“What’s this room called?” he asked, stepping inside.
“When you’re aboard, we’ll call this Alberto’s stateroom.”
His face turned up, glee in his eyes. “Really?”
“Really,” I replied with a grin.
His face fell slightly. “When I was in the hospital, they asked me my name and I couldn’t remember. Then they started calling me Alberto.”
“That was the name that was carved into the wood on the boat we found you on. They said you had a pocketknife, so we guessed you’d put the name there—Alberto Mar.”
His face contorted, as if trying to force a memory.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll come back to you. Did the hospital give you your knife back?”
He shook his head.
“Follow me,” I said, moving forward and opening the door to the master stateroom.
“Wow!” he exclaimed again. then looked up at me and smiled. “This is Jesse’s stateroom?”
“And Savannah’s,” I replied, moving toward the small dresser below the washer and dryer combo.
I opened the drawer and dug through my clothes until I found what I was looking for.
“Here,” I said, extending it to him. “A man should always have a knife. You never know when you’ll need one.”
The Schrade Old Timer had been Pap’s and he’d given it to my dad. When Dad died, Pap gave it to me.
“Take very good care of that until we get yours back, okay?”
“I will,” he said, turning the knife over in his hands. “I have a question.”
“What is it?”
He looked aft through the open hatch. “I didn’t see a steering wheel up there. How do you drive this boat?”
Steering wheel?
I wondered if Andersen had told him what that was while allowing Alberto to turn on the lights. Or did amnesia only affect personal memories? Could his knowledge of what a steering wheel was, have come from a memory of riding in a car with his parents?
I made a mental note to find out more about what memories amnesia erases.
“You’re a very observant young man,” I said. “Follow me.”
He put the knife in his pocket, and we retraced our steps through the salon. Once out in the cockpit, I pointed up the ladder just to port.
“Up there’s the bridge,” I said. “That’s where you drive from.”
“Can we go up there?”
“Sure. Just be careful on the ladder. Whenever you’re on a boat, especially when it’s underway, you should always maintain three points of contact. If you’re lifting a foot to climb a ladder, both hands should hold onto something. When you move a hand, both feet should be standing on something.”
He went up the ladder awkwardly, consciously keeping three points of contact with it.
When we reached the bridge, he went straight to the helm.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the cover over the large chart plotter.
I removed it and turned the unit on. “This is like a map. Do you know what a map is?”
“To show you where you’re going?”
So, it seemed that not all memory was lost when a person developed amnesia. Basic things were retained. He’d seen a map before, maybe in school.
Or maybe Andersen had explained what the chart plotter on the patrol boat was, as well as the steering wheel.
“Exactly,” I replied. “But instead of street names and towns, this one shows how deep the water is and where land is.”
I turned on the other electronics and even turned on the ignition, but didn’t fire the engines up. He asked a lot of questions. Smart ones.
Footsteps could be heard on the stairs.
“Sounds like the admiral is coming down for an inspection,” I said.
“The admiral?”
“I’m the captain of the boat, but Savannah’s the admiral. She outranks me. That means she’s my boss.”
“How come?”
Another good question.
“You’ll understand later,” I said.
“When I get my memory back?”
I laughed. “No, probably not until you’re a few years older—when you have a girlfriend.”
“Ahoy,” Savannah called out.
I looked over the side. “Up here.”
I felt the boat move and knew that Finn or Woden, or more likely both, had jumped over the gunwale into the cockpit. The boat moved again as Savannah came aboard.
“Y’all get back,” I heard her say as she started up the ladder.
Alberto looked up at me, standing next to him at the helm. “Who’s she talking to?”
“The dogs,” I replied, as Savannah joined us.
“Can they come up here?”
“No,” I replied. “They’re not very good at going up a ladder and even worse going down.”
“Teaching him to dive next?” Savannah asked, parroting my earlier question when I saw the fish ID book on the nightstand.
I grinned down at the kid. “No, we haven’t gotten to that yet.”
We spent the rest of the day showing our new guest around. We waded the shallows at low tide and visited some nearby sandbars and tidal pools, where he got to see small fish and crabs trapped by the receding tide.
In the distance to the west, a group of boats were gathered in Content Passage, a shallow, natural channel between the two largest of the Content Keys.
“What are those boats doing?” Alberto asked.
It being a weekday, I told him that I wasn’t sure. “Sometimes people just like to come up here and hang out.”
Later, we cooked fish over an open driftwood fire and ate with our fingers, using banana leaves for plates. As the sun set, we went out onto the north pier to watch it slip below the horizon.
I told Alberto about the green flash you could occasionally see, though I didn’t think conditions were right on that particular night. He still made a silent wish.
We stayed out there until it got fully dark—or at least as dark as the first quarter moon, directly over our heads, would allow. Living on an island with few lights, far from the light pollution of the more inhabited keys, allowed a person’s eyes to adjust. The moon illuminated everything around us and the stars were like a million little diamonds scattered across a black velvet blanket.
I pointed out some of the clusters of stars that could be seen
