You can tell that Uncle Mo is trying to be nicer to Cody. He’s not barking at him anymore, and he’s not calling him a knuckleheaded doofus. Cody doesn’t seem to know how to take this. He stares at his father, as if he is studying him.
Cody’s face is looking much better. We found the adhesive sutures and were better able to close up the cuts on his eye and nose. When we get to England, Cody can go to a real doctor and get checked out. Uncle Stew says Brian should get his arm looked at, and I should get my leg checked, too, but my leg is a lot better, not as sore, with only one nasty bruise left around my knee.
It’s a funny thing about Uncle Stew. Now, when you’d think he’d have so many more things to worry about, he seems calmer and kinder.
When Uncle Stew was asking me about my leg, he said, “It’s odd being a parent. You feel responsible for everything, and you’re so protective of your children and so worried about them that you can hardly think straight sometimes. But then sometimes you realize that you don’t have control over a lot of things and sometimes you have to just hope that everything will be okay.”
He glanced over at Brian, who was tacking up a list in the galley. “And sometimes,” Uncle Stew said, “you have to let go and pray that the children will be okay on their own.”
I could understand what he was saying, but I wondered if the same was true of children, that sometimes you can’t control things and sometimes you have to let go. Maybe you even have to let go of your parents. But then I was all muddled in my head and I couldn’t make sense of anything, not even where I was or why I was there.
Now that Cody and I have been on watch together again, we’ve started to talk about what happened. I don’t know if anyone else understands how The Wave affected the two of us, because—except for Uncle Dock—they didn’t see it, or feel the first power of it crushing us like nuts in a nutcracker.
And I keep thinking about the wave dream I used to have. What seems especially eerie is that the wave in all of those dreams was The Wave—exactly the same: the same height, the same shape. The only difference is that the wave in my dreams was black, and this one was white.
In my dreams, I was always on land, usually playing on a beach. I remember that in one of the dreams, I could see the wave coming in the distance and I started piling up sand bags to make a barrier. I can’t get rid of the feeling that the waves of my dreams were all pointing to The Wave that got us on the ocean.
And now I’m having new dreams, worse ones. In these I am not on land, but on a boat, and the wave is coming and it gets me and it sweeps me far, far away, and when I wake up from the dream, I feel as if I am still floating, far out at sea.
And I keep coming up with lists of things I want to do, hurry, hurry, things to do. I want to learn how to weave—to build my own loom and weave silky cloths like my mother does. I want to go hot-air ballooning. Skydive. Hike the Appalachian Trail. Mountain-bike a thousand miles. Canoe down a long, long river and camp along the way. Climb mountains. Build a cabin on an island like the woman with her dog on Grand Manan.
And I want to take people with me. Bompie and Cody and Uncle Dock. My parents. Even Brian and Uncle Stew could come.
Maybe sailing will go back on my list once we reach Ireland. The dolphins came back today, and they leaped and rolled and made me laugh. It was like an invitation: Come on, Sophie, have fun in the sea.
Cody says he thinks that we built up energy on the first part of our trip—getting stronger, storing energy—and when the wave hit, the energy became a protective layer that wrapped itself around us and saved us. It makes as much sense as anything else does these days.
And Cody said, “You know what? When that wave hit, you know what I thought about, when the water was pouring over me? I thought about Bompie—”
“I did, too!” I said. I’d forgotten that, until Cody mentioned it. “In the middle of the wave, when I thought I was underwater, I thought about Bompie struggling in the water—in the rivers, in the ocean—”
“Me, too! Isn’t that strange?” Cody said. “You know what I said to myself, under all that water? I said, ‘Giddy-up, giddy-up!’”
“I did, too. How weird.”
“Maybe we’re losing our marbles,” Cody said.
Last night, Cody and I got into this very serious talk about Life. We wondered if maybe people never die, but simply live on and on, leaving other planes behind. When you come near death, you die on one plane—so to everyone you are with, you are dead, but you—the you in you—doesn’t stop existing. Instead, you keep living the same as always and it just seems as if you’ve had a close call. We wondered if maybe we’re not each just one person, but many people existing on millions of different planes, like a line that branches off and branches again and on it goes, but it always has one central trunk.
I was getting a headache from so much thinking, and then Cody said, “At night on the ocean, a person thinks strange things. Let’s not think anymore. Let’s juggle.”
So we did. We juggled wet socks.