“What do you mean?”
“We get a good haul, all right, and that’s sweet for us, but what happens to you? Do you plan on ever going home again? Or will you be on the run for the rest of your life?”
“You don’t have to worry about that.”
“I’m worrying about it. You get picked up, you go back to jail, right? For breaking your parole? And when they identify you for what happened in St. John’s…”
I close my book.
“They’ll work out whose passport you’ve been using,” she warns me as if I’m unaware.
“How?”
“I don’t know! How do police do anything?” She sits up angrily, swinging her legs to the floor. “What aren’t you telling me? ’Cause you sure as shit don’t seem like a woman on the run.”
“I’m not on the run.”
“You should be! You should be scared, Franny! I don’t want you going back to jail.”
I hear the tears in her voice and realize with horror that she’s started crying. “Jesus, don’t do that,” I try. “It’s not worth that.”
“Oh, fuck you,” she snaps, covering her face.
Reluctantly I climb out of bed and move to sit beside her. “Léa, come on.”
“You don’t care, do you?”
“Not really.” Hard to care when the plan is to die long before anyone catches me.
Léa looks at me, and there’s something about the pain in her eyes, there’s a seduction in it, and before I can look away she is kissing me.
“Léa, hey, we can’t.”
“Why not?” she asks against my lips.
“I’m married.”
“Didn’t stop you with Basil.”
“That was destruction, it didn’t mean anything. This would.”
She sighs a little; she has turned languid and knowing. “So let it.”
We kiss again and I want to, I want to sink into it and let it overwhelm everything, let the intimacy salve my wounds, and I think it would, it might, but what a betrayal that would be, not only to Niall but to my own sense of certainty, to this migration I’ve begun. The only person I’m intent on destroying is myself, with no more collateral damage along the way.
So I end the kiss as gently as I can, and I go back to my bed and turn out the light. She watches me, wordless and wanting and unsure in the dark. Then she, too, sets herself to sleeping.
* * *
We are a plague on the world, my husband often says.
Today there is a huge landmass to our left, and it surprises me because there is no land on the chart I’ve been studying. As we draw close enough to see, I realize that it’s an enormous island of plastic, and there are fish and seabirds and seals dead upon its shore.
* * *
I write to Niall; the pile of letters to send him grows fat with the weight of my thoughts. I try to come to terms with our relationship, with the mistakes I made and the twisting paths we chose to take. I ponder the way things could have been different but try not to dwell there; only regret lives in what-ifs and I have an ocean of that already. Instead I spend most of my time in the sweetness, the moments hidden between words or looks, the lines he wrote me while I was away, always generous and tender despite my abandonments. I live in the nights we spent in bed, reading to each other, or the weekend mornings we ran each other baths, or the endless bird-watching trips we took, silent and perfect and breathing each other in. I try to pretend we will have more of these moments.
* * *
Down along the coast of Brazil we travel. Each day begins with hope, is spent straining upward, gazing, searching, frightened of blinking, and ends breathless with despair. Only two wear trackers, but there should be many more of you, and you should be near. Where are you? Are your little wings still flapping? Are you still struggling against winds and tides and exhaustion? What if you aren’t there when I reach Antarctica? What if you die on this journey, like the others? My meager attempts to find meaning in the end of my life will come to nothing.
I wonder if this matters.
I wonder if there is meaning in any death, ever. There has been meaning in the deaths of the animals, but I am no animal. If only I were.
I wonder if Niall will be able to forgive me for failing.
* * *
The power to the radio goes first. Léa and Dae manage to get it back up again, but this causes an outage to the kitchen, meaning the fridge, microwave, kettle, and oven all go. We eat our way through the cold food as quickly as we can, but most of what we have left goes to waste.
Things fail by the day; Léa explains it’s because the boat is automatically rerouting the power to the autopilot system, which uses the most energy and will always be the most important thing aboard—apart from the navigation system. We lose our television, and our ability to refrigerate the stores. We are lucky to have made it to warmer weather before we lose the heating. The hot water goes in and out—someone is usually testing it to see when we might steal a quick shower or a cup of tea. Soon the autopilot fails; the battery is too low to be able to sustain it. Followed, a day later, by navigation.
Nobody says a word about any of it. There are tireless efforts to fix what has gone. Léa and Dae work night and day on the equipment, sometimes getting things up and running again, mostly not. The rest of us work around the clock to keep the boat moving, scooping water out of the engine room and off the deck, trying to keep everything dry. Ennis rarely sleeps now that there is no autopilot, and he spends his days with charts, compass, and sextant, navigating the way sailors of old once did. It is terrifying, all of it, and I can feel fear coming off the sailors in waves, yet I can see in the captain a quiet kernel of passion sputtering to life, a return to the way the world once was. He doesn’t know this ocean and yet I think some ancient heart of him knows all oceans, the way some ancient heart of me does.
It’s not only Ennis and me who now take comfort in the red dots of the terns but the whole crew. One by one they have made their way to the bridge to ease their trepidation and check that the little beacons of hope are steering us true.
“It’s time to stop,” I overhear Anik say to him one day. “We had grand plans, and we made it a long way, but it’s over now, brother. The birds are too far ahead, and the ship’s failing.”
I think this will be it. We can’t limp on this way forever.
But all Ennis says is, “Not yet.”
I watch the captain return for the bridge, leaving Anik to stare after his friend. I know what Ennis must be thinking: we’ve come too far to stop now. He hasn’t reached whatever line it is he won’t cross. I don’t know where mine lies, but I haven’t reached it yet either.
I approach the first mate carefully, trying to offer support. “He’ll find us a way through this,” I say softly. “He’s strong.”
Without looking at me Anik flashes a bitter smile. “The stronger you are, the more dangerous the world.”
22
GALWAY, IRELAND ELEVEN YEARS AGO
On our one-year anniversary the thing I feel most is astonishment. Niall isn’t surprised in the least, but a part of me has always quietly thought this a frivolous adventure that would lead, ultimately, nowhere. We would discover too many qualities we didn’t like in each other, I would panic, leave, he would grow bored of me. Sometimes when I’m cleaning I imagine Niall and I are playing a monumental game of chicken, and I wonder who will be the first to admit how silly we are, to back down or laugh or throw in the towel, this was all good fun, wasn’t it, darling, but now back to our real lives, to the business of finding proper husbands and wives. Cohabiting with a stranger has been a terrifying, embarrassing nakedness.