Hold still or you’re going to bounce overboard, Bo yelled into the wind.
My father moaned. He curled his arms beneath his face and remained secure beneath Bo’s boot until they reached the deep water of the sound, where all those blues were allegedly schooling in the depths. Bo throttled back. The sun was a hard ball of ice just over the horizon.
Bo set the engine to idle and released my father.
Sorry about that, he said. There’s no cure out here for what you’ve got except to grab your sack and pray.
My father barely heard him. He was still facedown, a puddle of water licking at his cheek. His ears were popping.
Let’s do it, Feeney said, planting his foot between my father’s spread legs so that he could reach the rods. You’ll acclimate, Salty. Get yourself up where you can see the horizon. That’ll do ya.
My father groaned and moved one of his fingers to signal his assent.
It was another white day, the sky washed clean of color, with a decent wind whipping across the water. The boat rocked gently as the rollers marched beneath it, a pendulum ticking out a dirge. It rose and fell, and my father rose and fell with it. He felt it with his every cell. Eventually he managed to drag himself into a sitting position—cheers from his boatmates—and lodge his chin on the gunwale while they rigged their lines on the other side.
Punishment comes slow but harsh, my father thought. So much to pay for. He opened his mouth and let forth an eruption of vomit that slid over the gunwale, down the fiberglass hull, and into the water.
9.
Back at the house, beneath a headboard as darkly ornate as a Gothic altar, I was asleep in the enormous bed, a bed so large that my presence barely disturbed the expanse of its surface, enveloped in the cocoon of heat sleeping children spin around themselves, curled beneath a gray wool blanket, heavy, a layer of warm lead; when I moved, it did not move. My small face a pebble on the pillow. I was dreaming that our black-and-white cat, Slade, was creeping along a high beam traversing the span of a barn, and I was below him, my arms extended to catch him should he fall. Dust hung in a wedge of sunlight, cinematic. Slade, who in waking life had never displayed the courage to venture farther than the threshold of the apartment door, was exhibiting unusual daring, and when I suddenly found myself on the beam with him, transported there by dream physics, I took his tail. I knew Slade would lead me to the other side. Instead—horror—he leapt, spreading his limbs like a flying squirrel, and we plummeted before planing out inches above the packed dirt floor, accelerating through the open barn doors, arcing upward in a graceful climb, the green hills flattening out beneath us. Good boy, Slade, good boy!
Over the countryside, over the square hats of high buildings, past dark factory stacks oozing smoke, and down over suburban neighborhoods, each yard a perfect green cube bounded by a high, white wooden fence. Slade set down on the sidewalk in front of a white clapboard house. Tail high, he trotted down the walkway and slipped inside. I chased after him. It was dim inside, a warren of narrow corridors, and off the corridors, small rooms. In one room a boy sat on a bed all alone. The room had been turned inside out—chairs faced the wall, a standing mirror showed off its plywood back. A man entered and began to spank the boy. I ran out. I woke up.
I was not disturbed by what I’d dreamed, but I had no desire to close my eyes and return to that house. I was fully conscious in seconds, that great trick made possible by the porous membrane between a child’s dreaming and waking life, and in that blink of time I became aware of the weight of the blanket pinning me to the bed, and I drew my feet up and propelled myself out through the top of the pocket my body had formed in the covers. I stood straight up on the pillow and surveyed the room, then clapped my legs together and dropped bottom-first onto the pillow like a pile driver, the bed’s ancient timbers shuddering and clacking, before flipping over on my belly for the blind drop to the floor. I was supposed to be quiet. A child up early can have a house to herself if only she is quiet. I lowered myself down a millimeter at a time until my socked feet touched rag rug and I released the mattress.
Though I slept there, I was an interloper on the second floor, where my parents slept in the other guest bedroom, where Jane and Bo slept at the end of a long hall, where the atmosphere was saturated with evaporated sounds, loosened belt buckles and bathroom faucets, the bumping of shoes, hinges, squeaks and thumps and muffled voices, commonplace noises made mysterious by a closed bedroom door. There was a bathroom off the hall, and other doors leading to more bedrooms. I went downstairs, careful to tread lightly on the steps. In the kitchen I felt the cold granite floor through my socks, a wide, living chill radiating upward into my feet, a pleasing contrast to the warmth of the bed.
