Float Plan(3)

A bottlenose dolphin breaks the surface beside the boat, drawing me out of my head. I can’t help but smile, remembering an argument we had about dolphins. Ben called them rapists and murderers. “Don’t be fooled by their permanent smiles and happy chatter. They’re assholes.”

“Animals don’t live by a moral code like humans,” I countered. “So maybe you should be more outraged by actual rape than dolphins doing what dolphins do. Humans are the real assholes here.”

He stared at me a long time, then flashed the grin that made my knees go wobbly. “God, Anna, how fucking lucky am I that you’re mine?”

A second dolphin joins the first and they crisscross in front of the boat, playing chicken with the five-knot hull speed. They leap out of the water, showing off for each other, and it almost feels as though Ben sent them to me, which is ridiculous, but I watch them until they peel away, heading for wherever it is dolphins go.

“You were supposed to stay with me.” My words float away on the breeze. “Why did you go somewhere I can’t follow?”

Not sure if I’m talking to the dolphins or Ben. Either way, I get no response.

Sunset is fading into darkness when I motor the Alberg into a marina on the inside of Miami Beach. Ben circled No Name Harbor as our destination for the night, but I have never dropped anchor by myself, let alone in the dark. Instead I pinball the boat into a transient slip for the night, thankful there are no witnesses to my awful docking skills and badly tied knots.

Wearing one of Ben’s old undershirts, I crawl into the V-berth and open the forward hatch. As I try to see the stars through the light pollution of Miami, I think about the last time Ben and I slept on the boat, one of the last times we made love. Sex is not what I miss most about him, but I do miss it. Before Ben, I had no idea that loneliness could ache in so many different places on a person’s body.

Now I imagine him lying beside me. The warmth of his hands on my bare skin. The touch of his mouth against mine. Except the closer my imagination tries to draw him, the further away he feels.





aground (2)





The morning sun brushes across the back of my eyelids and I wake to the realization that I’ve overslept.

“Shit.” I scramble out of the V-berth and hop across the cabin floor, pulling on a pair of cutoffs as I go. My plan was to leave Miami well before sunrise, so I’d reach Bimini while there was still daylight. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

I quickly brush my teeth and braid my hair, then walk to the marina office, where I pay an ungodly sum for what might have been my last good night of sleep. Feeling the pinch of being behind schedule, I hurry back to the boat, cast off the lines, and narrowly miss crashing into a seventy-foot cruiser on my way out of the dock.

“You’re lucky you didn’t hit my boat,” a man says from the back deck. His eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, but his mouth is bracketed by disapproval.

“Trust me,” I say, my face burning with embarrassment. “I’m aware.”

I motor down Government Cut, past the cruise ships and ferries and out into the ocean, where I raise the sails and aim the boat toward the compass heading marked on Ben’s chart.

Had I undertaken this trip aboard a powerboat, I would already be in Bimini. I’d be lying on the beach, browsing the local shops, or sipping a fruity cocktail in a waterfront bar. I would have plowed right across the Gulf Stream and arrived a couple of hours later. But sailing to Bimini is an all-day endeavor.

Ben and I used to take turns driving the boat, but without him, I don’t feel comfortable walking away. I can’t go down into the cabin for some respite from the sun or to use the toilet. I can’t read a book. And the passage between Florida and the Bahamas is a busy shipping lane of tankers and container ships heading north to ports in the United States and Europe, and south toward the Panama Canal.

The wind is too light. The Alberg is only making about four knots. I struggle to stay alert as the sun moves across the sky. I jerk awake to find myself veering off course, the sails backwinded and flapping. Desperate, I pour water down the front of my tank top, but it’s not cold enough to shock my skin. I drink a lukewarm Coke, hoping for a caffeine jolt. Cue up a playlist of the most screaming punk rock I can find and sing at the top of my lungs. Anything to stay awake when my overheated system wants to stall out.

The next time I wake, it’s to the splash of a container ship passing within a dozen yards of the boat, its hull rising like a huge steel wall. So close that I can see a deckhand watching me from the stern. The Alberg pitches lightly on the wake. If the captain saw me, I don’t know. If he sounded the horn, I didn’t hear it. My heart slams against my chest and my entire body is shaking as I put the sailboat back on its proper course.

You should not be going to sea in a boat you have no business trying to sail.

Fear and shame bubble up inside me as my mother’s words echo in my head. I could have been killed, crashed into by a cargo ship bound for Cartagena. If I can’t manage fifty miles to Bimini, how will I ever make the long passage from the Turks and Caicos to Puerto Rico? Mom is right. I should go home.

And do what, exactly?

I walked out on my job. And the apartment where I lived with Ben now belongs to a couple of snowbirds from New Jersey. Even the vastness of the blue sea surrounding me feels less empty than the prospect of a life without him.