“Martin,” he whispered, smiling.
The smile undid Martin: it was so much John, it was what he had never thought to see again in all eternity. He began to sob, wiping the tears from his eyes.
“Is it difficult, Martin?” The figure crossed the room to stand beside the bed. Pityingly, and yet there was something remote in its gaze, too. “Martin?” the figure asked again. “Is it so very hard?”
Martin looked up, saw that within the hollow of its eyes something flickered that was not an eye. Hastily he lowered his gaze.
“It is—very hard,” he said at last. He forced himself to raise his head. “And you, John—is it—is it—”
The figure stared down at him. The misty white light seemed to fall away, so that Martin was not looking upon a glowing creature but only a man who stood in shadow. John tilted his head. His face grew gentle, and he stretched out his hand to touch Martin’s brow. But Martin felt nothing, not cold nor warmth nor the faintest breath of movement. He saw that the hand cast no shadow.
“It’s not so hard for us,” said John. “Because we remember, it’s not so hard as it is for you—”
“You remember?” Martin seized on the words. “You do remember?”
“Oh, sure,” answered John, grinning. “We remember. I remember—”
The grin spread as he opened his mouth, a glimpse there of more darkness, roots of teeth exposed like pilings.
Then John whispered, “Go with him. You won’t lose your way, Martin. I’ll find you…”
His words hung in the air, notes settling like dust. He wept so hard he couldn’t see, had to close his eyes to keep from exploding into grief. When he opened them the room was empty. A thin wind stirred across his skin. He sat up, fumbled for the bedside clock, and saw that it was 5:00 A.M.
He put the clock down, saw an object in the middle of the floor. A small wooden box, its corners rounded from being handled over the years. His bare feet skidded across the floor until he dropped to his knees, picked up the box, and cradled it in his hands—
“Oh John, John—”
—then opened the lid, trembling fingers feeling the worn velvet within and what it protected, cool metal forming the apex of a triangle and the sharper edges of the mirror and glass filters, a slip of pale green paper with a message written in peacock ink. Martin raised his voice in disbelief.
“—GOD! John, how—”
It had been lost for five years, since right before John’s last illness. He had looked everywhere for it, here and in the house in San Francisco and in the Wendameen because he had wanted to bury it with John, the present he had given Martin when they bought the boat for their seventeenth anniversary.
A sextant, bronze tipped with amethyst where the light struck it, the little mirror sending out sparks as he tilted it this way and that, then clutched it to his chest.
After some minutes he got up, still clasping the sextant to his breast, and went into the room with the boy. Martin watched him breathe, Trip’s chest rising and falling, his yellow hair spreading over the pillow like pollen; his face half-turned so that Martin could see his mouth parted like a child’s. Restless light played across his cheeks, indigo and orange, touched the cross on his breast so that it glowed. The topography of desire. His gaze shifted to the flickering square of window, the Wendameen upon its scaffold.
New York, Trip had said. I think that’s where she is. That’s where I met her. New York. Slowly Martin drew the sextant upward to his face, until he held it cupped beneath his chin. His stare remained fixed on the Wendameen.
The next day he began work on the boat. First clambering up the ladder and climbing down into the cockpit and then the companionway, to check the seams between planking. Looking for spots where the boards had shrunk and the light came through, replacing cotton caulking and running seam compound into the gaps. The boat had been up on jack stands for over two years now, but it had not dried out as badly as he had feared. He worked by the light of one of the Wendameen’s kerosene lanterns. There, belowdecks, with the familiar smells of kerosene and salt and Callahan’s Wax and the warm golden glow of varnished wood, all was just as it had always been, as it should be. It was exhausting, but it enlivened him, too, because he could lose himself, lose the world around him. After three days he was sorry to turn to other work, but by then it had all come back to him, the hours and days of labor needed to keep a boat alive, and the cries of gulls above the bay.
He moved the ladder, climbed down, and walked around beneath, so that he could see to the hull and begin the task of repainting the entire boat. The Wendameen had a copper-sheathed bottom, which protected it from worms and rot; but it all still had to be scraped and sanded and primed. He spent hours in Mars Hill’s old boathouse, scavenging half-empty cans of primer, scraping rust from tools and cleaning brushes with the turpentine he used for his paintings. Then came days of scraping, hands and fingers aching inside heavy suede gloves, paint scales covering the ground beneath like gull droppings. Prising out a rotten plank and replacing it, the slow process of planing, honey-colored curls of wood and the smell of shellac in the salt air. Then fitting the new boards between the old, like setting a falsely bright new tooth. Then sanding it all, again and again, by hand, the wood beneath his palm growing smoother and smoother still, until it was like milk, like silk, like skin. There is a love of wood as of other things that do not answer to our touch; entranced and exhausted, heedless of the fever that had begun to tear at him, Martin shaped the Wendameen into a boy.
When it came time to paint the exterior, Trip came down to help.
“I can do that,” he said, cocking his head. “I used to help my uncle.” A few yards away high tide lapped at the gravel. Trip bent and picked up a flat stone, expertly skipped it across a wave.
“Can you.” Martin looked down from the ladder and smiled through his exhaustion. It was the first time the boy had spoken, without prompting, of something in his past. An uncle, then, and a boat. “Well, there’s another ladder in the boathouse. Do you think you can get it by yourself? If you need help, just holler.”
Trip dragged the ladder out. He looked a little better these last few weeks, not so thin, his hair growing out. Not great, but better, like someone fighting a long illness; like Martin himself. Though the odd translucence of Trip’s skin remained; in the endless sunset he was sometimes hard to see, another trick of the light. He hauled up the rusted cans of paint and more ratty brushes and set to. Martin explained the color scheme: white hull and topside, magenta boot stripe, bulwark two shades of grey, like the breast and wings of a shearwater. Trip listened distractedly. He ran his finger along a seam and frowned, gently freed a pine needle that had gotten mired in damp paint. Martin watched him, heart so full he felt dizzy; Trip with the intense scowl of a child laboring at paint, brushes, wood.
It took them two weeks. Every evening they had to set the cracked blue tarps on a wooden frame above the boat, in case of rain. Geese flew overhead, honking. There was the nightly confusion of phoebes and chickadees in the white pines by the boathouse, trying to decide if it was really time to roost. One afternoon Martin walked up to the Beach Store, more exhausted than he could have imagined possible by the additional effort, and asked Doug to bring by a case of beer if and when they got some in. A few days later beer arrived. After that, Martin and Trip would sit on the ladders and each have two, sometimes talking, usually not. Watching amethyst-colored lightning play over the bay, the occasional passing of a lobster boat; once the huge silhouette of a Russian factory ship, merging into the darkness far away. In the extreme humidity it took a long time for the paint to dry, several days between coats, so they started on the interior. Cleaning out the bulkheads. Putting bunk cushions on deck to air, and the sails, smelling of mildew but, happily, undamaged. Checking out the engine. Martin cannibalized furniture and machinery in the boathouse and cottage for screws, nails, shims. He collected unopened and nearly empty pints of oil, carefully cleaned old filters because there were no new ones, and finally went to the big old plastic gas tanks he had stored the diesel in over two years before.