The Unsinkable Greta James(9)

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Being out here like this. On a ship. At night. Just bobbing around in the middle of the water. There’s something lonely about it.”

“Is there?” she asks, and for some reason, this makes her think about the time she got a bad flu in her twenties and her mom flew out to take care of her. For three days, Helen made soup on the janky stove in Greta’s tiny apartment, and they sat on the couch in pajamas and watched movies as the radiator hissed and the snow pinged against the window. One afternoon, when she thought Greta was sleeping, Helen called Conrad to check in, and in that foggy, thick-headed place between sleep and awake, Greta heard her lower her voice. “I know,” she murmured. “It’s times like this when I wish she had someone too.”

Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to Greta to feel lonely.

She’d just returned after seven months of touring, opening for a band she’d admired since she was sixteen—the whole experience quite literally a dream come true—and in all those days of travel and nights onstage, all the quotidian acts of her life had been shed: regular phone calls to her parents, texts to friends, even the fling she’d been having at the time with Jason Foster. When she’d returned, her brain was still sparking and firing, overcharged by those months filled with fans and frenzy, and she’d spent the next few weeks in the same gray hoodie and leggings, moving from her notebook to her computer to her guitar in a burst of creative productivity. She’d never been happier.

But suddenly she could see things through her mom’s eyes: how she’d come home to an empty apartment and had no one to take care of her when she got sick. It didn’t matter that Greta hadn’t actually asked Helen to come; she would’ve been fine ordering soup from the diner downstairs and resting up until she was better. And it didn’t matter that she could afford a bigger apartment now if she wanted one; it was that this place she’d lived in for so many years felt like home. Her life wasn’t this way by default; it was this way because she liked it this way.

She turns back to the guy with a shiver. His eyes are still on the water.

“I’ve been reading a lot about Herman Melville lately…” He pauses, glancing over at Greta uncertainly. “Melville was—”

“?‘Bartleby, the Scrivener,’?” she says, and his eyes light up.

“Wow,” he says. “Most people go right for Moby-Dick.”

She nods at the water. “Too obvious.”

“Anyway,” he says, looking pleased, “I was reading about when Melville first went to sea. He was only nineteen, which seems so young now, and he wound up on this merchant ship that sailed from New York to…actually, you know what?” He laughs. “This is the part where my six-year-old would tell me I need to recalculate.”

“Recalculate?”

“Like on a GPS,” he says sheepishly. “When you go down the wrong road, and it starts recalculating your route. I have a tendency to take the long way.”

“That’s not always a bad thing,” she says, and he scratches at his beard, which is trim and flecked with gray at the edges. He’s handsome in a deeply wholesome way, clean-cut and earnest, and though he can’t be more than a few years older than her, he seems like an adult with a capital A, like someone who has his shit together, like the guys she sees in holiday photos from college friends she’s mostly lost touch with because their lives are too different.

He walks over and sticks out a hand. “I’m Ben, by the way. Ben Wilder. As in Laura Ingalls.”

In spite of herself, Greta laughs. “You must have sisters.”

“Daughters,” he says with a grin, and her eyes automatically flick to his hand. He’s not wearing a wedding ring. “And you are?”

“Greta.” She pauses, debating about the last name, then decides it doesn’t matter. He won’t know her. She can tell just by looking at him that he listens mostly to Dave Matthews and Bob Dylan. Maybe a little Phish in college. “James,” she says finally.

“As in Bond,” he says with a knowing nod.

“As in Bond,” she agrees.

The lights above them flicker on as the sky settles into an approximation of darkness, and in the distance, they can hear the rise and fall of voices from one of the ship’s many bars.

“You know,” Ben says, “sailors in the British Royal Navy used to get a ration of rum for every day they were at sea. It was safer than the water. And good for morale.”

“I bet.”

“I think I’m gonna go for one. You’re welcome to join.”

She hesitates. But only for a second. “I should probably get back.”

“Okay,” he says with a smile. “Then I’ll see you around, Bond.”

“Have a good night, Laura Ingalls.”





Chapter Six


Greta wakes in the dark, the only light coming from the glowing red numbers on the alarm clock, which reads 3:08 a.m. She’s used to this moment of confusion, the first few seconds after sleep when she has to think hard to remember where she is, which hotel room in what time zone. But the absence of windows and the rolling of the ship beneath her makes this all the more disorienting. It’s been twelve hours now, and this is the first time she’s truly felt like she’s at sea.