“If you should see anyone fall over the side,” the man says, his voice almost cheerful, “please throw them a life buoy, then shout ‘Man overboard’ and inform the nearest crew member.”
A ripple of laughter spreads across the assembled passengers as they make whispered guesses about which of them will be the first to go over. Davis grabs Mary’s shoulders so suddenly she lets out a yelp. Eleanor reaches for Todd’s hand as if to anchor herself, but he’s busy watching a small iridescent bird flit past what little sky is visible between decks.
“A purple martin,” he whispers excitedly, fumbling with his binoculars. But they get tangled in his life jacket, and by the time he lifts them, the bird is gone.
Greta tugs at the straps of her own vest and looks around. Down the row, she spots the guy she’d seen earlier with the typewriter. As she watches, he lifts his phone to take a picture of this, the safety briefing, of all things. When he lowers it again, she can see him typing and wonders who he’s sending the photos to. Then she wonders why she’s wondering this.
“You’re not listening,” her dad says under his breath, giving her a nudge, and when the guy glances in their direction, Greta feels like she’s about twelve years old. But he only smiles, and then they both turn their attention back to the station captain, who is still detailing all the ways they might possibly—but not probably—find themselves in peril over the next eight days.
Chapter Four
Despite all the talk of buffets, her dad made reservations for the group at the most formal restaurant for their first night, a dimly lit sea of white tablecloths surrounding a dance floor. Out the window, the light is soft and hazy. The sun doesn’t set until after nine here, and dusk takes its time, moving leisurely from orange to pink to gray.
“So, Greta,” Eleanor Bloom says as their drinks arrive. She’s wearing an elegant black pantsuit and has already had her hair done at the salon. It always seemed to Greta that Eleanor was a bit too glamorous for their little corner of Columbus, Ohio. She’d met Todd decades ago on a trip to New York City with her girlfriends from Dublin. He was there for an insurance conference, and she was sightseeing, and they got caught in a rainstorm in Times Square. Greta always wondered how a man like Todd—incredibly kind but extremely boring—had managed to inspire someone like Eleanor to move across an ocean for him. But apparently her first husband had been a nightmare, and in Todd, she found a steadiness that gave her the space to shine. Which she usually does. “How are things with that adorable boyfriend of yours?”
Greta takes a long sip of her wine, trying to decide how to answer. It’s been nearly three months since they broke up, just after her mother’s death, but even so, the boyfriend part throws her off-balance. As does the word adorable. There are a lot of ways to describe Luke—brilliant and edgy, sexy and infuriating—but adorable isn’t really one of them.
“We’re actually…” she begins, then stops and takes another quick sip of wine. “We sort of decided to…”
“They broke up,” Conrad says with forced joviality. “Didn’t you guys get the email?”
Greta feels the heat rise to her cheeks. She hadn’t realized he was upset about that. The split had happened shortly after the funeral, and neither of them had been in a state to talk about much of anything then. But she’d wanted him to know, and to hear it from her, before Asher mentioned it. So she’d sent him a quick email.
He hadn’t written her back, and neither of them had talked about it since.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mary says as she reaches for a dinner roll, her bracelets jangling. Greta has never met anyone who can say as much with her eyebrows as Mary Foster, and right now, they’re raised sky-high. “I know your mom really liked him.”
This is not remotely true, but Greta appreciates it all the same.
Her parents met Luke only twice. The first time, at the New York City launch party for her debut album, she’d chickened out and introduced him only as her producer, worried that if they knew he was more than that, they’d hate him for a thousand different reasons: the cigarette tucked behind his ear and the sleeve of tattoos on both arms, the drawling Australian accent and the way he sneered whenever someone talked about a band he considered inferior.
“We’ve heard so much about you,” her mom said that night, smiling gamely as she shook his hand. “And the album is wonderful. You two make beautiful music together.”
Luke hadn’t been able to help himself; he’d burst out laughing. Even now, Greta can picture the look on Conrad’s face, the dawning disappointment as it all snapped into place.
The second time, things were more serious between them, and she brought Luke home to Columbus over the Fourth of July. For two days, he did everything right: he collected candy with her nieces at the town parade, helped her mom decorate the American flag cupcakes (adding an Australian one for good measure), and brought her dad a bottle of his favorite scotch. He even found a way to ask Conrad about his job selling ads for the Yellow Pages without seeming to imply that this line of work had perhaps outlived its usefulness.
On the last morning, she found him out on the patio, attempting to fix the broken barbecue, and as she watched him bend over it the way he usually stood over the sound board in the studio—tweaking and adjusting her songs until they became as close as they could to the way she heard them in her head—she was surprised that something so mundane could still be so attractive.
But afterward, as they sat waiting for the plane that would take them back to New York, he put his arm around her shoulders. “I can’t wait to get home,” he said, and when she murmured in agreement, he tipped his head back with a sigh. “If that were my life, I think I’d off myself.”
This, of course, is the exact same thought Greta has every single time she goes home. It’s the same thought that kept her picking at her guitar most nights in the freezing-cold garage when she was younger, the one that propelled her to a college two thousand miles away in southern California, then catapulted her straight to the opposite coast afterward.
It’s what’s driven her all these years, the fear of all that—of getting stuck, of standing still, of being ordinary. And it’s what’s kept her going, in spite of the wall that rose up between her and her dad, another brick for every aspect of her unconventional life, every decision that carried her farther from Ohio, from a nine-to-five and a mortgage and a white picket fence, from the way her brother’s life has unfolded—which is to say, the way most lives unfold—first a steady job, then marriage, then parenthood, all of it sure-footed and predictable.
But to hear Luke say it—Luke, who drinks only out of mason jars and wears a knit hat even in the summer, who can light a cigarette in the wind and recite the lyrics to all of her songs—was too much.