I lay in bed the next day until everyone left the galley. Then I made toast, coffee, and carried it back to my cabin. I reinserted myself in the sheets, slid my hand under my knees, my ankles, to tuck the blanket in the gaps. I had not realized I’d been crying. In the mirror on the cupboard door, a grey eel blinked back at me. Yet my emotion felt disconnected from sadness or anger. More of a reeling. The way you lurch when the yacht pitches over a Pacific roller. Again and again. A reeling.
Mom had taught me how to drain puffy eyelids. You close your eyes and tap your finger on the swollen flaps of skin. The word “tap.” Like plugging two faucets into your eyes and twisting the handles.
Around noon, Joan checked on me. I jumped at her knock.
Willa?
My toast remained on the nightstand without a plate. I had placed it on Metamorphoses. The bread had grown cold, the butter congealed in a tract down the middle. I took the book onto my lap.
Are you okay? What happened?
I worried, for a moment, that I had lost my speech again. But in the mirror, I saw myself shrug and say, Nothing.
You’ve been crying.
Allergies.
Out here?
The girl in the mirror shrugged again.
Joan’s stare lingered on me. Then she turned to the metal sink, straightened the hand towel.
We’ve anchored at Todos Santos. I thought we could go for a dip while Kenneth sleeps for a few hours.
Okay.
There’s another boat here too—they said we could borrow their snorkels. You want to come?
Okay.
You’re sure you’re all right?
I’ll get my swimsuit on.
It felt like a girdle that morning, the stiff cotton around my stomach, digging seams into my upper thighs. I hadn’t eaten much, yet I felt bloated, ashamed of the flesh the suit pushed from my waist. A blue stamp marked my breast where the flesh felt tender. Another woman would have slapped him.
Greta was bobbing near a twenty-foot sailboat called Mozart. The family included three children, the parents and a grandmother. Our schooner looked ancient next to their fibreglass vessel, three times its size. Kenneth’s voice drifted to me over the deck, where I rubbed suntan lotion on my shoulders. He was shouting to two sandy-haired boys from the gunwale. —You don’t believe we’re pirates? Then I guess you’re not interested in joining our crew.
They had lent us their snorkels and masks. From the corner of my eye I watched Patrick float on his back. The mask encircled his face, the tube bracketing his cheek, like he didn’t realize he had to face the other way.
I dove in before he saw me, muscled a path in the opposite direction until I could hold my breath no longer. Then I surfaced, wiped the salt from my eyes, treaded water in a circle to note our distance. He floated face down near the other end of the schooner. On one side of us, the south island rose—much grander than the Coronados, though scraggy, with tufted grass and cactus and guano-pasted rocks. In the other direction, a blue haze. We were too far to see Ensenada.
A girl stood on the deck of the family’s boat. She wore red thongs, her hair pinched into a braid. She leapt into the water chest first and beads of water surged from her heels. From where I floated, the colours shifted and lost their shape. The seat of her swimsuit looked like an armful of yellow daffodils. Slowly, she rose by the crown of her head. Her braid lifted from her shoulders and pricked the surface. She could hold her breath a long time. I counted the seconds. Forty. Forty-five. Finally, she gasped to the air. A ribbon of hair slicked her cheek. She stared at me as she caught her breath. It seemed I was watching myself. Her suit sagged from her tailbone as she scaled the swim ladder and clambered onto the deck. Then she raised her arms over her head and dove back in. I dipped under water and opened my eyes. The girl’s body formed a pale crescent, her chest punched out, legs arced behind her. Though it appeared dark from deck, the water was so clear it hung between us the colour of oxidized copper. The skin of her face looked green.
Now I counted forty-five seconds. Fifty. She rose first and I followed. A woman on the deck of the sailboat called her name. Lydia.
I have to go, mouthed the girl, though we had not spoken to each other. She turned and swam to the woman, who crouched at the ladder in a pink swim costume and matching lipstick. She held a towel.
At the stern of the sailboat, the grandmother washed herself with a pitcher of water. She had rolled the suit down to her hips. Her stomach pillowed over the lining, her breasts hanging from her chest like milky turnips.
I paddled around the stern of their boat, far from the schooner. What would happen if they couldn’t find me? If I sunk under water at the right moments, held my breath for fifty seconds, sixty? I would probably make it to sixty. How long could I float out here? With the dolphins and albacore tuna. It occurred to me I didn’t know what tuna looked like. I only imagined the fish in cans.
If I floated on my back, would the tide carry me to shore? In books, islands are fertile paradises with coconuts clacking off trees and fish you can spear from the shore. But who says it’s not a sandy pip in the sea with a few gourds of wild cucumber?
Joan called from the deck of the schooner.
Another option was: climb onto the family’s sailboat and stow away in the head. How long would Joan ask Kenneth to wait for me? The girl would teach me how to French-braid my hair. Joan didn’t know how to French-braid either. That’s why she kept it short.
I closed my eyes and experienced the salt on my skin, wizening my cheeks where it dried in the sun, the ocean under my heels, bearing my weight. I thought about ablution, the touching of clean water, the oils of last night curling into the sea.
When Joan called a second time, I swam back. She had dried off already and changed into an oyster-grey pantsuit, her hair parted and locked in foam curlers.
I heaved myself onto deck from the ladder, sensing the weight of my body. Patrick watched from the cockpit as I swept my hair to one side without wringing it. The sea water made me feel heavier, my bathing suit sodden, the water pooling around my feet. For a moment, I felt truly that I belonged in the sea. I was an octopus—a waterlogged sac on land, but nimble in the ocean, my limbs flowering and contracting to propel me through water, as petals open and close on a poppy.
Joan passed me a towel. When I didn’t take it from her, she rubbed the terrycloth on my shoulders herself, careful not to dampen her pantsuit.
What’s the occasion? I asked her, not looking at him. His eyes combed my thighs, red and puckered from cold, the indents over my bum where the suit had pressed its edges and now twisted into the crack.
Well I thought we were going to Ensenada, but Kenneth doesn’t want to clear customs until we use this treat he brought from the clinic. So we’ll have dinner here instead. He’s sleeping now.
I couldn’t imagine what “treat” would come from a clinic and cause trouble at customs, unless he had packed gross quantities of painkillers.
And then what? I said.
We’ll overnight here and see Ensenada tomorrow.
That wasn’t good news. I missed the sensation of forward motion. The terrycloth was irritating my skin, and this physical discomfort was amplified by Patrick’s stare, which dared me to look back at him. I tore the towel from my sister’s hands, wound it around my chest and skulked below deck.
I climbed into my dirty houseboy pants without drying my legs and buttoned a flannel shirt over my chest. I looked shapeless, a beached cephalopod, the flannel billowing over my hips. I wiped the hair from my face, twisted the strands into a bun.
Then I was in Patrick’s cabin, sifting through the sweaty undershirts he had dumped on the floor. His toiletry case hung on the cupboard door. I unhooked the bag and sat on his bunk. Inside, he kept his razor and pot of cream, two horsehair brushes. Here also was a metal comb, toothbrush, tube of paste. Two spaces in the toiletry kit were vacant: one for nail clippers, the other for the nail brush, which remained on the nightstand.
In monster stories, the hero steals something from the demon for her protection: a nail clipping, an eyelash. I read about one demon in the Philippines. His knees arc above his head when he sits, he lives atop balete trees, in bamboo and banana groves. To subdue him, you leap onto the creature’s back with a rope and pluck three spines from his mane.
I couldn’t find clothespins, but I stole the nail brush and hid it under the mattress of my berth.
It had been Patrick’s idea to borrow nitrous oxide from Kenneth’s dental office. The canister mounted over us on the galley counter. It looked like a missile. Kenneth watched it from the settee, as if his gaze could prevent the can from tipping over the counter. He scrambled from his seat and lifted the can, set it on the settee. When he saw I wanted to sit down, he lifted the cylinder again and placed it on the floor, his palm dropping a sweat print onto the blue metal.
It was Patrick’s idea, he said for the second time. —I could get fired.
Joan stroked his hairline and hovered her mouth behind his earlobe.
You’re just nervous, she whispered, then stepped back behind the galley counter. —They’ll never notice.
Water lapped against the hull, but without movement for so long that I felt more and more claustrophobic. Patrick leaned against the cushion on the other side of the settee. His stare pricked me with every sweep of his eyes, from my oversized flannel shirt to the bun I had pinned at the crown of my head. He lit a cigarette.
Joan took in my outfit also, but she didn’t say anything. She dumped hamburger meat into a glass bowl and massaged the mass with parsley.
Did you catch a chill from the swim? she asked. You look pale.
Headache.
Kenneth, why don’t you fetch her some Tylenol.
It’s okay. It’ll pass.
Kenneth.
He turned from the can, slid his hands into his pockets and headed toward their cabin. —Where did you say it was?
My purse. Hanging on the door.
She wiped her cheek on her shoulder, both hands plugged in the bowl of raw meat.
Will, can you grind pepper for me?
I joined her at the bowl, ground pepper into the scarlet mass, which again I couldn’t look at closely. I focused on the cheap candlestick someone had planted in the centre of the table—a rococo mermaid heaving the wax stub on her back, engraved grapes spilling lavishly down the nickel column.
You like it? said Patrick. I took it from my mother’s.
His lips whitened around his cigarette. He released a long chain of smoke through his smile.
Excuse me, I said. I set down the grinder and climbed the steps to the deck. Behind me, Kenneth shouldered into the galley from their cabin. He said something with a rigid voice. A silence followed. I walked faster to the bow.
When I reached the side, I leaned over the gunwale. A school of fish hung suspended in the water, the light glinting off their bodies before the fleet lifted and tilted into the tide. I could hear Joan and Kenneth fighting in the galley. I tried to block out the sound, inhaled the ocean’s salt on my skin, the tang of seagull shit dried onto the deck. Slowly, larger shadows overtook the shadows of the helm. Then these darknesses—spilled by the masts, the boom—were overtaken by the largest shadow, of Earth turning away from the sun. I closed my eyes. The wind fingered the curl that had dropped from my braid, dangling down the nape of my neck.
When I returned below deck, something had happened. All three of them sat on the settee with plates and hamburgers, though no one had called me to dinner. Nor had they started eating, but when I perched beside Joan on the end of the settee, Kenneth lifted his hamburger in both hands, as if he had been waiting. There wasn’t enough room for me on the bench, but no one shimmied over. I clenched my butt muscles to avoid slipping. Patrick watched me take my place, then lifted his hamburger too. My sister clasped her hands in her lap, the whites of her eyes yellowed from crying. Kenneth fidgeted with his fork, spinning the utensil tines-down on the table. Without taking a bite, Patrick set his burger back down and began to saw it in half with his knife. Joan jerked one hand free from her lap. She shook the bottle of ketchup upside down and set it next to my plate.
The first bite of my hamburger drew only a mouthful of bun, which dried my tongue and made it difficult to swallow. I reached for my glass of milk. That’s when I noticed the bottle of Enovid on the galley counter. I glanced at Joan. She felt my eyes, I knew, and didn’t look back.
We ate—my sister’s hands trembling under the table, her vibrations absorbed by my thighs wedged against hers; Kenneth, who hadn’t spoken since he found the contraceptives in her purse; Patrick, who cut his hamburger in sixths before eating and kept laying down his utensils to palm his hair.
When Kenneth stood to wrest himself from the settee, he muttered something I couldn’t hear except the word “solipsistic.” He said it meanly, but I’d always thought there was something of the sun in the word—sol, like the Spanish. Solar. In dictionaries, the word comes from solus, alone, but maybe they are not so different, the sun and solitude. Maybe they need each other.
When Kenneth had disappeared above deck, I helped Joan clear the dishes.
Are you okay? I leaned to her over my stack of plates.
She looked at Patrick first, who studied us from the table, then me, before taking the plates from my hands and setting them in the sink.
I don’t know.
I passed her the dish detergent, meeting Patrick’s eye for the first time all evening. Scram, I mouthed. I turned to Joan. —Talk to him. I’ll do these.
She pressed her hands to the bottom of the sink. The suds marked her forearms as the basin filled with water.
Patrick went up on deck. Joan dipped the plates in the water without rinsing them. I didn’t say anything. I wiped the crumbs and rifts of foam with a towel.
If he doesn’t like it, he can find a new wife, see what I care, she said.
You should talk to him.
What do you know? You’re so good at relationships?
Eventually, the yacht pushed into motion. From the window, I noticed we were retracing our path from the cove, around the easternmost point of the island. We were headed back north. Not anchoring overnight or stopping in Ensenada. Kenneth had turned us around.
Patrick administered the gas in red balloons that he pinched shut with his fingers and passed over the settee table like soap bubbles. My sister closed her mouth around the rubber and breathed in and out, the balloon expanding and contracting. Eventually, she bowed away, her eyelids fluttering for forty seconds, maybe sixty. When he passed me my balloon, I pinched it tight in my lap. I felt wounded. Joan would rather humour Patrick than tell me what had happened. But I couldn’t stand being left behind. So I took the balloon in my mouth and inhaled the gas, which wicked the back of my throat. Then warmth filled my limbs and their voices bent in my ears, and for a moment I wondered if we always saw our breath in balloons, would we realize how precious it was. In what felt like hours later, though no more than a minute could have passed, I woke with a cobweb of saliva latched to my chin.
Next, Patrick presented a mask attached to a breathing tube, which he screwed onto the canister. Joan lay back on the settee and shut her eyes. He fixed the plastic to her nose. A loose smile played on her lips as the gas streamed up her nostrils for one minute, two. Longer than I could hold my breath.
We took turn as his patients. We lay on the wood sole and he strapped the plastic mask over our noses. The sun filled our heads; his words slow like he sucked a crust of bread. The tension released from my body. I didn’t even mind when he touched my breast. After a few minutes, he removed the mask and carried it to Joan, fixed it over her nose, the strap indenting the flesh of her cheek, stretching the baby hairs above her ear. Her eyelids closed, and I saw an openness I had never found before—her forehead long, unbroken by the pots of her eyes, extending past her pale eyebrows and the bridge of her nose. Patrick adjusted the nozzle of his can and we both watched her nod, the smile parting her mouth. As he stepped toward her, his shoe tipped over his canvas satchel, which sat beside the canister on the floor. The contents spilled onto the floor. I made them out from the settee: a pouch of clothespins, a length of frayed rope, from the locker in the bow, I guessed, safety pins, the bottle of disinfectant. He inserted a finger under Joan’s collar and traced the drop of her neckline. Then his hand settled on the crotch of her pantsuit. After another minute, he removed the mask and strapped it over his own nose. I waited for his head to tip back, then reached for his satchel. I tied the rope around his bare ankles; he wasn’t wearing socks. I tied a constrictor knot, which Dad had taught me. His hands flapped to remove the mask from his mouth, and I pushed it back. I unbuttoned my flannel shirt and parted it over my chest so he would think it was a game. I removed his shoelaces. Every time he nudged the mask away and nodded awake, I flashed him. Sometimes I massaged my breasts and pressed them together to make cleavage. A bulge built in his trousers. I pushed him onto his side so I could get at his arms. I bound his wrists with the shoelaces. Joan touched her fingers to her temples. She watched my actions with confusion in her eyes, as if she might be dreaming. After I yanked the knot tight, Patrick flopped onto his spine. I readjusted the mask on his face; the gas funnelled into his nostrils. I wondered how long you were meant to go under for.
Joan ran her eyes along Patrick’s body, which had contorted on the floor like someone pushed from a window.
You should find Kenneth, I said.
What are you doing?
I tried to recall the thoughts that led us here, but my memories had unhinged, billowing in my head like bright, teasing clown fish. I saw the rope in his satchel, the clothespins on my breast. Strands of jellyfish branding my wrist, the rowboat. Joan in a blouse too large for her bust, pushing Kenneth against the well at the beach house. My mother’s foot in a nude stocking. Ko-Ko’s origami frogs. The phosphorescence. Three bears at the zoo on hind legs, their paws shining out.
I know what I’m doing, I said, though I didn’t. A giggle rose like bile in my throat, but I kept it down.
Even at twenty-three, she could slash her eyes like a nun, her thumbs worrying the pockets of her pantsuit, the heel of her pump drilling the floor.
Go find your husband, I said. While you still have one. We both know you will anyway, so stop wasting your time.
She scooped the curls off her shoulder, scraped her fingers along her scalp.
She dropped her hair and gripped the step rail. She climbed to the hatch. I really felt it, then: alone.
Patrick remained a crimped husk on the floor. A flash of sweat cooled over my forehead—what if I’d given him a brain injury? Had he been inhaling for too long?
My hands clattered to remove the mask from his nose. I bracketed my wrists under his armpits and dragged him toward his cabin, before Joan or Kenneth returned below deck. His chin knocked my knees. Then his head lifted, his eyes opened and he released a panicked shout. I lost my grip and his shoulders slammed to the floor. He writhed for a moment before he realized his forearms were bound. This discovery stunned him. He lay dumbly for a moment and I lifted him again, slinging him into his cabin. He tried to curse at me, but his jaw had slacked from the gas. His voice came out mangled, like an orangutan’s. Still, I removed the handkerchief from his trouser pocket and jammed it in his mouth. He continued to grunt with only his throat muscles.
I couldn’t heave him onto the bunk by myself, so I tucked a pillow under his head and draped the wool blanket over his body. I closed his door and returned to my cabin.