by Trish Doller
“Could be a barracuda or perhaps a small shark.” His biceps strain as he cranks on the reel, pulling the fish closer and closer. When it reaches the boat, the fish is a silver blur beneath the surface, thrashing wildly, fighting its fate. As Keane lands it on the cockpit floor, it writhes and flops, gills gaping in the air.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Mackerel.” He reaches for the winch handle and I wince as he gives the fish a sharp smack on the head to kill it. Keane trades the handle for a fillet knife and slices the mackerel from top to tail. Inside, the heart is still pulsing, unaware that the fish is dead. “Want a bite?”
“What? Now?”
“Sashimi doesn’t get any fresher,” he says, offering me a ragged sliver of raw fish.
The flesh is warm and minerally on my tongue, nothing like the cool, tidy rolls at my favorite sushi bar. Here we have no little bowls of soy sauce or decorative mounds of wasabi, just a cockpit that looks like a crime scene. I eat a second piece, and a third, feeling slightly Lord of the Flies. “I thought this was going to be terrible, but—”
“Incredible, right?” Keane says, separating the meat from the skin. He tosses the offal overboard. “I’ll portion a bit out for dinner and put the rest in your freezer for another day.”
He gathers up the remaining fish and carries it down to the galley, while I use my dishwashing bucket to rinse down the cockpit. When he comes back to resume his watch, I stay on deck.
“Where in Ireland are you from?”
“You probably haven’t heard of it, but a small town on the southwest coast called Tralee,” Keane says. “The closest town people know is Killarney.”
“I haven’t heard of Killarney, either, so…”
He laughs. “You’re from Florida?”
“Born and raised in Fort Lauderdale.”
“What do you do there?”
“Are you familiar with Hooters?”
Keane glances at me, but his eyes are shaded behind aviator-style sunglasses, so I have no idea what he might be thinking. “As a concept, yes, but I’ve never been.”
“The place I worked was like Hooters, but with a pirate theme,” I explain. “The waitresses dressed like sexy pirates and the bartenders wore black tank tops with the word wench across the back.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“When you work in a restaurant like that, people tend to think you’re either flaunting it and you think too highly of yourself, or you’re degrading yourself and you have low self-esteem,” I say, thinking of the little side comments Ben’s mother used to make. “There’s very little accounting for how most of the women are simply trying to pay bills or support their families in a patriarchal system that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. I’m not thrilled with being objectified, but I’ve made a lot of money letting it happen, so my feelings are complicated.”
“Mine too. I’m not certain I’d feel entirely comfortable eating in a place where it feels like the staff is part of the menu, but sexy pirates?” Keane grins. “I wouldn’t hate it either.”
“That’s fair.” I stand and head toward the companionway. “I’m grabbing a Coke. Would you like one?”
“I would, thanks … wench.”
I give him the finger and his laughter follows me down into the cabin. I open the refrigerator hatch, my eye catching on the bulkhead wall. I & LOVE & YOU. Sadness tumbles me like a wave, and I climb into the V-berth to look at Ben’s photo.
The morning we snapped that Polaroid, he woke me when it was still dark, whispering, “Come on, babe, let’s go watch the sunrise.”
I threw on some clothes and he drove me to Hillsboro Inlet. We sat on the hood of his old blue Land Rover as the sun came up, and he kissed me under a sky of golds and blues threaded with ribbons of pink. We took the picture—with the lighthouse in the background—to mimic the one we’d taken on our first date, my lips pressed against his cheek as he smiled at the camera. I had no idea it would be our last photo.
It’s so fucking unfair that Keane is here, and Ben is not. Keane shouldn’t be the one sitting in Ben’s favorite spot with his hand on the tiller. Tonight he’ll be sleeping aboard Ben’s boat and there’s no fairness in that, either. Keane Sullivan seems like a good person, but he’s not Ben, and I can’t help wondering if I’ve made one more mistake. I touch my fingertips to the border of the Polaroid on the wall. He’s here to do a job. He’s doesn’t have to be my friend. He doesn’t have to be anything at all.
I grab the cans of Coke from the fridge and go back out on deck, but my mood is thrown off.
“Would you mind taking over for a bit?” Keane says.
I’m relieved when he goes belowdecks, but after a bit I hear him rattling around in the galley and catch a whiff of frying fish. He emerges half an hour later with plates of fried mackerel, red beans, and dirty rice.
“I don’t expect you to do the cooking,” I say. “That’s not in the job description.”
“Seemed like you needed a bit of space.”
“I—Yeah, I did. Thanks for making dinner.”
“You’re welcome.”
We reach the anchorage at Chub Cay at midnight. Together we furl the sails before Keane makes his way up to the bow. He directs me to a large space between two bigger sailboats.
“Now back it up,” he says.
I shift the throttle into reverse and watch as he lowers the anchor slowly into the water, letting the boat drift backward until the anchor line grows taut and the hook catches on the bottom. It’s a very different method than my throw-and-hope-for-the-best technique in Bimini, when I was lucky the anchor held.
“Next time, in daylight,” Keane says, returning to the cockpit and killing the engine, “you should do the anchoring.”
I realize now how much Ben used to do when we were sailing together, how often I sat back and let him. Ben might not have been a very skilled sailor, but at least he’d learned how to plot a course and drop an anchor. How naive I was to think I could make this trip alone. “Okay.”
Ben is still on my mind as I gather my pajamas, a towel, and my shampoo bar. My skin is sweaty and warm, and my body aches from a long day on the water. I lower the swim ladder over the side of the boat and when Keane goes belowdecks, I shed my clothes as quickly as possible and jump. The initial shock of cool water steals my breath but rinses away the stickiness of the day.
“Anna, are you intentionally overboard?” Keane calls from the cabin.
“Yes.”
“Just checking.”
He remains below as I climb the first two rungs of the ladder to wash myself. The night air, cool water, and fragrant lemon soap are a sensual combination and my body aches in a different way. I sink back down into the water to rinse, running my fingers through my hair to work out the lather, and down my body, pretending Ben is touching me. It’s not the same, but my fingers between my thighs are enough to send a shudder of release through me. Enough that I can climb back into the boat and go down into the cabin.
“Feeling better?” Keane asks, and my face grows warm, as if he knows.
I nod. “Yeah, um—thanks.”
“I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve pumped a bit of fresh water to have a wash.” He gestures toward the bucket. “Now that you’ve finished, I’ll take a turn in the sea, but I need to bathe my residual limb in fresh water when I finish.”
“Totally fine. We have a watermaker.”
Keane is wearing his swim trunks as he climbs up into the cockpit, where he arranges his toiletries before he sits to remove his prosthesis. He peels back layer after layer of coverings until he reaches bare skin. His leg ends about mid-calf, tapering to a skinny stump. The solar light hanging in the cockpit is bright enough to see scars crisscrossing the end of his limb like railroad tracks. The skin is pale white compared to the rest of his tanned body.
Keane hoists himself onto the port side of the boat and pivots on his butt. “Allons-y,” he says, giving me a wink before pushing off and dro
pping into the water.
While he’s bathing, I change into pajamas and gather the day’s dirty clothes into my laundry bag. Several minutes later Keane is back in the boat. I carry the bucket up to the cockpit, where he has changed out of his swim trunks and into a pair of loose basketball shorts. He rinses the seawater from his limb, then washes out the liner—the layer he wears closest to his skin.
“Salt water can leave behind an abrasive residue,” he explains. “With my prosthesis pressing against the stump all day, it’s important not to have irritants between the two.”
When he’s finished, Keane dumps the water and clips the liner and his wet trunks onto the lifeline to dry. He slides along the cockpit bench to the companionway and easily climbs on one leg down to the cabin floor. He’s done this before.
I stow the swim ladder and go back down into the cabin. Keane is making up his bed using one of the sleeping bags as a sheet and another as a pillow. I take one of my spare pillows from the V-berth and hand it to him. “Use this.”
“I couldn’t.”
“I have four pillows. Please take it.”
“Thank you.” He settles back on the quarter berth, resting his dark head against my pillow. I switch off the cabin lights and climb up into my bed. It isn’t long before Keane’s breathing falls into the steady rhythm of sleep, but I’m wide-awake. The first time I shared a bed with Ben, I couldn’t fall asleep. Every place where his body touched mine felt alive and my nerve endings were so lit up, I was awake all night. It’s not like that now. Keane Sullivan is not touching me. And I don’t have feelings for him. But I’m not so far away that I can’t hear the sleeping bag rustle when he shifts. It feels too close.
The floor creaks as I creep from my bed, comforter and pillow in hand. I climb up to the cockpit and make a new bed for myself on one of the benches. It’s not as comfortable as the V-berth, but the air is cool. The space around me feels wide and stars fill the sky. It takes no time at all for me to fall asleep.
off balance (6)
“Was I snoring?” Keane sits opposite me in the cockpit, dressed for the day in a pale blue T-shirt and shorts, his prosthesis in place. I sit up, and he hands me an egg-and-cheese sandwich wrapped in a paper towel.
“Thank you. No,” I say. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“You miss him.”
“Ben and I were supposed to take this trip together, and on the day we planned to depart, I just … left. But now…” I trail off, searching for the right words.
“Now you’re on a boat with a strange man who is neither a lover nor a friend, and it doesn’t feel right,” Keane offers.
“You’re very perceptive.”
He takes an enormous bite of his sandwich and holds up a finger while he chews. In the sunshine, his eyes are flecked with green and gold. He swallows. “I’m not here to cause you stress, Anna. If you’d feel more comfortable with me sleeping on deck, I’ll do that. I will operate as far in the background as you like.”
My eyes sting with tears, thinking about everything he has done for me in such a short time. “Why are you being so nice to me?”
His brows pull together as though the question is preposterous. “Why would I be anything else?”
I take a deep breath to keep the tears away, and nibble a bit of egg sticking out from my sandwich.
“Obviously, your situation is much more painful than mine,” Keane says. “But I do understand loss. For what it’s worth.” Before I can say anything, he stands. “After you’ve eaten, we can leave. Unless you’d like to go ashore and have a look around.”
“I’d rather keep going.”
With the sun rising behind me, I finish my sandwich. Keane makes coffee while I brush my teeth, get dressed, and braid my hair. Together we stow away our bedding and make the cabin secure for sailing.
“The wind will be on the nose today, so it could get a bit bumpy,” he says. “We can motor or attempt to sail.”
“Let’s sail.”
“That’s my girl.” The words are barely past his mouth when his neck goes red. “Just, um—a figure of speech.” He clears his throat. “I’ll get the anchor, shall I?”
In a matter of minutes, we pass from green water so clear you can see a bottom freckled with swimming fish and starfish as big as dinner plates, into a blue so deep it seems bottomless. Into the Tongue of the Ocean, a trench that stretches down more than a mile. The picture I snap of Chub Cay fading behind us is beautiful, but the reproduced color can’t even come close to the original.
“Does it ever get old?” I wonder aloud. “I mean, I can’t imagine growing tired of this blue, or the green around the islands. It’s so peaceful.”
“I reckon if you stay in one place too long, you might start taking it for granted,” Keane says. “But if you keep moving, everything holds its wonder. At least that’s been my experience.”
In this regard, he reminds me of Ben. Ever moving. Never waiting for trees to spring up and block the view of the forest. I feel a catch in my chest, but I breathe through it, not wanting to cry in front of Keane again. Or at all. Instead I think about what lies ahead. Nassau was never part of the original plan. It’s not on the map. But since the moment he stepped onto the boat, Keane has been keeping a running list of things I failed to bring—jack lines, radar reflector, a lock for the dinghy. We need to stop for supplies.
“Have you been to Nassau?”
“Once,” Keane says. “It’s a busier place than Bimini with the cruise ships coming and going. A bit less rustic. A lot more tourists. But we should be able to get everything we need.”
“I don’t want to stay long.”
“Understood,” he says. Then: “Do you come from a large family, Anna?”
“I have a mother, an older sister, and a niece who is two.” I explain how I haven’t seen my father since he left, that he has a whole new family. “What about you?”
“Oh, my family is one large Irish Catholic stereotype,” he says. “My parents are married near on fifty years and I’m the last of seven. My mom calls me the tiebreaker, since I have three sisters”—he pronounces it tree instead of three—“and three brothers. Which meant someone was always threatening to belt me if I didn’t take their side.”
“It sounds fun, though.”
His smile is luminous. “Oh aye, it is.”
“Do you see them often?”
“Usually at Christmas,” Keane says. “My da owns a pub, so all the family comes from far afield—brothers, sisters, and I think we’re up to about a dozen nieces and nephews—and we gather at the pub to celebrate. It’s my favorite time of year.”
“I bet you’re the cool uncle, huh?”
He laughs and spreads his arms wide, as if the answer should be obvious. “The older ones have convinced the littles that I’m a superhero. Keeps them from being bashful about the leg.”
“That’s sweet.”
The wind freshens and waves start breaking across the bow, spraying us with a fine mist that thickens my hair and salts my lips. We pull on our foul-weather jackets.
“I reckon we ought to reef the main,” Keane says. “Do you know how?”
“No.”
“Take the tiller. As soon as I’m on deck, head to wind.”
He scrambles on top of the cabin as the boat pounds through the waves, and I don’t know if I should be worried. He’s wearing sailing sneakers with good traction and bracing himself against the mast, but I can’t help wondering how his balance is affected. Yet as he lowers the mainsail a couple of feet, creating a smaller surface area, Keane is as off balance as anyone would be in a sloppy sea, and the same kind of careful coming back down into the cockpit.
“You needn’t worry about me.”
“Actually, I was still trying to decide if it would be worth the effort,” I say, eliciting a small laugh from him. Keane laughs often. Not that Ben didn’t, but there were days when he wouldn’t get out of bed. He would hardly speak, let alone laugh. Those were hard days because I w
anted to crawl into bed and hold him until he felt better, but I also wanted to get away from him. Like his darkness might be contagious. I should have spent more days in bed with him. I should have tried harder to help him stay alive.
“I already know how the body responds to certain situations on a sailboat,” Keane says, pulling me back to real life. He takes over the helm and I sit beside him on the high side of the boat. Nassau is still too far in the distance to see, which makes it feel as if we’re sailing to nowhere. “I’ve learned to adapt. I have to be more mindful than I was before, but I’m disabled, not incapable.”
“Well, when it’s my turn to reef the sail, I hope you’ll worry about me, because of the two of us, I’m most likely to fall overboard.”
“If that happens, I’ll save you.” He nudges his elbow against mine. “But let’s add reefing the main and man-overboard drills to the list of things you should learn.”
We slog through the bumpy chop for several miles before Keane pulls the plug on sailing. “We’re wasting daylight now. Best we motor the rest of the way.”
He lowers the main while I roll up the jib. The ride remains rough and the waves still break over the bow, but with the engine running, we make better time. We share a bag of plantain chips Keane finds in the pocket of his jacket and watch as sportfishing boats and mega-yachts speed past us at varying distances.
It’s past noon when Keane makes a radio call to one of the marinas in Nassau to arrange for a dock. “I’m not keen on rowing groceries and supplies out to the anchorage,” he says. “And leaving an unlocked dinghy at a landing is a bit like leaving the keys in your car and expecting it to be there when you return.”
Despite my worries about how much it will cost, I look forward to being able to step off the boat and use a proper bathroom. Maybe even eat in a restaurant.
His next call, a few miles later, is to Nassau Harbor Control, requesting permission to enter the harbor and informing them we have a dock reservation for one night. That we’ve come from Bimini. The coral-pink towers of the Atlantis resort are visible in the valleys between waves. As we get closer, the wind begins to calm and the shoreline of Paradise Island emerges, white sand and green vegetation. We peel off our jackets, the boat passing from the Tongue back into shallow turquoise water, where schools of silver fish flash in the sunshine.
