The next morning, unable to bear the idle frustration any longer, I sent a fax to David, telling him our next destination and my estimated arrival date, then I slipped Stormchild’s mooring lines. Jackie, knowing that the winds were not yet propitious, was puzzled by our precipitous departure, but her respect for my sailing experience made her accept my muttered explanation that, despite the depressing forecast, I was expecting a northerly blow at any minute. We motored our way offshore and suddenly, five miles from land, and against all the careful predictions of the weathermen, a steady northeaster did indeed begin to blow. I killed the motor, trimmed the sails, and let Stormchild run free. The unexpected wind proved to Jackie that I was a genius, while I knew I was merely a fraud. Two days later we found the trade winds and turned our bows west and thus we ran in Columbus’s path, bound for the Americas.
We furled the big mainsail, lashed the boom down, then whisker-poled our twin headsails, one to port and the other to starboard. The wind came from dead astern, the twin sails hauled us, the wind vane guided us, the flying fish landed on our deck, and Stormchild crossed the Atlantic, rolling like a drunken pig, just as every other boat had run the unvarying trade winds ever since Columbus’s Santa Maria had first wallowed along these same latitudes under the command of a man who insisted he was sailing to the Orient and who, to his dying day, angrily denied that he had ever discovered the Americas.
Jackie and I sailed through sunlit days and phosphorescent nights. We saw no other boats. Hundreds of craft were out there, strung and scattered across the conveyer belt of the trade wind latitudes, but we sailed in apparent solitude, lost in an immensity of warm sea and endless sky under which we fell once more into our watch-keeping routine. I took the first watch from midnight until four, then Jackie would take the deck until ten in the morning. She then slept until nearly six o’clock in the evening, when she would join me in the cockpit for our main meal of the day. At eight I would go below and try to sleep until midnight, when Jackie would wake me for the first watch with a cup of coffee. I was always on call in case of an emergency, but she never needed to rouse me; she claimed that the hounds of hell could not have woken me, so deeply and well did I sleep at sea. My snores, Jackie claimed, began the moment I went below.
I did sleep well. For the first time since Joanna’s death I was sleeping the night through, unharassed by regret. There was only one single morning on that whole voyage of two thousand seven hundred miles that I woke early. On that morning my eyes opened just after eight, a full hour before I usually rolled out of my sleeping bag, and for some reason I could not fall asleep again. It was not the solo sailor’s instinct for danger that had woken me, because there was nothing wrong with the boat’s motion and there were no odd sounds that betrayed a piece of broken rigging, and I could tell Jackie was safe, because I could hear the shuffle and slap of her bare feet on the foredeck. I wondered if she had gone forward to deal with some small emergency that had woken me, and which, before I was fully conscious, she had brought under control. I could think of no other explanation for being awake.
I yawned, wriggled out from behind the lee cloths which held my sleeping body against the boat’s rolling motion, and climbed toward the cockpit. I paused at the midpoint of the companionway and turned to look forward, only to see Jackie doing strenuous aerobic exercises on the sun-drenched foredeck. I froze in sudden and acute embarrassment, because she was doing her bends and stretches in the nude. For a few seconds I stared at her, half in amazement and half in admiration, then, before she became aware of my early appearance, I ducked swiftly back into the galley, where I ostentatiously clattered some pots and pans together.
“You’re awake early,” she called down a few seconds later.
“Couldn’t sleep. What’s it like up there?” I shouted the question so she would not think I had already been on deck.
“Same as ever. Sunny, warm, and a force-four wind. I’ve got six flying fish for your lunch.”
“Chuck them back!” There comes a point when the taste of flying fish palls. “Do you want your tea now?” I asked her. Jackie had brought on board an herbal concoction of caffeine-free leaves, which I gallantly brewed for her whenever I took over the watch.
“Please!”
By the time I reached the deck she was in her bikini, looking positively overdressed. “You can turn in early, if you like,” I said.
“I’m not tired.” She sat cross-legged on the far thwart and I was suddenly assailed by a vivid memory of her lithe, tanned body flexing and arching between the foresails’ sheets. I stared upward so that Jackie could not see my blush and, high above Stormchild’s swinging masthead, I saw a trans-Atlantic jet scratching its white contrail against the sky. “They say you can navigate by those jets,” I said, just to distract myself.
“You can do what?” Jackie had been concentrating on harvesting her sprouts which grew in their plastic trays with an astonishing vigor, and which she ate with an equally astonishing enjoyment.
“I’m told that some people have successfully navigated the Atlantic by following the vapor trails of big jets.”
She looked up at the white line scratching itself between the puff-ball clouds. “Figures. Cheaper than buying a sextant.”
The next morning six dolphins appeared to escort Stormchild. Their arrival gave an ecstatic pleasure to Jackie, and I had not seen such joy in another person since the day I had woken Nicole to the exact same sight twelve years before. Nicole’s delighted face had shown an unusual softness, and now, with Jackie’s enthusiasm to bring the memory into sharp and sudden focus, it did not seem so odd that Nicole had become the disciple of a man who claimed to be a fanatical environmentalist. “Tim, they’re so cute!” Jackie enthused.
“They taste good, too.”
“Oh, shut up!” She laughed and hit me. There were times when she seemed impossibly young, and I hated those times. Mostly, to hide my feelings, I treated her with an exaggerated formality, and she seemed to reciprocate the courtesy, but, once in a while, as when she watched the dolphins leaping, her polite mask would slip and I would feel the scar being torn from my soul. I convinced myself that Joanna’s death had made me unusually vulnerable to a young woman’s charms, and I armored myself against any display of that vulnerability by my painfully correct behavior.
Thus we sailed on. Stormchild threw us a few problems, but none that were unusually difficult; a steel cotter pin snapped on the self-steering gear so that the boat suddenly rounded up toward the wind and the sails slatted like demented bat wings. Jackie was on watch, and, by the time I was on deck, she had already recovered the helm and had opened the locker where we kept the spare fastenings. Another day I discovered the bilge was slowly flooding and traced the problem to a pinhole leak in a spare water tank. The odd sail seam opened, but nothing that a few minutes with a needle and sailmaker’s pad could not mend.
Day by day the pencil line that represented Stormchild’s progress inched its way across our chart. I measured its advance by taking running fixes with the sextant, a process that, at first, Jackie had liked to double-check by turning on the satellite receiver and waiting for the small green numerals to betray the ship’s position, but gradually she learned to trust the sun more than the clever box of silicon chips, and soon she wanted to master the sextant herself. I taught her, and it was a good day when I was able to congratulate her for fixing our position within fifty miles. She laughed, rightly pleased with her achievement, then she spread her arms as though to encompass all of Stormchild and all of the unending sea and sky. “I could do this forever, Tim.”