Isabelle has the weekend free, since Taylor Han comes in to do all the secondary tasks that Island Air doesn’t really need Isabelle for anyway. Kit had a kidney stone and had to take a few days off, but Jane already arranged for a contract pilot from Anacortes to keep their schedule on track. Phones get answered; payments get made. The planes go in and the planes go out as they have for years, splashing down, lifting off, right on time. Really, Isabelle feels as useless at Island Air as she did in college working at Nordstrom’s Brass Plum, where she’d hang back shyly as the other “sales associates” boldly approached shoppers looking for the right sweaters to go with certain jeans. Isabelle is not passive; she hates that word. Just, if people are larger and louder, she tends to let them go ahead being larger and louder.
But, hey, it’s great, because Saturday is hers. And it’s the kind of spring day that gives spring its reputation. You can smell that summer is coming with just a few more twirls of the planet. The air is warm, and dewy arrowheads of bulbs have recently edged up. Isabelle should be going through all her mother’s stuff, she should at least have a conversation with Jenny Sedgewick, who’s called more than once, saying her son, Thomas, wants to buy the house if she’s selling. She should maybe mow the little lawn in the back; the small patch where the two lounge chairs overlooking the sound now resemble a pair of cats crouched in long grass. She should maybe do a hundred different things. But this is a day she wants to greet.
And Henry has called, as he does now every morning and every night. They’ve both decided that it’s too beautiful a day to waste. They, meaning the two of them, making decisions together. Waste, meaning every have-to on her list. It’s true, though—in the Northwest, days like this are ones you should take advantage of. The weather of the San Juan Islands is mercurial, stormy. It’s as moody as Isabelle’s mother was. The clouds can go from plump and angelic one minute to dark and vengeful the next, spitting a fury of hard rain. Blue sky days make everyone a little euphoric. The convertible tops come down and the shorts go on, even if it’s sixty degrees out.
And now that the endless, dull metal-gray of winter is mostly over, tourists are starting their annual migration, so it’s good that she and Henry had decided to meet over by the harbor rather than in town. It’ll be quieter, without ferries dumping traffic onto small streets.
Let’s go out, Henry had said.
Out?
Out-out, like on the water.
There’s a couple of boats you can—
Just come. I’ll handle it. We can pretend we’re away from all this.
There isn’t much of all this that Isabelle wants to be away from lately. Look at the old hotel, sprawling like an aging actress managing to keep her graces, look at the green lawn rolling down to the docks, look at the blue water and the perfect white V of a seagull propped in a postcard sky. It all makes Isabelle feel glad. It makes her want every bit of it, and more. And here comes Henry, his hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts, his shirt untucked, his brown hair loose, and an overlooked dot of sun lotion on his nose. A dog trots beside him.
“You made a new friend,” she says, as they kiss hello.
“This is Rocko, who’ll unfortunately be returning to The Windswept.” Rocko’s ear twitches at his name. Henry scruffs the dog’s neck. Even Isabelle’s mom would have approved. Good guys like dogs, she always said. Isabelle’s father (no wonder she hates the word passive) liked cats, and Harv didn’t like anything, even Maggie, it often seemed.
“Pleased to meet you, Rocko.”
“I rented us a boat. The Red Pearl.”
“Oh, wow. Yeah. I know the boat.” She wants to laugh, because the Red Pearl is a cabin cruiser that’s been docked at Delgado Harbor forever. Isabelle didn’t even know the motor actually ran. A couple of sleazy former divers, Jan and Dave, own it, and there always used to be high school parties on it, with young girls in bikinis aboard. Now, Jan and Dave are at the age of Viagra and bad knees. Back then, though, the Red Pearl was for losing both your virginity and your common sense.
“Come on. I got us all set up.”
There it is, the Red Pearl, same as it ever was. “Fantastic old wooden boat, don’t you think? What a beauty.” Henry hops on board. He holds out his hand, even though Isabelle doesn’t need it. She’s been stepping onto rocking vessels since she was a toddler, and can drive a boat like a captain. When you grow up on Parrish, water is your element.
“Oh, it is. It’s lovely,” she says. She doesn’t know why she’s lying. All she sees when she looks at the wood cabin and brass rails is Kale Kramer puking up too much tequila over the side. She smells the faint pee-tang of beer, too, but maybe it’s just her memory adding details.
“This right here is history. Imagine the stories.”
Well, she doesn’t exactly have to imagine. And she doesn’t tell him this, either. She’s doing that thing, the thing she swore she would never do again, the hiding, the pleasing, the polishing. If she can’t be herself entirely now, if she can’t say what she really thinks, when will she? When she’s ninety?
Henry ducks into the chartroom. “Hey, look!” he calls. He’s sitting on the wooden stool mounted in front of the desk, one hand cupping an old brass compass. “This probably brought the old girl in from rough waters many a time.”
If anyone was in rough waters, it was young girls. Young girls in rough underage waters, and the captain didn’t so much sit on that stool navigating high-sea adventure as sit on that stool getting blow jobs he should have been arrested for.
“I’m sure it has,” Isabelle says. A person could misunderstand and think that all the careful steps and mini-evasions are about keeping herself perfect in his eyes, but they’re really about keeping him perfect in his own. If she tells him the truth about the boat now, he’ll feel like a fool, and she perhaps already senses that Henry’s ego is a fragile thing that must be held carefully, lest it break. Isabelle performs this self-saving service for everyone, not just the men in her life. She buffs up the esteem of repairmen and grocery clerks, fellow passengers on airplanes, and waitresses. It’s a tough job, helping everyone feel good about themselves. An exhausting job.
And to all the strong women in her head who judge her for performing this endless service, especially for the men in her life, women like her friend Alice, who’d never dance around a person’s mood or flagging self-image, she says, Shut up. She says, You have no idea, and Alice doesn’t. Alice was raised with the right to speak her mind and not be smacked for it. Alice got her MFA because she wanted to. Alice doesn’t take shit from anyone. But Alice had not spent her formative years making nice to avoid being in trouble, in big trouble. Alice had not been a little child weatherman, watching the sky, bolting for shelter, holding the kite with the key in the lightning storm. Alice will never get the way childhood fear can lead to paralysis and perpetual anxious tending, so shut your mouth, Alice! Isabelle knows full well what she does and why. She just can’t get to the next part, where she stops.
“They don’t make boats like this anymore,” Henry says, outside again. “Don’t you hate those big Bayliners with the cup holders and the giant speakers pumping music?”
“Evan loved those,” she says.
“And we won’t go hungry.” He nudges a cooler with his toe. She looks inside. Cheese and wine and fruit, stuff the Red Pearl’s never seen before. Its usual fare was Budweiser, maybe. Bean dip in a can.
“Wow. That looks amazing.”
Henry sits in the driver’s seat outside, turns the engine, which coughs and then spits black noxious gas before clearing, like an old smoker with emphysema. Isabelle lifts the top of a bench and tucks her bag inside. She could back this boat out of this marina with her eyes closed, and she knows just how far they can go out on the sound before the water gets too rough. But she tosses her sweatshirt on the padded chair next to the captain. It’s okay. For now, he can drive. “Where are we heading?”
“A little trip around the island?”
“Let’s do it.”
Isabelle is untying the floats when Jan himself comes jogging up the dock with a few life jackets under his arm. They’re the retro orange kind, the sort you used to wear as a kid, that strap around your waist and buck your chin high.
“I just remembered that these were on the Sunsurfer! Coast Guard regulations.” Jan’s got a big gray beard now, and booze eyes. He can still see clearly, though, because he says, “Isabelle Austen, is that you?”
“Hi, Jan.”
“Hey, sorry about your mom.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Tough old broad. She used to scare the crap out of me, to tell you the truth. But I respected her.”
“I hear you.”
Jan tosses the jackets and Isabelle catches them, and then they wave as Henry backs the boat out of the slip and eases away.
“That’s the life, huh?” Henry shouts over the motor. “Live on your boat, have a small rental business. Keep it all simple…”
“I don’t know how simple. Supposedly, he and Dave have been hiding here for years after some drug trouble in the Bahamas.”
Henry shakes his head as if he can’t believe what goes on in the world. The boat putters past the slips. It’s early, but the racers have already left, and only the weekend fishermen are up, settling in to their favorite spots. The rest of the boats are still tucked in tight, their residents sleeping off Friday-night fun. Later, it’ll be a madhouse out here.
Henry picks up speed, heads to open water. Isabelle stands beside him, holds on as the bow smacks the waves.
“You can be my Dirk Peters,” he shouts, grinning.
“Oh, no. If this is Poe, I’m worried.”
“The Pym novel. Pym and Dirk sailed to the South Pole together.” From this elevation, she can see a sprinkling of gray in Henry’s hair as it shines in the sun. It makes her feel tender toward him, and she kisses the top of his head. The wind whips past them.
“I love this,” Isabelle shouts. And, hey, after all the misuse, the Red Pearl is getting a second chance, same as she is. Here’s who they both were meant to be. God, it all fills her with the glory of being alive. She wants to sail to the South Pole. She wants to sail to everywhere.
The island gets farther away, and the marina retreats into the distance. Isabelle can see how magnificent it is, the mighty Northwest, with that rocky shore against the deep green waters, with the nearby islands rising from the sea like a pod of killer whales.
Henry heads east. From there, Isabelle can see a ferry heading to Orcas, and one of their own planes rising northward. The beauty is ridiculously abundant, and yet all of the San Juans feel like a secret, with their tiny harbors and clapboard main streets, hidden arcs of rocky, windswept beaches, everything painted in ancient, watery hues. The scenery sweeps by. Isabelle leans over the side, lets the cold saltwater spray against her arm.
“Look,” Henry calls. It’s a team of sailboats speeding toward a buoy. He heads in their direction, and the tiny triangles grow to full-sized spinnakers shouting colors.
“Spring Series Regatta,” Isabelle says.
He cuts the engine. “I’ve got to get some photos. This is stunning out here.”
They bob and slosh for a while as Henry snaps. “Let me take one of you,” she says. “You can send it to your brothers.”
“No, no. I should tell you, I hate getting my picture taken. Hate.”
“Really? All right. How about one of both of us? Would that help? Do you have a timer on that thing?”
“Nope. Nice try. I’ll take you, how about that? If there has to be some recorded proof that we were here.”
His tone is teasing, but his words are a little sharp. It’s probably not how he means it. Before she can object, he focuses, clicks, and then checks the results.
“Pretty nice, actually.” He shows her. It’s an art shot, the way the sun shines down behind her in streaks, lighting her blowing hair. The spinnakers of the boats fill the back of the frame.
“I could win a prize with that,” he says.
“I have missed this.” Henry brought real plates and real white napkins, too, not the Chinet and roll of paper towels of Isabelle’s boating life until now. There’s a fine, chewy loaf of sourdough that Henry tears into artful chunks.
“You did this a lot with Sarah, you said, when you were married?”
“Well, I don’t know about a lot. When I was growing up, my father fancied himself a sailor. He mostly went alone, though. I think he just did it to get away from my mother. She was afraid of water, so it was the one place she’d never follow him to.”
Isabelle notices it, the way he slides the conversation away from Sarah. He always slides the conversation away from Sarah, as if it’s too unbearable to have nearby. She has to piece the woman together from tiny bits of information. Wealthy family. Catholic school. Brilliant but troubled. She wishes Henry would talk about his marriage and what went wrong. There’ve been hints of another man, some flirtation or maybe something more, so this may be why his ego is so tender. Still, she’d like to talk about where her marriage went wrong. She wants to really know him, and have him know her. The angers and disappointments, the loneliness of life with Evan, the loss of all the years with no true partnership and children and family to show for it—she wants to share this. She needs to, so she can move forward.
“You said your dad was an attorney?”
“High-powered attorney and asshole of the highest magnitude.”
“Why is high-powered always used with attorneys? You never hear high-powered dentist or high-powered teacher.”
“Easy answer. Most attorneys are assholes. He was, anyway.”
“Is this why your brothers and you all became, let’s see if I get this right, a potter, a pediatrician, and a poet? Every gentle profession imaginable?”
“Hoping to give him the heart attack he eventually had.”
“That’s awful.” She socks him.
“He deserved worse. All right, this is Roncal, a Spanish cheese. Meaty, lightly nutty. This is a Grayson. Lively, bold…made from the raw milk of Jerseys on a Virginian farm.”
“I’ve never eaten this good in my life.”
“This well?”
“Henry, if you correct my grammar again I may have to stab you with this knife.”
“I stand warned.”
The moment is there and gone, and you could call it a red flag, only it’s not an alarming color, and it does not even wave in warning. It’s small and quiet, easily ignored as a whisper. And why not ignore it? Does what he said matter? No. Does the fact that he said it matter? Not really. It wasn’t very sensitive, but Isabelle has her own faults. Love requires generosity. Love requires giving someone the benefit of the doubt.
Love requires not being an asshole, Maggie says. Tell him where he can stick his “well.”
Maggie needs to shut it. Maggie couldn’t maintain a relationship to save her life. See what good anger brings you? It’s a poison that kills off whatever is nearby. Maggie is clearly trying to toss gasoline onto a little flare of irritation, which Isabelle douses. Henry hands her a plate of food, and Isabelle is otherwise having one of the best days she’s had in a long while. She wants this. Who he is and who she is are complicated variables in this. Love always involves an identity crisis; at least, it involves the small shifts of self that make room for another person.
“And what’s cheese without wine?” Henry says.
His feet are planted, balancing on the rocking boat as he hunts through a cloth shopping bag. He finds the bottle and grabs it around its neck, holds it in the air with a flourish.
“Perfect,” she says. He tucks the bottle between his knees and twists in the corkscrew. “Don’t hurt anyone with that.”
“You’re in good hands, Isabelle Austen. Don’t you forget it.”
With that, any small criticisms are gone. Good hands—such beautiful words. Pretty much the thing anyone really wants.
He pops the cork from the bottle. “Voilà!” he says, like he’s just pulled a rabbit from a hat.
He pours the wine into two glasses, and they clink. They feast on the bread and cheese and fruit—thin slices of apple and pear, small boughs heavy with grapes. They sip; they eat. They gaze out. The boat is sloshing and rocking, though. Isabelle’s stomach sloshes and rocks, too.
She is watching his face as he sits beside her on that wooden bench seat, and so she sees it, all at once, the way his face changes. It goes slack. He suddenly looks his age. He stares at the scarlet wave inside his glass, as if it’s a miniature ocean in a faraway land. The cheese on his plate has lost its magic, and only looks like any cheese, flat and finished.
“Henry? Are you okay? When we’re not moving like this, it gets pretty rocky out here.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“I’m feeling a little seasick myself.”
“I’m fine, I said.”
She doesn’t say anything more, and neither does he. There’s just the slop of waves against the side of the boat and the awkward shouting of silence. She begins the accounting, scrolls through the ledger of what might have gone wrong.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I thought I could do it. All this…” He sweeps his hand out toward the sea. “The boat, the wine, the outing…I wanted to…I don’t know. Erase. Do over! Foolish. Crazy. One of the last times with my wife, Sarah? A boat, a bottle of wine…”
“Jesus.”
“We’d gone out to Rockport, rented a cruiser…”
“Jesus, Henry.”
“Had a big fight. And after that…”
Oh, he’s crushed. Destroyed by Sarah leaving him, that seems clear. Who can resist such heartache? Who can turn away from the chance to make everything right? Not Isabelle. She reaches over, takes his hand. She brings it to her mouth, kisses it softly. His skin smells like wind and sun and boat gasoline, and something that’s just Henry. She wants to smell that and smell that and smell that.
“And then she was gone. It was done.” His voice is hoarse. He looks like he might cry. “It’s impossible to understand, someone just taking off…”
Isabelle can’t, that’s for sure. In a way, she wished Evan had left that way years before, rather than the protracted distancing and returning he did, like the lion coming back to pick at the carcass. God, what is crueler? She has no idea.
“What did she say, Henry? How did she explain herself?”
“She didn’t.”
“She didn’t give any explanation?”
“Well, we’d been fighting. There’d been problems. But, then, after that night, nothing. Not another word.”
Not another word? Maggie says. Not one single one? What the hell, Isabelle. What the hell! “You mean, like after that, you just communicated through lawyers and such?”
“Pretty much. Look, Isabelle. I’m done talking about this. I’m sorry, I…I just wanted to have a great day doing something I love to do with you.”
“Of course, Henry. Of course. And we did. It is a great day. I’m so sorry that happened to you. No one deserves that. Especially not you.”
He gives her a squeeze, but he’s clearly shaking her off, shaking off the demoralizing memory. Rejection, well—it always turns you right back into the nine-year-old no one wanted to eat lunch with, even when it doesn’t turn your whole life upside down.
“How about I drive us to the marina?” Isabelle says. “These waves…”
“Let’s not let her ruin everything. Come here.”
Henry pulls Isabelle to his lap. He takes her face in his hands. He kisses her hard. Her face, that kiss—she doesn’t want to just be a thing that erases another thing, but it’s a good kiss. A great, if complicated, one.
“Let’s start back,” he says.
Kiss or no kiss, it seems that Sarah has ruined their day after all. At least, when they return to the harbor, Henry is terse and short-tempered. The marina has filled with weekend boaters coming in and going out, and the sailboats from the regatta are arriving, too, and it’s as crazy there as Isabelle predicted. Henry nearly clips a catamaran, and when Isabelle urges (strenuously urges!) he not use the wheel to dock, just the throttle and shift, he snaps an “I know.” He follows that up with a curt Watch the bow. Docking tiffs or all-out arguments—threats of divorce, even—they’re a common occurrence in boating, she knows, given the stress of the task and the added embarrassment of onlookers. Isabelle’s glad, though, when they’re in and all tied down. They gather up their bags. They drop the keys off with Jan, who’s already half tanked over on Hideaway, his live-aboard.
That night, though, in Henry’s bed, in the room where Clyde Belle likely tumbled with the despair of his life, the day’s tensions fall away. They reconnect, with skin on skin and mouths on mouths and bodies that are still new to each other. As much as Isabelle hates tension like that (her childhood made nearly any upset feel cringing and unbearable), something feels more real now. It’s not just tra la la, roses and flower petals and lots of sex between them. He’s a person with a past and she’s a person with a past, and she felt some of his hard memories with him today, navigated a few difficult moments as a couple, literally and figuratively.
“Thank you for the boat ride and everything else,” Isabelle whispers after they’ve made love. Her head is on his chest. Her arm crooks around him like he’s shelter or like she is.
“Look at this tiny wrist,” he says.
“Small but mighty.”
“I’m falling for you, Isabelle Austen,” Henry North says into her hair.
She smiles. She kisses him. “And I’m falling for you, Henry North.”
They’ve gotten through something. Her heart is so full. He’s weathered stuff, and she’s weathered stuff, and this makes her think they can weather stuff together. She forgets that stuff plus stuff plus weather leads to crushed buildings and drowned ships and broken glass everywhere.
“It’s very possible I love you already,” Henry says, and somewhere, maybe somewhere like the South Pacific, a cold, unstable wind gathers. Isabelle’s life, honestly, has been a collection of generic troubles until now. A distant, cheating partner, an unfocused identity, an overbearing mother turned into an overbearing ghost. But all of that can change when a wind circles around a center, when spirals of rain join the party, when gusts pick up, and the newly formed beast travels over the water to the most convenient shore.