Chapter 10 - The Clear Water of the Sound
One year later, the Atlantic was the color of hammered pewter beneath the crisp, brilliant blue of an October morning.
The dock at Fishers Island stretched sixty yards out into the deep water of the race, its massive granite timbers weathered silver by sixty seasons of salt and nor'easters.
At the end of the slip sat The Cattleya.
She was an eighty-four-foot wooden yawl, her hull built of double-planked teak over white oak ribs, her brass winches polished until they caught the morning sun like small mirrors. She had been salvaged from the boatyard in Greenport, rebuilt from the keel up by twelve master shipwrights over ten months, her diesel auxiliary engines replaced with twin silent electric drives that left no wake of blue smoke on the water.
Maya stood at the helm.
She wore dark denim trousers, a thick cream-colored Irish wool sweater with the sleeves pushed up to her forearms, and no jewelry save for the platinum signet ring that had returned to its ancestral place on her right pinky.
Her skin was brown from three months of sailing the Maine coast, her hair tied back with a simple strip of navy ribbon.
Beside her, standing on an upturned teak milk crate so she could see over the coaming, was five-year-old Lily.
The child wore an orange life vest over her yellow flannel shirt, her small hands resting with fierce, solemn concentration on the spokes of the mahogany wheel.
"Two degrees to starboard, Captain," Maya said, her voice warm, low, and completely relaxed. "Watch the green buoy off the point. The tide is running six knots through the gut."
"Two degrees, Mommy," Lily chirped, her small muscles leaning into the timber. "The green one has the bell!"
Across the cockpit, Julian sat with his long legs stretched out on the teak bench, a ceramic mug of dark coffee in his hand, an iPad resting face-down beside his elbow.
"Thomas sent the final disposition from Riverhead," Julian murmured, looking up from the water.
"Which one?" Maya asked, not taking her eyes off the sail trim.
"The Dix Hills house," Julian said. "The bank foreclosed on the second lien yesterday. The auction cleared three hundred and ten thousand—just enough to cover the legal fees and the state tax forfeiture on Vance Logistics."
"And Richard?"
"He took the three-year plea at the state correctional facility in Marcy," Julian said, taking a sip of his coffee. "Grand larceny in the second degree, corporate embezzlement, and three counts of perjury regarding the municipal filings. His lawyer tried to argue for community service, but the judge happened to be a trustee of the Maritime Historical Society."
Maya smiled—a tiny, private tilt of her lips that carried no malice, only the vast, cool peace of an open horizon.
"And the mother?"
"Living in an assisted-living annex outside Binghamton," Julian said. "Her daughter—the cousin from New Jersey—pays the six hundred dollars a month for the room. She tells the other women at the bingo table that Richard is on an extended diplomatic assignment in Europe."
"Let her," Maya said. "Fictions are expensive to maintain, Julian. They require an enormous amount of energy, and eventually, the winter arrives."
The wind shifted four points to the south, coming clean and hard off the open Atlantic, smelling of wild kelp, clean granite, and deep water.
The massive Dacron mainsail filled with a sharp, concussive snap, the heavy wooden hull leaning four degrees to port as the keel caught the laminar flow of the current.
Lily let out a high, triumphant shout of pure, unclouded joy, her small knuckles white against the mahogany wheel as the spray kicked up over the teak bowsprit, showering the deck with a million brilliant, liquid diamonds that vanished instantly in the sun.
"Mommy!" Lily shouted over the roar of the water against the hull. "We're going fast! Where are we going?"
May you like
Maya reached down, her strong, calloused hand covering her daughter’s small fingers on the wheel, feeling the steady, rhythmic heartbeat of the ship transmitting through the oak, through the bronze, through forty generations of blood that had never learned how to stay small.
"Out, baby," Maya said, looking toward the wide, unbroken blue where the sky met the sea without a single fence in sight. "Just out."
