The Starboard Sea: A Novel (19 page)

Just as the road dead-ended into sand, a pair of police squad cars guarded the entrance to the beach. Officer Hardy leaned against the shiny black hood of his car, the sand coating the heels of his black boots. He seemed surprised but happy to see me.

“Jason from New York,” he said. “Glad to know you’re safe and dry.” We shook hands and I asked what was going on.
It was low tide and he pointed to three yachts beached along the

salt marsh and tidal flats. A team of men in orange coveralls stretched thick bales of canvas straps out onto the sand.

“Some big shots are paying ten grand apiece to have their boats airlifted to dry dock.”
“Airlifted?” I asked.
“By helicopters. The boats are too heavy to be pulled out and too damaged to go back in the water. Should be a good show.”
I’d never heard of such a thing. Of rescuing sailboats by flying them in the air. This was something I wanted to see. I scanned around for Aidan, hoping to share in the spectacle. Hardy pointed to my grocery bag. “You got any snacks for me?” I offered him the box of crackers and he said, “I’m just joking. You’re a nice kid, though. You’d hand your lunch money over to a bully.”
Handing over anything to a bully had more to do with fear than kindness, but I didn’t bother correcting Hardy, just took his statement as a compliment.
After days without a bird in the sky, the seagulls had returned. Their slender white bodies circling overhead. I watched as the gulls swooped down, flashing the black tips of their wings. I told Hardy, “You call a group of seabirds a wreck. Kind of perfect, isn’t it?”
“Those scavengers are just looking for a meal. Smells like something died out here.”
A stench of rotting fish and spilled petroleum overwhelmed the shore. I thought of New Bedford. Of the polluted waters and the fishprocessing plants. On the beach, a dried-up horse shoe crab decomposed in the sand, its sharp tail skewered on a brittle bed of seaweed. The horse shoe’s body a tough brown helmet, another casualty of the storm.
Officer Hardy and I had a view across the harbor of Race’s shipyard. I imagined the yachts were headed there. Hardy pointed to the shipyard and asked, “You know Leslie Goodwyn?”
“You mean Race? Yeah, I know him.”
“His family’s going to make a killing off our little maritime disaster.”
I always vowed that if I owned my own yacht, I wouldn’t be some weekend warrior. I’d take good care of her. Especially during a storm when it was smart to put her in dry dock or moor her in a sheltered harbor. But if caught out at sea in a hurricane, I knew I’d be able to keep her safe. Using a parachute anchor as an underwater sail, Cal and I had practiced a tactic called heaving to. Instead of slowing down a skydiver in midair, the parachute anchor expanded underwater keeping our boat steady during the blow. Together, Cal and I could have saved these beached yachts not by running them under bare poles but by trimming our sails and positioning the yacht right into the wind. The parachute anchor created a vortex street of water and held the yacht in place. Like hitting Pause in the roiling ocean. A seemingly impossible task. Cal would have been disgusted by these shipwrecks. Knowing that all of this destruction could have been avoided.
Another cop stood farther down the beach. He shouted out to Hardy and pointed up at the sky. “Look at that. Here comes the cavalry.”
Like a shining flock of Canadian geese, three hefty Sikorsky helicopters tracked across the horizon in V-formation, silver fuselages nosing their way toward the yachts. Hardy and I jogged along the beach, hoping for a better view, our hair and clothes blowing wildly in the helicopters’ downdraft. The rotator blades sliced the air, sending ripples along the surface of the water. Loose grains of sand funneled up off the beach, stinging our faces. Around us brown columns of cat-o’- nine-tails beat against plumes of sea grass. As the copters whirled above, the men in orange coveralls scrambled around hulls, over foredecks, and behind exposed keels, positioning the straps of canvas.
I tried to identify each yacht by size and design. There was a high- performance Shannon 50 Ketch whose white hull had been cracked open like an eggshell hit hard against a counter. I imagined the Shannon planing continuously in strong winds, lifting up onto its bow wave and skimming the surface of the water. Beside the Shannon, a 51 Formosa PH Ketch had crushed a boggy field of marsh grass. The Formosa was so heavily constructed that it would have made a perfect around-the-world cruiser. Joshua Slocum would have balked at the luxury. But my favorite of all the beached yachts was an Alden 54. A real offshore thoroughbred. With an Alden, Cal and I could have committed some serious passage making. Setting off from Martha’s Vineyard to Bermuda on the first leg of our circumnavigation. From Bermuda, we’d sail to Saint Martin, down to Panama, and out to the Galápagos. With Cal, there would be no coast hugging. Only the bluest open ocean. I watched the yachts being readied for flight and turned to Cal who wasn’t there and said, “That Alden’s begging for the South Pacific.”
Officer Hardy looked at me. “I used to think about buying a boat,” he said. “But I’d be better off flushing my greenbacks directly into the ocean.”
Overhead, the helicopters staggered their positions, treading sky, maintaining a stationary midair pose. One by one, each copter uncoiled a vein of thick wire cable. The descending steel shone against the swimming pool sky and, for a moment, I imagined that the cables were giant zippers waiting to be unzipped. Opening out onto another dimension. On the beach the workmen gathered the wide straps of heavy canvas and secured the wire cables to a complex series of metal hooks cinched within the canvas. While the copters hovered above, the workmen slipped the straps under the hulls, fore and aft. A signal was given, and soon the copters climbed higher, winching the yachts, cradling them in their slings.
Colonies of acorn barnacles and hairy patches of orange algae had ravaged the yachts’ blue-and-white hulls. With their cement-colored caps and sharp flared bodies, the barnacles looked like ugly, unwanted stars. It was funny to me that the owners would spend so much money on a rescue mission when these yachts had long been neglected. They should have been dry-docked and scraped down ages ago. The boats so dramatic and elegant when floating on the ocean were being consumed beneath the waterline, the barnacles thriving, forming a rough honeycombed crust, suffocating the yachts. “Poor Celia,” I thought. The ocean was full of life, but when you tried to put your own life into it you wound up with barnacles, feathery webs of algae. In the summertime, Cal and I would scrape down our Catboat, singing lines from
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. Just when the Mariner realizes that his shipmates have perished, that he himself is cursed, that his only companions will be the schools of tormenting sea creatures surrounding his boat, he says:

The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie;

And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.

I pointed up at the hulls covered in algae and barnacles. “A thousand thousand slimy things,” I said. Cal would have known what I was referring to, but Officer Hardy just said, “What a waste.”

The helicopters hoisted the yachts high above the marshlands, ascending deep into the Atlantic sky. In a brilliant feat of engineering, the helicopters rose, the fuselages hidden amid the white surf of clouds, leaving only the yachts to dangle below the mist. Three ghost ships suspended by sunlight, their shadows darkening the ocean. I felt the gravity and weight of these yachts and their pull on the sturdy helicopters, but I also felt a soaring lightness as though I myself were being carried above the water. I thought of my family’s Calder mobile, of the whale skeletons hovering from the museum’s ceiling, of the Renoir seascape. All of these images converged into the form of these flying yachts and their hidden helicopters. Aidan would have loved the sight. In a moment like this, there were so many beautiful and uncommon things worth saying. Aidan would have said them all, stealing this spectacle from the men who’d paid for it, making it her own.

The noise from the whirring helicopters obscured the sound of the workmen in their orange jumpsuits waving at us, urging the officers to come down to the beach. I was the first to hear the men shouting and I led the way across the tide pools to the marshy sandbar.

The men huddled in a ring like cautious worshippers at some ancient ceremony. I had to press my way inside their circle. A woman had been pinned beneath one of the yachts, the massive boat crushing her body. Her face was shrouded in red hair, a cluster of broken barnacles crowning her head. Her naked chest and torso nothing more than a patchwork of lacerations and bruises. A rough of matted sea grass covered where her legs should have been.

“Mermaid,” one of the men whispered.
The woman’s arms stretched above her head resting on a slab of driftwood. Her fingernails painted cobalt blue.

The sound I made was a keening cry, and it was only the sharpness of my voice that broke the spell Aidan’s body had cast over the men. Before I had a chance to dig down and free her from the wet sand, Hardy dragged me away from the beach and placed me in the back of his squad car.

TEN

I felt the waves of this new truth, this new loss crash over me, and I did the most unremarkable thing. With my fingertips, I dug into and peeled the clementine, the one Race hadn’t taken. With great focus, I flayed the peel off in a single orange curl. I did all of this listening for an ambulance’s siren, but when the ambulance arrived it was silent. The ambulance driver drove onto the beach and parked on the marsh blocking my view. After I removed the rind, I tried to fit the curly shell back around the orange, attempting to restore the skin. I would have no appetite. Not for a long while.

I figured that Hardy had put me in the backseat to prevent me from running out, from seeing Aidan being unburied and placed on a gurney. But locked in that car, sequestered behind a metal grate, I felt a surge of guilt. I wanted to confess my own crimes. How I’d hurt Cal, how I’d let us both down. I thought my remorse might save Aidan. I wasn’t ready to accept that she might be gone. I needed her to be alive.

It wasn’t long before Officer Hardy returned to the car and insisted on driving me back to school. “You knew her?” he asked. “Was she a student?”

I nodded. “Is she going to be okay?” I understood that she wasn’t, but I needed to hear the hope in my own voice.
Hardy stole a look in his rearview mirror. “There wasn’t much we could do, son.”
What I wanted was to go to the hospital, to sit with Aidan. I had no desire to flinch or back away from this moment. I wanted complete access to whatever pain or mystery was attached to that scene on the beach. Hardy wasn’t hearing any of this. He drove me to my dorm and asked me to spell Aidan’s name. That was all he wanted to know. I wrote it down for him on a scrap of paper. “She doesn’t have a father,” I said. “Her mother does stuff with films and oranges.”
“Films and oranges?” Hardy repeated.
“In California.” I could hear myself not making sense. My shoulders began to shake. My chest expanded and I felt as though I were drowning.
Office Hardy looked away. I heard him open the glove compartment. He pulled out a crushed roll of toilet paper and unspooled a makeshift handkerchief. He handed the tissue back to me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “She was my only friend. This can’t be happening.”
Some random freshmen from the JV soccer team saw me get out of the back of the police car. Hardy waved the boys along and said, “Nice cleats.” I felt too old for this boarding school world, like I was living in my own past. Hardy asked if I was going to be okay. “Do you need to sit with someone?” I told him I’d be fine, though I wondered how I would even make it up to my room without smashing my fist into a wall or some innocent face. Hardy warned me against saying anything. “I know you’re upset, but let’s not turn this into gossip,” he said.
“We were supposed to meet each other,” I told him. “On the beach. That’s why I was there.” I held up my stupid bag of groceries.
“Look, son.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Just try and forget what you’ve seen.”
And because I was always so good at following orders because I
would
give my money to a bully because I still wasn’t certain of what I had witnessed, I said nothing to anyone and waited for someone with authority to tell me what to do next.

There was a windstorm that night. No rain. Just blustery wind. I thought Officer Hardy might return to check up on me. He didn’t. I stayed in my room waiting for Windsor or Dean Warr to visit and invite me to their homes or at least send word that they wanted to meet with me in their offices. But I didn’t hear from Windsor or Warr. Scared, confused, and alone, I called my mom. There was no answer. I thought about leaving a message, then remembered her words, “You shouldn’t tell your parents everything.” Riegel had accused me of dragging Mom and Dad through unnecessary pain over Cal, of threatening their marriage. It was possible that in order for me to become an adult, I needed to learn how to be alone with my grief. I would spare my family the details of this loss, this sadness. In truth they hadn’t been much comfort where Cal was concerned.

I tried cleaning my room, throwing all of my dirty clothes into a knapsack. The worst part of that night was that I knew I would wake up the following day. My face would greet me in the mirror. I would walk down hallways and into rooms and my name would be called and I would hear the call and answer. I would go on. The linear progression of time would rule and I would be caught in its mornings and afternoons. The nights would come and I would feel alone. When Cal died, I thought time would cease to recognize me. Thought that I would step into some new dimension. I realized how innocent I’d been and how much worse it was now to know the unsettling truth about grief. I heard the wind outside and knew that the weather was changing, that it would be winter soon, that I would need to wear a wool coat.

Mostly I spent the night wondering what had happened to Aidan, refusing to believe she was dead. I saw Aidan in her ugly rust-colored sweater surrendering her black scarf to the wind. I saw her standing on her rocks and felt her thin body sleeping next to mine on her narrow bed. Then I saw the two of us naked in the water, the same awful water that had taken her away from me.