CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
HAZEL
The go-bag lives by the door now, packed and repacked on a schedule, and the terrible joke is that I was the only person on that boat who wasn’t surprised.
It’s a transfer run, six miles of open water between the mainland and the island, on a converted workboat called the Merry Gale that the island co-op bought with grant money and maintains with love and, it turns out, one aging transmission.
I’m going over for the beacon dedication, the little solar light the islanders put up on the headland to mark where the dock used to be, and I’m the guest of honor, which mostly means Doyle wants me to say four sentences and eat a casserole.
Maren’s in the carrier, chewing the strap with the four teeth she’s decided are enough. There are eleven of us aboard: Doyle, two crew, a nurse from the new clinic, a family of five going home from a mainland appointment, and me, the woman the island calls when it wants to feel like it won.
The engine dies forty minutes out.
Not sputters. Dies. One cough, a shudder through the deck plates that I feel in the soles of my feet, and then a silence so total that the water against the hull gets loud, and the family of five all look at me, because I’m the woman from the storm, and a boat has gone quiet, and I have apparently become the person you look at.
I’d been feeding Maren puffs out of a cup, and she keeps right on chewing through the silence, oblivious, one foot kicking the bulkhead in four-four time.
Doyle’s casserole for the dedication is lashed in the cooler under the bench, his wife’s recipe, the one with the topping he describes as “structural.” We’d been arguing about the beacon plaque.
It says DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO WAITED, and I’d told him it should say THOSE WHO ROWED, and he’d said the committee voted, and I’d said the committee can row, and the nurse from the clinic had been laughing at us both when the deck shuddered.
None of that stops mattering, which is the thing I could never explain to the inquiry panels.
Disaster doesn’t erase the small stuff. The casserole is still under the bench.
The plaque argument is still unresolved.
You just carry all of it at once, the fear and the lasagna, and you do the next thing.
“Well,” says Doyle, from the little wheelhouse, in the tone of a man refusing to inherit anyone’s panic. “That’s not good.”
The weather has been building all morning.
Not a monster, just a mean little front.
The forecast calls it scattered. The sea calls it practice.
The wind comes up as the engine goes down, because the sea has comedic timing, and the Merry Gale starts to drift broadside, rolling in a way that makes the family of five hold onto each other and makes Maren laugh, because she is a year and a half old and the world is a ride.
My body does the thing. The stairwell flickers.
The dark. The sound of water where water shouldn’t be.
I’ve done the work, two years of a very good therapist and a very patient husband-shaped person, and the flicker comes and I let it come and I put my hand flat on the bulkhead and count the rivets, six, eight, and I’m back, I’m here, I’m on a boat in six miles of gray water and my daughter needs me present, not historical.
“Radio’s up,” says the younger crewman, a kid named Wendell whose voice is fighting to stay level. “Coast Guard’s on. They have our position. They’re dispatching from the station, forty-five minutes, maybe more with the seas.”
“Tow?”
“Harbor tug’s on the mainland side of the front. They’re routing it.”
Forty-five minutes. In this roll, with this drift, and a lee shore I can see off the port side, low and rocky and patient.
The mother of the family has gone gray around the lips, and her oldest, a boy of maybe nine, is doing what children do, which is deciding whether the adults are scared so he knows how much fear to budget. I sit down on the bench across from him.
“Hey. What’s your name?”
“Junior.” Suspicious.
“Junior. Your mom’s going to tell you to put on a life jacket in a minute, and it’s going to be the uncomfortable kind, and I need you to not fight her on it, because you’re the oldest and the littles take their cues.
” I nod at Maren, who is investigating the concept of her own sleeve.
“Even that one. Especially that one. She has no judgment yet, she’s all appetite and courage. ”
He looks at Maren. Maren looks back with the serene menace of a toddler. Something in him settles into a job, which is what happens to most people when you give them one.
“Are we sinking?” he asks, fair and square.
“No. We’re floating without an engine, which is annoying, not dangerous, as long as everyone does the boring things. You’re going to hear the word ‘boring’ a lot tonight. Boring is the goal.”
I take the go-bag off my shoulder and put it on the table and open it, and the whole cabin watches me do it, and I realize I’m not scared, and that realization is so enormous I almost sit down with it.
The flares are in the side pocket, where they always are.
The waterproof pouch with the documents.
Maren’s suit, the warm one, not the yellow one, the yellow one is framed now, that’s a different chapter of a different life.
Emergency blanket. Water. I pack for weather like other people pack for picnics, and today it isn’t trauma, it’s seamanship.
“Life jackets on,” I say, pleasantly, like I’m suggesting a salad. “Everyone. Kids first. Then we get everybody on the high side, center line, and we sit low. Wendell, sea anchor, do we have one?”
“Forward locker.”
“Doyle, get the drogue out, even half a drogue will keep her bow to the seas and stop this rolling. The Coast Guard knows our position, the tug knows our position, our only job between now and then is to be a boat that stays upright and boring. We’re good at that. We’ve literally done it before.”
A couple of people laugh, shaky, and the family of five puts their life jackets on, and the mother catches my eye and mouths thank you, and I think: this is the thing I built out of the worst week of my life, and it’s just a bag and a voice and a list of rivets, and it works, it actually works.
Maren objects to her life jacket on principle. I let her object and put it on her anyway. She yells at me in fluent toddler. The nurse from the clinic grins into her sleeve.
That’s when Wendell comes down from the wheelhouse with the radio handset in his hand and a face like a man carrying a spider.
“Ms. Morse.” He’s trying to decide whether to say this in front of everyone, and deciding wrong, and saying it anyway.
“The Coast Guard’s asking about— there’s a second vessel in distress.
Big one. A Morse ship, the Meridian Star, she’s lost steering fifty miles south of here and she’s asking for tugs, and there’s only the one ocean tug in range and—” He swallows.
“The Coast Guard wanted to know if— somebody called Mr. Morse’s office, and Mr. Morse’s office called him, and he’s—”
The cabin has gone very quiet. The sea keeps talking.
“Say the rest,” I tell him.
“He’s on the mainland pier. He heard our call on the Guard frequency.
He’s got his own boat there, the fast one, and he—” Wendell looks at the handset, betrayed.
“His ops people told him the Meridian Star needs him, she’s his flagship, she just relaunched, there are two hundred crew aboard and she’s dead in the water in shipping lanes, and he said—”
He checks the paper he wrote it on, this kid, he wrote it down, because some sentences you don’t trust your memory with. “He said, ‘Then they have a commander. You don’t have me.’ And then his boat left the pier. For us. For here.”
The roll of the boat goes through me, and under it, another roll entirely.
Fifty miles. Steering gone, shipping lanes, two hundred crew, his flagship, his do-over, the ship I watched him applaud from a folding chair.
And a thousand people on that vessel and ashore who have been trained, for a year and more, to not need him, because a woman on an island refused to be the reason a company had one spine.
I know what the Meridian Star has that I don’t. She has Reyes’s regional commander on the Guard frequency. She has a harbor tug routing. She has procedures with page numbers I wrote notes on. She has, in short, people.
I have a drogue and a toddler and a lee shore.
And he looked at the whole board, all the lights on it, the way he’s looked at boards his whole life, and for the first time in the history of the man, the light he went toward was mine.
“Ms. Morse?” Wendell is waiting for an order, poor kid.
“We keep doing our job,” I say. “Upright and boring. Mr. Morse is doing his.”
His boat finds us twenty minutes later, a gray-hulled shadow coming out of the weather. And he doesn’t take over. I want that written down somewhere, so I’m writing it here: Christian Morse comes alongside a boat in distress with his wife and daughter aboard, and he does not take over.
He holds station off our bow, breaking the seas for us, a wall of steel between us and the weather, and his voice comes over the radio, calm as a harbor master, to Doyle, to Wendell, to the Coast Guard, coordinating, supporting, never commanding, because the Merry Gale has a skipper and the skipper isn’t him.
“Merry Gale, Mercy Bell, we’ll keep station on your port bow and take some of the roll out of her. Coast Guard rescue boat is eighteen minutes out. You’re doing fine.”
“Merry Gale copies,” says Doyle, and then, because Doyle is Doyle: “Took you long enough, son.”
A pause on the frequency. “I had to file some paperwork with my company first.”
I sit on the high side of a dead boat with my daughter strapped to my chest, both of us in orange, and I watch his boat hold itself between my boat and the sea, and Maren pats the window with one flat hand and says her new word, her actual new word, the one he wouldn’t spoil.
“Boat,” says Maren, with total conviction, pointing at his. “Boat.”
“Yeah, baby,” I say, and my voice does something I don’t supervise. “That’s your dad.”
The Coast Guard comes, and the tow comes, and the front blows itself out into a flat silver evening.
The whole time, the whole long gray middle of it, the Mercy Bell stays on our bow like a promise that finally learned the difference between saying and doing.
Nobody on either boat says the word love at all.
It’s the most romantic thing that has ever happened to me, including the proposal.
On the pier, in the dark, with the tow line slack and Maren asleep on my shoulder, we finally stand on the same dock. He’s in oilskins with two hours of spray in them and he doesn’t come closer than the length of a mooring line.
“Reyes has the Star,” he says, before I can ask. “Tugs have her. No injuries. She’ll anchor till morning, and in the morning there will be a very boring press release, and Duarte will read it, because she’s the one whose name should be in the paper.”
“Two hundred crew.”
“Two hundred crew, and every one of them had a person whose job it was. So did you.” The dock lights hum. Somewhere Doyle is loudly telling the Coast Guard coxswain about the casserole, which survived. “I’m not going to make this a speech. You were busy. I held a wall up. That’s the whole report.”
“Christian.”
“Yeah.”
“Come to the dedication tomorrow. Don’t sit in the back.”
He goes still, the rare bird, and then he nods, slow and final, a man signing something.
“I’ll bring the casserole carrier,” he says. “The good one, with the straps.”
Maren sighs in her sleep, boat-drunk, and we stand there in the humming dark, three feet of dock between us and neither of us in a hurry to close it wrong.