“I’m in awe,” Mattei said. “Aren’t you?”
“Every day,” Zee said.
Mattei sat and considered for a moment before speaking. “So I take it Melville’s not coming back.”
“He tried. Finch kicked him out again.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea. I know they had some kind of disagreement, but Melville said it was an old argument that had been settled a long time ago.”
“Evidently not,” Mattei said.
“That’s exactly what I said,” Zee said.
“So that leaves you as caregiver.”
“Pretty much,” Zee said. “At least until I can figure something else out.”
Mattei looked at her.
“I want to do this,” Zee said.
“That’s very noble.” Mattei paused. “But caregiving is very difficult.”
“I have Jessina,” Zee said.
“Even so.”
“It’s been okay,” Zee said.
“And you’ve been doing this for what? A week?”
“Nevertheless,” Zee said. It was meant to end the conversation, and Mattei knew it.
“Just promise me one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Promise me you’re not just hiding out here.”
Zee thought about it. “I’m not,” she said.
“Okay,” Mattei said. “Take a leave of absence. But I don’t want to lose you. You’re too good a therapist.”
“Recent evidence to the contrary.”
“Stop it,” Mattei said.
MATTEI LEFT ZEE WITH THE name of a caregiver-support group at Salem Hospital and a prescription for sleeping pills.
“I don’t need the pills,” Zee lied.
“You told me you weren’t sleeping,” Mattei said. “It doesn’t hurt to fill the prescription. If you don’t need them, don’t take them.”
“Thanks,” Zee said.
Zee thought about it before bringing up the next subject. “There’s one thing we haven’t talked about,” Zee said.
“Really? What is that?”
“I’m assuming you talked to Michael.”
“We’ve spoken, yes.”
“Just tell me one thing,” Zee asked. “Is he okay?”
Mattei thought carefully before she spoke. “He’ll be fine. Given the right amount of time and enough red wine.”
Zee nodded. She didn’t want to know any more.
23
HAVING FORGOTTEN THAT HE’D agreed to teach the class tonight, Hawk had planned to go to Zee’s after work to install the railing.
As part of his employment contract for the summer, he was to co-teach a celestial-navigation course sponsored by the National Park Service. Though most of the Friendship’s navigation was done by GPS, Hawk was the only member of the crew who was proficient in celestial skills, and the captain wanted each of the ship’s journeys logged as if it were still the early 1800s, when all navigation was done by the stars.
This would have been fine with Hawk, except that many of the classes, which were taught at the Visitors’ Center and not at sea, conflicted with his duties on the ship. When he had agreed to teach, he’d assumed that the classes would be held on the Friendship as she sailed, allowing the students to learn to take the twilight sights. What he didn’t know at the time was that the Friendship rarely sailed at all, and when she did, she sometimes carried a few VIPs, but almost never any regular passengers. Though she was coast guard-certified to sail, as a general rule the Friendship stayed in port except when she served as Essex County’s or the National Park Service’s flagship for maritime festivals up and down the coast. Most days she sat at the wharf while large groups of tourists boarded and disembarked.
Recently an application had been made to the coast guard to commission the ship, which, if accepted, would allow the Friendship to take passengers out to sea and provide students and any other groups with a firsthand experience of Salem’s sailing history, something they were unlikely to understand any other way. But commissioning was a slow process. Hawk was able to bring the class aboard the moored ship to practice noon sights and learn to determine latitude, but he hadn’t been able to take them out to sea. For the most part, this summer’s celestial-navigation course had been confined to the classroom, something Hawk found appalling, and he didn’t hesitate to say so.
He was no less vocal the night of the first class when the other instructor, a man who had been teaching the course for the last five years, espoused the theory that sun sights alone were sufficient for navigation and that he had made several trips across the Atlantic taking nothing but sun sights.
“What other instruments did you have?” Hawk sounded doubtful.
“Well, we didn’t have GPS, I can tell you that much,” his co-teacher huffed.
Hawk’s co-teacher was an older gentleman named Briggs, a seasoned veteran with good credentials, who had once crossed the Atlantic solo from Plymouth, England, to the United States in a sixty-five-foot multihull. Hawk thought the guy was lucky to have made it. He didn’t criticize Briggs in front of the class, but he later expressed a strong opinion that the class should be taught using more than one navigational technique. Sun sights were certainly a part of celestial navigation, but so were moon, planet, and star sights, and Hawk could not conceive of teaching a course without all of them.
“They will learn to use a sextant,” Briggs said. “And for this beginning class, sun sights are quite satisfactory.”
In an odd twist, this year’s class consisted entirely of women. The other crew members kidded Hawk because the online brochure for the class had featured photographs of both instructors, and they were certain that this was the reason for the exclusively female enrollment.
“He looks like a young George Clooney,” one of the crew said, referring to Hawk’s photo.
“Shut up,” Hawk said.
After the first class, Hawk wanted to quit. Not only did he think an inside class was ridiculous, but the conflicts in his schedule left the Friendship shorthanded. And there was another reason. For the most part, the class full of women was fine with him, but there was a small group of them, known well to the other instructor, that the crew had nicknamed the “Yacht Club Cougars.” Three of them attended the first class. By the second, the group had expanded to seven. It wasn’t that he had anything against them, though they were a little cliquish and very outspoken, which tended to keep the other, less outgoing women from asking many questions. But their attempts at humor were fairly bawdy and were usually directed at Hawk, which might have amused him had it not made Briggs envious and argumentative. After one particularly disagreeable class, Hawk decided to talk to his boss. Contract aside, this class didn’t need two instructors, and the two men clearly didn’t like each other. Hawk would volunteer to quit.
But the other instructor beat him to it. “I can’t work with him,” Hawk overheard Briggs tell their boss. “You’re going to have to choose one or the other of us, and let me remind you that not only do I have seniority, but my family has donated quite a bit of money to this project over the years.”
Hawk quit the class. But a few weeks later, his boss came back to him. They’d had some complaints from the enrollees, who agreed strongly with Hawk’s assessment that the class should be taught at least in part on the water.
“Great idea,” Hawk said, happy that the students would finally get their money’s worth. “But why are you telling me?”
“We have an issue,” his boss said.
“Yeah? What’s that?” Hawk said.
“Over the years Briggs seems to have developed a problem with seasickness.”
“You’re kidding.” Hawk couldn’t help but smile.
“We were hoping we could convince you to take them out in your boat. It would only be for one class,” he said. “And we do have a contract.”