The Year of Broken Glass (13 page)

Francis has to think about this for a few moments, not because there aren't examples, but because there are so many it's like a fog in his mind, a million little particles of memory clustered together to form the one monolithic storm cloud of Anna's anger.

“Okay. I like to take a bath in the evenings. So does Anna. It's so important to us that the first thing we did when we rented the house we live in, before we'd even unpacked all our stuff, was to replace the old standard tub with a really nice sixty-six-inch clawfoot. Anna's always working in the evenings once Willow's gone to bed, and she likes to go to bed later than me. But she refuses to have a bath after me. She wants the fresh water before I soak in it. It's something that started when she was pregnant, and it seemed reasonable then, you know, hygiene, but she's upheld it as a rule since, even though there's no real reason for it now other than that she doesn't like the bath once I've dirtied it up. Anyway, most nights I get tired of waiting for her to come out of her study and have her bath, so I draw one for her to move the whole thing along. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Often whatever she's doing on the computer is just too important for her to put on hold. So the bathwater goes cold—unless I nag her, which is asking for a fight—and she refuses to add more hot because it's an energy waste. Of course this is my fault. So I started some time ago filling the tub with only scalding hot water, adding no cold, so it would take a long time for it to cool. It seemed the best solution, seeing as there's no way to get through to Anna about the fact she might be in some way to blame for those cold baths, that she might consider my side of things. But it didn't work. She started complaining about the bath being so fucking hot on those nights she'd actually go to get in right away. How she'd have to let some of the hot water out in order to make room for the cold she'd add to cool it down. That this was a shameful waste too. I couldn't win for losing. So then I'd tell her she should consider herself lucky she has a husband that goes to the trouble of drawing her a bath at all, let alone one who waits for her while she has it first. Which would always lead to an argument, to her railing about how I don't appreciate what she does around the house, and to me railing about how she's inconsiderate and wholly incapable of sharing a home with others. At least not in any harmonious way, everything always having to occur on her time, how she likes it.”

“That doesn't sound too out of the ordinary to me Ferris. You know, I've been married three times, and each of those marriages has had its share of my-side-of-the-bed-your-side-of-the-bed kind of conflicts.”

“Sure, but get this. A couple of weeks ago Anna has a headache, so she draws the bath for herself early, as soon as Willow's gone to sleep. She's at the sink flossing her teeth, still wrapped in her towel, when I get into the tub. It's the perfect temperature, and I say so as I sink in, in an isn't-this-luxurious kind of a way. She turns to me and says something like,
That's 'cause I fill the thing properly
, in this nasty tone. She just digs in, and I'm so tired of her spewing her anger onto everything, even a pleasant moment such as that one, that an anger rises in me to equal hers, and by the time it's all over we've been yelling at each other for half an hour, we're in the kitchen with towels wrapped around our waists, the floor is littered with broken glass from the Mason jars Anna has thrown across the room at me, and Willow is in his pyjamas, crying in his mother's arms, his bare feet bleeding from the glass he stepped on when he came running from his room, crying at us to stop.”
   

Of Different Worlds

TO
THE
SOUND of the little diesel resonating through the hull, Miriam sleeps through the early hours and dreams of dreaming beside Yule in the fo'c'sle of the
Misty
. She wakes with the scent of him, salt water, fish blood and tobacco, the slightest base of grease and diesel, as though caught and lingering in a dream-cloud around her. There is that pain to the left of her abdomen again, both dull and sharp at once, radiating upward through her body, and she wonders if it has something to do with the onset of menopause, with the fallowing of her ovaries. The boat is bucking a bit with the waves, so she knows the wind is up, the rigging chiming above deck.

She fixes two bowls of instant oatmeal, the default breakfast each morning, neither of them too keen on the dehydrated egg powder. Out in the cockpit, Francis is dressed in a full flotation suit. Through the night the rising northerly wind cleared the sky of the high overcast cloud cover that settled in when the wind died yesterday, and the temperature has dropped dramatically.

“Cold night?” Miriam inquires, handing him his bowl. The sun has risen now over what they can still see of Oregon's coastal mountains and the volcanic ash hovering above them, the upper ridges and peaks forming a thin, obscured, blue-green band on the horizon. The day is just beginning to warm beneath the cold northerly bite. “You might want to put a couple sweaters on if you're going to stay up here. Did you get some sleep?”

He's noticed Miriam is one of those people who look a wreck in the morning, like all her energy has crawled deep down into the cave of her body and hasn't yet risen to the surface though she has risen from sleep. By noon she's one of the most radiant, pleasantly energetic women he's ever seen, of any age, which makes her morning appearance all the more surprising, almost disturbing, and intriguing, as it signifies for Francis—he doesn't consciously articulate this thought, it's more a visceral recognition—a complexity and a depth to Miriam, a ground-source to her character he hadn't first perceived and hadn't expected. It also signifies her need for coffee. “Take the wheel,” he says to her, just as she's about to answer his question, to start telling him about the dream still hovering at the fore of her mind, and he jumps down the five steps of the companionway and into the cabin.

He emerges ten minutes later—Miriam's morning fog already lifted, blown off too by the steely, crisp wind, shivers just setting in—with extra sweaters for her, and hot, black coffee. Now she's thinking of her life with Yule from beyond the trance of her dream. “My first husband and I used to fish these kinds of mornings, offshore of Winter Harbour, trolling for coho and springs this time of year. It's so clear, isn't it?”

Francis knows little of her life previous to the one he's seen her living at the Glass Globe, and hearing her say this he feels a mixture of shame for using her as a sounding board so much these past couple of days, for not reciprocating her curiosity; and understanding, because something in her seems too much like home to him, and the fact that she was once married to a fisherman, that she once fished herself, is a puzzle piece clicking into place.
“A northerly always feels like a fresh start, doesn't it, like the whole world's slate has been wiped clean,” he offers, trying not to let his emotions surface, wanting to hear more.

“If only that were true,” she says, taking a good sip of her coffee and smiling at him, the blue in her eyes seeming to darken and deepen against the backdrop of the day's light equally darkening and deepening the wind-waves as they begin to churn around them. “Yule always said there were two worlds, the one out here, and the one back there.” She tips her gaze toward the diminishing sight of land. “He maintained that if everyone was made to spend some time out at sea then the world would be changed for the better. That people would come to appreciate the magnitude of the natural world and so would learn to live with reverence, not narcissism and arrogance.”

“I think it's a lot more complicated than that.”

“Me too, but Yule was still in his twenties when he died.”

“Before the romantic death rattle sounds.”

“That, and he was—we were—profoundly in love.” As she says this that love is still almost present, not something lost to the sea nearly thirty years ago, but just carried off with her dream-cloud on the northerly wind. She has just lain, less than an hour ago, in the warm cave of his arms, his thick beard rough down her neck. “I don't think many people find that kind of love. That's why they can't believe things could be, are, as simple as Yule believed.”

“Don't you think that's a bit presumptuous Miriam, a bit condescending?” he asks her, irked by her Anna-esque certainty, her moral authority.

On any other day she would have agreed with him. With the disillusionment of two marriages of convenience behind her, and the love she and Yule shared hardened with time to a statuesque fact—something for her mind to dust off, polish and occasionally ponder from the perspective of observer, not creator—she would have asserted that no love is transcendent; that romantic love is, ultimately, delusion. But this morning, still held within her dream's gravity, she thinks differently. She thinks, yes, if only each person could spend a month at sea, or better yet a lifetime in love, real love, the kind she and Yule shared those days they fished alone together on the
Misty
; those nights they spent sleeping on the deck of the
Florence Five
, their little sloop, anchored somewhere in the Sea of Cortez in a secluded bay on one of its volcanic islands under a net of stars too numerous to contain.

“Let's hoist the sails,” she says, by way of avoiding his question, not wanting to get further into a conversation which will lead inevitably to disagreement; to waste such a splendid morning doing the old tête-à-tête clackity-clack down that dead-end track. So they do, working for an hour to establish the right sail pattern, Miriam's limited knowledge the only thing to guide them as they try various configurations before setting a double spinnaker, two genoas poled out, and the
Belle
assumes a natural downwind course and cuts across the swells at hull speed.

They lunch early on the remainder of yesterday's tuna, then Miriam takes the helm and lets Francis sleep away the afternoon, well through his three-hour allotment. She can see he's tired, and would be too, she concedes, if she were carrying the burden he's set upon himself. The wind courses across the water at a steady twenty knots, the waves stirred to a not-uncomfortable four feet, the
Belle
's high stern solid with the following seas, so the steady, easy sailing affords Miriam time to reflect, and consider.

A week ago, this time, she was preparing dinner for herself in the warmth and comfort of her well-arranged and well-appointed kitchen. Poseidon would have been most likely having his late-afternoon nap on the couch, or just waking to demand his dinner. She was probably considering what pretenses she might invent to seek out Francis, as in her at the time was a thirst for him that seemed unslakable. Now she's headed for the fortieth parallel, without a home, lost in her old love for her first husband, with Francis sleeping his torment off below deck, seeming less like a man to be desired than like a confused, frightened child. Which he is, it's becoming clear to her. A boy not much older than her eldest daughter, albeit inhabiting a man's body, a strong and perfectly balanced, beautiful body that could fire desire in the most frigid of women. And now she's on this boat and there's nothing to be done but make it through to Hawaii, to find this man Sunimoto, whom she's been assured by several old and good acquaintances does indeed live there, as they have been assured by their old and good acquaintances, whom have been assured… It's a mug's game, possibly, the entire thing.

Francis finally wakes just past 5 p.m., climbing to the cockpit with sleep still in his eyes. He rubs them heavily, then squints out off the port side, toward the eastern horizon. “It's gone,” he says, and she looks out too. She'd been so engrossed in her own thoughts all afternoon she had not noticed the last of the distant mountain peaks disappear from view. “I've got to say I never thought I'd see it. No land. Wow,” he says. “I'm not sure about his ideas on love Miriam, but I'll go with your husband on this. It's definitely a different world out here.”

Nightwatch

THE
NORTHERLY
PERSISTS, pushing them past the fortieth parallel. Through the night Francis holds to a downwind track, south-southwest, keeping the wind and waves astern so Miriam can sleep comfortably below. They'll keep to this course until they've crossed the thirty-fifth parallel, the horse latitudes, then they'll catch the northeast trade winds and set a direct course southwest to Hawaii.

Francis likes the night watch. It's eerie, the sound of the hull creaking and splashing through black water, the stars scattered from horizon to horizon against a sky lit by the light of no moon. It gives him shivers, the immensity of space surrounding and the cold north wind, so he lights the propane lantern in the cockpit to keep them both at bay. He wishes he had a pack of smokes, a bottle of rum… and thinks about opening one, perhaps a bottle of Scotch to warm the blood; thinks about what Miriam said of the flame being inside his head, his heart, not the whiskey, and concedes to himself her point. Perhaps with Jin Su things will be different. Perhaps they'll share a bottle of wine over dinner and it won't lead to a scathing fight, to him tearing out to the bar for more, to escape her suffocating reprisals, pushing the fire at his feet hard and fast down the dark winding highway, his anger like an anvil on the accelerator.

That's a world away to him now, those dark nights, and Francis thinks instead about what lies ahead of him, all things going with grace, the new lease on life the fishing float will provide at this journey's completion. He sets the autopilot and goes below to take the float from its tote stowed beneath the main salon bunk. Carrying it out to the cockpit, he studies it by the pale lantern light. Not a scratch. It's something he and Miriam don't talk about because it's ultimately beyond explanation or comprehension. Like crop circles. Or the tiny ball of light he and Anna saw once while lying in bed a few days after Willow was born. It flitted about above them, streaking across the room, then hovering, then again streaking on another angle until it suddenly disappeared. What to say of such a thing? Tinkerbell? Extra-dimensional crossover? Extraterrestrial visitor?