“Really? That’s a bit of a coincidence, I guess.”
“Coincidence nothing, it’s a sign, and it’s not even the only one.”
“What do you mean?”
“This other book?” He picked up the one by the author with the difficult first name. “By Mignon Eberhart? Lenore, Poe’s novel was about a ship that sank and three of the survivors ate the fourth one. Almost fifty years later a real ship sank and three marooned survivors ate the fourth. The name of Poe’s fictional victim was Richard Parker and that was also the name of the real man who got eaten!”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. And you’ll never guess, but the name of that real ship was... the Mignonette!”
“Charles, stop. I already told you I’m ready and willing to buy this boat with you. You don’t have to make up stories about signs to convince me.”
“I’m not making anything up. It’s all true. Lenore, this boat is meant for us.”
“You’re really not making these things up?”
Solemnly, he shook his head.
“Well, this is amazing,” she said, getting up slowly from the bed. “And I think you’re right. Maybe I’m not the great believer in signs that you are, but even I have to admit that this is just too much of a coincidence for it to mean anything else.”
Her husband let out a sigh of relief. “I’m so glad you see it that way, too.”
Lenore walked around the bed until she could embrace him. “Of course I do. You always tell me to pay attention to meaningful coincidences, and these are just too obvious to ignore.”
“Shall we go find the agent and put in an offer?”
Lenore grinned at him. “Let’s do it!”
“And, Lenore?”
“Yes?”
“I haven’t even told you the funniest coincidence. When the Mignonette sank, the only food they had to eat was... a turnip.”
Lenore’s eyes widened in astonishment.
“A turnip!” she said, as if she had just fallen off the back of a truck full of them.
On their way out of the galley she said, “Before we make our offer, let’s take one more look around our boat, Charles.”
They ran their hands over the lovely teak wood of the cabinets.
Lenore ran the water in the double sink in the galley while Charles sat in the captain’s chair and turned the wheel back and forth. They opened the cabinets and marveled at the tidy display of canned goods they saw. Laughing, Lenore walked over to the refrigerator, where a white board was attached to the door, with an erasable writing marker tied to it. She picked up the marker and said playfully, “Let’s make our first grocery list for the boat, Charles.”
Playing along, he walked over to her and looked at the scribbling that was already on the board. The current owners appeared to have jotted down some of their recent boat expenses, complete with costs of each item.
“Eighteen dollars and thirty-eight cents for a sirloin steak?” Lenore said. “Good grief, where do they shop for groceries, Neiman Marcus?”
She turned, laughing, to face Charles.
“Charles?”
He was staring at the numbers written on the little board, his face gone white.
“Charles, what’s wrong?”
Stiffly, as if he had suddenly turned into a robot, her husband lifted his right arm and pointed his forefinger. “Eighteen thirty-eight,” he said.
“Yes. I know, it’s a lot for a steak.”
He lowered his finger to the next item. “Eighteen eighty-four.”
“Even more for the second steak.”
“No.” Looking sad and worried, he gazed into her eyes. “Lenore, we can’t buy this boat. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if we should be thinking of going to sea at all.”
“What?”
“These dates, Lenore...”
“Dates? They’re prices of meat, Charles.”
“Not to me, they’re not, they’re dates. Eighteen thirty-eight was the date of the publication of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Eighteen eighty-four was the date when the book came true.”
“Oh my God, Charles.” Lenore’s hands went to her lips to cover her gasp.
She turned and stared up at him, wide-eyed. “You don’t think... you don’t think it could happen to us, do you?”
“I think the universe is trying to tell us something.” He grabbed her shoulders and turned her around until she was facing the outer door. “It’s too much. It’s too many coincidences about something too awful to contemplate. The names of those books, the turnip, those seemed benign, but this feels... malevolent, Lenore. This is a warning. And think of all those stoplights!”
“But you said—”
“I was fooling myself about their meaning, Lenore. Red means stop in any language, and certainly in the language of symbols and signs. They were already trying to tell me something and I wasn’t listening. My God, I could have endangered both of our lives. I should have stopped before we even got here.”
He was half shoving her, half pulling her off the boat and back up onto the deck outside.
“No!” Charles shouted at the sales agent when the man stepped toward them smiling. The smile faded fast. “We don’t want it!”
Almost before she knew what had happened, Lenore found herself back on dry, steady land again, with her new blue tennis shoes planted on terra firma. She thought about letting disappointed tears well up in her eyes, but decided not to push her luck. She slipped her hands inside of Charles’s hands, looked up at him, and said, “I want what you want, and if you think this boat is bad luck for us, well, I trust your instincts. And I know that you and I will be happy together anywhere we are, even back in our own home.”
Charles leaned over and gratefully, lovingly kissed her lips.
“Thank you,” he said. “For saying yes. And thank you for saying no.”
They walked arm-in-arm back to where his car waited in the parking lot.
“I’ve got a class to teach,” he said. “I’ll take you home first.”
“No, you won’t; that’s completely out of your way and you don’t have enough time to do it, anyway. I’ll just take a cab.” She had a bookstore in mind where she wanted to make a stop and pick up a copy of the book for next month’s meeting.
Charles waited with her for the taxi to arrive, and then he ushered her into its backseat.
“I guess it wasn’t meant to be, darling,” she told him.
“No, one must never argue with fate,” he said, and then kissed her.
Well, she had argued with fate and she had won, Lenore thought, feeling triumphant as she leaned back against the taxi’s seat. There would be no boat in her future, thank God. No vomiting over railings, no peeling, sunburned skin, no weathering of storms out in the open sea. She could curl up at home studying and reading, and live contentedly for all the years of Charles’s retirement, while he puttered about at his Poe nonsense.
When the taxi driver peeled away from the dock fast, jerking her from one side of the cab to the other, she had a moment of doubt about his skill as a driver, but it was quickly forgotten as they sped away and she began to reminisce about the delicious... and only... hour she had spent on a boat with her husband. It was not, however, the only hour she had ever spent on a boat. On that boat. Just that morning, she had made a preview inspection, telling the sales agent that she knew just the right things to scatter about the cabin to convince her husband to purchase this boat that he so dearly wanted to buy.
And so she had dropped a turnip here, placed a couple of paperbacks there, all based on her study of the Poe story and her forays into old bookshops and other stores. Why, Charles hadn’t even noticed some of the best “signs” she’d left for him... a painting of Nantucket, and the souvenirs from England and Australia, which had been the destinations of the real ship that went down.