The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolls and rolls and calls to me. Come in, it says, come in.
Uncle Dock is forecasting tomorrow or the next day as the Day of Departure. “Just a few more things to fix,” he says. I feel torn, as if something is pushing and pulling. I could stay forever on Grand Manan, but the sea is calling me.
This morning, Cody, Brian, and I went to a boat-building place, where the man who owns it let us nose around. He works mostly in fiberglass, hand-laying everything, even the gel coat. He even makes his own dinghies, and his work is so fine. I thought I knew something about fiberglass from building Buddy the Bilge Box, but I hardly know potatoes.
“Look at this,” Brian felt obliged to mention. “Not a bubble in sight.”
“Well, he’s been doing it longer than I have,” I said.
The man showed me some tricks, like how to use rollers to apply the resin and gel coat, and how to use plastic wrap on small areas so the layers underneath stay smooth.
“That’s what you should’ve done with Buddy the Bilge Box,” Brian said.
“I didn’t know about that then, did I?” I said. Brian was starting to bug me.
“You don’t like me, do you?” Brian asked.
That made me feel awful. “I never said that.”
“It’s okay if you don’t. No one does.” He stood there like a limp puppet, all clumsy arms and legs.
Cody was taking this all in, listening but not saying anything.
“I have no idea why nobody likes me,” Brian said.
I was hoping he wasn’t going to ask me to give him some reasons, when Cody piped up.
“Well,” Cody said, “it might have something to do with all those lists you make and how you’re always telling everybody what to do and how you always act like you have the answers to every single little atom of a thing and—”
Brian folded his arms tightly across his chest. “I wasn’t talking to you,” he said. “I don’t care what you think,” and he turned and left the building, striding along in his jerky, stumbling way.
“Well, he asked for it,” Cody said.
Uncle Dock made us all go to the baptism for Frank’s grandson later in the day. Brian stayed as far away from me and Cody as he could get. I didn’t want to go at all; my heart was not in it, but I’d never been to a baptism before, and by the time it was over, my eyes were bugging out of my head.
People in robes, sort of like graduation robes, walked into the water, waist deep, with a pastor. The pastor dunked them, sploosh, backward, full body, into the cold, cold water. It looked as if the pastor was holding them down, and what if they couldn’t breathe, what if he held them down too long?
All the while the people were being dunked, the bystanders were singing “Amazing Grace,” and that song made me freeze up completely. Where had I heard that song before? At a funeral? My throat was all clogged, as if there was something stuck in it, like a big sock. Everything got blurry and woozy, and Uncle Dock said, “Sophie? Sophie? You’d better sit. Put your head down—”
On the way over to Frank’s house for the baptism feast, Brian broke his silence to inform us that the reason for the dunking was that the water would cleanse them of all their sins and they could start fresh, as whole new clean people. I kept thinking and thinking about that, and what I saw in my head was this very dirty person being dipped and then whoosh out he came all white and clean, like an angel. I saw this over and over and I started getting dizzy and woozy again.
“Here,” Uncle Dock said. “Eat some of this. Maybe you haven’t eaten enough today”—and he offered me some seafood chowder and fried scallops and lobster salad sandwiches and potato salad and two kinds of cheesecake and carrot cake and banana bread. I ate what I could but then I threw it all up.
“Maybe you’ve got the flu,” Uncle Dock said, and he took me back to the boat.
I slept a bit and then woke up when Brian and Cody came in.
Brian said, “I hope that wasn’t our last supper.”
“Shut up!” Cody shouted. “You’re such a wet blanket. Why do you always expect the worst? What are you trying to do, jinx our voyage?”
“I’d feel a whole lot better if the crew on this boat actually knew what they were doing,” Brian sneered.
“Well, you’re part of the crew, you knuckleheaded doofus—”
“I’m not a knuckleheaded doofus—you are!”
Our boat family is getting touchy and nervous. We’re all ready to be under way, but we’re also starting to think of the problems we might encounter. Thinking too much is not good. We should just go!