s Mom’s.”

  “I know,” he said, and kept walking. He propped it up against all the old baby gear, squeezed the back tire, jiggled the baby seat on the back, and left it there.

  The sun caught the chrome on the handlebars. I closed my eyes against the flash and saw Mom holding up the bike while Gerry sat in the baby seat. She was leaning down to kick up the kickstand, and we were all waiting for her to come. I was thinking about the lake and how cool it was under the trees and how Mom always took so long to get ready to go anywhere. Then she looked up and smiled and said, “Ready.” I opened my eyes. The sun had moved. The chrome wasn’t shining anymore. I went inside.

  The movers were emptying the family room bookshelves into boxes marked FAM RM. Gerry’s drawing of our boat on the lake. My cheetah sculpture from kindergarten. Dylan’s fourth-grade honor-roll certificate. It was as if they had stuck a giant vacuum hose to our front door and everything we lived with every day was getting sucked out. When there was nothing left downstairs, the movers went up to the bedrooms.

  In the hallway, they had stacked boxes labeled BOY ONE, BOY TWO, and BOY THREE. Dad was telling Gerry to throw away a stash of junk he kept in his top drawer. Then he saw me standing in the door. “Pitch the car magazines,” he said.

  “Do what?”

  “Get rid of all those old magazines. There must be five years’ worth. They’re out of date anyway. Just pitch them.”

  “My magazine collection?”

  “Yes. Do it now.” He reached down and pulled a string out of Gerry’s hands. “It’s just string,” he said to Gerry, and Gerry howled.

  I walked out.

  “Ben,” Dad called, but I didn’t answer. I walked into Mom and Dad’s room to sit on her chair. But her chair was gone. And their bed and their bureau. Their lamps, their pictures, their books and bookcase—all gone. Lined up against the wall was a stack of boxes. On each of them the movers had scrawled MOTHER. The empty room spun with light. I sat suddenly on the floor and held my head in my hands.

  The rubber soles of Dad’s boat shoes made a slapping sound on the bare floor.

  His toe nudged my thigh. “I told you to toss the car magazines.”

  I looked up at him and saw his face creased with lines.

  “What are you going to do with these boxes?” I asked. “Are you going to put them in the giveaway pile too?” I felt my voice go high. “Everything of Mom’s?”

  “Ben,” he started.

  I reached for the closest box and ripped the tape off.

  Dad grabbed at my hand. “Ben,” he hissed. “Stop it.”

  I shook him off and dug in the box. It was the stuff out of her top bureau drawer. An old wallet. A tape of Dylan and me playing rock star. A makeup case. A note to the tooth fairy. A little tiny bracelet that said BYRON. It was the only thing Mom had kept from the last baby, the one who had come too early. And then a photograph Dad had taken of her last summer on the boat. I took out the picture.

  He grabbed my wrist again. “Go take care of the magazines.”

  “Don’t touch me,” I told him, and jerked away. I held the picture up in his face. I shook it at him.

  “This is mine,” I said, and slipped it into my pocket. “It’s mine, and you can’t take it away.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  ON CHRYSALIS I had a room of my own but nowhere to put the picture of Mom. Everywhere in the starboard quarter berth looked like somewhere that would get wet. I spread my five new car magazines under the mattress. The diesel engine book took up all the space on top of the hanging locker where I stowed my clothes. Finally I put Mom’s picture inside the cover of the book. I knew no one else would ever open that book, and I liked having her there. I liked her hidden smile. She felt like my special secret, throbbing just inside the cover, like an engine in idle waiting to shift into gear.

  The V-berth was now Dylan’s private room. He had brought his clothes, his star books, and The Chronicles of Narnia. He had left his telescope behind because there was no room for that on a boat.

  Boats don’t have room for blocks or tricycles or Roller-blades either, so Gerry had brought only a few of his little cars and his markers. They all fit on the shelf above the starboard settee in the main cabin where he had decided to sleep. I had helped him pick out some of his favorite picture books. He spread them under the cushion of his bed.

 
Dad had the port quarter berth for his room. He had brought nothing with him except clothes and one book, a collection of poetry. He always said he could read a poem a hundred times and it would be new every time. I guessed he meant it.

  But then in Key West, a new selection of books appeared. Now the books in our family room—the main cabin—were about sailing and the Bahamas, coral and marine life, snorkeling and spearfishing. Dad had clearly bought out the whole reference section of the bookstore. “No more poetry, please,” he must have said. “Just give me the real stuff.”

  Of course he had to buy a lot of things besides books to get the boat ready to go. He bought a GPS, attached the antenna to the stern rail, and hooked up the display screen beside the nav table. Then he punched in the keys, and the screen told us exactly where we were. We hadn’t needed that on the lake, but now he said we couldn’t sail without it. He got a new outboard motor for the dinghy and a whole new set of life jackets. He outfitted the emergency pack with new flares and an EPIRB, a device that broadcast your position in an emergency so you had a chance to be rescued. After buying all that, he decided not to get new sails. We just hosed off the old ones with fresh water and bagged them properly when they were dry. The radio gave him a little trouble. It worked when the guy came to look at it and then stopped as soon as he left. But Dad fiddled with it and got it straight. He was glad not to have to buy a new one.

  Dylan was working hard to learn navigation, especially sun shots. At noon, he sat with the sextant and measured the height and angle of the sun relative to the horizon. Then he did all kinds of mathematical calculations and slowly began to figure out that we were somewhere north of the equator. I figured he was a sort of junior Einstein to do that much, but he wanted to get better. He kept trying.

  I was doing a different kind of hard work. Dad hauled me up the mast to mount a new anemometer for measuring wind speed. We trued the compass together. I replaced the lifelines. I broke down the engine and I scrubbed the hull. I think Dad would have even had me sand the teak and varnish it if he hadn’t gotten impatient.