After the cake and punch and a couple of rounds of crying from my mom, Bailey took off with me. Her sad, broke-down truck had one last job to do before she consigned it to the truck graveyard.
In the lot behind my house, my boat sat on a trailer. She was just a twenty-four-foot keel, nothing I could fish from. But I wouldn’t be fishing for a while, and that’s not why I bought her. It took a year and a half to clean her up and get her seaworthy, but she was finally there.
Hooking the trailer to Bailey’s truck, I hopped in her cab for one last time. Her face was a little red from holding the parking brake back so hard.
“You never were gonna get those brakes fixed, were you?”
She blew me a kiss and dropped the brake. “Not for any woman, no ma’am.”
It wasn’t a long drive to the shore, though backing the trailer to the water was more exciting than it had to be. For a minute, I thought we were gonna commit Bailey’s truck to a sea burial. She managed to stop it at the last minute, then cut the engine.
“There’s a coast in Georgia,” she said as she hopped out. She came around to help me with the chains. “I don’t know how far it is from Athens, but I’m probably going to buy a car when I get down there.”
Grinning at her, I steadied myself against the hull. “With brakes?”
“When’s the last time I told you to kiss it?”
With a laugh, we both moved at the same time to set my boat in the water. I had new plans to sail the coast. To see more of the world than Broken Tooth, Maine. I’d come back in the springtime, to help Daddy get the traps ready for the season, and to teach his temporary sternman how to do my job.
And when I got my license back, I’d take my place. These waters were my waters; this village was my home. The legacy still mattered. I was gonna work the stern of the Jenn-a-Lo until Daddy retired. Then I’d step into the wheelhouse, her new captain.
I’d be able to do it knowing that I had seen other places and lived other lives and still chosen this one. Three hundred years of Dixons had fished these waters; three hundred more waited. I didn’t want my initials to be the last set on the banister at Vandenbrook.
“I’m not crying for you,” Bailey informed me, wiping her face.
I hugged her, and bumped our foreheads together. Then I pinched her as I let go. “That’s to give you something to cry about.”
That night, we had a bonfire on Jackson’s Rock. The whole senior class, and let’s be honest, most of the juniors and sophomores, too. Nobody could remember why we’d never done it before.
Since you could only sail onto the south side of the island, we were hidden in the cove. There was plenty of downed wood to burn, and instead of cold, damp caves for secret kisses, there was an abandoned lighthouse.
I stayed until the stars shifted to midnight. Until the waters were clear and smooth and I could see the mainland shore glimmering in the distance. Setting off across perfect seas, not on a Friday, I was whole. Happy. Alive.
Hours slipped by, and as I passed the cliff over Daggett’s Walk, I could have sworn I saw a figure standing on the shore. He was a pang and a light—I squinted to try to make him out.
Somebody was there, for sure, leaning against a truck, while someone else waited in the cab. The watcher’s face was familiar but not familiar. Impressions of shadows that came together to shape a thin mouth and keen eyes. I couldn’t know him for sure. But for some reason, I thought I might.
It was only a moment, and I sailed on by. I had too many things to think about to lose myself wondering. To spend time adding up an expression, matching it to a memory. I was my own captain, and I had to think about the stars and the seas and my path through them.
But if I hadn’t been imagining things—if he really was that ghost I’d known in the lighthouse—it was all right. I didn’t have to stop or wave. No need to say hello. I wasn’t sure I’d ever need to speak to him again.
I was changed, and he was necessary, but it wasn’t that kind of magic. Not gold ink calligraphy swirling across the page, a delicate, transcendent the end. But he was something.
A boat’s name was its charm. It was full of superstition like everything else—remembrance, penance, prayer. In our fleet, there was the Boondocks, where Mal Eldrich hailed from. The Jenn-a-Lo, for my daddy’s wife. Lazarus belonged to Zoe Pomroy, and she sure as hell had brought it back from the dead when she bought it off the side of the road for fifteen pounds of blueberries.
The night was sweet with lilac blooms; clear skies over clear waters. Singing with my engine, the wind wound through the trees and crept into my cabin. My belly was full; I was warm. I had a direction. The whole world waited.
I sailed on to my destiny on the Levi Grey.
Acknowledgments
Professional thanks to Julie Tibbott—never was there a finer editor—and my wonderful agent, Jim McCarthy. Though we have yet to watch a good show together, I remain ever hopeful.
Foundational thanks to Mandy Hubbard for helping me find the high in the concept, LaTonya Dargan for bringing the legal science up in my house, and Colonel Joe Fessenden from the Marine Patrol for clarifying the consequences of cutting gear and not getting away with it.
Extraordinary thanks to Abigail Luchies (@Aluchies), Kelly Jensen (@catagator), Susan Dee (@literacydocent), and Laura Phelps (@elfhelps) for Twittersourcing the perfect full-time Mainechecker. This is why teachers and librarians rock, y’all.
Wild, enthusiastic thanks and adoration to Emma Wallace, for being that perfect, full-time Mainechecker. You made this book a million times better, Emma. Thank you so much! Much gratitude and appreciation to Rick and Diane Wallace as well, for lending their daughter to a strange author from Indiana.
Lovey author thanks go to Christine Johnson for massaging the partial, R. J. Anderson for reading and cheerleading, Deva Fagan for checking my Maine in the early stages, and Carrie Ryan and Sarah MacLean for helping me find the magic. Thanks and smoochies to Sarah Rees Brennan for the handholding and lamenting.
Forever and ever thanks to Jason Walters, who insisted I needed an office and refused to stop until I had one. Thank you for being my champion and my hero, always.
Finally, Wendi Finch, my muse and my hetero-lifemate, who knows that the last ferry will take us to Maine, back to Maine, always to Maine.