Blue Water by A. Manette Ansay Read Free Book Online Page B

step over patches of broken glass.
    I boarded Chelone believing it was possible to step over Cindy Ann the same way, given enough distance between us. To blot her from my thoughts with imaginary paint. I did not yet understand that we’d been forever bound to each other like sisters, like lovers, like people who have known each other in the glimmer of some otherworldly life. That Cindy Ann had been woven into my heart like a violent act, or a secret child. That she, in her turn, carried me: a bumping beneath her ribs, a fluttering deep in her abdomen, an acid burn that bubbled up after meals. This, despite the old sleeping pills, the new high-tech antidepressants. Despite the drone of the court-appointed therapist’s bored voice. Despite the guilty bottles of wine she still downed in the evenings, defiantly, helplessly. Or so she would admit to me later, much later, when I was able to hear.Her beautiful face twisted, transformed. Stricken with utter self-loathing.
    The face from which, at sixteen years of age, I’d turned away.
    Â 
    One morning at dawn, a warbler fluttered into Chelone’s cockpit, perched on the rail, then slid, exhausted, onto the bench. It was my watch; I called out to Rex, who poked his rumpled head out of the companionway.
    â€œWhat?”
    Then he saw it, too.
    For a moment, we just stared at it, stunned, disbelieving. We were hundreds of nautical miles from the nearest piece of land. I don’t think we could have been more surprised if an angel had appeared.
    Rex tipped freshwater into a bottle cap, nudged it as close as he dared. To my surprise, the bird drank immediately, lustily, tilting back its head to reveal its yellow throat. Within a few hours, it had revived completely, and by the following day, it flitted comfortably between us, pecking crumbs off the cockpit floor. We assumed it would stay with us, our mascot, our darling—after all, where else would it go? But all of a sudden, without any warning, it simply took off.
    It was gone.
    A small loss and, yet, how easily it swelled to fit the exact dimensions of each familiar, empty place. I sat in the cockpit, hugging my knees. Rex paced the deck, oblivious to the sun.
    â€œWhat was the point?” he finally said.
    â€œThere’s always a point,” I said.
    He passed a hand across his eyes. “I wish we’d never seen the goddamn thing,” he said.

Three
    f or the first days after the squall line passed, Rex and I were grateful to find ourselves becalmed. The ocean barely breathed beneath us, a dreaming animal, rumbling with content. We huddled beneath the shade of the bimini, slathered ourselves in sunscreen and zinc. We played cards. We read books. I polished all the ship’s brass—pump handles, grab rails, the post supporting the mast—while Rex oiled the teak hatch covers, rubbed down the engine with grease. He was still moving slowly, babying his shoulder, taking prescription painkillers from the medical kit. The dark bruise had transformed itself into a bright tropical flower: a whorl of lavenders and purples, burnt umber, pale green.
    After a week of stillness, we began to grow uneasy. We ran our refrigerator thirty minutes a day, just enough to keep things cool. Ice, of course, was impossible. We were out of fresh fruit and vegetables. We were down to six eggs, a stick of butter, a half block of hard cheese. Plenty of rice yet, thank goodness. Plenty of chickpeas,black beans, kidney beans. I knew, exactly, what we had left, balances ticking inside my head. The last of our bread had sprouted an extraordinary halo of bright, blue mold, and though I’d brought along flour and yeast, it was too hot to think about baking fresh loaves. Besides, operating the stove—like running the refrigerator—drained power from Chelone ’s batteries. Charging the batteries required running the engine. Running the engine required fuel. Already, we’d used roughly half of the one