Float Plan(26)

“Keep going.” Keane’s voice is calm, but I’m burning with anger and fear. Every instinct I have tells me to stop the boat to keep it from happening again. From making it worse.

“I told you this was going to happen,” I say, pushing the words between gritted teeth. “I told you.”

“Easy, Anna,” he says. “It’s going to be okay. Keep going.”

My eyes are blurred with tears as we motor the last few yards into a broad sandy-bottomed clearing. The only reason I know we are in the clear is because Keane tells me. He lowers the anchor, and when he calls back to put the engine in reverse, I do. The anchor catches in the sand and he motions for me to kill the motor, and I do that, too. I steel myself, preparing to scream at him, but before I have the chance, he leaps over the starboard lifeline—prosthesis and all—into the water to survey the damage.

“It’s right below the waterline,” he calls up to me as I stand in the cockpit, seething. “A bit deep, but it’s only a scratch. An easy fix.”

“You asshole.”

“Anna—”

“Ben spent a long time making his boat beautiful,” I say. “And it’s ruined.”

“It’s not ruined.”

“You could have driven us in. This didn’t have to happen.”

“I could have,” he says. “But it’s not Ben’s boat, Anna. It’s yours and you’ve got to know how to sail it.”

“Hiring you as a guide was supposed to be the sensible thing to do!” I shout. “You wouldn’t have hit the fucking reef!”

I was looking forward to this anchorage, where I could peel off my clothes and wash away the miles between Cat Island and Samana. I imagined snorkeling and catching spiny lobsters for dinner. Instead anger shimmers off me like a hot road and I want to be as far away from Keane Sullivan as my limited world will allow. Except I have a boat to repair.

“I’m sorry about the scratch.” Keane climbs the swim ladder. It’s odd to see him wearing his leg, and even though I don’t want to be worried about him, I can’t help thinking water, especially salt water, is bad for his prosthesis. “And it is only a scratch. But I was not wrong that you need to be able to rely on yourself. However, I may have been wrong to push you when you weren’t prepared.”

A small snort escapes me. “May have been?”

“If you don’t want to learn, what’s the point of all this?” he asks. “Why not pack it in and go home?”

“I don’t want to go home.”

Keane looks beyond me and rubs the heel of his hand against his mouth as if blotting the words he wants to say. “Then take responsibility, Anna. Decide you really want to learn how to sail, so that when I leave you in Puerto Rico, you’ll be ready for the Caribbean.”

He goes down into the cabin for his tool bag before coming back out on deck. “I need your help to fix the boat. I can’t do it alone.”

I take the bag. “I want to repair the scratch.” It comes out petulant.

We launch the dinghy without the engine, and as I row to the starboard side of the boat, Keane pushes the boom out over the port side and hops up to sit on it. The boat heels over and the jagged scar lifts out of the water. It’s nearly a foot long and about an inch wide. Deeper in some places than others, but the fiberglass matte is not exposed. It’s not as bad as I expected, but looking at it makes me ache.

Following Keane’s instructions, I rub sandpaper over the scratch until the bottom paint is removed. The repair compound resembles a stick of modeling clay that I knead until it’s soft. I press it into the scratch, using a putty knife to smooth it out. While the compound dries, I watch a school of blue tangs zigzag beneath the dinghy and my anger starts to fade.

Ten minutes later there is a long gray patch in the navy-blue paint. It’s not pretty, but the boat is fixed.

“Do you think it will hold?” I ask when Keane and I are both in the cockpit again.

“It should,” he says. “But if it fails, we’re in no danger of sinking.”

My anger has abated, but a thick fog of tension clouds the air between us. I wonder if Ben and I would be squabbling if we had made this trip together. Would I be sick of him? Except I’m not sick of Keane. I’m irritated. Mostly because, as usual, he is right—about everything.

“I’m going snorkeling.”

“I’ll, um—” Keane stops short of saying he’ll join me, which is smart. I want to be alone. “Have fun.”

The reef surrounding the boat is in shallow water, and swimming along the surface puts me closer to undersea life than I’ve ever been. I’m an arm’s length from branches of elkhorn coral, and the fish are so close that I can almost grab them. Hidden in crevices are large grouper, and queen conchs are scattered across the sandy bottom.

Keane cannonballs into the water several yards away from me, first as a mass of bubbles, then as a man swimming—fins strapped to both his intact foot and the foot of his waterproof leg—toward a hollow near the bottom of the reef where a spiny lobster hides. Keane uses a tickle stick to tease the lobster out into the open and a net to scoop it up. He surfaces, before returning to the bottom to catch another. The lobsters are so abundant that he doesn’t even need to try. I swim away from him and lose track of time, listening to parrotfish chomp algae from the coral with their human-looking teeth, and watching my shadow send tiny fish behind seaweed fronds, where they hide until I’ve passed.