The Year of Broken Glass (33 page)

Which is when I realize this is actually happening, the sun's heat too real, the scene before me too tangible. Willow is on his knees beside his emaciated father, Vericombe, Smith, Fairwin' and Figgs all gathered around them. Vericombe is discussing something with Smith while Fairwin' is trying to lift Willow, dragging his feet in defiance, from his father's side. Figgs is nodding up at Smith and grabbing hold of Ferris under his arms. Smith takes his legs and they start to carry him toward me, toward the cabin. “He's alive,” Fairwin' is saying to my son. “He's going to be all right Willow.”

Just like that I'm jolted from my dreaminess and a severe clarity, an extremity of the state I normally function in, sets upon my mind. This is my husband passing by me, hanging limp as a hammock in the arms of Figgs and Smith, unconscious, with the appearance of one who has only the slightest veil between himself and death. I watch him pass, wanting to lunge down and take him in my arms, but my limbs are heavy as though frozen still with the inertia of sleep. I look up to see Willow coming toward me, tears gushing, so I take him instead in my arms, looking to Fairwin' and Vericombe for something, anything.

“He's going to be fine,” Vericombe replies to my unspoken question. “He's severely dehydrated, but we're prepared for that. Smith is a doctor. My own personal doctor, the best I've ever known, and we've got everything we need to treat this.” Okay, I think. Okay. This man has been right so far, hasn't he, despite Figgs's doubts, despite my own? Ferris is here now, and whatever his state it's better than him being out there still, unprotected, uncared for, alone.

“It's going to be okay,” I tell my son, soothing him as best I can. “He's going to be okay. He's here now. We found him.”

SOME
WOMEN
HAVE the sea in them. They have its fierceness and its tranquility. Such a woman has its depth in her body and a wind always blows around her. It rises from her. Heat transfer. They're rare. I've been to every major port on this earth, where I've bedded more whores than I care to remember. It's on my soul, that sex, those nights black as base oil, the whiskey. But that's not what's brought me to this dilemma. It's two of the few women I've known with the sea in them, Miriam and Anna—how knowing the one has led to knowing the other, and now has led me to this choice I have to make.

I first met Miriam nearly a decade ago. I'd just come off the farm, out of rehab, and after a year or so on the tugs in the Fraser and the strait I ended up in French Creek on Vancouver Island, living in a small seaside Pan-Abode at the French Creek Cottages. A friend I'd made on the farm—the son of a fisherman, and a fisherman himself whenever he wasn't too far gone on the needle—got me a job helping his old man drop a new engine into his seiner. It turned out he was doing a major refit on the whole boat, and he kept me on most of the winter, through which I picked up work on other boats in the French Creek fleet whenever we were stalled up waiting for parts, or fabrications, or decisions to be made. By the time the seiner was finished I'd built up a reputation, and so my work was in enough demand that it seemed only sensible to stay on at the cottages, as I did for a number of years, until I got this job with Arnault. But that's getting ahead of myself a bit. First, Miriam.

I met her through her husband at the time, Horace Maynard. He'd bought a hand-built wooden ketch off a bush pilot from Port Hardy, a guy who'd spent the better part of his life building her only to sell her upon completion. His retirement plan I guess, building that boat, labouring passionately—you can see it in the detailing, the precision joinery—for years just to sell her off to the first rich man willing to pay the price. Such is our lot in life, brother… So Horace was that rich man, and Miriam his wife, a woman more suited to that bush pilot for certain, just as the boat was, but it was Horace who had the bucks, and so he had it all, including me to care for his boat and desire his wife like I had not desired a woman before in my life, and haven't since, until I met Anna.

Horace bought the boat, then named the
Tsulquate River
, for a song. He had no idea the calibre of boat he had acquired, and neither did the bush pilot, obviously. At any rate, he hired me to care for her, which seemed a fine side-job to me, a bit of wood polishing and light duty maintenance instead of the usual heavy wrenching I was being hired to do by the fishermen. First thing I did was have the boat moved from French Creek to Schooner Cove, a more suitable home for her. First thing Horace did, unfortunately, was rename her.

Every seaman knows if you want to keep a boat under good stars you don't do that. Of course Horace was no seaman, and he was insistent that the word
Tsulquate
was too awkward and meant nothing to him. So he renamed her
Princess Belle
, after Miriam's second daughter, Mirabelle, and it was at the re-christening that I first met his wife. Miriam, with the long legs and hair like a head full of sunlight. She wore a white sleeveless dress with little purple flowers stitched across it. Let me be clear, I rarely if ever remember such details. I've been a man mostly driven by my own darkness and the sea-wind inside me, and I've not often taken notice of a woman in my life.

Alone is how I've preferred to be, with the sea. I've known men who've tried to have both and I've seen nothing but divisiveness and sorrow come of it. I don't claim to be a man of wisdom, but if the sea has taught me one thing it's this: of all that a man desires he can have and hold only a precious small amount, and even that is ephemeral and always under threat of being lost in the ever-coming storm. It may be different for those who live their lives on land, relatively safe and stable as it is, but out here the limits are well set, and no one survives well who doesn't live within them. So I'd forgone the comfort and love of women for the sea, and it was for the first time at that christening that I felt what it might be like to be in love, or want to be in love, with a woman.

Perhaps it was because I'd been off the deep sea for years by that point, two on the farm, one on the tugs and one in French Creek, or perhaps it was that I was ageing and it's only natural to find someone who might care for you, be there for you, in those years when caring for yourself becomes a difficulty. Maybe I had a sense the days I would still be capable of going to sea were numbered, that eventually the sea inside a woman like Miriam would be the closest I would be able to come. At any rate, I lost myself to her as I watched her break the bottle over the bowsprit, and I've not been the same man since.

It's been one thing for me to feel as I have. It's another to do something about those feelings. What I did with Miriam those first few years was to remain in French Creek, connected to her through her husband's boat, which I cared for as if it were my own. Knowing the curse brought upon it with its re-christening, and that this woman whom I loved might someday sail out onto the open ocean with her clueless husband at the helm, meant the
Princess Belle
needed to be as seaworthy as she could be to see them through.

It was quite some time after Horace's death that I finally made my feelings known to her. Another thing I've learned at sea is that timing really is everything. It means the difference between taking the right wave broadside when turning in the midst of a storm, or taking the wrong one on the stern-quarter. It's the split seconds in life that often make the difference. In this case I was months if not years off, and I can only say again it must have been my years on land that handicapped me. For me there's no clarity when the day-to-day is spent in too close a proximity to too many other people.

And so when Miriam asked me to take her up to Chatterbox Falls on the boat, I misread her. To make a long story short, she was paying her final respects to her husband while I was anticipating romance. It's hard to believe when one feels so strongly for another that they can't or don't feel the same way. And perhaps she would have come to it, given time, but while she was carrying an urn of her husband's ashes on that trip, intent on spreading them below the falls, I was carrying the expectation, as I've said, of a romantic voyage. The disparity of the two eventually led to my being replaced as caretaker of the
Princess Belle
, though in the gracious way Miriam operates it came in the way of a job offer from her husband's old friend Arnault Vericombe, and I've worked happily for him the four years since. In that time, living here aboard the
Naacal Warrior
, I've come to accept the sea as my rightful bride, and I've thought less and less of Miriam and of women in general, forgoing even my usual excursions to brothels, learning instead to be at peace with my sobriety and my solitude. Living that first truth of the sea, keeping only what I need—my clothes, my glasses, my books and my tools—here with me.

Setting out on this crossing in search of Miriam has been enough to blow me wide open, though. And then a day into it, Anna. Anna with her all-salt-and-tears body. Her angry eyes and mother's wrists, elegant and strong. I'd give anything for a taste of her, while all the while she thinks of nothing but her husband. I've had half a mind to sabotage the main just to strand us out here, but I'm too proud of my work to do that. If there's one thing I'm not, it's a lousy engineer. No ship I've ever worked on has not made its crossing soundly on account of mechanical failure and I can't, despite myself, bring myself to tarnish that record. At any rate, he's here now, contrary to what I'd planned for or expected, and I now have a much bigger decision to make.

This cellphone I'm holding in my hand was given to me a year ago by Jeremy Gibbon. I first met him also through Horace. Shortly after the re-christening of the boat he invited me to the Glass Globe to share Christmas with his family. It's true Horace and I took an instant liking to each other. Of the books I keep, the works of Herman Melville are prominent, not only for their sheer volume, but for their importance to me. Once a whaler, always a whaler, I suppose. Herman said that friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is the only truth. That's how it was with Horace and I, despite the fact that he was a piss-poor excuse for a seaman and I was jealous of both his boat and his woman. Still, I would have turned down the invitation if it weren't for my even stronger feelings for Miriam and my inability to deny myself the opportunity to be around her. So I went for three days and nights and that's where I met Jeremy.

He was a scrawny little schoolboy then. He must have been no more than twenty-one. Miriam's daughter, Mirabelle, had met him at school in Montreal and they'd been dating for a number of years by then, I think. Long enough that he was spending the holidays there with her family instead of with his own, though I've since learned that his own isn't much of a family at all as far as holiday get-togethers go. He's the only child of two American foreign aid diplomats and he spent his childhood moving from one poor, war-torn region of the world to the next. By the time he began his secondary studies at McGill—Montreal being the closest thing he has to a home city as his parents keep a rural farmhouse in the Gatineau Hills—he'd studied at ten different international schools, having been moved almost once a year throughout his whole childhood, quite often from father to mother and back to father, pinballing between his parents' different postings, living in hotels or guarded rentals, even at times in refugee camps. As he tells it, his longest stint in one place before he moved as a young man to Montreal was inside an armoured compound in Kigali, Rwanda, where his parents were given a rare posting together for two years following the genocide.

After he completed his studies at McGill, Jeremy joined the Peace Corps and spent a number of years living in East Africa. As I understand it, the distance eventually put an end to his relationship with Mirabelle, so you can imagine my surprise when Arnault came down to the boat a couple of years ago, Jeremy Gibbon in tow. Freshly shaven, in clean blue khakis and a button-up shirt, I almost didn't recognize him, though I've yet to forget a face. He'd put on plenty of pounds since I'd last seen him that Christmas many years past, and he'd acquired a businessman-like air he'd not had back then either. As it turns out, after his time in Africa Jeremy did an MBA at Stanford, and his visit with Arnault was precipitated by his need for venture capital investors.