The Year of Broken Glass (26 page)

Now I'm wishing I'd said yes to Ferris. To his need to buy that fishing boat and all that it's brought us. To his need to stop fighting the world and instead build something he believes in within it. Because I can see now that's what he's wanted to do. To build a life that will be lasting for us, us and our son, something solid and stable, something with the prospect of longevity regardless of how the world changes or crumbles around us.

We've just rounded the southern tip of Vancouver Island and we're heading up Juan de Fuca Strait. I can see the odd bright light on the shore where Victoria once burnt its electric fire deep into the night. They're starting to rebuild already, crews working through the night under the light of glaring generator-powered halogens.

When he bought the boat, Ferris thought it would be our ticket out. A source of making a living somewhere further north, away from the city. Cortes Island, Malcolm Island or Echo Bay. Possibly even Haida Gwaii. Maybe Ferris was right. Is right. There's no stopping it. Them. Which is the same thing, I think, though some people like to speak as though it were otherwise. As if we're all just being driven by the momentous thrust of technology. The technology we design and build and implement. The machines we drive into and across and over the earth.

When I find you Francis Wichbaun I'm going to start saying yes. To leaving together. To building together. To being together. I'm going to leave the fight to those who have nowhere better to go to. Because I do. With you. For better or for worse.
The next line's unthinkable, so I leave it unsaid, for now, with the million other things still unspoken. I flick my butt into the wake and watch it blink out when it hits the water. Then I head back in, calmed, to offer Fairwin' an apology. Ready to accept my decision to be here on this boat with these men on this journey. Ready to take on whatever comes next with as much courage as I can muster. With the kind of courage Ferris would have if he were here. The kind I know he has now, wherever he is out on this crazy sea.

The Variables

WITHOUT
THE
GLASS float or money, they motored out of Hilo Bay, both uplifted, despite all that had transpired, by the
Princess Belle
being still tied to the dock awaiting them. Uncertain what approach to take, they cruised northwest up the island shorelines, past Maui, for three hundred miles. They felt there was safety amongst the number of boats out on the water—many still shuttling people away from the calamity caused by the eruptions and the lahars—and both feared returning to land for the possibility of being found. Still, for two days they watched the skies instinctually, their ears keen to the possible
wump wump wump
of approaching helicopter blades, until their trepidation eased and they joined in line with the armada of boats waiting in Nawiliwili Harbour on the island of Kauai to refuel. With tanks topped up they set a course to magnetic north, hoisting the sails to take the trade winds abeam, and settled in again to the rhythm of the sea.

It's counterintuitive, under normal circumstances, to feel a sense of relief when watching from a boat's deck as the last sight of land slips from view, but Miriam and Francis shared a loosening sigh when they lost sight of the Hawaiian Islands over the southern horizon, putting the fear and failure of that place behind, leaving them to themselves—the now-familiar world of living and sailing together on the
Belle
—and the long journey home.

•

Their night in the cave below Rainbow Falls works like a harrow in both their minds. Miriam had known she desired him, but that night she'd experienced what she hadn't expected: love. The kind she'd had with Yule when she was young. A love so entirely clear it was like the cadence of the moon's tides moving through their bodies in the dark of the nowhere and everywhere they were together, a place their union took them outside, beside, space and time, a portal to something perfect and pristine both beyond and within this world otherwise altered. It's upon this otherworldy ground that any and every true marriage—consecrated or not before any god or church or state or otherwise—is founded. And it is upon it also that these marriages flourish or founder.

It's what has kept Francis and Anna together, ultimately, and it is also what has torn them apart—because it is ground too sacred to keep to for us despoilers, us little rogue beings. We want it like a drunk wants a drink, or a junkie a fix, always after the bliss of that first kiss, indescribably sweet, the taste we carry hauntingly on our tongues. Some addicts will spend their life's last cent, will submit the last of their body's ability to survive, to re-attain what they experienced when the heroin first shot like the cool breath of god across their brain, a cheap synthetic facsimile of the floodwaters true lovers swim together. Similarly, some lovers will fuck each other to the other side of love to swim or drown again, for even the slightest taste of that elixir, then try to wring it from each other in fits of rage and violence until one or the other or both lie breathless by the other's hand. It's completely beyond the realm of the rational.

For Francis, the waiting has required more faith than he has had the capacity for. His first few years with Anna were woven together by the occasional ascension back to that ground, and so it was easy to keep the rope that bound them together taut. Of course they fought, and fought more and more as their love slipped into routine, unsuccessfully scaling the heights of the walls their day-to-day lives built between them. But then there would occur a re-infusion, a reconnection, a re-journeying to that place Miriam and Francis have now shared. And so they would start afresh, falling back with time into a mundane, profane familiarity closing in on them, claustrophobic, until they would begin to turn acrimonious toward each other, fucking almost aggressively to fight the feared, inevitable spiritual and sexual ennui, until they would somehow push past it, back to that place of rejuvenation and replenishment.

But since Willow's birth, they have not been back there. Anna has understood this, due much to her mother's counsel through the years, as a not-uncommon state for those in early to mid-parenthood, and so she has held to her memory of what she and Francis once shared, and to her love for the child they do share, and though their love's estrangement has lasted much longer than she'd expected—on account of Francis's straying into his other life with Jin Su—Anna has not thought more than fleetingly of stepping from their marriage.

Without any sibling or close parent as confidant, for many years it was Anna who acted as both best friend and counsel in times of trouble for Francis. But when the afterglow of Willow's birth and infant year diminished, and he bought the boat despite her cautioning and reservations, she became more and more his adversary, until he lost sight of what she'd once been to him, of what they'd once shared, of the love they'd achieved. He began to doubt in his mind that it was ever anything other than the desire-induced hallucinations of the young, naive and mutually solipsistic.

But what occurred with Miriam in the cave has reawakened him just as it has reawakened her. To love's potential, to its true essence. And to the love each still has for the one with whom they first attained it. Which has cast them both into a state of divergent clarity and confusion, him longing for Anna and her for Yule as they both simultaneously desire each other. They sailed north of Hawaii for eight days without either of them properly noticing time's passage. Countless occasions they set the autopilot and radar alarm and ducked below deck to Miriam's bunk, or made love in the hot sun on the smooth teak capping the cabin roof. They fucked each other raw trying to get back there, to that precipice, and it wasn't until the wind died five days ago that they sobered up and it set in for each that what they'd found in the cave had somehow been given by some force beyond their control—just as the wind was, and now was not, filling the
Belle
's sails—and it was not again to be found together, no matter the desires they submitted to or efforts they made together to make it so.

•

The horse latitudes. The calms of Cancer. The variables. On the ninth day from Hawaii they passed into that zone again, multifariously named, where the cold recirculating winds of the Hadley and Ferrel cells converge in the tropopause and sink, creating two hundred miles or so of variably light to calm winds; a place of pause amidst the massive machine of the world's ever-churning winds. For anyone sailing on the conveyor-belt coursing of the trades it comes as a sudden jolt to the system, as though some god has flicked a massive reset switch or cut the wire that sends the winds their ever-present power. Everything changed for Francis and Miriam the day they crossed over, though it wasn't the wind's recession exclusively that put a tether on their mutual obsession, but rather two things that happened concurrently.

The night the wind subsided Francis was at the wheel while Miriam slept in her stateroom below. Exhausted as he was from the upheaval and turmoil of the past month coupled with their insatiable lovemaking as of late, Francis had fallen asleep in the cockpit again inside a cloud-covered night so black keeping watch was staring into an immediate, oppressive abyss. He woke up to the sound of the sails flapping in the diminishing wind, the boat bobbing on the waves, making no headway. So he lowered the sails and started the diesel, which woke up Miriam for a moment as it sputtered and rumbled, warming to its duty, then sung her with its vibration back into sleep.

For a few hours Francis motored northward, kept awake by the thrumming diesel, until it sputtered and choked and abruptly died. This time Miriam was deep into her dreams, and she did not wake. Francis went below and pulled up the floorboards to access the engine room. He found water in the primary fuel filter when he drained it off, and it was black with dirt and grime when he removed it from its housing. He replaced it, then unscrewed the secondary filter from the block. It too was full of water, so he replaced it and crossed his fingers.

By the time he began trying to restart the main engine Miriam was coming out of her dream, and the undesirable sound of the starter labouring to no avail brought her back to the boat from the one she'd been on with Yule in the Sea of Cortez, drifting on that bright turquoise blue. She felt a great pain in the left side of her abdomen again, the one she'd been feeling many mornings over the past month, and she became overwhelmed by mild, retching convulsions. Just as she heaved up a pool of bilious blood onto her pillow, the main engine surged to life. Francis revved it up full throttle to try to blow any air, water or gunk out of the head, and for a time it roared in the middle of the cabin, belts whirring. Miriam wiped her mouth clean, removed the soiled pillowcase from its pillow, and climbed from bed, holding her searing and tender ache with both hands. Then she collapsed to the floor, again spitting up blood into the pillowcase, as the main engine's revs dove, went quiet, then heaved, heaved again, and quit.

The Calms of Cancer

ON
ACCOUNT
OF their mutual, twofold ignorance, the tragic irony of
the calms of Cancer
is lost on Miriam and Francis both. Firstly, though they have each often heard the more common
horse latitudes
, and have their own vague ideas of why it is or may have been termed as such, neither has heard the thin windless region of the northern hemisphere they've entered referred to as
the calms of Cancer
—as opposed to
the calms of Capricorn
, south of the equator. Their other ignorance is of far greater consequence and is why the nature of the irony is tragic.

The first time Miriam fell into one of her depressions, half her lifetime ago, when Yule was still alive and Esther was still a breastfeeding infant, it had been symptomatic of her contracting the Epstein-Barr virus. Because both her daughter and husband didn't get sick themselves, and because her physician mistook her lethargy, depression and general ill-health as symptomatic of Seasonal Affective Disorder—sending her home with a bottle of little blue pills and a suggestion to return to Mexico as soon as possible—it went undiagnosed.

In oncology and haematology it's becoming widely understood that viruses can trigger or lead to various forms of cancer. With Epstein-Barr, that is several of the eighty some-odd types of indolent, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, one of which has been in Miriam's blood for nearly twenty years, at times flaring inside her so that she's gone back into the lethargic, depressive state she experienced when first contracting Epstein-Barr.

The pains she's been feeling in her abdomen with waxing and waning intensity for the past year have been caused by the swollen, hardened lymph nodes in her para-aortic and spleen regions, and more recently by the deterioration and disintegration of her spleen organ. If they were anywhere near a hospital she would be rushed to ultrasound and doctors would detect an extreme amount of fluid inside her abdomen. Her cascading blood pressure would indicate the fluid to be blood and an emergency laparoscopy would be performed. In the operating room, the surgeon would lift a mushy ball of flesh, her disintegrated spleen, from her abdomen. They would vacuum out the excess fluid, suture her and keep her in the hospital for a week or so on IV-drip antibiotics while they monitored her recovery and ran a battery of tests on her blood and body. They would find she was suffering from indolent lymphoma, stage two, possibly three, and they would send her home with a watch-and-wait protocol, as little else can yet be done by allopathic medicine for her illness. She would take it upon herself, because she is a fighter, not a flighter, to use her money to seek out alternative treatments throughout the world, and she would live many more years, in relative health, with an ever-renewing sense of happiness and spiritual contentment, knowing she was living on stolen time having come so close to death, all the more grateful for each blessed day she'd been given.