crying. You never know quite where the depressed person is. I mean, you can’t anticipate where she is going to be next.
Sometimes I’d just ask outright. I’d be in the bedroom, dressing for work, Juliet motionless in bed. She seemed awake, but not close to getting up. Meanwhile sunlight would be streaming in around the edges of the blackout curtains. I was worried she wouldn’t be able to take care of the kids. Should I stay home? I’d wonder. Should I call my mother? Ask her to come help us for a while? Was she going to hurt herself? I tried asking these questions in ways that wouldn’t offend her.
Hey, Juliet, I’d say. Are “the mulligrubs” any better today?
Looks like you’re in “the doldrums” again, Juliet.
Got “the mopes” today, honey?
The grumbles?
The blues?
One day she was like, Michael, I’m going to scream if you use one more euphemism.
So I did. I shut up. I mean, I really shut up.
* * *
—
When they went below, I was exponentially alone. As I watched the sea, I could see him move around the cabin, getting Sybil into bed. Stepping in and out of the light.
I’m going to turn off the cabin lights now, Juliet, he called up softly. It’s easier to see on deck without them.
Then, darkness. I held my breath in the interval, in which I saw nothing at all. Gradually I could make out the lace of foam on the sea swells, the moonlight being passed from wave to wave, and the boat herself, sails drawing, her deck white as china, her flags and her flywheels and her telltales streaming. For all the improbability of what she was doing, slicing across the sea, she was very quiet. I held fast to the wheel.
Burua. That was the right word. That’s exactly the right word. Burua.
There were so many kinds of winds. Ernesto had told me that the Guna name each one. Sagir burua comes from the Chagres River. And dii burua. That is the wind that blows just before it rains.
And this, I asked Ernesto in my mind, what’s the name of this wind? It blew almost behind us, at our port quarter. The following swells lifted Juliet first from the stern, then beam, then forepeak, but without any splashing, no hard setting down, just a shudder, a sense that a force had passed underneath. Above, the sky held several humped clouds, which wandered, balloon-like, passive. Clouds were the cows of the sky, it seemed to me, remarkable only in their size, their bellies full of moonlight. As a child, in school, we tied our names and addresses to the string of helium balloons. We stood in a field and released them. Whoever’s got the farthest would get a prize. I remember watching mine rise higher and higher until I could no longer tell if I was seeing it or imagining it. They had to call me inside.
When I was a kid, my mother’s best friend, Louise, was a constant in my daily life. Her first husband died when they were very young, and by the time she hooked up with us, she still lived in their house by herself, no kids, making dark jokes about her bad luck. I could see into Louise’s living room from my bedroom window. I could see the back of her head and the book she was reading—on the rare occasions she wasn’t at our house, that is. I often wished she and her dead husband had hurried up and had a little girl. Because that girl would have been my best friend. We could have sent messages across on a clothesline. We could have ridden our down-market bikes up and down Morry Road, which dead-ended in a pile of cedar chips between the woods and our house. I liked Louise. I could see why she didn’t want to jump into marriage again with just anybody. She was a big-boned woman, quiet except for when she laughed, which was frequently. She and my mother laughed all the time. My mother wasn’t very funny. It was as if my mother possessed a kind