Change of Course Page 6

  The wind had shifted, so now it came out of the southwest. Perhaps it was that shift, or perhaps it was the change from night to day - or maybe it was nothing but our imaginations - but it seemed not so cold as it had felt in the darkness.

  My deafness gave way to a steady ringing noise in my ears, and eventually I could distinguish individual sounds, but it would be some time before my hearing returned to anything approaching normal.

  With the light, we were able to inspect Sea Legs for damage. A section of our railing had been badly bent and we’d taken a tear in our jib and lost a buoy or two overboard; besides that, everything had survived intact. We ventured below, where - despite our efforts in lashing things down and sealing the cabin closed - a fair amount of equipment had found its way to the floor and taken a good soaking. But we’d sustained no real damage to speak of, a testament to the seaworthiness of our boat, or to dumb luck, or maybe a bit of both.

  I fired up the stove, which was ingeniously suspended on gimbals designed to keep it level regardless of the boat’s motion. While the principle may have been sound, the practice lagged somewhat behind, and it proved to be tricky business. I made coffee, dark and strong and hot, which we half-slurped and half-spilled in the cockpit, burning our tongues and laughing at our clumsiness.

  * * *

  By noon, both the wind and the rain had fallen off appreciably, and the seas were down to ten feet. We laughed at the waves, we mocked the whitecaps. I found myself thinking in military terms, noticing, for example, that it no longer seemed as though we were the storm’s target of choice. For I truly felt as though I’d come through a war. I imagined how a soldier must feel after living through the worst of a nightmarish battle, no longer startled by the muffled thud of an occasional shell exploding off in some distant field.

  The clouds began breaking up towards nightfall, and the seas continued to flatten. The rain still fell, but only intermittently, and with no driving fury behind it.

  We began the transition back to normalcy: We replaced the jib and set our sails once again, we retrieved our storm anchor, we untied our safety lines and took off our life vests and harnesses, we even changed into dry clothes.

  That night, we placed our trust in the self-steering device. We went below, cooked, and ate for the first time in a day and a half. We broke open a good bottle of red wine, and I filled two glasses.

  “To life!” I toasted, as I had at the beginning of the storm.

  I could see from Jack’s expression that he wanted to correct me, but I was still too deaf to hear his voice. Nonetheless, by reading his lips, I was able to make out his words.

  “To living” is what he said.

  Al1 my life, I’ve been a great believer in omens, in signs from the heavens. Spotting a rainbow is a sure promise of good things to come. Finding a coin and picking it up can bring good luck, but only if it’s head’s-up; if it’s tails, better to leave it where it is.

  So when I awoke the next morning to sunlight slanting into the cabin, my first reaction was nothing less than a feeling that I’d been reborn. I lay on my bunk, squinting into the light, listening to the sounds of Sea Legs under sail. There was the whooshing of the sea as it parted for our bow, the slapping of the wind against our sails, the groaning of the hull. At one point, I made out the ratcheting of a winch being grinded. It struck me that the combination of sounds was not unlike a symphony, a coming together of different parts, different instruments, different voices. I must have listened for a good ten minutes before it suddenly dawned on me: I could hear again!

  I climbed up on deck, expecting to find Jack at the wheel. And I did, sort of. He was sprawled out on the bench, his head propped up against a flotation cushion, his hat pulled down over his eyes. His feet were bare, one dangled beneath him, the other rested on the wheel, apparently in charge of the steering. His hands were occupied nestling an open can of beer.

  “What time is it?” I asked, staring at the beer. Neither of us had ever been much of a drinker, even at more traditional times of day.

  “Oh, this?” Jack looked at his beer and laughed. “I’ve always wanted to try one for breakfast,” he said. “I figured now’s as good a time as any.”

  “And?”

  He answered with a long, full-bodied belch, the sort we used to summon as kids when we were engaged in contests to see who could be more disgusting. At one point in our teens, we’d devised an elaborate rating system, all the way from a one (assigned to the politest of mini-burps) to a ten (reserved for an all-out, window-rattling moose belch). We’d even mastered the art of belch-talking, explaining to our mother that you could never tell - it might come in handy if one of us ever had to undergo a laryngectomy. But this time, I let Jack’s opening salvo go unanswered. I was afraid that if I tried to top it so early in the morning, I might end up losing the previous night’s dinner, which would be grounds for automatic disqualification.

  “We’ve got company,” Jack said, extending his beer can as a pointer.

  And he was right: An escort of dolphins was spread out on either side of our bow. There must have been two dozen of them, perfectly attuned to our speed, gliding effortlessly from wave to wave. We hadn’t seen dolphins since the very first hint of bad weather. Like Jack, they’d sensed the sea change early. Now they were back.

  Sunlight, blue sky, and the return of the dolphins! How could I not feel my spirits soaring? How could I have asked for a more fitting moment to shrug off the cloak of ignorance and confront the mystery that Jack had created?

  “So,” I said, trying my best to sound matter-of-fact. “What’s the story with Walker Island?”

  “I told you,” Jack answered. “There is no Walker Island.”

  “So you did. But you never bothered to tell me where we are going, if there’s no Walker Island.”

  “You never asked.” As though I needed him to remind me of my days spent in avoidance.

  “That was then,” I said.

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m asking.”

  “Are you sure?” He took a long swig of his beer.

  “I’m sure,” I said, though the truth is, I’d never been less sure of anything in my life. But by bringing the matter up, I sensed that I’d passed some point of no return. Having once asked where it was that we were going, I now had no choice but to press on for an answer.

  And I got one.

  “We’re going to where Walker Island would be,” Jack said, “if there were a Walker Island.” He said this as though everything were quite self-evident, and it was I who was somehow missing the obvious.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I still don’t get it.” But I was beginning to, and by now I think we both knew it.

  All this time, Jack had been studying the sails, alert for any subtle shift in the wind that might require a steering correction. Now he allowed his gaze to wander to the horizon.

  “We’re still going to the same spot,” he said. “Thirty-one north latitude, sixty-five west longitude, give or take a few miles. Same as before.”

  “What’s there?” I asked, the dread building, the blood beginning to pound in my ears.

  “Oh, about 10,000 feet of water,” Jack said calmly. He continued to look off to where sea met sky,

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “And what happens there?” I asked, though by now I surely knew. Still, I guess I needed to hear it from him.

  For the first time, Jack met my gaze with his. “That’s where I get off,” he said softly. “That’s where this trip ends for me.”

  If I could free some sleeping genie from an old lamp or dusty bottle and be granted but a single wish, it would surely be to travel back through time to those days aboard Sea Legs before I made my brother tell me what was to happen once we’d reached our phantom destination. And if the genie trifled with me and told me that the best he could do would be to transport me back one tick of time, to the very instant before I demanded Jack’s actual explanation, the
n I’d settle for that. I’d willingly go back to the dread if only I could avoid the knowing. And to those who would disagree and insist that’s it’s always better to know, I would say this: No, not always.

  Because The Log of the Sea Legs contains no entries for a full three days following that terrible notation - “Today Jack told me about Walker Island” - I have no written record of the period. During the storm itself, I was too occupied with the business of survival to write; afterward I was too distraught by Jack’s words to put them on paper. But my memory is raw enough to enable me to re-create our conversation with the same degree of certainty with which you might recite what you ate for breakfast this morning. Some recollections owe their vividness to recentness, others to a long-term lender far greedier in what he takes as interest.

  “When we get to ‘Walker Island,’” Jack explained now, “I’m going to say good-bye to you. We’re going to hug. We’re both going to cry some. Then I’m going to walk to the bow of the boat. From there, I’m going to dive into the ocean.”

  “And me?”

  “You? You’re going to turn the boat around and take her home.”

  “Just like that?” I asked.

  “Just like that.”

  My first reaction was one of pure denial, insistence that Jack was joking. “You can’t be serious!” I said, doing my best to keep the terror from cracking my voice and betraying me. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “Sorry,” Jack said. “But I’m afraid I’m not kidding.”

  Still, Denial can be a seductive mistress, who tends to cling long after the affair has ended. I absolutely refused to hear what Jack was telling me.

  “I don’t believe this!” I shouted. “You can’t be serious!”

  “I’m dead serious,” Jack assured me. “If you’ll pardon the pun.”

  “I won’t pardon anything! And I won’t accept what you’re telling me, Is this your idea of some stupid April Fools’ joke?”

  “We’re well into May,” Jack reminded me.

  Surely there came a point where even I could hear my protestations begin to ring false. Each time Jack told me how serious he was, I’d voice my disbelief all over again. But inside, I must have known full well that, April or May, this was anything but a joke.

  For as I began to think back, the pieces started to fall into place, bit by bit. Why, after all, had Jack gone to such trouble to rig Sea Legs so that all her lines could be managed single-handed, when there were two of us? Why had he bothered to install furling gear for the mainsail, or add the self-steering device? Why had he been so insistent that I become proficient with the sextant and be the one to master the art of dead reckoning? There was but a single answer to all of these questions, I realized now: Jack had known from the outset that he wouldn’t be coming back. He’d brought me along - among other reasons, perhaps - so that there’d be somebody on board to turn the boat around and sail her back when the time came.

  It strikes me now that in continuing to insist that my brother was joking while these facts stared me in the face, I was playing the first of a series of cards from my hand: Even as Jack assured me that he was completely serious, I was deliberately treating his idea as absurd, as nothing short of totally ludicrous. By holding it up to ridicule, I was hoping that I might somehow manage to belittle it, to reduce it to something comical and bizarre - and thus force him to rethink the whole business.

  I went to bed at the end of that day still refusing to acknowledge that my only brother really intended to throw himself into the ocean. I was determined to spend one more night wrapped in the comforting arms of Denial. But it was a fitful sleep, of grudging minutes far apart; when finally I awoke bleary-eyed in the morning, my mistress had vanished from my side for good.

  Morning brought more than the loss of denial. It brought clear skies and a fresh breeze from the south. It also brought anger.

  I can even recall the instant it arrived. One moment, Jack and I were sipping coffee in the cockpit, talking about the change in the wind.

  “Another storm?” I asked him.

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “The prevailing wind changes around this time of year. It’ll make things easier on you bringing her back.”

  It caught me like a punch in the nose, all over again. I held my tongue for a moment, but the anger was there, and I couldn’t contain it.

  “So tell me,” I said, “when did you make this little decision of yours?” I don’t know just what I thought his answer might be. I guess I half-expected him to say, “Last month,” or “A few days ago.” I probably wouldn’t have been too surprised if he’d said, “Yesterday.”

  He squinted for a moment, as though trying to remember.”Almost a year ago,” he said. “I started thinking about it the day I found out I was sick. I had some more tests to see if there might be some mistake. There wasn’t. So I went to the library, did some reading on prognosis, onset of symptoms, treatment. It didn’t take me too long to decide I didn’t need any part of it. At that point, I sat down and asked myself what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, while I was still well enough to do it.”

  “But that’s just it!” I shouted. “You are still well! You could be well for another year. You could live another five, maybe another ten years!”

  Jack shook his head. “I don’t want those years,” he said calmly. “This is what I wanted.” And to demonstrate, he swept his hand across the deck, across the horizon beyond it. “And,” he added, “I wanted it with you.”

  I should have felt honored, I suppose. I should have felt trusted, rewarded, deeply loved.

  I felt nothing but rage.

  “So you lied to me, you bastard! You tricked me aboard!”

  Jack nodded. “It was the only way I could pull it off.” He smiled. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come otherwise.”

  “You’re damn right I wouldn’t have come!”

  “See?”

  “And I wouldn’t have let you go, either.”

  “Yes, you would have,” Jack said. “And after we’d fought about it for a week or so, you would’ve come along, too. But fighting onshore would’ve been much nastier - you trying to keep me from going, bringing all sorts of other people into it.”

  “No one else knows?”

  “No one else knows.”

  “You haven’t bothered to mention to your daughters the little fact that you won’t be coming back from this trip?” I was incredulous.

  “No,” Jack admitted. “And that was hard. But I don’t think they could’ve handled it quite like that. This way, they’ll be okay. They’ll always be able to think I died doing what I loved most in life.”

  “What you love most in life is killing yourself?”

  “No.” Jack smiled. “You’re going to tell them I was washed over in the storm.”

  “I’m supposed to lie for you?”

  “Some lies are good lies. ‘Fibs,’ we call them.”

  The rage within me built with every exchange. It was dawning on me that Jack had thought of everything; he’d mapped out each step of his plan with meticulous detail. He now unfolded it all for me in absolute calm. And I think it was that very calmness that infuriated me most.

  “Have you told your wife?” I asked him.

  “Ex-wife,” he corrected me.

  “Ex-wife.”

  “No. But she’s a smart woman I suspect she pretty much knows.”

  I remembered her words to me at the send-off party, as she’d pulled me aside on the dock and looked me hard in the eye. “She made me promise to bring you back safely.”

  “You see?”

  “And me, you bastard. What about me?”

  “You’ll be all right,” Jack said. “If you’re worried about sailing her back alone, head up to Bermuda first, take on a mate. Take on a whole crew if you like.”

  “Goddamn you!” I screamed, going for his neck. We hadn’t fought since we were kids, trading blows with plastic toys, or books, or whatever else happened to be ha
ndy and not too lethal. “I’m not talking about some fucking boat!” I shouted, my arms flailing wildly, tears streaming down my face. “I’m talking about me, Jack. I’m your brother.”

  He caught me in his arms and held me close.

  “Who’s going to lie to me?” I sobbed. “Who’s going to lie to me?”

  Fifteen years later, I have difficulty piecing the rest of the day together. I can remember crying; I can remember arguing; I can remember beating my fists against my brother’s chest at one point in a child’s tantrum, though I can no longer recall the exact remark or comment that set me off. And all the while, Jack maintained his infuriating calm. In time, he’d explained that it was only his way of trying to project a sense of certainty, of letting me know that he’d thought everything out long ago and made up his mind once and for all. He’d wanted me to realize that there was nothing I could do about it. That way, I wouldn’t feel responsible for his decision, and in time I’d be able to accept it.

  “Never,” I’d promised him. “Never.”

  Anger has a certain energizing quality to it, and rage can sustain us for a while. But the human body can pump just so much adrenaline before exhaustion eventually takes over. By early afternoon, I felt totally drained, almost unable to keep my head up. I went below to find escape in my bunk.

  I must have been slept out by then, however, because I found myself lying awake, staring at the ceiling above my head, feeling the motion of the boat beneath me. My thoughts drifted back to the storm, to how it had tested us, and how each of us had met that test.

  Unlike Jack, I’d come aboard Sea Legs without any ambiguity about living: I’d brought with me no desire whatsoever to die. But as things had turned out, in the middle of the night, when I’d succumbed to believing that the storm would go on forever until it would kill us, I’d been ready to die, to give it all up. But Jack - Jack, who already knew that in ten days’ time he’d be throwing himself over the rail; Jack, who so easily could have surrendered to the sea and let it take him right then and there - Jack had put me to shame with what I could only explain as a fierce determination to survive, a will to live. In my darkest hour, I’d had Jack to keep me going. What had Jack had? What reserves had he been able to draw on, at a time when I was so absorbed in my own fear, and so overwhelmed by my own exhaustion, as to be totally useless to him?