Jeanne stood up.
“It was thoughtless of us,” she said. “Forgive us, Frank.” She walked over to him and put her arms around him. Neil saw him respond stiffly at first and then put his arms around her and lower his head to rest on hers.
“You make it kind of tough to hold a grudge,” he said.
“I hope so,” she said softly.
“What were you doing, anyway?” he asked.
There was a brief silence.
“Flirting with Neil,” she answered. “I’m trying to get out of even-day garbage detail.”
“Try flirting with me,” Frank said. “I own the damn boat.”
Jeanne stretched up and kissed Frank on the cheek.
“Good night again,” she whispered and moved off toward her cabin.
“You might pay a little attention to the boat,” Frank said to Neil. “Every now and then, for appearances.”
“I pay attention to this boat every second of every day and you know it,” he snapped back.
Jeanne had stopped at her cabin entrance, and Jim and Lisa, who had withdrawn from all this, were still standing at the wheel.
“Yeah,” said Frank after a strained silence. “I guess you’re right. I’m sorry, Neil.”
Neil waited a moment before responding.
“Don’t worry about it,” Neil said. “I’m sorry about the noise.”
“Yeah. Good night. Good night, Jim. You, too, Lisa.”
Frank moved away again to his cabin, sliding his hatch closed behind him. Neil walked over to where Jeanne was still standing at her cabin entranceway.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her softly.
She looked up at him in the darkness and then away.
“I… think I love you, Neil,” she said in a low voice. “But it’s no good. We’re a family. Our… love would be… a kind of incest.”
“You’re not my sister,” he replied almost sharply.
“Ahh, but I am,” she said softly, looking up at him. “Don’t you see, you and Frank are brothers, and Frank and I are brother and sister, so you… we’re all too close, Neil.”
“I see that Frank would be hurt if we made love,” he said after a pause. “And I don’t want to hurt him. But he’ll be hurt by our love whether we… act on it or not,”
She turned away her face, barely visible in the dark, and glanced toward Jim and Lisa.
“In this world… in our new world, no one must be alone,” she said.
“Does that mean no two can ever be together?” he asked, pulling her gently against him.
She turned to look at him, then again turned away.
“Oh, Neil, I don’t know,” she whispered. “I’ve got to get things right with Frank. You must see that.”
Neil stared down at her barely visible face.
“I’m not sure that’s possible, Jeanne,” he suggested quietly.
When he tried to lift her head to look at her she pressed her face against his shoulder, refusing to budge. He could feel the wetness of tears on his bare shoulder. He held her, stroking her hair against her back; his smile faded, and he suddenly had a clear image of himself on a ship racing through the night away from a universe of death to the north. A second image, of Frank angrily looming up in the wheelhouse entrance, returned to him, and he felt a great sadness.
“It’s no use, Neil,” Jeanne finally whispered. “We’re not free.”
In the wheelhouse after Neil and Jeanne had gone off to their separate cabins Jim and Lisa carried on with the task of keeping Vagabond on course. For many minutes neither of them spoke. Lisa left Jim to check on the trolling rig and spent two minutes reeling in the lure to look for seaweed. She cleaned off the lure and let it back out again, adjusting the drag. When she returned to Jim at the helm, they were both silent. They didn’t touch each other.
A muffled sobbing from Jeanne’s cabin cut through the silence, and both of them stiffened. After another minute in which every groan of a line stretching, every slap of a halyard, rustle of a sail, whine of wind in the rigging, seemed for a brief second to be the sound of a woman moaning, Jim finally spoke:
“Are you all right, Lisa?” he asked quietly, touching her briefly on her shoulder, then letting his arm fall.
“It’s so sad,” she said in a small voice.
“It’s hard on my father too,” Jim replied. “He…”
“I know,” she said.
“Everyone seems so alone,” said Jim. “It makes me feel lonely.” He had to put both hands on the wheel as Vagabond slid off the face of a swell.
Lisa took his arm and hugged it, then put her arms around his waist and pressed her head against his shoulder.
“Don’t feel lonely, Jim,” she said. “Don’t ever feel lonely.”
Jim released one hand from the wheel to put his arm around her. Still facing forward, he hugged her to him. He was grinning.
“Hey,” he said, looking down at her until she raised her head to return his gaze. “I wish I could kiss you.”
“Why can’t you?” she replied, looking up at him seriously.
“I thought you wanted us to be the best watch team Neil has?” Jim asked.
“I do,” she said. “But a good helmsman should be able to steer and kiss too.”
Joyously Jim bent and kissed her, Vagabond almost immediately racing slightly off course, and after fifteen seconds she slammed into a wave with a boom and shudder, effectively interrupting their embrace.
As Jim wrestled the wheel with both hands to get Vagabond back on course Lisa clung to him, her head buried against his chest.
“I love you, Jim,” Lisa whispered. “Please love me, please love me.”
Jim squeezed her against him, his heart pounding, his eyes facing forward but seeing nothing.
“I do,” he whispered down at her.
“And I want you to make love to me,” Lisa said. “Before we die, I want you to make love to me.”
“We’re not going to die,” Jim said.
“Yes, we are,” Lisa said. “Oh, Jim, hold me, hold me. You’re the only solid thing left in the world—”
Jim hugged her to him with his left arm and held Vagabond roughly on course with his right.
“Make love to me, Jim,” Lisa whispered hoarsely. “I so much want us to make love.”
“We will,” he said. “We will.”
“We’re so alone…”
Frank lay on his berth, staring up at the white overhead, where the reflection of sunlight off the water danced like cold white fire. He’d gone to sleep about a half-hour after coming off watch at six that morning, and he figured it must be getting close to noon.
He didn’t feel rested. He felt bone-tired. There was a dull ache in his lower back that had been bothering him off and on for the last several days. His belly ached. An occasional wave of nausea swept over him like a pestilential fog. He wanted the voyage to be over. He loved Vagabond and was completely at home on her, but his ship, like the rest of life, was slipping out of his control. As long as he had owned her—three years now—he had loved her partly because she was his, his creation and his to control. Now she was no longer his. She belonged to… to everyone who needed her. If he didn’t like to see Skippy’s comic books lying around, or Jim taking over half his cabin or playing his guitar up on the foredeck, or Neil always sitting or standing around in the wheelhouse as if it were his personal command post, he was no longer free to say so. It was their boat too. If he tried to have everything run to please him, everyone else would be miserable. So instead he had to be miserable.
Vagabond was getting junky. No matter how often he and Neil spoke about it, no one ever seemed to clean the blood and fishscales from the side cockpits, ever remembered to pick up the lures and leaders and line that always seemed to be lying around. The wheelhouse was always cluttered with comic books, towels, paper cups, books, bits of food, or somebody’s shirt or socks. Bullet holes in the Plexiglas. The aft wall now a sail. The blankets and sheets were starting to stink. Jeanne and Katya kept the galley and dinette in good shape when they were around, but at other times Olly, Tony, and Jim left little messes. Neil and Macklin were neat, he supposed, but Neil didn’t seem to be trying to control the others.