This morning, I woke up thinking: I hate the sea and the sea hates me. It was weird. I don’t hate the sea.
Uncle Stew was in the galley when I went in to get something to eat. I don’t see him much. He’s usually sleeping when I’m awake, and I’m sleeping when he’s awake. So far, that’s been just fine with me.
It was awkward being in the galley with him, just the two of us. I never know what to say to him. So I decided to ask him about Rosalie.
“Did you ever meet Rosalie?” I asked. “The Rosalie that Uncle Dock told us about?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Uncle Dock liked her a lot, right?”
“To put it mildly,” Uncle Stew said. He was fiddling with a stack of lists, crossing things out, adding new things.
“So when Rosalie married someone else, Uncle Dock must’ve been upset, right? He must’ve had his heart broken, right?”
“Something like that,” Uncle Stew said.
“So what did he do?” I asked. “Did he just forget about her or what?”
Uncle Stew looked up. “Forget about Rosalie? Are you kidding? Why do you think we made all those stops—Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard, Grand Manan?”
“What? Why? Wasn’t Dock just visiting his friends? Weren’t we just getting The Wanderer fixed?”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure.” He shuffled his papers, restacking them neatly. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t tell Dock I told you what I’m going to tell you. He’s a little sensitive about Rosalie.”
“I won’t tell,” I said.
“Block Island—that’s where Dock first met Rosalie.”
“Really?” I said.
“And Martha’s Vineyard? Remember Joey? Well, Joey is Rosalie’s brother.”
“Her brother? Really?”
“And from Joey, Dock found out that after Rosalie’s husband died—”
“Her husband died? She’s not married anymore?” I said.
“That’s right,” Uncle Stew said. “So Dock found out that Rosalie went to Grand Manan to visit Frank and to see the whales—”
“You mean our Frank—the Frank we met on Grand Manan? That Frank?”
“That’s the one.”
“But Rosalie? Where was Rosalie when we were there?”
“Gone.”
“Well, where is she?”
“Guess,” Uncle Stew said.
But I couldn’t guess then, because Uncle Dock came below, and Uncle Stew got very busy with his papers and made it clear that the subject was closed.
I tried to ask Uncle Stew later, but he said, “I told you too much. Better let it be for now.”
I said, “You sure know a lot about Rosalie. I thought nobody ever told you anything.”
“Huh, huh, huh,” he said. “I still know a few things.”
And so I’ve been wondering where Rosalie is, and maybe we’re not really going to Bompie. Maybe Uncle Dock is taking us somewhere else, in search of Rosalie. Maybe she’s in Greenland; I think that’s on the way. Or maybe she’s right back in the United States and Dock is going to decide he has to turn around and go find her.
Uncle Dock worried me last night when I was on watch with him. I was steering, and he was standing on the foredeck, staring out at the sea. He turned around and looked at me, studying me for a minute, and then he said, “What’s it all about, Sophie?”
“How do you mean? What’s what all about?”
He sighed a heavy sigh. “You know. Life.”
“You’re asking me?” I said.
His lower lip puckered under his upper lip. I thought he was going to cry, and this would be shocking, because Uncle Dock is always such a steady, calm sort of person. You don’t expect him to be worrying about what life is, and you certainly don’t expect him to cry in the middle of the night on a sailboat.
But then he strolled back to the aft deck and started puttering with some lines, and that’s all he said about life. I stared out at the water and up at the sky and had the strangest rush of feelings. First I was completely peaceful, as if this was the most perfect place on earth to be, and then suddenly the peacefulness turned into wide, wide loneliness.
And so I started thinking about life insurance and how nice it would be if you could get insurance that your life would be happy, and that everyone you knew could be happy, and they could all do what they really wanted to do, and they could all find the people they wanted to find.