The Long Way Home Read online

  I can feel the speculation in her gaze, even though Marta’s eyes are hidden behind her sunglasses. “You have thought much on this.”

  I let too much slip, I realize. “Not much to do but think, sometimes.”

  “Suicide is not something one thinks upon for no reason,” Marta says.

  I feel the wind shifting. “Prepare to come about,” I say, by way of evasion.

  I don’t miss the smirk on Marta’s lips as she sets her magazine aside, and I’m careful to keep my eyes on the sheet flapping loosely for a moment as we come about for a new tack, and then on the waves, on the wheel, on anything but her as she moves about the boat, tightening and tying off lines with efficient grace. Once our new tack is established and the sail is taut, I busy myself with my e-reader, doing my best to look absorbed as Marta resumes her seat and her magazine page-flipping.

  Minutes pass in silence, and then Marta’s ability to remain quiet slips. “My sister killed herself. When I was eleven. So many people acted shocked, but I was not. Marie, she was a very upset person…disturbed, you would say, I think. Much in her own mind, sad, or angry, and always alone. Why, I do not know. She was twenty-five when I was eleven, and I suppose there may have been things she experienced which I have no idea about. I was so young, after all. I just remember seeing her walking along the docks near our flat, and thinking that she was just so sad, so sad, always so sad. And then one day Papa was at work and I came home from school, and I found Marie. In the bath, her eyes open wide, but seeing nothing. The water was red, and there was a razor blade on the floor. I didn’t understand at first. Or, perhaps I didn’t want to. I left the flat, and went to find Papa. He worked on the docks, loading and unloading ships. I found him, and I told him, and he only nodded. Kept me with him, and called the authorities. That was it. When we returned home some hours later, she was gone. Someone had cleaned the bathtub, erased all of the evidence.”

  “I’m sorry you went through that.” I can’t figure this girl out, why she would tell me that.

  “No sadness is so great that to die is the only escape.” She sets her magazine down on her thighs and I can feel her stare hard and sharp on me once more. “This world, it is so wide, so vast, so complex and filled with so much beauty. To die before it is your time, you miss all the beauty. All the wonder. The happiness that is out there if you only have enough courage to go find it.”

  “And sometimes, the world is so full of ugliness and pain that beauty has no meaning. Sadness, tragedy, it can consume you. Blind you. It obscures everything, Marta. Drags you down like an undertow.” I stare out, watch waves crest white to starboard. “Yes, the world is full of beauty, sometimes. Yes, there is happiness, if you look for it. But sometimes…just waking up is a struggle. Being alive, facing the world, facing life, facing yourself, it’s too much. Too hard. Sometimes, it’s impossible to see past things to the beauty and happiness there is out there. How are you supposed to find something if you don’t know what it looks like, what it feels like?”

  Marta is silent, then. “You have known such pain?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do not wish to speak of it.” She states this flatly, but her head is tilted to one side, inquisitive, and she toys with her braid as if nervous.

  “Not really, no.”

  She doesn’t push any further, thankfully.

  I pretend to read, and so does she, but I don’t think either of us is seeing the words.

  The silence is broken by Jonny’s voice. “Look port side!”

  Marta and I both move to the port railing. At first I don’t see anything but the rippling blue-green of the Atlantic. And then a curve of something mammoth slices the surface of the sea, a dark shadow breaching up from the depths. Another. And another. And then a whale’s tail spears out of the water and slaps down, sending a white gout of water pluming into the sky.

  Marta and Jonny have already reefed the sheet, and we coast to a rolling stop in the middle of the pod. I count at least a dozen, probably more, as it is hard to keep track as they surface and dive again, a few tail sailing—leaving its tail above the surface to catch the wind, its body under the water.

  Marta has vanished below deck, and returns with an armload of wetsuits. “Have you ever swum with them before?” she asks, handing me my suit.

  I shake my head as I begin donning the rubber suit. “Seen them, sailed with them, but never swam with them.”

  She gestures at the pod, individuals breaching and tail slapping, tail sailing, sliding past just beneath our boat, huge eyes visible for a moment. “They are curious creatures. To be this close to so many is a rare treat.”

  Within a few minutes I’m suited up, my tank on and mouthpiece in, tumbling backward into the water, and my worldview shifts.

  Beneath the surface is a wonderland of life, titans of the sea twisting and squealing, tails drifting lazily, fins flicking. I kick away from the boat, and within a few strokes of my fins I’m parallel with a gargantuan creature. It is breathtaking and terrifying all at once, my stomach dropping away and my heart slamming in my chest. It sees me. It rolls onto one side and tilts away, bringing an eye to bear on me, watching me. I cannot breathe. The surface, the boat, Ava, all of it fades. It’s just me and this whale, a wild, gentle, curious beast fifty feet long and something like fifty or sixty tons. It drifts, and I kick my feet, extending my hand carefully; the whale watches, and drifts. Its fin lifts, floats toward me. Breathless, I touch the fin with a fingertip only, at first. And then run my palm along the rubbery surface. Its eye follows me as I inch closer, brush a hand along her side.

  I cast a glance around me, and realize I am surrounded. A mother and her calf sidle closer, curious. The calf remains tucked near its mother’s fin, against her side. The whale closest to me gives a gentle flick of its tail and drifts away with slow easy grace, breaching the surface. I follow her up and watch as she spouts, her blowhole whuffling and sputtering and then inhaling a whistling lungful of air before sinking back down. The mother and her calf are a few feet closer, drifting cautiously toward me; I tread water to stay in place as they approach, my fins flicking now and again to keep me from sinking downward. Mother and calf, a wonder of new life. They’re less than twenty feet away now, and I have to remind myself to keep drawing oxygen off my tank, keep breathing. The calf wiggles its fins, and then flicks its tail, leaving its mother’s side finally; the mother watches, alert as her baby approaches me, circling around to keep an eye fixed on me. I see intelligence in that calf, the curiosity, the wonder. This creature has a personality, a soul. It is a life. Not just another creature in the sea, but an individual being moving through life, thinking thoughts I cannot fathom, but thoughts nonetheless.

  After a few circles around me, I hear the mother make a sound, a low rolling, rumbling murmur shuddering through the water, and the calf darts back, ducking underneath mama’s fin once more. Mama angles away, and the calf follows, and then pauses, as if glancing back at me one last time.

  It makes me think of a human mother and her child I saw once. My first trip to Africa, we put in at Bata, a port town in Equatorial Guinea. We only spent half a day there, but I remember prowling around a market, wide-eyed, still green, just a kid who’d never been east of Illinois. A woman was at a fruit stall, bartering for mangos and coconuts. Her child, a tiny, frail-looking little girl with wide eyes and a hundred thin braids in her hair, crouched clutching her mother’s colorful skirt.

  The girl watched me, curious, as I paused at a fish seller’s stall a few feet away. I bought a fish, took the paper-wrapped package, and then turned to the little girl, squatting, smiling. The girl tugged on her mother’s skirt, and the two exchanged words, and then the little girl had skittered cautiously closer to me, stopping just outside of arm’s reach. I extended the package to her, and the girl took it, eyeing me warily. I only smiled, and waved at her. She inched closer, clutching the fish to her chest with one hand, and ran her finger along my forearm, marveling at the white skin. T
ouched my hair, and then hers. And then she waved at me and scrambled back to her mother, hiding behind that bright yellow and red and black skirt again, and the mother took her fruit and moved away, her free arm herding the daughter along with her.

  And, like the whale calf just now, the little girl had paused, stopping to look back at me, a moment of awareness between us, eye contact between two souls. The mother paused, meeting my gaze steadily, and then she called for her daughter. I obviously had not known the language, but the context had been clear—come, child; let’s go. Gentle, loving tones. Mother and child had gone their way, and I’d gone mine. A momentary interlude, a brief interaction, remarkable in the moment and easily forgotten amid a million such moments over the years, but remembered now for the similarity.

  A whale and her calf; a mother and her child—moments of beauty. An interaction that touches the soul, reminding me that I am not alone in the world. If that mother was to lose her calf to some tragedy, she would grieve. Prowl the waters, clicking and mourning and howling her grief, and perhaps other mothers would drift beside her for a while, comforting her.

  I return to the boat, and Jonny and Marta take their turns in the water, and eventually the pod breaches, blows, sucks in great drafts of air, and then dives down and we lose sight of them.

  We resume our eastward tack, and I sit behind the wheel with my wetsuit around my waist, remembering the whale mother and her curious calf.

  My thoughts are myriad, and tangled.

  22

  Epistle #2

  November 19, 2015

  * * *

  Ava,

  * * *

  I swam with a pod of southern right whales yesterday. A mother and her calf. The calf came right up to me and swam around me, and I felt the soul of the animal. It was a beautiful moment, my own curiosity mirrored by that of the baby whale.

  I am adrift. I am a whale scudding alone through the deeps, surfacing for breath now and again, far from anyone, far from land, from my own kind or any other. Who is there to know my thoughts? Who is there to hear my sighs in the night?

  No one.

  I wonder, in the sleepless hours of starlit predawn, what you are doing. What you are thinking, what you are feeling? Do you miss me? Do you long for me?

  Do you still mourn?

  Do you still cry yourself to sleep?

  Do you touch yourself and wish it was my touch? I cannot indulge in even that. Even self-pleasure falls flat without you, Ava.

  I am not alone on the boat any longer. It is a confusing thing, to have others present, but to still feel so utterly alone. I cannot speak of you, cannot even think of Henry—to write that name, to type those five letters…it is raw agony. Impossible to speak of it, even to Jonny, who knows everything. Or nearly everything.

  He does not know that I dream of you. That when I do manage sleep, I wake having dreamed of you. Just this past night—it is five in the morning as I write this, and I am awake for the day, sitting on the trampoline with my laptop, watching the sky lighten—I dreamed of you. Do you want to know?

  It was a bizarre, erotic dream.

  It began with an all-pervading sense of blue—blueness. Soft, delicate, warm azure. The color of ocean water lapping in an inlet somewhere on the coast of Bermuda, Hog Bay, perhaps. That was all there was, for an eternity or a moment, that lazy lapis lazuli. It surrounded me, enveloped me, breathed in me and through me and was me. I was the blue, and the blue was me.

  Then I floated. Like lying on my back in a pool, eyes closed, sun bright and warm on my eyelids, water lapping at my cheeks and lower lip, just breathing and floating. I sank into that blue, into the peaceful swirl of a gentle current.

  Then, slowly, the floating drifting blue…shifted. It was a subtle transition, a gradual becoming. Motion, before random and idle, now breathing with purpose. The blue, before like water, now swallowed me. Slid along my flesh with purpose. Alive. Not a fearful or frightening or alien life, though; this was familiar, and lovely, and comforting. All I knew was that the touch of the blue was like curling up in my own bed after a month of hotel sheets. And this too was lovely and comforting; yet there was a new element, a new feeling, now. Softness and the slide against my skin was less the slick wet splash of water and more the deliberate tracery of palm on thigh, cheek on chest, breast on mouth, tongue on hip, breath on core.

  This too pulsed with the soul-calm of home.

  An eternity passed as I drowned in that touching kissing licking embracing breathing blue. I gave myself over to it, let it consume me. I became one with it.

  Eternity after eternity, and still I convulsed and writhed and sighed in that roiling flesh-slick blue of touch.

  Never end

  Never end

  Never end

  Those two words were my only thought, my only awareness. I was home, and I wished never to leave. I needed it.

  And then all morphed again, another slow imperceptible shift.

  The blueness became a gaze. Awareness. Intelligence. Sentience.

  Blue desire.

  A vibrant blue, vulpine and ravenous.

  And so, so familiar. Home. All that is me, all that is known, all that is comfort and solace.

  The sense of touch became more. More everything—more real, firmer, needier, hungrier. Aching. Clawing.

  All within that blue, such a sweetly familiar shade, a flavor of blue I knew with my mind and my heart and my soul and my body and into my pores and down through my cells. I knew that blue.

  It touched. Demanded. Possessed. Became.

  Again, I gave myself over to it. Abandoned myself to being possessed. The touch expanded, and I expanded with it. The touch slid along my neck, tracing the tendons. Carved a furrow down the center of my chest, like a teasing fingertip scraping from breastbone to navel. Another long slow touch, this one beginning at my toes and brushing up my calves, to my thighs, to my belly. Palms on flesh. Need. Ache. And that blue, blue gaze. It was a gaze, now, and I knew the eyes. Such vivid, vibrant, ensorcelling azure. Tracing my body with hungry needy fever, fervor, furor. A tempest of touch, a tangling, sighing dream-silk of whispers winnowing awareness from sleep.

  The touch became…aggressive.

  My balls ached, throbbed. I felt my manhood engorge. Felt it stiff and hard as nails and dripping with need. The blue, it saw my need. Felt my desire. Tasted my desperation.

  I looked into that blue, into those eyes, and assented to anything, everything. Begged for touch. For the bliss of release. Pleaded for more.

  And so the blue caressed me, intimately. A sweet slow affectionate brush of hands over my cock. Gentle and unhurried.

  I breathed a whimper of pleasure, and the blue breathed back, lips whispering against mine, words I couldn’t make out, whispers like a breeze in the treetops, licking against my cheekbones, ruffling my hair.

  And I recognized as well the texture of that whisper. It was as blue and familiar as the eyes that gazed at me, into me.

  For time without end I lay in that drowning blue, basking in the touch, the breath, the presence. Letting the blue caress me, unhurriedly squeezing and sliding and stroking until I was unable to breathe properly, unable to be still, until I could only writhe and beg for the dulcet beautiful torture to end, to let me find release.

  Whispers met my plea.

  Words, this time.

  Give it to me,

  I heard.

  Never end,

  I heard.

  Opposite, but complimentary. The blue and I both wished for this to never end, but we both knew it must, and so we both wished for the ending to be…a song so glorious even the most distant stars would hear and feel jealousy.

  And so it was. The build-up was slow and my arousal was painful. The touch and the blue gaze grew hungrier and needier and I could not resist the need to release any longer. I became aware of the touch as a real physical thing, a hand wrapped around me and sliding slowly and grinding at my base and twisting around the top and sliding and car
essing unceasingly until the moment of release was upon me, undeniable, heat and pressure boiling through me fiercely enough to melt me from the inside out, and I stared into those blue eyes and whispered back—

  To you.

  As I came, it was you touching me, Ava.

  Only at the end as I exploded with a wrenching groan did I know you as the owner of those blue eyes and the perfect touch. But it was always you. Always the shade of your eyes, the texture of your voice, the sweetness of your touch. You, Ava.

  You.

  When I awoke, my come was a sticky hot pool on my stomach.

  If you had been there…oh, love. You would have gloried in the mess. Teased me, tasted it, perhaps. Cleaned me with a loving touch.

  I woke, messy, and you weren’t there.

  It had all been a dream.

  But I choose to believe it was you, still, somehow.

  Perhaps our dreams are tangled.

  I wonder if you dreamed of me, that night. Was I there, in your mind, in your sleep? Touching you? Licking your core, tasting your essence, gathering the sweet slick dew from deep within you on my fingers and licking it away like the nectar from a flower, like honey dripping from a golden comb? Pleasuring you as slowly as you did me? Teasing you to the edge and denying you the release—just as you love so much in reality.