© Lee Kottner 2004
Chapter 1: Down to the Sea
The magicians believed in causative action at a distance . . . Newton called it gravity. The magicians liked to call it Love.
–John Crowley, Ægypt
Neo York, Early Spring, After Moonfall
Nicol:
Falling, I jerk myself awake in a cold sweat and then can’t remember why. For a minute, I just lie in bed, scrubbing my eyes and the stubble on my face, and try to get my heart to slow down and figure out why a plain old dream about falling should leave me so spooked after I wake up. Then the dream comes back to me.
It comes in little bits and pieces at first: a tower, the ocean, surf and rocks, something with huge white wings. Someone I know, flying.
No. Not flying. Jumping off the tower. Jesse, jumping off the tower, into the ocean. Onto the rocks. Falling. And I can’t stop her. My heart bangs painfully in my chest again.
I know it’s just a dream, but it’s the kind that’s so real that you just have to make sure nothing like it has actually happened. And I can’t. But I make a grab for the phone and start to punch numbers before I remember that. The last time I tried to call Jesse was . . . a long time ago. The number belongs to somebody else now. There’s no current listing for Jesse MacLeod.
I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling for a while. It’s a bright morning and my room’s full of sunlight, but everything feels just a little bit skewed and unreal and wrong. The trouble is, you never know with dreams like this. Once, I dreamed a friend of mine had been swept away in a tornado, and I called him all the way from my vacation in Ireland to discover he’d just gotten a job in Kansas City and would be gone before I got back to say goodbye.
I don’t know where Jesse is. I don’t know how to find her. I don’t even know where to begin to look. And suddenly, I wonder what I’ve been thinking, letting her go without a struggle.
I get out of bed, get dressed, and walk in a hurry over to her loft.
There’s no answer to Jesse’s buzzer, but I didn’t expect one. I get in the elevator and ride up anyway to the last stop. Jesse’s place was on the top floor of this old industrial building in what used to be factory space, and there’s only the accordion gate in front of the open eighth floor shaft. I’d been helping her renovate the loft off and on since she moved in two winters ago and would gladly have put in a door for her. It’s not much of a job, hanging a door. But last time I offered, she just smiled and said no. She’s never liked heights, so it made me wonder what she was flirting with. I think about the dream that’s still too fresh in my mind and shudder.
My heart starts to pound as the elevator comes up on her floor. I’m starting to wonder how much of this was my fault. There was a time in my life when I wasn’t a real good friend to anybody, and sometimes I’m still not sure if I know how to do it right. It’s not like Jess to ignore her e-mail and not return phone calls, not for as long as she has. Was doing that with everyone, or just me? Jess and I have been out of touch for too long; if it’s her choice I’ll respect that, but I need to know why for my own peace of mind.
At least, I tell myself that’s why I’m here. That dream was just a hint, wasn’t it?
When the elevator stops in the foyer of her loft, I can see through the gate that her place is empty. Sometimes you just know that a place is deserted and not just temporarily unoccupied. This confirms what I already knew.
I pull the gate back and walk out across the wood floor, leaving tracks in the thick film of dust that’s settled on the planks. She’s been gone longer than I thought. The pit of my stomach feels hollow all of a sudden.
Where’s she gone? Why didn’t she tell me?
She’s even left her cell phone on the table. I pick it up, brush off the dust, and flip it open: dead as a stone. Flipping it open and shut idly, I sit down on the windowsill feeling lonely and sad and kind of sick, as though I were somehow responsible for her leaving. I guess that’s a feeling that comes back too easy once you’ve messed up someone else’s life. Jesse going off like this brings back bad memories. It’s too much like Carrie leaving, back in Colorado, and that was my fault. I can’t help wondering what I’ve done this time to make someone want to disappear out of my life with no explanation or fare-thee-well. Years later, I understand why Carrie did what she did, but I can’t figure out why Jesse would do the same thing now. I like to think I’ve learned something in the last few decades besides how to work with my hands.
But maybe I haven’t. I spend a while sitting on the sill looking at the loft and thinking about what’s been going on with us since Moonfall. Not much, recently. I’ve been too busy wor—no, I’ve been busy working, but not too busy. That’s a lousy excuse. Nobody’s that busy anymore. I don’t really know why I haven’t tried harder to see Jess. It’s only partially because she’s been hard to get hold of. Maybe I’ve been afraid of what I thought was growing between us. Afraid I might blow it as I have so many times before, one way or another. Afraid of doing some real damage the way I’ve done in the past.
So I’ve been doing what most guys do when we’re afraid of something: throwing myself into work. Like that’s going to keep me warm at night. You’d think I’d have learned that by now, all the screwing up I’ve done. But it’s easier to deal with things than with people, and if you’re really good at something, it can be real seductive, especially if this is your first chance to do work you love, and it is for me.
I’ve been a city planner and a builder and quit both to be a housing activist when I got sick of the red tape and greed involved in managing real estate in this city. At least until Moonfall. Now, everything’s changed, and I’m doing all three.
Now, I wake up in the middle of the night crazy to get something I’d been dreaming down on paper because it was the perfect thing to make this building or that neighborhood plan perfect. Sometimes, things come into my head that I never would have imagined in a million years, things that are really inspired, not just plans, but building techniques, how to use new materials or how to use old ones in new ways. Looking back, I have to think somebody was putting those ideas there, not just in my head, but in everybody’s. In a couple of months, we had plans for all of New York, not just Manhattan, but across the rivers as well. That’s an impossibly short time for the scale we were working on. It’s an impossibly short time for even a major building. But we had drawings for new infrastructure as well as buildings and communities.
Even more amazing is that it’s working out pretty much the way we planned it. While we were planning, the construction crews were already busy clearing sites, hiring people, training them, feeding them, helping them house themselves. Little co-ops, kind of like my old squat, sprang up in no time. We work hard, but there aren’t any time clocks. Nobody punches in or punches out. Nobody stands around doing nothing, but we always have time to do things we love that aren’t work. If there’s nothing to do because of weather or scheduling, you go home. If only part of the crew’s needed, the rest take the day off. If you have things of your own to do that are important, you do them and then come to work when you can. Work’s more like play, because we’re doing something we love. The pace is urgent but not pressured, and the work goes more smoothly and quickly than any job I was ever on before Moonfall.
The best thing—the best—isn’t the ideas, or the work, or the cooperation, or the synergy, or any of that. It’s the buildings. The City. It’s like nothing ever built before. It’s not the height or size, either, like it was before, when we built to intimidate and show off, though we’ve still got some skyscrapers and a skyline that can’t be beat. It’s the city’s beauty. The beauty of each building and the harmony of the whole and the fact that it’s a city built for people, with plazas and parks and markets, benches and steps and shade, sculpture and fountains and playgrounds, for street life and night life. People smile, living here now. They say hello, stop and pass the time. It’s a home they’ve helped design and build. It’s quieter, slower. Safe, but with an edge of electricity and life because things till happen here. Boy, do they happen. Just not like they used to.
While they were happening, I still managed to get a boat built, something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a 25-foot ketch called the Dharma Bum, and I built it at the old Brooklyn Navy Yard with a couple of friends and a master boat-builder who taught me the moves as we went. It only took a couple of seasons, in fact, in between making plans and helping with the general citywide construction and fixing up my own place.
So there’s really no reason I couldn’t have made time for Jesse. I had time for a lot of other things and people.
She’s the only person I’ve let slip away from me like this, which is funny because for a while, I was afraid I’d lost her in Moonfall, too. I still don’t know how she found me after the quake. She’d been up at Woods Hole when it hit, and she stayed up there for about a week afterwards, but comsats and relay towers were offline so we couldn’t get in touch with each other. By the time she made her way back here, I’d headed down to Soho, where the cast iron buildings were a little sturdier. I guess she found someone in my old neighborhood who knew where I was, because I came home from inspecting buildings uptown and found her sitting on the steps of the new building I was squatting in. She had her bag and her notebook and a the thumb drive she always carried, and that was all her worldly goods. The hug she gave me was pretty fierce, and I guess the one I gave her back was, too.
“You okay?” we said simultaneously and then cracked up.
“I saw your place, in the middle of the block—amazing.”
“Yeah, kind of miraculous that it’s the only one standing,” I said. “What about yours?”
She shrugged, trying to be cool, but I could see her fighting back tears. “Bare beach. All of Seagate is. We couldn’t even get near it in the cab. Nothing but dunes. The guy was nice enough to wait for me, though.”
“How did you get back, anyway? The airports are still closed.”
“Caught the train to Bridgeport and took the ferry to Port Jeff. Hitchhiked from there. Most of Brooklyn and Queens were okay. The cabbie let me off at the Brooklyn Bridge after we left Bensonhurst. I walked over and up from there. Coney Island’s gone, all the Boardwalk, the Aquarium, everything. And Blues is gone.” The Blues was her blue-point Siamese cat. That hurt her more than anything else, I think, to lose Blues. “And downtown—must have been one hell of a wave. I saw it on the news, but . . .”
“Yeah, you kind of had to be here.” I hugged her again, remembering, so glad to see her that I thought I’d explode, and made her come upstairs.
She stayed with me for a while, and even then I could see how shell-shocked she was, seeing her adopted hometown in ruins. She was edgy and scared, and jumped at noises and I hated to leave her alone. When I was off with the construction crews, I don’t know what she did, but she was usually in the loft when I came back. She didn’t eat much and didn’t sleep well. I just didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe that’s why I’ve stayed away.
One night, I woke up to these soft, weird sounds and wandered out of my bedroom to see Jesse sitting on the couch with her notebook on her bare knees, the sounds coming out of its speaker and fractal patterns blooming on the screen. “Orcas,” Jesse said, seeing me standing there in my underwear, looking confused. “I can’t figure out what they mean.” Even then, I realize, she sounded scared. I was too sleepy to think it was strange but it sure seemed that way in the morning. When I asked her what she’d been doing, she just looked at me as though I’d dreamed the whole thing, so I never brought it up again. But that was the first night of many I heard those sounds.
Eventually, Jess found a loft of her own just around the corner on Greene. I helped move her in, and went over now and then to help her work on it. She seemed better once she got her own space back and started to make it home, but she never quite got over seeing the city half in ruins. Like everybody else, she pitched in on the cleanup, but after that, I’m not sure what she did. I got wound up in rebuilding and renovating for people, and I saw less and less of Jesse. When I did see her, now that I think about it, she always seemed just a little sad and a little touchy and a lot lost, not anywhere as full of herself as she’d been. That should have tipped me off, if I’d I been paying more attention.
I get up off the windowsill and start to walk through the loft. It’s a big space for such a small person as Jesse, about 2,500 square feet, all open except for the bathroom in the back. 12-foot high cast iron pillars support the ceiling and roof in double rows of four. Arched windows in the front and back and another row of windows along the south side overlooking the street flood it with sunlight during the day. She’s hung bells and windchimes in front of the windows to catch the breeze. The plants she had hanging there are now sitting on the fire escape.
I walk through a maze of floor cushions and low tables scattered around the area rugs. She’s left darn near everything behind. It’s not until I walk back to the sleeping area in the back of the loft, screened off with sliding shoji panels, that it becomes real obvious Jesse’s gone.
Back here, the bed is made and all her books are still here, the ones she’d begun to collect again. When she was first staying with me, that was one of the hardest things for her to get over: losing her cat, her great-grandmother’s velvet quilt, and her books. Can’t say I blame her. She must have had around a couple thousand of them crammed into the little room she called her library in the Seagate house, and a couple hundred more scattered around all the other rooms, including the bathroom. That was how we met: when she hired me to build bookshelves for her. So that was the first thing she started to collect when she got her own place again.
The three seven-foot high bookcases here are crammed nearly full and there are more on the floor in stacks. But they’re all covered in dust. If she’s left these, she’s really gone.
There’s one book face down on a stack of others on the floor beside the bed, Bruce Chatwin’s, What am I Doing Here? furry with dust. Beneath it is Tim Cahill’s A Wolverine is Eating my Leg, one of my favorite travel books. In fact, I think I gave her this copy. Finally, beneath that, is Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. The book is old and crumbling, like a lot of the books Jesse salvaged from abandoned stores and apartments and then left behind herself. Picking this one up, I fumble and drop it, and it lands on the floor, paper spine splitting open and scattering pages across the floor. I pick it up again, trying to keep the pages together, and find one with highlighting on it that draws my eye. “A traveler often differs from a nation-state, however, in wishing to disturb nothing in the land beyond his borders, but only to visit and somehow arrive, through the inevitable contrasts, at a renewed sense of the worth of his own place, of the esteem in which he wishes to hold the landscape that originally shaped him.” If Jesse’s left messages with these books, they’re cryptic ones.
Putting the books down again, I walk over and open the wardrobe. This brings back bad memories too, but at least I know whose belongings I’m going through this time, and I don’t have to worry about being caught. Most of Jesse’s clothes are still here, her fancy outfits and shoes, work suits, some casual pants and shirts, stuff I don’t ever remember seeing her wear. If I didn’t recognize the rest of what’s still here, I’d think I’d wandered into the wrong loft. I’m beginning to wonder how well I really knew Jesse.
I find one drawer of lingerie, which kind of blows my mind. I’d always figured Jess for the practical, Jockey-For-Her type. This is a side of her I don’t think I’ve even guessed was there. There’s not much of it, and what there is is less sexy than just pretty: not much lace but a lot of silk.
Picking up a soft, plain little slip-like thing, I catch myself visualizing Jesse in it, and I’m surprised I can. I’m not surprised that it makes me breathe a little faster. When I scrunch it up and bury my face in it, trying to catch Jesse’s scent, it sends a jolt of shock through me how much I need to know where she is, that she’s all right. But she hasn’t worn this; it smells new. That disappoints me at first, and then it makes me panic.
I rifle her wardrobe, press my face to the clothes she’s left there until I find a shirt with a faint trace of that clean, flowery perfume she wore when she dressed up. I feel a little better and a little worse at the same time. I hold the silky turquoise in my hands for a long time, breathing in her perfume. It’s the only thing comforting here, and it makes my throat tighten up and my groin ache.
Looking around some more, I realize that what’s gone is all her practical clothes: jeans and t-shirts and sweaters, anorak and hiking boots, the camping backpack and gear I got her to replace what she’d lost. Wherever she’s gone, she’s traveling rough and intending to be gone a long time.
I never expected Jess to leave New York. She loved this place as much as or maybe more than I did. Before Moonfall, we used to walk around the city all times of night and day, looking at buildings and hanging out. Jesse loved all of it, from Harlem to Battery Park City, the outer boroughs to midtown. She’s the one who got me interested in the East Village, taking me down to the little clubs and bars and restaurants, the poetry slams at Nuyorican Poet’s Café, the bands at the Mercury Lounge, the junkyard/performance space at Avenue B and Second Street. A lot of her friends lived there, and I think if she hadn’t worked in Coney Island, she would have too. It was nothing but a slum, really, but she couldn’t get enough of the layers of cultures there: Ukrainian Orthodox churches, Hispanic bodegas, Jewish delis, punk nightclubs, New Age paraphernalia boutiques, Old Hippie food co-ops, Irish bars, boho-artiste cafes, Japanese video stores, the Hell’s Angels’ headquarters. Everybody lives here! she’d shout, standing in the middle of the street in one of her wackier moments, usually after we’d had a couple of beers at Saint Dymphna’s on St. Mark’s. Beauty in diversity! No matter where she went, this was always home to her, she said.
So why would she leave it? And where would she go?
She could be anywhere, judging by the places we’ve been together and the gear she’s taken.
I sit down on her bed, feeling this big hollow space open up inside me. The platform sways like a porch swing, the hawser ropes suspending it from the ceiling creaking gently. With anyone else, you’d think of S&M in a bed like this. When I was helping her hang it, I jokingly asked her where the whips and chains were. “Not my style,” she said, pointedly disgusted. I felt my face redden up when she said, “I didn’t think it was yours either. Is it?” I thought about the old cigarette burns on my ass, the scars of which had just recently faded for good, and shook my head. “No.”
Not anymore, I was thinking. God knows I’ve done plenty of other things that revolt me now, and liked them when I was doing them, but Jess wouldn’t know that. When she first met me, I was just starting to get my head out of my ass. I still don’t quite know what made me like that view so much to begin with, or what exactly made it begin to seem less appealing, but by the time I came limping back home from Colorado, I’d been screwed up for a long time and clean for not nearly long enough. My first year in Colorado is still kind of a blur of drinking, inhaling, smoking or swallowing just about any intoxicating substance I could get my hands on. The only thing I never did was shoot up and that’s only because I hate needles. I slept in my truck too often, on the floors of other people’s houses or their couches, or outside when it wasn’t too cold. I panhandled with my fiddle for a while, tended bar, carnied for a little fair one summer, did some river guiding when I started to get my shit together and got myself qualified as an EMT along the way, somehow.
When my dad let me move back in, I started a construction business with his help and my brother Evan as partner, then decided to go back to school. By the time Jess hired me, I was on my way to Carnegie Mellon for an urban planning/architecture degree, getting through my required basics somewhere cheap before I got into the expensive core courses, and doing finish carpentry on the side. I’d been clean for two years. I liked her before we’d even met, because she got my name right—“nickel” like the metal, not Nicole—on the first try on my answering machine. She was one of the few people who didn’t call me Nick, either, because, she said, anybody can be Nick or Nicholas, but not many people get to be Nicol. For the first time, I started to like my name, especially when she said it. I don’t know what got us talking one day after work, but I wound up staying first for coffee and then for dinner. We talked a lot after that, and before we knew it, we were friends.
She was older than me, at a different place in her life, settled and solid, and confident, but prone to saying “just like a guy,” and rolling her eyes when I’d do or say something that annoyed her. Even so, she was a good friend, and I needed someone who knew when to cut me slack and when to kick my butt the way Jesse did. When I was done with her bookshelves, we started hanging out together on a regular basis. We’ve been friends a long time. I turn over the big brass hourglass on the bedside table and watch the sand run through it for a while. A long time.
There’s a Tibetan singing bowl on the table too. I run the dowel around the edge lightly, hear it resonate, the sound swelling. I push off with my feet, setting the platform swinging from side to side and lie down to look up at the ceiling. Back here, Jess painted it midnight blue and spangled it with glow-in-the-dark stars, not the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere she sailed in so much, but Orion and the winter stars of the north. The tiny bells on the bedspread tinkle a little bit as I get comfortable. Now I understand why she made the bed this way. Lying here swaying with bells tinkling and the stars glowing overhead is like being on a boat, and Jesse loves the water. It’s soothing too, like being rocked in a cradle, or rocked by a lover. I close my eyes and try to think like Jesse, to figure out where she’s gone, to figure out why I’m suddenly so desperate to find her.
Jess and I were never lovers. If I had to put a name to what we were to each other, I’m not sure I could. I’ve been through a couple of girlfriends since I’ve known her, almost gotten myself engaged, and Jesse’s been around through it all. We’ve done a lot of things together, concerts and clubs and restaurants and bars, stuff that could have been “dates” but wasn’t. She likes to travel and so do I, so we’ve gone places together. She taught me the rudiments of diving, I taught her kayaking and some sailing.
When I had woman trouble, Jess was always around to buy me a beer, commiserate, and tell me if I’d done something wrong or the trouble was on the other side. And she was painfully honest about that. I’ve done some real stupid and sometimes cruel things in relationships, and Jess let me have it when I managed to be a big enough ass that things blew up. “Look,” she said once, early in our friendship, “if you’re going to sleep with women you’re dating, make damn sure you always, always, always call them the next morning after you leave. Don’t let days go by before you talk to them again.” It seems obvious now, but at the time it was a great piece of advice. Gives you some idea what kind of a jerk I was when she met me.
But she never asked for the same things from me. She always seemed self-contained, like any good scuba diver. We got to be good enough friends finally that she told me she’d broken up with a guy a while back, somebody she’d really been in love with and lived with for years, but not what had happened between them. She didn’t talk much about her past, or her family, or work—we seemed to talk about everything but—though she wasn’t exactly shy about personal details. It wasn’t any big secret when she started therapy, or that she’d done some wild stuff like hitchhike to Woodstock and all over Europe. We talked about God a lot, and she had some real strong ideas about what the plan was, ideas she’d back up with text and the precision and exactness of a scientist; they made sense, and she was pretty darn close, except for some details. She was just better at getting me to talk than she was at talking about herself. And when things went wrong, or stuff happened that she couldn’t control, she burrowed in and never let on.
So I never quite knew where I stood with her, but there were moments, now that I think about it, when I’d be telling her some sad story and she’d reach across the table and lay her hand along my cheek, moments that were full of something I wanted to ignore at the time, because I thought I wasn’t interested, or because I knew what it meant and was afraid of it. I needed Jesse to be a friend to me then, sort of a guide. Okay, maybe a mom in some ways too.
Being with Jess changed me. I grew up a lot, hanging around her, and she softened up, too, hanging around me, so I guess we changed each other, not just the way friends change each other; but the way people who love each other do. But she gave more than she got, and I’m starting to realize that wasn’t—isn’t—right. Not for as long as we’ve been friends.
And anyway, I miss her. I’ve been catching myself wanting to hear her laugh at my wild ideas again. I miss the hours we used to sit and talk, the places we used to go together. It’s a shock to realize that the things we did together were a kind of courtship. They must have been, to make that dream I had this morning make me want to hold her the way I want to now, to make me want her to touch me again.
After a while, the sound of the singing bowl becomes surf and I smile, thinking that’s a nice way to start a dream, with the swaying bed and everything. Over it, faintly, I start hearing the slap-slap of chop against the hull of a boat too, and seagulls screaming. I’m lying in the hammock I sometimes string up on deck when the weather’s nice. But I’m not. I’m lying in Jesse’s bed swaying from anchor bolts in a 12 foot ceiling under painted stars. But I can smell the ocean, and when I squint, I can see . . .
A mermaid. Poised on the bowsprit of my boat like an out-of-place figurehead.
Her hair is the same greenish black as seaweed, tangled and curly. Her blue tail is more like a dolphin’s flukes than the marlin I somehow expect. Her eyes are a clear grey that makes her look blind. From the hips up, she’s pale and naked and beautiful, with full round breasts and a narrow waist, except her skin’s vaguely scaly and glitters green-blue-green in the sunlight.
I went North to taste the air again,
before leaving, to
smell the lake, carry bits of it away
between my toes, in my pockets, my hair.
The night you arrived, I was on the shore
picking wild iris,
she says in a voice like water running, and dives into the sea. A minute later, I see a porpoise leap from the water to starboard.
I wake up then with my heart pounding, and get up and walk out of Jesse’s loft, I guess. I say “I guess” because I don’t remember doing it. But the next thing I know, I’m walking down the slip where my boat’s berthed. When I realize that, I stand stock still, leaning against a piling, and give myself a couple of minutes to shake, wondering how I got here, if I’m dreaming this back in Jesse’s loft. If I am, it’s a damn vivid one. I smell water and wet rope and varnish. The sun’s bright, the weather’s fair. It’s a fine day for sailing. Sitting in her slip, the Bum looks just the way she should.
I board her and go below. In stowage are food stores and water and tools and clothes and spare rigging and such, and charts of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Great Lakes. I only put her back in the water last week. I don’t know where this stuff came from.
Then, topside, I see Jesse’s singing bowl on deck holding down that blue silk shirt, and I don’t know what to think. I don’t remember having anything in my hands when I boarded. I’m sure I didn’t. I touch the deck’s teak planks. They’re smooth against my fingers, just the way I sanded them, but there’s a strange hum in them. I pick up the singing bowl again, holding it cupped like an offering or a beggar’s bowl. It vibrates in my hands soundlessly, fills my head with deep, tolling chimes that make my bones ring.
I went North. I think Jess has or had relatives in Canada, in Quebec or Ontario or Nova Scotia.
A mermaid. Holy shit.
“What the hell,” I mutter. I’ve got nothing else to keep me here, nothing but work, and what’s that but a way to kill time? I cast off and head out into the harbor on engine alone. Before long, a pod of dolphins starts to swim through my bow wave. There are a lot more of them around than there used to be, and I’m glad to see them. They’re beautiful and sleek and playful—good company. I always feel safe in some funny way when they’re around. They seem to like humans, like hanging around us when we’re out in their element, more so now that we don’t pee in their pool or drown them in nets.
The wind freshens, banging the shrouds against the masts, and I stop the engine. The tank gauge reads full, but I don’t want to waste fuel if there’s a good wind.
For just a second, well, maybe longer, I lose my nerve. I still can’t believe I’m just taking off like this, leaving my loft, my friends, my work. I must be crazy, following visions or dreams or whatever kind of mystical shit has been going on all day. I start to shake again. Then I think, Jesus, how much prodding do you need, asshole? Somebody’s trying to tell you something more important than how to use crushed brick and adobe. Get with it.
I take the cellphone out of my breast pocket and just look at it. I can almost feel Jesse’s hand on my cheek. Maybe it’s just the wind, blowing up warm from the south.
The dolphins mill around the boat, waiting for me to make up my mind. Before I have time to reconsider, I flip open the phone and make a few calls. “Hi, listen . . .Yeah, really . . . I don’t know how long I’ll be gone . . . Canada, first, I guess . . . Yeah, I promise I’ll keep in touch . . .”
When I’ve stowed the phone below and come up on deck again, one of the dolphins hurls itself into the air and splashes down beside me, sending spray everywhere, soaking me. Hooray! Three more dance on their tails off the bow. Come on! Come on! Come on!
I hoist the mainsail and the Bum glides out of the harbor with her escort, heading north.
