Float Plan(28)

“I’m a fucking mess.”

“I don’t mean anything by it,” Keane says. “I just thought you might need a place to land.”

So I land, stretching out beside him, my head on his shoulder, as he holds me. There’s something about Keane Sullivan that makes me want to burrow inside his chest and live there, safe and warm, but I’m afraid to move for fear he’ll think I want something more from him. I close my eyes, thinking instead how far sound carries. How much did Keane hear? “I’m sorry I left. I—”

“You don’t owe me an explanation.”

“Will you tell me something?”

“What kind of something?”

“Anything,” I say. “Just talk until I fall asleep.”

His chest quivers beneath my cheek as he laughs. His shirt is soft, and his fingertips are warm on my arm. “This shouldn’t take long at all.”

I close my eyes and he begins a story about how his mother picked his confirmation name because she didn’t trust him to choose for himself.

“To be fair,” he says, “I was heavily under the influence of American rap at the time, so my suggestion of Tupac was not well received.”

I’m too tired to laugh, but I smile. “What name did she give you?”

“Aloysius.”

“That’s pretty awful.”

“It is,” he agrees. “Killed my career as a rapper before it even—”

“Keane?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

His lips press the top of my head. “Go to sleep, Anna.”

My heart rate slows, and I focus on the steady thump of his heart as everything in me quiets. I wake some time later, still tucked against him; my arm wrapped around Keane’s torso. I should let go, but I don’t.

“Are you awake?” I whisper.

“No.”

I laugh as I sit up. Gold gathers along the horizon and the sky is early-morning blue when I unzip the tent screen to watch the sunrise. “Did you sleep at all?”

Keane sits up beside me, shaking his arm and wiggling the life back into his fingers. Sunbeams play in the air around him. “A bit.”

“Please tell me I wasn’t snoring.”

“No,” he says. “I just didn’t want to move for fear of waking you.”

“You stayed up all night because—” I rub my hand over my face and blink back tears. “Could you possibly be any nicer?”

He’s silent, and when I sneak a glance from the corner of my eye, his mouth seems to be wrestling with itself. I look away. He clears his throat. “Actually … I could.”

The tent shrinks even smaller. Three years with Ben did not make me invisible. I recognize attraction when I see it and I understand what Keane meant. I just don’t know what to do about it. It’s been ten months and—My heart free-falls in my chest as I realize I’ve lost track.

“I don’t know about you,” I say, scrambling out of the tent, “but I could use some coffee—and breakfast.”

“Breakfast,” he echoes. “Right.”

Keane and I strike the tent, and as we motor away from the beach in silence, our equilibrium is off.



* * *



When it’s time to leave, Keane pulls up the anchor and guides me out of the harbor. I’m still afraid, but I focus solely on the channel in front of me and trust the sound of his voice, altering course only when he calls out an adjustment. We make it through the cut without incident and last night’s red sunset proves itself true—it’s a gorgeous day for sailing. A downwind sleigh ride that will push us closer to the Turks and Caicos.

“So, what’s the plan?” Keane asks, taking first watch at the helm. It’s early yet, so I sit with him, Ben’s chart book spread across my knees. San Salvador Island is believed to be where Christopher Columbus first set foot in the western hemisphere, but according to Ben’s handwritten note in the margin of the map, Mayaguana may have been the actual landing spot. “I guess I can see why Ben might want to go there.”

Keane doesn’t offer his opinion.

“It seems pretty desolate,” I say. “Kind of like Samana.”

His mouth pinched into a straight line, Keane only nods.

“Clearly you have something you want to say, so say it.”

“Mayaguana is very undeveloped,” he says. “And Christopher Columbus? He abused the indigenous peoples, introduced them to any number of lethal diseases, and paved the way for the transatlantic slave trade.”

This trip is not going the way I expected. Everything is different. “Are you saying we should go straight to Providenciales?”

“I’m not saying anything. But if I were, that’s what I’d be saying.”

I set aside the chart book and laugh. “Okay. Fuck Christopher Columbus. We’re going to the Turks and Caicos.”

“Grab the helm.”

I take over the tiller, and he disappears into the cabin, returning with the bag containing the spinnaker, a sail Ben and I never used. On the foredeck, he secures the sail bag to the side rail. As he moves, it’s clear Keane has done this hundreds of times—maybe thousands—and it makes me sad that the people who once valued him see his prosthesis as a hindrance. The spinnaker crackles like tissue paper as it goes up, fluttering in the wind, flashing bright primary colors on a field of white.