Float Plan - Trish Doller Page 0,15
not like that now. Keane Sullivan is not touching me. And I don’t have feelings for him. But I’m not so far away that I can’t hear the sleeping bag rustle when he shifts. It feels too close.
The floor creaks as I creep from my bed, comforter and pillow in hand. I climb up to the cockpit and make a new bed for myself on one of the benches. It’s not as comfortable as the V-berth, but the air is cool. The space around me feels wide and stars fill the sky. It takes no time at all for me to fall asleep.
off balance (6)
“Was I snoring?” Keane sits opposite me in the cockpit, dressed for the day in a pale blue T-shirt and shorts, his prosthesis in place. I sit up, and he hands me an egg-and-cheese sandwich wrapped in a paper towel.
“Thank you. No,” I say. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“You miss him.”
“Ben and I were supposed to take this trip together, and on the day we planned to depart, I just … left. But now…” I trail off, searching for the right words.
“Now you’re on a boat with a strange man who is neither a lover nor a friend, and it doesn’t feel right,” Keane offers.
“You’re very perceptive.”
He takes an enormous bite of his sandwich and holds up a finger while he chews. In the sunshine, his eyes are flecked with green and gold. He swallows. “I’m not here to cause you stress, Anna. If you’d feel more comfortable with me sleeping on deck, I’ll do that. I will operate as far in the background as you like.”
My eyes sting with tears, thinking about everything he has done for me in such a short time. “Why are you being so nice to me?”
His brows pull together as though the question is preposterous. “Why would I be anything else?”
I take a deep breath to keep the tears away, and nibble a bit of egg sticking out from my sandwich.
“Obviously, your situation is much more painful than mine,” Keane says. “But I do understand loss. For what it’s worth.” Before I can say anything, he stands. “After you’ve eaten, we can leave. Unless you’d like to go ashore and have a look around.”
“I’d rather keep going.”
With the sun rising behind me, I finish my sandwich. Keane makes coffee while I brush my teeth, get dressed, and braid my hair. Together we stow away our bedding and make the cabin secure for sailing.
“The wind will be on the nose today, so it could get a bit bumpy,” he says. “We can motor or attempt to sail.”
“Let’s sail.”
“That’s my girl.” The words are barely past his mouth when his neck goes red. “Just, um—a figure of speech.” He clears his throat. “I’ll get the anchor, shall I?”
In a matter of minutes, we pass from green water so clear you can see a bottom freckled with swimming fish and starfish as big as dinner plates, into a blue so deep it seems bottomless. Into the Tongue of the Ocean, a trench that stretches down more than a mile. The picture I snap of Chub Cay fading behind us is beautiful, but the reproduced color can’t even come close to the original.
“Does it ever get old?” I wonder aloud. “I mean, I can’t imagine growing tired of this blue, or the green around the islands. It’s so peaceful.”
“I reckon if you stay in one place too long, you might start taking it for granted,” Keane says. “But if you keep moving, everything holds its wonder. At least that’s been my experience.”
In this regard, he reminds me of Ben. Ever moving. Never waiting for trees to spring up and block the view of the forest. I feel a catch in my chest, but I breathe through it, not wanting to cry in front of Keane again. Or at all. Instead I think about what lies ahead. Nassau was never part of the original plan. It’s not on the map. But since the moment he stepped onto the boat, Keane has been keeping a running list of things I failed to bring—jack lines, radar reflector, a lock for the dinghy. We need to stop for supplies.
“Have you been to Nassau?”
“Once,” Keane says. “It’s a busier place than Bimini with the cruise ships coming and going. A bit less rustic. A lot more tourists. But we should be able to get everything we need.”
“I don’t want to stay long.”
“Understood,” he says. Then: “Do you come from a large