“We have a call in to the boat repair place,” Mother said. “Which means we’ll get to stay in a slip in the marina for free while they repair it. Did you know Lloyd’s of London is the only company that insures boats? And they ring a bell every time one goes down. I wonder if they rang the bell for us.”
“They keep insisting it was our fault,” Stepmother said. “But I told them, we were power-sailing. Yes, we had the motor going, but we had a sail up, too. We were sailing. They hit us.”
The dogs barked a greeting to Girl as they pulled abreast of the Sea Gypsy. They wore pet-sized yellow life vests and seemed to have adjusted to living onboard. Mother took them to shore a few times a day in the dinghy, because although Muffin had never been fully housebroken and would pee anywhere, Mother had been unable to train George to pee on a plant at the back of the boat.
Their boat was as cluttered as their house had been. Father had run a tight ship—everything had to be stowed away before they left harbor. Stepmother’s papers and pens and loose coins and little shells and seeds she had gathered topped every flat surface. They had an unsecured TV, and when the family motored out to the reef, it flew from one side of the cabin to the other, crashed against the wall, and came to rest on the built-in bench.
The first thing Girl noticed was the clutter, and the second thing was the smell. Mother and Stepmother were proud of this boat—it cost more than their house had—and showed Samson and Girl their berth and the tiny “head” or bathroom. Mother explained how to pump the toilet and admonished Girl not to flush toilet paper, but to put it in the grocery bag hanging on the wall. There were two built-in beds over the pontoons, and a large cabin at the bow of the boat where Mother and Stepmother slept. Samson and Girl had one berth, and on the other side was the cat’s berth, the main source of the smell. Humid sea air infused with dirty litter box and a trace of urine-soaked toilet paper flooded the entire cabin.
That night, Samson and Girl rolled back and forth in their bed to the motion of the waves. The hot smell and constant movement made Girl sick to her stomach. Samson and Girl whispered about Mel Fisher, a local treasure hunter, who lost one of his children when their boat sank due to disrepair. For the first time, Girl worried that she wasn’t going to make it out of this vacation. She had never doubted her parents’ ability to keep her safe, but it was obvious that they had no idea what they were doing, and she knew that the ocean could be dangerous.
Mother and Stepmother lived on the boat for two years, and in spite of Girl’s misgivings, nothing that terrible ever happened. Sure, they crashed a few times, and Mother got all sorts of bruises and once even a flesh-eating bacterial infection in her thumb. Thankfully, they gave up on sailing to Mexico. “I just couldn’t figure out how to deal with the dogs when we were out of sight of land,” Mother explained. “George would have had to hold it for two days, and that didn’t seem fair.” Eventually they bought a trailer on a canal with deep water access, but once Mother got on land, she was done with sailing.
They did have one last adventure, though. Some friends of theirs were sailing to Cuba, and invited Girl’s parents to follow along in the Sea Gypsy. They had gone so far as to hire a man on as crew, but then they decided the trip was beyond their skill set.
“It’s a good thing, too,” Stepmother told Girl. “He had already stowed his things on the boat, and after he left we found naked Barbie dolls and a penis pump. That wouldn’t have gone over very well in customs.”
Their friends invited Stepmother and Mother to crew on their larger boat, and they sailed over without much trouble.
“When we got there, customs boarded the boat,” Mother said. “And they were really upset that we had brought hard boiled eggs. They have no salmonella in Cuba, so they didn’t want to let American eggs come to shore. They were going to make us turn around.”
“I offered to throw the eggs overboard,” Stepmother interrupted, “But that got them even more upset.”
“Finally, we agreed to eat the eggs in front of the customs officer, and then put the shells in a Ziploc bag and promised to bring them with us when we left,” Mother said.
The trouble started on their return trip. The waves were a little rough, and Stepmother got seasick, so she went below decks.
“That’s the worst thing you can do when you are seasick,” Girl interrupted.
“I know, but you can’t tell Stepmother anything,” Mother said, continuing the story. “So Stepmother went below and the waves were rolling, and she hit her head, and must have passed out. Mary went down to check on her, and Stepmother jumped on her back and started punching her.”
“I had amnesia,” Stepmother explained. “I thought they were kidnapping us and taking us to Cuba.”
“So I heard the noise and went down, and found Stepmother on top of Mary, and had to explain to her that we weren’t being kidnapped.”
“I was so confused. I kept asking, ‘Am I a comuniss? Are you a comuniss?’”
“I explained to her that she hit her head, and she’d get it for a while, then a few minutes later, she’d start asking if she was a communist again,” Mother said.
“Once I came back to myself I felt just terrible, and I apologized to Mary,” Stepmother said. “But they turned the boat around and went back to Cuba,”
“We
