Chapter 17
Was this what Elena meant, being alive? Feeling her blood and her breath and her body? Sam and Ben fucked in the single-person bathroom on the car deck. He gripped her legs while she rode him. They were sweaty, gasping. His ID badge on its lanyard fell between them, and she pushed it over his shoulder, where his picture and his last name could thump against his back. GARCíA, announcing itself in capital letters to nothing but the fiberglass wall. She made him take his vest off because otherwise her skin slipped against it. The reflective stripes. He left it in a ball on the floor, where his boots stuck, where thousands of other people had stepped before.
The next morning, he climbed to the top deck at five-thirty, before the galley opened to passengers, and made her come in the supply closet. She held on to the shelves of packaged pastries. She held on to his head. After her shift ended, on the ride from Anacortes back to Friday Harbor, they clawed half their clothes off together in the crew quarters. They had to be hasty there; they only had fifteen minutes between when his duties ended departing one island and started with preparation for the next. He pressed his face into her neck, slick, warm, and pumped against her. She was alive. Wasn’t she? She could feel her organs. The spot where he hit her inside. He talked to her, low and constant, saying wild things that went too far about how much he wanted her, things he would never say when they were dressed and standing a cash register’s width apart, and she let the words wash over, she gripped him tighter until he collapsed. After he came, he was sweet. He nuzzled. She had to peel him off. She didn’t like fucking down in quarters because his co-workers knew too much about what they were doing. When they came out, the other crew members would wink, or laugh, and Ben, still flushed, would make a joke, and she would think how dumb they all were. She’d have to go out on the deck upstairs to cool off.
Ben was cute, for a deckhand. He was fun. If this wasn’t living, Sam didn’t know what was. It had certainly been her whole existence so far. She’d lost her virginity to a boy in her merchant mariner course and hooked up with a couple of the caddies at the golf club. None of them stuck around; they weren’t supposed to.
Elena had her own ways of getting through these years, Sam figured. Texting with Kristine. Going for walks. Organizing care for their mother. She didn’t date, but she liked to hear Sam’s occasional stories—the waiter from Alaska, the man who loved snorkeling, the one who kept insisting on chivalry—and so Sam liked to bring the stories (never the people) home.
For the last two months, the stories featured Ben. His parents were still in the house where he grew up, in Medford, Oregon, but he’d moved to Anacortes during lockdown. He had an associate’s degree and was considering whether to go for his bachelor’s. He’d asked for Sam’s number the first time they met. On his days off, he fished. He could be sharp, clever, and he didn’t try to trick her with kindness, and after this tourist season ended he would probably disappear, which made him exactly what Sam was looking for.
Ben gave her pleasure. He came up to the galley and sat with her at a plastic table during the late hours when few customers stopped by. She took her mask off and relaxed a little. Sometimes he pretended to read her fortune in her palm. “I see a tall, dark man in your future,” he said. “About…ten minutes from now. In a storage closet.” She pulled her hand away and rolled her eyes. Once, he brought her a jar of raspberry jam. She and Elena ate it, sweet and seedy, on their toast for days. Elena told Sam to pass on her thanks to him, but Sam didn’t, and Ben didn’t ask, and there were no more gifts to complicate matters after that. Instead he told her stories about his friends from home: the pranks they’d pulled, late nights with beers and drugs and firecrackers. He prompted her for her own school-days tales but she said she didn’t have any.
“No stories?” he asked.
“No friends,” she said.
He shook his head and called her his hermit. Asked if everyone on her island lived alone in a cave. She said, no, just ugly little houses, and he said he’d believe that when he saw it but she’d never let him see it, and in that case he was going to picture her bearded and solitary, meditating cross-legged on the bare San Juan ground. All gaunt, he said. In a loincloth. Oh, he liked that, the loincloth— “You freak,” she said then, but he said, “Who are you calling a freak, you friendless wonder?” She kicked him under the table until he grabbed her leg, gripped her ankle, ran his fingers beneath the hem of her pants.
In that way, he got her to talk about Elena. Their childhood. On his every visit, he heard more from Sam than she intended to tell. She described their earliest walks in the woods, the clear night skies, the summer salmonberries, and he teased her through it but he also listened, he kept listening, which was in itself a satisfaction. Sam couldn’t go on about her memories to anyone else; Elena already knew all these things.
They didn’t only discuss the past. Ben knew her mother was sick at home, though Sam didn’t get into the exact diagnosis. And he knew Sam and Elena would be moving soon.
On the rare occasions his shift’s end aligned with hers, he asked her to lunch or dinner. In Friday Harbor, in Anacortes. Sam always declined. The meals they did share were foods pulled from the galley: prewrapped sandwiches, nachos topped with plasticky cheese. Later those foods would sit heavy in her stomach while he rocked into her. This was what they had together. From him, she didn’t want any more.
The ferry hummed forward. The clouds gathered and parted and came together again. Ben went down to the car deck, and Sam, at her counter, organized the sweetener packets by color, pale yellow, pale pink, pale blue. Tourists complained about seasickness. Waves sloshed against the boat’s sides. Toddlers ran across the cabin without supervision, until, behind Sam’s back, there came the sudden noise of a slap and a shout. People bought coffee, tea, soda, kombucha. People bought cookies, chowder, soft pretzels, red apples, bananas bruised in their peels. People took sweetener by the handful. Sam organized the packets again. She had to take her enjoyment where she could find it. This period would be over soon.
Sam traveled in loops day after day—Anacortes, Orcas, Lopez, Shaw—and pictured Elena walking on the trail through the trees. She didn’t picture the bear. Imagining it was too frightening—its paws crushing twigs, its breath curling from wet nostrils, its mouth open to expose yellow fangs—but imagining her sister was a balm. Elena out there, happy. Unencumbered, however briefly, by the demands of the old ladies who lunched at the club. Walking in hope of seeing something that would delight. Sam worked on accepting that image, and really, when she put her mind to it, it wasn’t hard.
It shocked her, then, when Ben, loitering on her deck at quarter to nine at night, said, “Your bear is back in the news.”
She’d been closing out the register. She gripped the stack of ten-dollar bills in two cold hands. “What happened?”
“Killed some lambs or something.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “That’s terrible.” Picturing the tottering black-faced things that she and Elena used to feed grass to over the fence at Hearthside Farm, while the grown sheep watched from a cautious distance. Those darlings, cached now in the clawed-open ground.
Ben didn’t seem disturbed. He was sitting in one of the blue molded chairs bolted to the floor. His hair was getting long, beginning to flip over his ears, and his cheeks and neck showed stubble. He’d worked a double the day before—he looked too tired to get fussed about anything. “Everything’s got to eat.”
Sam put the tens down and started on the stack of fives. She didn’t have to pay attention to the counting anymore. Her fingers tallied for her. “I can’t believe it’s still on the island. That woman said it would leave.” She’d told him about Madeline.
“How long has it been?”
“Three weeks already.”
“Not that long,” Ben said. He stretched out his legs, pointed the toes of his boots. Sam put down the fives. “It’ll go soon. You and your sister were lucky, though, weren’t you?”
Once she finished the ones, she wrote the final count on a sheet and tucked it, along with the bills, into the deposit bag, then put that in the safe under the counter. All that cash, locked away, looping uselessly around the channel. “Lucky how?”
“That it didn’t see you when you saw it.” He pushed himself up off the chair. “It’s dangerous, isn’t it? Tearing into little animals.” He came up behind her. Lifted his hands to her shoulders, made claws of his fingers, and pressed them there. Put his mouth against her ear. “It could’ve ripped you apart.” Cold washed down Sam’s spine. And she could feel, like Elena had described, her muscles clenching, her quick breath. She felt the whole shape of it under his fingers—this precarious life.