The Girl in the Mirror(23)

One thing Adam hasn’t changed on this boat is the undersize fuel tank. Fortunately, the autopilot and fridge run on solar panels, so we don’t need fuel, as long as there’s enough wind to keep us sailing.

I can’t help but admire Adam. If Dad had shown as much consideration for Annabeth’s comfort as Adam has for Summer’s, maybe my mother wouldn’t have wanted to get off the boat. Maybe Dad could have left Carmichael Brothers in Colton’s hands, as he talked of doing, and we could all have made it to Africa back when we were still a family. Before Francine.

There’s even a washing machine and a dryer, installed one over the other in a cupboard beside the bathroom. There’s not enough water or power to use them at sea, but Summer has already piled her used underthings into the hamper, ready to be laundered as soon as we get to port.

“Adam installed it as a surprise,” Summer tells me when I first pull open the oak door and find the gleaming white goods cleverly concealed behind it. She whispers in my ear, as though Bathsheba is listening, “Don’t tell anyone, but it’s my favorite thing on the boat.”

My favorite thing is still the double mirror. Living on Summer’s yacht, amid Summer’s things, eating Summer’s cooking, hearing about Adam and Tarquin and the baby, I almost feel I’m disappearing, dissolving in the heat. I keep an excited-auntie smile hovering on my face, ready to employ should Summer pop into view while I’m on watch in the cockpit, or resting below in the stateroom, or walking from one place to the other—this is what life is reduced to on an ocean passage. But in the bathroom, I can be me. No smile. The girl in the mirror is miserable, but at least she’s real.

And I’m still a better sailor than Summer. Every day we use the sat phone to download a weather forecast and an email from Adam—Tarquin’s improving slowly—but Summer’s really only interested in the latter. She keeps watch okay, but I still reef down each night after dinner for her so that Bathsheba is manageable in the darkness, and then I shake the reefs out when she wakes me at midnight to begin my watch. The monsoon wind continues strong and steady from the starboard quarter, and each night I relish the moment when, as Summer turns in for the night, I shake the sails out, and Bathsheba, given free rein, breaks from a constrained canter into her tireless westward gallop.

Africa awaits.



Despite everything, I’m happy at Bathsheba’s helm. I can forget about Noah and his new girlfriend, Lori. I can forget about Summer and Adam. I can forget about the baby.

All around me is the peaceful night ocean. We haven’t seen a single boat, a single sign of human life, in a week. Above me, the mast sways among the wheeling Indian stars. In the silent dark, fantasies fill my deprived senses. One night, all night, we seem to be sailing downhill, as though the ocean has tilted, and I can’t shift the sense that we’re going somewhere I’ve been before, many years ago—some deep ancestral home that lurks beyond the limits of my earliest memories. Another night I surely doze on watch, because I can smell Adam, I can taste him, in the cockpit with me, encircling me in his manly arms, pressing against my mouth with that strange, hard tongue. Another night I convince myself that Summer and Adam have given me Bathsheba, modest compensation for their monstrous betrayal. I’m sailing around the world’s oceans, rounding the Horn, steering Bathsheba through sleet and snow into the uncharted south, keeping watch for icebergs.

My dreams are exposed in the sober light of day, a madwoman’s folly. Summer and Adam love Bathsheba now; they will never give her to me. Adam will do all the hard jobs on board, and Summer will make Bathsheba a home, mothering Tarquin and the baby, feeding Adam, making love every night. They’ll never leave the tropics. Their life will be perpetual summer.

On a passage with a crew of two, you don’t see much of each other. One of you is always on watch, the other sleeping. But Summer and I sit together each evening in the cockpit after dinner, and Summer talks.

I never thought of us as drifting apart. If the will had driven a wedge between us, Summer was blissfully unaware. She was never unfriendly, even when I eloped with Noah, stealing a march on her wedding, but now she’s more than friendly. She’s loving, but she was loving in Queenstown. It’s something more than that. She’s celebrating me. Despite the mess I’ve made of my life, Summer shows no pity or condescension. She treats me like a queen.

All the same, her talk is a little too much. She doesn’t mean to pain me, but every topic of conversation advertises how fabulous it is to be Summer. I’ve always thought that raising a dead woman’s kid would be tedious, but it has its benefits. Adam is so grateful to Summer for loving Tarquin that he does everything he can to make life easy for her, always arranging babysitters and nannies to ease the load, or taking Tarquin out himself to give her “me time.”

And Tarquin is the least attractive part of Summer’s life. Everything else is even better. A travel agent makes a great husband. They’ve only lived on Bathsheba a short time, but Adam has taken them to all my favorite places, Thailand’s hidden jewels: the cave-islands of Phang Nga Bay; the coral gardens of the Surins; Paradise Beach, where elephants come to bathe. While Bathsheba’s rigging was being replaced, Adam flew Summer up to Burma for a “second honeymoon,” leaving Tarquin with a nanny. They hadn’t even been married a year.

The most sickening part is that Adam’s such a romantic. I wouldn’t mind if Summer were sharing pervy stories about kinky sex on night beaches, but there’s more to it than that. Adam is deeply in love. I guess the dead wife taught him that life is fleeting, so now he piles on the candlelit dinners, the spontaneous gifts—jewelry, perfume, white lingerie—the slow seductions, each as fresh and unassuming as a first date.