and swamp the boat. The swell crests at the top, then pushes the boat along with a forward zip. The boat zigzags in my inexpert hands. Several times, I mistake the direction I should turn the wheel, and overcorrect. I do not see how I will be able to keep the waves behind me. My hands become stiff with the wet and cold. The wheel shakes, and I put all my weight into my hands to keep it from spinning away from me. Less than an hour earlier I was on the beach at Smuttynose.
A wave breaks over the railing to my left. The water sloshes into the cockpit, rises to my ankles, and quickly drains away. The water is a shock on the ankles, like ice. The boat, I see, is turning into the swells. I fight the wheel, and then, oddly, there is no resistance at all, just a spinning as if in air. To my right, lightning rises from the water. Then we are lost again in a trough, and I am once more struggling with the steering apparatus. Rich has been gone only a minute, two minutes. There is another lightning skewer, closer this time, and I begin to have a new worry.
The jib snaps hard near the bow. It collapses and snaps again. I turn the wheel so as to head into the wind. The jib grows taut and steadies.
Adaline emerges from the forward hatch.
I rub the surface of the diving mask with my sleeve. The wheel gives, and I take hold of it again. I am not sure what I am seeing. There is the smoky blur of the Plexiglas hatch rising. I take the diving mask off and feel for my glasses in the pocket of my oil-skin. There is a half inch of water in the pocket. I put the glasses on, and it is as though I am looking through a prism. Objects bend and waver.
Adaline sits on the rim of the hatch and lifts her face to the sky, as if she were in a shower. The rain darkens and flattens her hair almost at once. She slips out of the hatch entirely and closes it. She slides off the cabin roof and onto the deck. She holds herself upright with a hand on a metal stay. She comes to the rail and peers out. I yell to her.
She has on a white blouse and a long dark skirt that soaks through immediately. I cannot see her face, but I can see the outline of her breasts and legs. I yell again. She doesn’t have a life vest on.
I shout down to Rich, but he doesn’t hear me. Even Thomas cannot hear with all the roar.
What is she doing out there? Is she crazy?
I feel then an anger, a sudden and irrational fury, for her carelessness, this drama. I do not want this woman to have entered our lives, to have touched Thomas or Billie, to have drawn them to her, to have distracted them. I do not want this woman to be up on deck. And most of all, I do not want to have to go to her. Instead, I want to shake her for her foolishness, for the theatrical way she carries herself, for her gold cross.
I let the wheel go, bend forward at the waist, and clutch at a stay. The wind flattens the oilskin against my body. I reach for a winch, the handholds in the teak railing. I pull myself forward. She is perhaps fifteen feet from me. My hood snaps off my head.
Adaline leans over the teak rail. Her hair falls in sheets, then blows upward from her head. I see then that she is sick.
I am three, four feet from where she is huddled at the railing. I shout her name.
The boat turns itself into the swells and heels. Adaline straightens and looks at me, an expression of surprise on her face. The jib swings hard, and makes a sharp report, like a shot. She holds out her hand. It seems to float in the air, suspended between the two of us.
I have since thought a great deal about one time when I shut a car door, gave it a push, and in the split second before it closed, I saw that Billie’s fingers were in the door, and it seemed to me in the bubble of time that it took for the door to complete its swing that I might have