Sailing into the Storm of Us

Mara Kingston was thirty-four years old, and she missed being watched.

Not in a creepy way, she told herself. Not in a way she could explain at a dinner party, either. But there it was. For eight summers she had sat in that tall white chair at Halloway Beach, whistle around her neck, and every single person on that sand had known exactly who she was. The lifeguard. The one who'd see you if you went under. Two hundred strangers tracked her whenever she walked to the water tower, and she had loved it, that strange electric weight of all those eyes.

Then she'd met Shawn, quit the chair at thirty-two, married him within the year, and moved into a cottage beside a cemetery. A groundskeeper's cottage, all drafty windows and salt-stained shingles, with boxes still stacked in the living room two months in because neither of them had unpacked anything past the coffee mugs.

The cemetery was quiet. That was the entire appeal, supposedly. Quiet, cheap, and the rent came with the job her husband had taken, and the move she had agreed to.

And it was too quiet.

"You're doing the stare again," Shawn said from the kitchen doorway.

He was thirty-six, still built as if he spent his days hauling sailboats, and he was holding two mugs as if offering peace. Mara was curled on the couch with her feet tucked under her, looking out at the fog. Through the window she could see the storage shed and the little dock on the salt pond, both of them soft-edged and gray.

"I'm not staring. I'm brooding. It's different."

"It's very different," he agreed, and handed her a mug. "Brooding has more dignity."

She took the coffee and he sat down beside her, close enough that his knee pressed hers. So here was the thing she couldn't say out loud, or hadn't yet: she loved him, and she missed the chair. She missed the whistle and the crowd and the feeling that if she took her eyes off the water for one second, someone would notice. Out here nobody noticed anything. The dead didn't count as an audience.

"Okay," Shawn said. He set his mug down, which was what he did when he was about to propose something. "Hear me out."

"That's never good."

"Hear me out anyway. It's blowing twenty knots out there. Fog's coming in off the pond. The water's going to be choppy and cold and absolutely miserable."

"Wow. Sell it harder, why don't you!"

"And I want to take you out for a sailing lesson," he finished, grinning. "Right now. Tonight-ish. Before the light goes."

Mara laughed. It came out sharper than she meant. "Shawn. It's October. The pond is forty-eight degrees and getting worse. And you want to take the beginner out in it?"

"You're not the beginner. You were a lifeguard for eight years. You can swim circles around me."

"Lifeguarding is not sailing!"

"It's close enough," he said, and his voice did that thing it did, the low patient thing that had worked on her the day they met, when she'd signed up for an adult sailing class at thirty-two mostly because she was bored and he'd spent the whole first lesson watching her the way nobody had watched her since she'd stopped wearing the whistle. "Come on. One hour. If you hate it, we turn around and I make dinner and never mention it again."

She looked at the fog. She looked at him.

Here was the other thing she couldn't say, the one sitting underneath the first one. Somewhere in two years together, and two months of quiet mornings and unpacked boxes, they had stopped being a spectacle to each other. He didn't look at her like the man on the dock had looked at her that first June. And she wanted it back, badly, in ways that embarrassed her a little.

"Fine," she said. "But if I get hypothermia, you're explaining it to the cemetery committee."

"Deal. Go get your swimsuit."

"Why would I need a swimsuit? You said a lesson. Lessons happen in clothes, Shawn. I've taken one."

"Trust me," he said, already heading for the door. "Trust me!"

* * *

The dock creaked under her bare feet and the wind hit her like a bucket of seawater.

She had changed in the cottage, argued with herself for a solid five minutes in front of the mirror, and then put on the red one-piece she hadn't worn since her last summer on the chair. It was cut high on the leg and low in the back and it had always made her feel like someone worth staring at. Standing on the dock with the wind peeling across the pond, she felt every inch of it, and every inch of her skin woke up and paid attention.

"This is insane," she called over the wind. "I want you to know that. This is completely insane."

"That's the spirit." Shawn was at the mooring, fussing with the lines on the little day sailer they kept there. He looked up and stopped fussing. He just stopped.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing. It's just..." He trailed off, which he never did. "You look the way you do on the first day of class."

"You look as though your wife is about to make you sleep on the couch."

He laughed and went back to the lines, but she'd caught it, the look. The one she'd been starving for. And so she did something a little crazy, something the old Mara would have done on a crowded beach just to feel the eyes follow her. She walked the length of the dock slowly, hips doing the work, knowing he was watching, knowing the fog gave her cover from everything except him.

The oil lamp was her idea, sort of. It had come with the cottage, a brass thing with a sooty chimney that lived on a nail by the door, and Shawn had lit it and hung it off the stern as though fog lamps were a maritime requirement and not a dramatic gesture. It threw a soft yellow circle over the cockpit.

"There," he said. "Now we're officially visible to any passing ghost ships."

"Is that a safety measure or a mood?"

"Can't it be both?" He held the boat steady against the dock. "Okay. Step in, sit on the windward side, and don't stand up without telling me."

"Windward. Got it. That's the... windy one."

"See, this is why the lesson," he said, and she climbed down into the cockpit, the boat rocking under her, the cold of the pond breathing up off the water.

He cast off and the dock slid away, and the shed and the cottage and the cemetery all got smaller and grayer behind them. The fog was coming in properly now, thick and low, and the whole world shrank down to the yellow circle of the lamp and the slap of chop against the hull and the two of them.

"Feel that?" Shawn said. He had the tiller in one hand and the mainsheet in the other, and the boat leaned a little as the wind caught the sail. "That's the boat talking to you."

"The boat is complaining."

"The boat is complaining in a way that means go faster," he said, and eased the sheet out, and the lean deepened, and Mara grabbed the rail and felt her whole body light up.

There it was. There it was, the thing she'd been chasing in her head for two years. The cold spray, the tilt of the world, the wind trying to take things off her. Her heart slammed and she laughed out loud, a real one, the kind she hadn't heard out of herself since the chair.

"Okay," she shouted. "Okay, I take it back, this is not insane."

"What?"

"I said this is not insane."

"I know, I just like watching you say it." He was grinning at her across the cockpit, hair whipped sideways, and the lamp swung on its little hook and threw his shadow long across the boards.

The fog wrapped around them like a curtain closing. Somewhere out there was the shore, the town, the road with its headlights, and all of it might as well have been on the moon. There was just the lamp, the boat, the wind, and Shawn.

"Hey," she said, quieter now, the wind dropping for a second like it was giving her a window. "Why the weather, Shawn? Really. You hate cold water. You complain about the cold in July."

He looked at her for a moment, working the tiller, keeping them steady through a gust.

"Because you've been somewhere else for months," he said. "And I figured the only way to find you was to go somewhere uncomfortable."

Shawn steered them out of the main chop and around a low finger of rock, and the pond opened into a smaller bowl of water he clearly knew about. A cove. Of course he knew about a cove. The man had lived on this coastline his whole life.

"Where are we?" Mara shouted.

"South shore. Nobody comes out here in October." He let the sail ease and the boat settled, gliding. "And look. See that light?"

Through a gap in the fog she caught it. A yellow smudge, low and small. The kitchen lamp, left on in the cottage window.

"That's us," she said. "That's our light."

"That's us. Which means anybody on shore with a pair of binoculars and nothing better to do could be watching this boat right now."

"Shawn. It's foggy and it's forty-eight degrees. Nobody is watching this boat."

"Probably not," he agreed, grinning. "But probably isn't nobody."

And that, that stupid little probably, did something to her that two years together and two months of moving boxes hadn't managed. Because Mara Kingston, thirty-four years old, eight summers in the chair at Halloway Beach, had spent her whole adult life being looked at, and she had never once stopped missing it.

"So here's a question," she said, standing carefully, one hand on the mast. "Hypothetically."