Float Plan(6)

Officially cleared, I go back to the boat, where I take a fast shower. After I’m dried and dressed, my hair braided, I lock up the cabin and go ashore.

The island’s main road is lined with sherbet-hued shops, bars, restaurants, and homes, and there are more cars than I expected for an island that’s only seven miles long and several hundred feet wide. Bimini reminds me of a favorite toy, shabby and worn, but well loved. I step into a tiny blue grocery store, where I buy a SIM card so my phone will work in the Bahamas. My first call is home.

“Oh, thank God.” Relief floods my mother’s voice, but I hear Rachel muttering in the background. Sometimes it’s like having two mothers, like I’m five instead of twenty-five. “I called the coast guard to report you missing, but they said there was nothing they could do if you’d left the country.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner,” I say. “I arrived really late the night before last and slept about fifteen hours straight. I only just came ashore and got my cell phone sorted out.”

“I don’t understand this, Anna. What you are doing is foolish.”

I didn’t call to fight with her, but my defenses go up. “You’re the one who keeps telling me it’s time to move on.”

“But that is not what’s happening,” my mother says. “You are sailing Ben’s boat, living his dreams. You are not putting him in the past; you’re wallowing in his memory.”

“Maybe I need to wallow.”

“Anna, it’s been almost a year.”

“I wasn’t aware there was an expiration date for grief.”

“That’s not what I mean. You should talk to a therapist.” She sniffles and I realize she is crying, and I feel even worse. “I’ve never had to worry about you, and now that’s all I ever do.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want you to be sorry, Liebchen; I want you to be happy. Ben would want you to be happy.”

One of the worst things about life after Ben is how everyone seems to be able to predict what he would want. He’d want you to start dating. He’d want you to be happy.

“Yeah, well,” I say, “his death pretty much sealed the deal on the exact opposite.”

“Please come home.”

“I can’t.”

Mom breaks down in tears and I hear Rachel huff as she takes the phone. I steel myself for the oncoming storm. “Anna, you need to knock this shit off. Think about someone other than yourself for a change.”

As kids, Rachel and I were close. Barely two years apart, we played together, went to school together. Until he left, Dad called us his two little peas in a pod. But after Rachel had Maisie, something changed. Sometimes I get a jealous vibe, but I don’t understand why. Rachel has a job she loves and a beautiful child. I have a gaping hole where my life used to be.

“Tell Mom I’ll call her in a few days.” I disconnect and silence my phone.

The crossing from Florida was definitely not an unequivocal success—not when I overslept, nearly got smeared by a cargo ship, and ran aground only a few yards from my destination—but maybe I’ve gotten all the foolishness out of the way. Maybe I can handle island hopping through the rest of the Bahamas and the Caribbean.

Except the passage from the Turks and Caicos to Puerto Rico is about four hundred miles of open seas, battered by trade winds. There is no shortcut. And there is absolutely no way I can do it alone. I need to find someone to help me.

At the marina there is a bulletin board pinned with business cards for diving charters and rain-faded flyers for fishing tournaments. I leave a note that says:

WANTED: EXPERIENCED CREW TO ASSIST

ON PASSAGE FROM TURKS AND CAICOS

TO PUERTO RICO. SALARY NEGOTIABLE,

MEALS INCLUDED. TEXT 555-625-6470 FOR MORE INFORMATION.



Jangling with nervous energy, I leave the resort complex, heading south. The island is fully awake and busy with tourists buzzing around on golf carts and locals calling out greetings to one another as they walk down the main road. I turn onto a shorter street that cuts across the narrow island and end up at a cluster of tiny beachfront restaurants. A group of young men are hanging out around the doorway to one of the shops, talking loudly, drinking beer, and listening to the dance music that spills from speakers mounted on stands along the side of the building. Beyond the restaurants is the beach, where people have spread out their blankets. A dog rolls in the sand and children play in an ocean that’s so vivid—seafoam green and turquoise and cobalt—it hardly seems real.

I step inside a restaurant called CJ’s, where I order an egg sandwich for lunch and grab a beer from the cooler.

“You can wait out back,” the woman behind the counter tells me. “We’ll call you when your food is ready.”

Behind the building is a wooden deck with picnic tables overlooking the beach. A couple of guys are drinking Heinekens and talking, but their accents are moving too fast for me to understand what they’re saying. I snap a picture of the beach with my phone, then sit on a bench beneath a shady pine to wait for my lunch. Content isn’t exactly the word I’d use for how I feel, but Bimini makes me feel a little bit lighter, a little bit hopeful. Right now an egg sandwich and a beer are all I need.



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