Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

Where is Katie’s mother when her father’s out trapping lobsters or laying boats together? Could she be dead? He’s seen the father on the island but never at the shop; the shop is clearly left up to Katie, and so, apparently, is her life. No mother would agree to let her fifteen-year-old girl go off on a journey like this.

“Katie,” Rufus says, “the sea is calm, the sky is clear, the forecast is mild. It should take us about eight hours to get to Colonsay. If everyone is holding up fine once we get to the Torran Rocks or we can’t find an anchorage, we won’t stop. But we’re on a mission of peace. It won’t do to have discord on our vessel.”

Eight hours . In the rush of getting ready, it hadn’t occurred to him to ask how long they’d row each day. In the gathering light, Ghislaine’s back, arms, and shoulders slide effortlessly. A wall of trophies, she told him. Under the loose sweater she wore to dinner, her body remained a secret to him. The life preserver she now wears over a ribbed long-sleeved shirt still keeps him from seeing much, but her upper arms are full and hard, and so is her ass, on the bench in front of him. She’s bigger than he initially thought, but tight. A slender woman who has packed on lots of muscle. She must be very strong.

Normally, the gamines like Georgina are the ones who catch his attention, but what would it be like in bed with Ghislaine? Is she tight everywhere? Would they row along under sheets, finding the same sort of rhythm as they do in the boat?

“If you kept your eyes on your rowing and off my body,” Ghislaine says over her shoulder in a low voice, “you might not create such a drag on the boat.”

He laughs, hoping Katie won’t have heard. “You have eyes in the back of your head, Ghislaine?”

But she’s right. He’s fallen off unison again.

Dawn opens up the sea around them, moving through deep blues to a sweet dusky azure. There’s comfort in being able to see land out there. It helps him to gauge the steady pace they are keeping, with the low northwesterly wind and tide in their favor. His hands already feel stiff, but his arms and shoulders are moving better than during the first hour.

“We got lucky with the weather,” Ghislaine says.

“God is on our side,” Rufus says. “Or at least the weather god. Remember that time down in Devon, and big pieces of hail started to fall from the sky?”

“Pouah,” Ghislaine says. “Don’t remind me. That wasn’t hail. They were like frozen lemons.”

“I wouldn’t mind a lemon right now,” Rufus says. “Or, more precisely, a tall glass of lemonade.”

“Bah, lemonade. A nice cup o’ tea,” Katie says.

“We know that’s what Eamon’s dreaming about. Aren’t you, man?” Rufus says.

Eamon grunts.

“What about you, Francis? A cup of tea or a glass of lemonade?”

They were drinking lemonade when his father dropped to his knees, crumpled like a doll, nothing like the tall, steady hero who was his real father. The taste of lemons always used to bring that moment back to him, that slice in the wall of time between before and after, when his cheerful mother suddenly shouted Stay with us! But his father didn’t.

“Water,” he says.

But then, one night in Mallorca, he and Georgina ended up squeezing lemons over each other, licking the juice, laughing. They’d begun by slipping raw oysters into each other’s mouths preceded by gulps of cava and followed by squeezes of lemon. You have to have the lemon, Georgina said. You need the bitter to make the sweet taste so good. After they ran out of oysters, they just kept going. Lemon juice in each other’s hair, on their shoulders, down his smooth chest.

A few years ago, I spent two months in Greece picking lemons, he told her, dripping beads of lemon juice the length of her leg. Her ankle, her shin, her knee, her thigh. Seven days a week, ten hours a day: pull, twist, pull, twist. Finally, I caught a ride north through Yugoslavia and Italy into France. The driver stopped in Menton. Nice town, he said. You’ll find something here. So I got out, so happy to be done with all that. It was March. Turns out that’s Menton’s lemon-picking season .

Sounds like sour luck to me, Georgina said, laughing hard, drawing her leg up and around him.

That night, lemon juice didn’t taste so bad to him.

There are moments when he wishes things could have been different. That he could have been the kind of man who would have stayed and helped Georgina. That he could have been the kind of man who was able to help her.

He leans on the oars, stroking away the rush of loneliness that overcomes him, beating it out of his body. His tongue sticks a little in his mouth. His lips feel swollen. A tall glass of water or lemonade or anything would be nice. At the same time, his lower abdomen has slowly been tightening. The piss bucket is in the front of the boat behind Rufus. He doesn’t want to pull his dick out in full sight of Katie.

The sea tugs on his oars. He glances over his shoulders: up ahead is a scattering of dark rocks, some almost large enough to be called islands or at least skerries, others more like giant teeth jutting out of the sea. The boat is suddenly moving faster, almost, than they are rowing.

“The start of the ebb tide,” Rufus says. “On its way out from Mull it splits up on the Rocks and doubles its strength. You’d best get hold of the steering oar, Katie.”

The once placid sea is now rumbling, splashing against the rocks. The boat is moving at twice the speed it was ten minutes earlier, as though it has been lifted onto a liquid conveyor belt, almost beyond their control. They pass a first skerry where three seals, their mottled gray backs shiny with water, raise their heads to look at them. A fourth seal, a large shapeless body reclining on an adjacent rock, shakes a flipper.

“Friendly,” Ghislaine says, puffing a little as she wields her oars in the current.

The seal slips off his rock to swim up beside the boat. He stares down into the animal’s soft black eyes.

“Can see,” he says, “why people—”

“Starboard!” Rufus shouts.

Which is starboard? Ghislaine is pulling with her left arm. He’ll pull with his left too, then.

“—made up selkies,” he finishes, once they are safely away from the rock. “Those eyes, those little hands.”

“Made up?” Katie says.

“Do you believe in selkies, Katie?” Rufus says in between pants.

The seal slips away. Katie harrumphs. It’s impossible to tell whether it’s a sign of assent or disgust.

“Watch out for that rock,” she shouts. “There. Leeward.”

They row as hard as they can, washing up and down in the break of the water. Another skerry, thick with nesting birds, comes up fast. They pull around it.

Once the tide is no longer aiming them against rocks, they take a collective breath. In unspoken agreement, they lighten up on their oars.

“Do you like fairy tales, Francis?” Ghislaine says.

He wipes his forehead against his forearm. “They’re okay.”

In his plastic barrel is the book of mythology his aunt sent them for Christmas many years ago. All these years, he’s carried it around with him. He’s not even sure why. When he left Phoenix for LA, he put it in his trunk. When he left LA for Europe, he stuck it in his pack. Every once in a while, he opens it up, reads about another long-ago hero.

The sun has fully risen. They’ve been rowing for over an hour, maybe two. His back and underarms feel hot and damp beneath his life preserver, and he really wants a drink of water now, even more than he needs to relieve himself. But a shout from Katie lets them know new rocks are sticking up ahead. They’re a team. He can’t just stop because he wants to.