that they would be boarding for health screening once the quarantine expired.
“We can also assist with instructions for a burial at sea.”
For days, the world had shrunk to the size of their vessel, but minutely it began to expand again, as though with the short, tight breaths of fresh sea air that Sarah gulped above deck. She felt paper-thin, one-dimensional, strained even by this effort to inhale, exhale, persist. But she kept moving forward mechanically, knowing that she couldn’t afford to do anything else. Their plan was set; it was already in motion. She plotted the course to the nearest anchorage that would take less than half a day’s sail. She couldn’t bear to stay where they were any longer, even if she was comforted by the sight of the other boats, and the strength of the Wi-Fi signals being beamed out, she guessed, from Georgetown.
In Owen’s inbox, there was a message forwarded from Rachel Levinson’s attorneys, sent several days earlier. She clicked on it and began reading. The masts of distant boats seemed to recede towards the shore as she read the note, while Buona Fortuna rocked in the swells as though in time with the Earth’s beating pulse. Outside, the sunlight blazed the ocean into a mirror.
Noah came up behind her, a bounce in his step, already wearing his mask and gloves without prompting. He watched her with his solemn stare, hair mussed from sleep into a tangled, golden halo. He was a human animal, a living miracle, a normal yet extraordinary boy. She realized she only feared death because it would mean leaving her son entirely on his own. And the thought of Noah being alone, of any child being alone, once again summoned a shivery clamminess beneath her clothes, acid flares of warning from her clenched stomach. Swallowing, she prayed the words she had drilled into Noah would bring him to safety if the worst happened, that some impression of her love would endure in his memory. She closed the computer.
“What are you doing, Mommy?” he asked as she pivoted from the laptop to the chart table.
She pulled out the ship’s log and glanced back over the record of their journey, all the dates and times, the waypoints and wind speeds, every nautical mile that had brought them with great effort and expense to exactly where they were. “We’re going to turn around,” said Sarah.
Owen,
I never intended to stay silent for so long. Only for as long as all the time you took from me. Or so I planned, in my blacker moods. But I may not have the time. I’m in the hospital with an elevated temperature that I fear is getting worse. My neighbour is sick with ARAMIS, and just last week I was over there for coffee.
The worst isn’t that you betrayed me. Or even that I thought I knew you but didn’t. (Though it’s true, that hurts.) The worst was the initiation into a new kind of life, one with intimate knowledge of how easily we can betray one another. And ourselves.
Yet that glimpse of chaos was what gave me the courage to have Henry. If everything is unknown, then doubt is a reasonable response. Sometimes waiting for certainty means you’ll be waiting forever.
There are so many things I’ve wanted to tell you since he was born. Parenthood is a maelstrom: intense, unseemly. It cracks you open. I hope something does that for you, Owen.
And the trust was a generous idea. Though I did laugh out loud when I heard that’s what you were giving us. Trust. I know the irony won’t be lost on you.
But more than the trust, Henry needs a family should anything happen to me. Somehow I know, by asking, that you will make sure of this. So, perhaps not all certainty is gone, after all. Maybe not all is lost between us.
When we loved, we were our best. We were infinite.
Rachel
ELLIOT
DECEMBER 2020
On his way back to the city, Elliot tried to think of forty-six names. John, Jane, Rebecca, Jason, Patrick, Lisa. A wet snow began to fall, perfect crystals plummeting into slush. Donovan, Gabriel, Sabrina, Martin, Amber, Corey. He tried to keep up a rhythm in time with the wipers. Francis, swish, Nick, swish, Allie, swish, swish, swish. It was impossible to think of so many names, let alone forty-six real people behind them. The scale of the thing was preposterous. Then his thoughts returned to the roll call of everyone he had lost to