“It looks like it’s going to take off,” remarked Trip when they were done. “You think it’ll do her?”
Martin privately thought the boat now resembled something from Waterworld. “I guess if the cradle doesn’t sink, we can just hack away at it until it does,” he said doubtfully, staring up at the Wendameer’s white hull. “C’mon, let’s get the rest of that gear stowed away.”
He bartered with Diana for food, giving her two paintings she had long admired in exchange for jars of preserved fruit and vegetables and the promise of fresh eggs the morning of their voyage.
“But aren’t you going to miss these?” Diana asked when Martin and Trip brought the two canvases over. “I mean, they were hanging in your place, it’s not like you had them stored away somewhere.”
“I can always come and visit them, right?”
“Sure,” Diana said absently. She was already measuring her walls for the canvases, and so didn’t see Martin’s stricken look. But it was too late now. He was committed to the voyage because Trip was; and because he could no more imagine not taking the boy south to Manhattan than he could imagine leaving him there, forever.
Still, there was a little time left at Mars Hill. The last few days of Indian summer, blisteringly hot beneath a sky like cracked cloisonné, the beach steaming where hailstones the size of fists hammered against stone and Trip stumbled round gathering them, to fill an Igloo cooler for as long as the ice would last. Not long, it turned out, a day or two. Enough to keep the last four bottles of beer cold; enough for Martin to fill an ice pack to lay across his brow, fighting fever.
“You’re letting him kill you!” his son Jason had raged. “You’re going to leave me here alone—you’re going to leave Moony and me and the baby—”
“But the world will know that I died for love,” he had told his son, and with a strangled sob Jason fled down the beach.
Ah well, nothing to be done. He devoted himself to teaching Trip what he could of seamanship. On the deck of the Wendameen, Trip’s face scrunched into that little-boy scowl of concentration as he followed Martin’s nimble fingers through the labyrinth of sailor’s knots: bowline, sheet bend, clove hitch, rolling hitch. Martin showed him where the harness was, in the cockpit, and warned him that in case of rough weather he was to put it on.
“Some boats have lifelines—ropes you can grab on to, if you have to. This one doesn’t,” Martin said, pacing from bow to stern while Trip struggled with a bowline. “So you’ve always got to keep your head up. You always have to have one hand for yourself and one for the boat.”
Trip nodded, not really listening; and so Martin said the same things again, and again, just as he endlessly showed the boy how to thread the knots, how to secure the anchor line, how to maintain the proper tension between jibstay and jumpers and backstay. Somehow, some of it would stick, he thought, smiling as Trip bellowed with triumph and held up a length of rope.
Weeks passed. Their nights were spent poring over the charts. Martin decided they would travel point to point, always within sight of shore. With no navigational aids beyond a compass and sextant (which was pretty useless, since you couldn’t see the stars to steer by), and with storms a near-constant threat, it seemed the only reasonable thing to do. He showed him the sextant, its deft interlocking of mirrors, prism, filters, vernier; even took him out onto the porch to explain how it worked. How it was futile if you couldn’t shoot the stars, although you could theoretically take a shot onshore, angle on three points on land, and find your way thus. The Graffams had told him that many of the old lighthouses along the coast of Maine were occupied again, since the Coast Guard no longer chased off squatters. It was rumored that some of the lights were even operational—Dick Graffam had seen one for himself, at Quoddy Head—and that a number of the old solar-powered light buoys still worked. The worst part of the journey would be getting around the ships’ graveyard off Cape Cod. The Cape Cod Canal would be too dangerous, without any advance warning of pirate ships coming through, and so Martin plotted another course. Which would also be perilous, but he and John had sailed it before. Martin felt fairly confident that if the seas were calm, they would have little trouble.
“Let’s aim for Friday,” he said one night, pushing his chair away from the cluttered table.
Trip’s face lit up. “To leave?”
“Well, to get the boat into the water, at least. There’s no point waiting any longer.” He felt a stabbing at his heart: why wait? The boy wasn’t going to fall in love with him, the stars weren’t suddenly going to show their faces through the broken sky, the tide wasn’t going to turn. “We should go now,” he went on, “before it gets worse.”
“Before what gets worse?” asked Trip cheerfully. “At least it’s not cold. And we’ve got the wind from the north, you said that’s good.”
Clueless, Martin marveled; he’s just so absolutely clueless. He smiled and nodded. “I did, and it is: it’s all good.”
But lying alone on the couch that night—listening to Trip’s even breathing in the next room, in Martin’s own bed—he could only sob, in rage and frustrated desire.
Stop killing me.
They launched on Friday in mid-December. Morning came, sky corrugating into emerald and cerulean and the brilliant yellow that seeps beneath a door closed to fire. On the porch Martin watched the day crack open. He had not slept, chased by fever and the knowledge that this would be the last time he’d sit here and look down Mars Hill to the bay, past decrepit cottages and leggy phlox and the Wendameen’s silhouette, to sparkling water and the eastern horizon. He felt beyond sorrow, oddly ebullient; buoyed by the very futility of his task. When he heard the first birds rustling in the lilacs he stood. He went inside to boil water for tea, then walked quietly into the bedroom to rouse Trip.
He slept soundly, as always. For a long time Martin stood above him, one hand on the headboard, and watched. He had always loved to do this, observe his lovers sleeping. It was like laying claim to a hidden part of them, like watching years fall away to reveal the other’s pith. John had always looked childlike when sleeping, one hand curled close to his face upon the pillow, mouth parted, brow furrowed.
Trip did not. Trip, sleeping, seemed least himself. He never moved—and Martin checked, Martin would stand there, memorizing the precise pattern of cheek against pillow, outflung arm, crooked knee. The boy’s face had a strangely slack look, not relaxed but deflated, the skin waxen and dull, lips pale, eyelids like little white shells laid across his eyes. As though some vitalizing spirit had gone. Martin frowned, thinking of all those stories where the hero’s soul flees him at night, of shamans who can leave their bodies and travel to the other world, returning with magic stones, coals wrapped in leaves, miraculous cures for blindness and plague. He gazed at Trip’s right hand, coiled against his breast, the gold ring there. He sighed, and gently shook Trip’s shoulder.
They had a small audience for the launch—Mrs. Grose, Diana, Doug from the Beach Store. Jason had made his farewells, stiffly, during his last visit; finally collapsed into tears and let Martin hold him. Martin had hoped Dick Graffam might come, but the weather was clear, no clouds that he could see; Graffam would be out fishing. It was high tide, waves lapping at pilings and gulls swooping overhead. On her jackstand the Wendameen gleamed cerise, reflecting the bright sky.