The Girl in the Mirror(33)

My skin is hot all the time. My head pounds. I cry without tears now and lick my lips with a rasping tongue. The sea is a cool, alluring blue, tantalizingly drinkable. Even the sky looks wet, as if I could drink the dew from it.

The sun is a torment. I promised myself I would save the wine for last, but one hot afternoon, I open a bottle and drink it to the dregs. The next day I finish the other bottle. To reduce my need for fluid, I sleep all day and wake at dusk. I hardly pee anymore.

I lose touch with the sun. I rise with the moon, now full in the evening sky. I talk to the moon. I talk to Bathsheba.

Bathsheba seemed dead when I lost Summer, but she comes back to life now, as if she is trying to save me. I’ve abdicated as skipper, given up, lain down to die, but she keeps sailing, keeps me safe inside her. The mothership. She is my third mother, my black mother, after golden Annabeth and white Francine. When I sleep, I float in her gentle womb.

When we were kids, Dad told us that Bathsheba was the wife of King David, the mother of King Solomon. Summer loved Bible stories. She would explain to everyone that this was why our autopilot was called Dave, and our dinghy Solomon.

Then we overheard Dad telling some other yachties the real story. He was entertaining them with drinks in the cockpit while we kids eavesdropped from the saloon. We heard him say that when David met Bathsheba, she was another man’s wife, and David raped her.

Summer rushed into the cockpit. She was crying. “You have to change her name!” she screamed. “And you’ve named our autopilot after a rapist! I’m never touching it again!”

Our guests tittered awkwardly. Dad told Summer she was being absurd, but she didn’t stop. In the end, he sent her to bed without dinner.

I was happy. Summer was so rarely in trouble. And I liked Bathsheba’s story. From rape victim to the mother of kings.

I relive Summer’s rage. I stand in the cockpit, where she stood shouting at Dad, and I shout and swear as if he’s here with me. As if I’m Summer.

All of Summer’s failings come back to me, few as they were. Her fleeting moments of anger or thoughtlessness. You’re not supposed to think ill of the dead, but I can’t help it.

When our parents told us the story behind my name, the flower chosen at random, Ben said it was lucky there were no petunias in the room. Summer took up the joke and found that it offered endless variations. “Hi, Tulip,” she’d say. “How’s it going, Begonia?”

It went on for months. Summer found names even uglier than Iris. Hydrangea. Chrysanthemum. Gladiolus. She never used my real name anymore, and other kids at school joined in. I tried to laugh along, to whack some names back at her. Autumn. Winter. Nothing worked.

Ben was the one who stopped it. “Can’t you see she hates it?” he said to Summer. “It’s bad enough that your organs are in the right place and you have the best name. You don’t have to tease her as well.”

When Summer realized how mean she’d been, she cried. I ended up comforting her.

I don’t want to be thinking about these things. I want to remember Summer in her perfection. Even her faults were so forgivable.



We sail over the Seychelles Bank beneath a bloody moon, and the waves bang and crash against the hull. Shallow water makes the sea uneasy. Landfall looms.

I zoom out on the chart until I can see the whole Indian Ocean, the vast stretches of Asia and Africa and the Middle East. I know I have to stay on this course. I must make landfall tomorrow. I’m low on water. Yet my hand hovers over the button to alter course.

I could just keep sailing. West to Madagascar. North to Somalia, where pirates roam. South to the Southern Ocean and its monster waves. Anywhere.

Tomorrow I have to break the news. Adam has already lost a wife. How will I find the right words to tell him? When Helen died, at least her baby was saved.



There are notes all over the pilothouse table in my handwriting. Fuller left cheek, higher left cheekbone. No one ever notices these differences. No one can tell us apart. Thicker eyebrows. But I’ve had them shaped. Skinnier. But I would be skinnier after a long sea voyage.

Left-handed. My left-handedness is the outward sign of my organ reversal, but it’s not a physical sign, only a behavior. I can’t write very well with my right hand, but at the moment, it’s wrapped in a bandage. No one would expect me to be able to write with it.

Heart and other organs reversed. Does Adam know this?

Sailing. Playing the piano. These are the things I’m better at than Summer. But it’s easy to fake being bad at sailing. Perhaps it’s harder to fake being a bad pianist. Safer to keep away from pianos.

Cooking and children. The things Summer is better at. They’re not rocket science. I could do them if I had to. As for nursing, Summer gave that up already.

The differences between Summer and me that I can’t hide from the world are her scar and her pregnancy, and I just gave myself the scar.



I don’t know when the idea first comes. Perhaps in the heat of noon. I wake in Bathsheba’s black womb, dreaming of Summer.

I could escape. Jobless, homeless, loveless no more. Bathsheba would be mine. Adam would be mine. The money would be mine.

The baby would be mine.

But there is no baby.

Perhaps the idea was always with me. Was it with me when I wrote the notes that are scattered all over the chart table? Was it with me when I climbed the mast?