The weight of water - Anita Shreve [91]
I turn away from him. “How high are those waves?” I ask, pointing.
“High,” he says. “You don’t want to know. OK, now, take the wheel.”
I turn and put my hands on wooden spokes at ten and two o’clock. Immediately the wheel spins out of my control, flapping against the palms of my hands.
“You have to hang on, Jean.”
“I can’t do this,” I say.
“Yes, you can.”
I take hold of the wheel again and brace my legs against the cockpit floor. The rain bites my cheeks and eyelids.
“Here, put this on,” he says.
He bends toward me with a diving mask, and in the small shelter of our hoods I realize we do not have to shout. “Rich, where did you meet Adaline?” I ask.
He looks confused. “The Poets and Prose dinner,” he says. “I thought you knew that. Thomas was there. You couldn’t go.”
“I couldn’t get a babysitter. Why was Adaline there?”
“Bank of Boston was a sponsor. She went as a representative.”
Rich slips my hood from my hair, and I think it must be that gesture, the odd tenderness of that gesture, or perhaps it is the fitting of the mask, as you might do for a child, but he bends and kisses my wet mouth. Once, quickly. There is a sudden hard ache inside me.
He lowers the mask onto my face. When I have adjusted it and opened my eyes, he already has his back to me and is headed for the cabin.
I think it will be impossible to do as Rich has asked. I cannot control the wheel without using both hands, so I have to steer with my neck craned to see behind the stern. The boat falls into a trough, and I think the wall of water will spill upon me 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,