Free Blue Water by A. Manette Ansay Page A

word.
    Water .

Four
    w e ate dinner at the round teak ta ble: hamburgers, canned green beans dressed up with slivered almonds, applesauce that Bernadette had made from her stock of dried apples. Leon sat in his wheelchair, watching our faces as we talked. He seemed restless, I thought, uncomfortable, and I wondered if this was because of Rex and me. From time to time, he jerked his head, cried out.
    â€œWhat’s up, honey?” Eli asked, massaging the child’s stiff shoulders. “This calm really gets to a person, doesn’t it? Even an old salty dog like you.”
    He and Rex were working their way through a six-pack, discussing the pros and cons of storm anchors, the nuances of single sideband transmission. Bernadette and I, on the other hand, had been talking about the homes we’d left, the people we missed. Again, it struck me how easily we might have been back in Fox Harbor. While there wasn’t enough space for the men and women to physicallyseparate themselves, the conversation itself had formed two discrete rooms, each with its own priorities, its own independent furnishings. A colleague of mine at Lakeview—old Fred Pringle, ears and eyebrows bristling with wiry, gray hairs—once told me that the difference between men and women was that a man, looking up at the night sky, wondered about the stars, whereas a woman looking up at those same stars thought, I need to wash my hair . Of course, I’d been offended. Of course, I did not—and do not—agree. But it occurred to me that Bernadette’s sense of direction, much like my own, came out of a deep understanding of where she’d begun: a compass built of sinew, blood, bone, one that could never be damaged or lost. Eli, on the other hand, spoke of chart kits, headings. Like Rex, he looked up and saw only the stars, places he wanted to go.
    As Bernadette slipped a bit of burger into Leon’s mouth, I glanced at the men, who’d pushed their plates aside and wandered over to the nav station. There they stood, scrutinizing Rubicon ’s GPS. Heads nearly touching. Exchanging coordinates, distances, frequencies like promises. Like kisses. Even their gestures held something like tenderness. But the words that they spoke didn’t match.
    â€œAre you ever lonely out here?” I asked.
    â€œYes,” Bernadette said, without hesitating. “And no.” She shrugged, made a funny face at Leon. “There are different kinds of loneliness.”
    â€œWhat about the homesickness kind?”
    She nodded, her red braids catching the light, and I wondered how I could have thought of her as pretty . She was, in fact, quite beautiful. I couldn’t keep my eyes from her face. “I get that a lot, actually. My parents are gone now, but I miss my sister.”
    â€œI miss my brother,” I said. It was the first time I’d admitted this out loud.
    â€œI miss the house where I grew up. We had all kinds of animals, horses and cows, dogs. A dozen cats, at least.”
    â€œI miss—” I began, then stopped. Evan . I imagined him curled up in the V-berth, coloring— illustrating, he would have said. I imagined him standing at Chelone ’s helm, scanning the horizon for pirates. I imagined the friends he would have made, year after year, in a place like Houndfish Cay. But, no. If Evan were alive, we wouldn’t have purchased Chelone in the first place. Never would I have taken so deliberate a risk, not with my own life, certainly not with his.
    â€œWhat is it?” Bernadette said.
    I blushed, shrugged, but she wasn’t speaking to me. She was looking intently at Leon. Abruptly, his legs kicked out as one, striking the underside of the table.
    â€œAah!” he insisted. “Eee!”
    And Bernadette said to everyone, to no one: “Something’s wrong.”
    The lolling motion of the boat had changed. We turned to Leon in unison, listening now, with the whole of our