Life #6. Diana Wagman
senior. I missed them all. They were gone. And this Jack, this young man, was going, going.
We experience so many deaths in our lifetime. Not just the actual demise of people or animals. Not just the end of a job or relationship or the departure of our children into their own lives. We suffer personal deaths, little bits of ourselves that pass away. Our hair and our memory. Our quick step. Our joints betray us. Our eyes give out. Our libido fades. But humans, we mourn, but we don’t stop. We get facelifts and take exercise classes and eat kale and buy all kinds of products to keep us going, even if we’re not exactly whole anymore. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable says a cat has nine lives because a cat is “more tenacious of life than any other animal.” Really? I think humans win. Humans hang on. Humans take the pills, do the tests, have the twelve-hour surgery, and finally demand to subsist for years attached to tubes and machines, unable to walk or wave or even swallow. Talk about tenacity.
On the boat, Doug told me he knew people who should have died and didn’t. He used himself as an example and said he believed each of us is given many lives to live. How many? I asked him. His wool hat glittered with raindrops every time the strobe light flashed. The sea moved up and down behind him, up and down. If cats have nine lives, I asked him, how many do I have? How many have I used up?
When I was five-years-old, I sailed through the windshield of my father’s car. Not his fault; we were hit from behind. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, but I don’t think there was one to wear. I launched from the red vinyl seat of his classic white Camaro and my pig-tailed head hit the glass and shattered it. I ended up sprawled half in, half out, my chest and stomach on the hood of the car, my legs and feet in pink socks dangling over the dashboard. My patent leather Mary Janes had flown off my feet into the back seat. I lay perfectly still watching the broken glass sparkle in the streetlight. My father’s nose was bleeding as he crawled over the hood to my upper half.
“Are you all right? Oh no. Oh no.”
“What happened to your nose?” I asked. To this day I remember flying and crashing and landing on the warm metal. My head hurt and the streetlight was too bright in my eyes, but I said, “I’m fine, Daddy.”
My father smiled and I was glad I’d made him happy. When the sirens and emergency vehicles arrived, he was energetic and trembling, joking with the cops and the guy in the other car. He was giddy until he had to call his ex-wife, my mother, and tell her he had almost killed me. His voice got low and scratchy the way it did whenever he had to talk to her. When he brought me home, she said he could never see me again, and that’s when I cried. His upper lip was swollen and bloody from hitting the steering wheel. No airbags in those days. No seatbelt laws. He walked back down the steps to his car with no windshield. There was a rip in the shoulder of his jacket, the white lining flapping farewell.
“Daddy!” I screamed.
He raised a hand. “Call you tomorrow, Button.”
Later, as my mother undressed me for my bath, she found splinters of glass in my thick hair and ground into the shoulder of my yellow sweater. It hurt too much to brush my hair so I went to bed without and in the morning my pillow had scratched my cheek from all the glass. Daddy called to see how I was and my mother cried and then she heard another woman in the background and got angry and hung up before I could talk to him. My headaches did not go away and when, three weeks later, I finally saw the doctor, he said I had a fractured skull and I should have died.
Fiona was sick. Seasick, sick of the sea, and they’d only been sailing for a few hours. She huddled in the cockpit beside Luc, doing her best not to throw up. Nathan was giving them some sailing tips—too late, she thought. She wasn’t listening anyway. She would just do whatever she was told. She leaned her head against Luc’s shoulder, but that made her feel worse. She had to keep her neck straight and her eyes on the horizon, barely visible in the gloom. Rain threatened, a few constipated drops fell. She knew a downpour was coming.
Doug squeezed in beside her. He wasn’t listening to Nathan either. He whispered in her ear, “Three is my lucky number. Remember. Threes are good.” Last night at dinner, before she and Nathan went to look for Luc, Doug had told her the story of his cancer. The luck he’d had and the signs. Three times the department secretary suggested he see a doctor for his headaches and the third time he went. Two doctors had told him it was inoperable; the third was Nathan. Three black crows on the telephone line outside his house in Arizona the morning he left. Three white seagulls on the dock before they set sail. She was the third girl he’d met since cancer. The first a nurse, the second a grad student, and now Fiona. She would be lucky for him. But there were five people on board this boat. This was her first voyage. And she had almost puked a zillion times.
The wind was picking up, the waves—constant and uncountable—growing larger.
Nathan said the mainsail was flogging. No one moved. He ordered Joren to reef the mainsail. Joren looked up at the sail and pushed the hair from his eyes.
Nathan frowned. “Don’t you understand ‘the English’? Think, Captain. What to do?”
The boat had become a demented seesaw, tilting one way and then banging down the other. At the same time the bow rose and came down hard, slapping the water and covering them in freezing spray. Fiona braced with her feet and held the bottom of the bench with both numb hands and gritted her teeth so she wouldn’t bite her tongue. Her stomach roiled, her eyes watered, her blue suede jacket was soaked. She watched Luc trying to light a cigarette and laughing—actually laughing—at the struggle. She almost hated him for feeling so good.
“Captain!” Nathan yelled. “Come on! Tighten her up!” He made a cranking motion with his arm. Joren headed for the winch on the left—port—side of the boat.
“Not that! The halyard!”
Joren shook his head.
“On the mast!” Nathan gestured. Joren turned to front of the boat. Nathan nudged Luc with his foot. “Help him.”
Luc grinned and jumped up to give Joren a hand. Fiona had worried yesterday’s heroin would be debilitating, but he was completely fine. His balance was perfect, he wasn’t seasick at all. Maybe she should have gotten high with him. She would try anything at this point to calm her stomach and her fears. Luc kept the lit cigarette in his mouth as he scrambled along the side deck to the main mast—as if he’d done it a thousand times. But then he and Joren didn’t appear to know what to do. She saw them talking and the sail kept flapping and the boat kept slamming against the waves.
“Oh Lordy.” Nathan looked out at the sea. “Wind’s probably at twenty-five knots. Blow!” He shouted at the clouds. “Blow me down!” He scampered over the deck to Luc and Joren.
She couldn’t hear what he was telling them, but she saw them nodding in reply. They folded part of the sail down and looped a line through a hole and around the boom. The wind caught the tightened sail and the boat heeled over so far Fiona was afraid it would tip. She almost screamed, but Joren turned a crank—the winch—and the boat held steady and moved more smoothly through the water. Joren and Luc stayed out by the mast, sitting on the deck with their feet over the high edge. They looped their arms over the steel cable—the lifeline—that circled the boat.
Nathan scrambled back and motioned for her and Doug to come out of the cockpit and climb up beside him, on the high side. “This is the windward side! Like this!” He had to shout to be heard even though he was right beside them. He shifted his weight and straightened his legs while leaning against the boat. If the boat had been flat he would have been parallel to the water. Doug couldn’t quite get his balance and Fiona worried he’d fall overboard backwards. She straightened out, doing it—hiking out—just fine, but the strain made her sicker. She closed her eyes, but that was worse.
Nathan leaned close and spoke in her ear. “I should have sailed alone. I’ve