thing!” She doesn’t hang up.
“What?”
“You’ll never guess who I ran into the other day.”
“No, I won’t.” The satellite phone is also too expensive to gossip across, but if she lets Viv have this one moment maybe she’ll save in the long run.
“Marika Mendel! Can you believe that? She came into the store, we had a nice chat.” Viv pretends to catch herself. Or maybe it’s honest, Faith can’t know for sure. “But I know you can’t talk long. I’ll tell you all about it when you come home. Bye!”
Outside, the rain is just getting started, and most of the passengers—five grad students, one professor, two amateur filmmakers, and three die-hard birdwatchers—are still on deck, sucking up as much fresh air as they can, as though it’ll last them. One of the filmmakers and one of the grad students have been seasick since they set out from San Diego, and the chop they’re likely to get riding this out will be hard on everyone, even the crew. Even Faith.
At night she writes blog posts, even though they can’t actually be uploaded until she reaches shore. The blog is her best free advertising, and lots of good you-are-there material is the key to its appeal.
But tonight, even though she should be thinking of adjectives to make the storm sound like a glorious adventure that people would pay for, she’s writing about gannets.
She does not write,
Eventually she is done with the gannets, and with the little glass of Laphroig that helps her write. She walks back up on deck, where the rain is now lashing and the waves are sending spray well over the deck. If she had a skin of gannet feathers, it would slide off of her and leave her unaffected. Her Marmot windbreaker is good enough, but the cuffs of her jeans get wet, and then dampen her socks.
But Vivian won’t even come out on the boat. She says she’s not scared, but Dad won’t come—Dad won’t even get in sight of the sea, a beach scene in a movie makes him walk out—and she won’t leave Dad alone.
Faith suspects she is scared.
At the height of the storm a small yellow-and-black landbird tries to perch in the rigging, then falls to the deck exhausted. The birdwatchers hover over it and identify it as a Hermit Warbler. It would break their rules to touch it, since nature must take its course, but they manage to half-crowd, half-shepherd it into the galley. The cook, Chaz, has been complaining about an infestation of fruit flies since they set out.
Chaz sets out a dish of water and some of the offending peaches. Out of the wind and the wet, the bird soon sheds its sickly, puffed-up look and begins to take an interest in these offerings.
Over dinner, everyone watches their new companion, who seems to have more of an appetite than any human aboard. The sailors and the birders swap stories of other warblers, sparrows, falcons, even a sand grouse that once washed on board an oil rig. The phalarope that flew into a lighted bathroom and swam in circles in the sink. The heron that crossed the Atlantic on a yacht.
When everyone has drifted away and Chaz is washing up, Faith takes a closer look at the bird. It’s almost certainly just a bird; still, on the off chance, she waits.
The bird ignores her, hovers to pluck a spider out of the corner, then drops back to the table and drinks. The yellow of its face shines in the slanting evening light. She can understand wanting to touch it, but she can’t—can no longer?—understand not knowing that touching it would be wrong.
Maybe she’s been hanging out with birdwatchers too much.
The bird stays until the storm has blown itself out and they’ve started back for San Diego. Then one morning it is gone.
If it headed east, the birdwatchers say, it will probably make it. Or maybe not, but at least it has a chance.
Once they’re back in cell phone range of port, Faith calls Vivian. She tries to run through the usual reassuring niceties, but Vivian cuts her off immediately.
“You’re back?”
“Less than a day out of port.”
“Thank god. We need your help on Wednesday; not tomorrow but this coming Wednesday, I mean.”
“That’s not going to work, I’m sailing out again as soon as we clean up and take on more supplies.”
“I thought that you didn’t have another trip scheduled for a month!”
“I didn’t. But the director we took out this time got an inspiration bug and is paying us to go out ASAP and get more footage. He wants to do a short feature on birds who get blown off-course and end up…”
“We need your help. An apartment in my building opened up and Dad’s moving into it. I can’t keep driving back and forth across the city twice a day to check on him.”
“That’s great,” Faith says. The idea made her choke, but she’d gotten it through her thick skull at least that other people were other people and had other feelings. “You deserve more free time.”
“And this way I can make sure he’s actually eating real meals. You know how he is about cooking for himself.”
“Well, it serves him right. He’s had years to learn.” Wrong, wrong wrong time for that argument, but it was too late to back up. “I’m sorry. I think it’s a great idea if it makes things easier on you, but I’m heading out again by Monday at the latest.”
“Tell the guy you have to wait.”
“If I make him wait now, it’ll be next year before he get another shot at what he’s looking for. And he’ll probably go look for it with a different captain.”
“We need you.”
“No you don’t. You’ll be fine.”
“With just my little car, it’ll take two days.”
“I didn’t even known this would be happening.”
“I didn’t know that the apartment would be available.”
“I’m sorry.” Faith would like to think of herself as an honest person, but it’s getting harder and harder to do that. Still, she only lies in self-defense and a lot of things are justifiable in self-defense.
“Dad misses you.”
There’s nothing she can say to that, not even the baldest lie would fool Vivian into thinking that she felt sorry for Dad. The first time Vivian had used the line, back when Faith was in college, she’d tried to lie that she missed him too. The second time she’d been drunk and she’d quoted Star Wars, to the effect that the more he tightened his grasp the more star systems would slip through his fingers. Neither worked, so now she waits. Vivian hears silence, not the slap of the waves on the boat and the chatter of the passengers outside, and her own need to fill that silence will always push her on eventually. That’s one of the few ways in which Vivian takes after their father.
“I saw Marika again. In the store.”
“How is she?”
“She’s fine. I told her you’d be ashore next week, and that maybe you’d want to get dinner.”
“Maybe next month.”
“She probably won’t be in town that long. She’s only here to give a lecture at the university.” Another pause. “She wrote a book, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that. I always thought she was going to be an actress.”
“It’s about our situation. With, you know, our moms.”
“Ah.”
“I asked if we were in it, but she just laughed.”
“Sounds like Marika.”
“She’d probably tell you. If you were going to see her. But I guess you won’t.”
“I’ll have to catch up with her another time.”
