The Girl in the Mirror(16)

I stand at Bathsheba’s bow and try to convince myself that I dreamed the conversation. Summer never talks like this. But I remember pulling a pillow over my ears, determined not to hear more. And then I surely did dream, because I felt firm lips pushing against my own, and I kissed back and opened my mouth wide, even though I knew I shouldn’t be doing this, that this wasn’t Noah, this wasn’t my husband. He smelled so spicy-good, and his strong arms held me tight, pinning mine at my sides, but I didn’t care, I wanted it. He pushed his tongue deep into my mouth, and with a tingle of surprise, I felt that his tongue was hard, impossibly hard, rock hard.

It was too much to wake up in the stateroom, in Summer and Adam’s sumptuous bed. The lights were out. Hours must have passed; Summer must have fallen asleep somewhere. Desperate to shake off the dream, blushing in the dark, I stumbled up to the deck, where I threw myself on the nearest cushion and fell asleep in the moonlight.

Now I see Summer has already hoisted Solomon onto the davits at Bathsheba’s stern, and she’s stowed the swimming ladder. There’s no easy way to climb back on board, and I don’t have time to waste on leisure, but this journey is going to be epic: I can’t leave without some kind of ceremony. I climb the pulpit, high above the water, where I can look straight down at the black links of the anchor chain coiling into the deep. Unseen beneath me, buried in the seabed, Bathsheba’s big anchor is the only thing holding me to land. The ocean lures. The air sings. I raise my arms above my head. And I dive.



An hour later, we’re sailing. My sister was roused either by the splash when I hit the water or my fist pounding on the hull once I resurfaced. She rushed up on deck and let the ladder down for me, beaming with admiring eyes.

“You’re such a mermaid,” she said, extending an arm to help me over the stanchions and onto the side deck, where I stood with a salty puddle forming at my feet. “You’re so at home in the ocean. I feel so safe in your hands.”

We breakfasted on mango and passionfruit waffles, I checked the forecast, Summer made one last phone call to Adam, and we were off. Like Dad, I hoisted the mainsail before winching up the anchor, and Bathsheba drifted away from the continent of Asia silently, under sail.

Now I unfurl the new genoa while Summer helms. In her lubberly way, she points us straight downwind. With the wind directly behind us, each swell rocks Bathsheba from side to side, and the wind threatens to flick behind the mainsail. If that happens, we’ll jibe: the mainsail and the boom will crash across the cockpit. On Bathsheba, the boom is at head height for anyone foolish enough to stand on the aft deck instead of safely within the cockpit. In an uncontrolled jibe, the boom could knock you unconscious, knock you overboard, or kill you. Dad acknowledged that it was a design flaw, but he resisted having the boom raised, since the mainsail would have to be shortened, and that would slow us down.

I take the helm and alter course so that there’s no risk of crash-jibing. The motion improves, and we speed up. We’re on a broad reach, the best point of sail for Bathsheba. Summer, apologetic, tidies away the breakfast dishes and goes for a nap, aware there are nights ahead of little sleep.

The breeze sweeps across the stern from the northeast, and Bathsheba picks up her skirts and dances westward. I’m in charge, hand-steering, my eyes scanning the blue horizon. Flying fish skitter ahead of Bathsheba’s fine bow and leap in her wake. Behind me, the sun rises golden above Thailand as the land fades to a low silhouette.

I fall into the rhythm, reacting to the gusts and lulls in the air, the crests and troughs in the water, as though I don’t know where my body ends and Bathsheba begins. The tiller hums with the ocean’s song. By midmorning, we’re well out to sea. We’ve escaped Thailand’s wind shadow, and nothing can stop us now.

My skin tingles with the warming sun. I’m alert, watching the compass, the weathervane, the sails, the water, but I barely need to think. My feet press into the timber; I’ve found my sea legs. I taste salt on my lips.

This is what I am born for. This is being alive.



Summer emerges in the noonday sun, balancing a platter of blueberries, camembert, and caviar. It seems you can buy anything in Phuket these days.

“There isn’t room in the fridge for everything,” she says, “so you’ll be doing me a favor by stuffing yourself with these. Let me flick on the autopilot so you can sit in the pilothouse with me.”

I bite back the urge to criticize armchair sailing. Summer’s right; it’s absurd to hand-steer all the way across an ocean. Most sailors use their autopilot twenty-four hours a day and pass the long hours and days of a passage lolling in the pilothouse, glancing around every few minutes to check for traffic. They might look at the electronic chart once an hour and scribble in the ship’s log once a day. Only the rare sight of another ship or a change in wind or weather will force them out to the cockpit to handle the sails. Dad was an old-school sailor who trained us to use both paper and electronic charts, but even he was so fond of the autopilot that he nicknamed it Dave and liked to tell people that Dave was “the best sailor on the boat.” But Dad insisted that we all learn to hand-steer, and for me, it’s still my favorite way to sail, eking the best out of wind and wave, communing with sea and air.

Bathsheba, unusually for a yacht her size, has a tiller rather than a wheel, and when I take it in my hand or press it between my knees, steering by bending my legs to port or starboard in time with each rolling swell, it’s like the ocean is breathing through my body. But this is a pastime for fresh mornings and clear nights, not long afternoons under the punishing Asian sun. Summer pushes a button, Dave wheezes to life, and I join my sister for a feast in the pilothouse’s welcome shade. Windows of reinforced glass give us wraparound views of sea and sky, and we naturally sit looking past each other, both of us scanning the surface with a sailor’s instinct for the watch.