The Ferry Reckoning

You know what used to kill me about Krissy? The impressions. She did this air traffic controller voice, this clipped robotic guy voice, and she'd use it to narrate dumb stuff, like telling me the toaster was done. "Toast complete. Please proceed to breakfast." I would laugh so hard I'd get the hiccups. Every time. Hiccups!

That was five years ago, when we met. I was twenty-four, she was twenty-three, and we both flew for a living so we thought we were clever. We married two years later. And now? Now I'm twenty-nine and our conversations sound like two people reading from a manual. Did you pack the charger? Yes. Did you call your mother? Yes. Great flight? Yeah, you?

That's it. That constitutes the entirety of the marriage some weeks. So when she texted me on a Tuesday and said, hey, there's a ferry to Tallinn Thursday night, want to just go? I said yes before I even thought about it. Which is maybe the point. Maybe I should have thought about it, but the answer was going to be yes anyway.

So here we are, hauling our bags up the gangway in Helsinki on a Thursday evening in late August, and the sky is doing that thing where it's pink and gray at the same time. The ferry is bigger than I expected. I don't know why that surprised me, it's not like I don't know what ships look like, but I always picture ferries as little tubs with a snack bar. This one has seven decks and an escalator.

"Escalator on a boat," Krissy said, pointing at it.

"I know. Where does it even go when the boat rocks?"

"Into the sea, presumably. It's fine. It's boat furniture."

See? That's her. That little dry joke, that's the girl I married. But then her phone buzzed in her pocket and she checked it while we walked, and the joke was over and we were just two people with luggage again.

Okay, confession time. I felt a stab of something ugly right there. Resentment, I guess. Because she had a four-day stretch off, we were standing on a boat she booked specifically so nobody could reach us, and she was reading dispatch messages. Cargo schedules. Somebody else's problem, supposedly, except it never is, is it? She's a cargo pilot and I fly passengers, and somehow she's the one who's always on call even when she isn't.

I swallowed it. Down it went, like a vitamin stuck sideways. I'm getting really good at swallowing that particular thing. Too good, probably. I said nothing, she typed two words back to somebody, and we found the cabin.

The cabin is tiny. That's fine, I told myself. That's the point. Small room, no wifi worth the name, one bed, one porthole. Stripped down to the essentials. Krissy dropped her bag on her side and flopped back on the mattress and sighed.

"This bed is harder than my hotel in Riga," she said.

"Good. Maybe we'll actually sleep."

"Since when do you care if we sleep?"

Ouch! Fair, but ouch. She said it with a little smile though, so I let it go. We unpacked almost nothing because there was almost nothing to unpack, and then she said the magic words: bar first?

Bar first. Obviously bar first.

The bar is on deck five, dim lights, wood paneling, the whole fake-nautical thing. There's a woman about thirty-two behind it, dark hair pinned up, name tag says Trina. She took one look at the two of us and did that thing bartenders do where they've already sorted you into a category. I'd bet money her category for us was "couple who needs a drink and maybe a miracle."

"What'll it be?" she asked.

"Whatever's local," Krissy said. "Surprise us."

"Oh, I like her." Trina poured two glasses of something pale. "This is Finnish stuff, it'll taste like a forest decided to be a drink. You're on the overnight, yes? Tallinn in the morning?"

"That's us," I said.

"Nice crossing tonight. Flat sea. You picked a good evening for it." And then she just left us alone, which I appreciated more than I can say. Some bartenders want to be your therapist. This one read the room correctly, which is that neither of us wanted to talk to a stranger yet because we apparently couldn't even talk to each other.

We carried our drinks up to the observation deck. Big windows, scattered chairs, maybe six other people on the whole deck. The sun was going down behind Helsinki and the water was doing that late summer thing, all silver and orange at once. We sat in two chairs angled toward the glass and said nothing for a while.

It wasn't comfortable silence. It wasn't the good kind. It was the kind where you can feel the other person composing sentences. I was composing sentences. I had like four drafts in my head and all of them sounded as if they belonged on a greeting card.

Finally Krissy put her glass down on the floor and turned her chair toward me.

"Harvey. Can we skip the part where we make small talk about the boat?"

"Please."

"I booked this trip. I mean, I told you I did, but I never told you why, really." She pulled her knees up into the chair, which she always does, she sits like a pretzel whenever she can. "I hate that we've become strangers. I hate it so much I couldn't stand it one more month. That's the why. That is the entire reason why."

My draft speeches all evaporated. Good riddance, honestly, they were garbage.

"I thought you'd say the schedule did it," I said.

"The schedule did some of it. But schedules don't turn us into people who say 'did you pack the charger' to each other for a year. We did that ourselves. Slowly. Like a leak." She looked out at the water. "Do you remember the toaster voice?"

I laughed! Out loud, right there, six strangers on the deck probably thought I was a lunatic.

"Toast complete," I said. "Please proceed to breakfast."

"Oh my god, yes, that one." She was grinning now, this real grin, the crooked one. "You used to laugh so hard you got the hiccups. I used to do voices specifically to get the hiccups. That was my whole entertainment budget."

"When did we stop doing that?"

"That's the question, isn't it." She reached over and put her hand on the arm of my chair, not on me, on the chair. Small move, but it felt big. "I don't have an answer. I just know I miss you. You're right there and I miss you, which is insane, but there it is."

The city lights were shrinking behind us by then. Helsinki all spread out along the water, getting smaller and smaller, and somewhere behind those lights were our separate hotels and our separate rosters and all the nonsense we'd built up. It looked good getting smaller.

"I swallow a lot," I heard myself say.

"What?"

"Nothing! I mean, I resent the phone thing, sometimes, and I swallow it, and that's my contribution to the leak. Full disclosure." There. I said it out loud for the first time in about a year, and the boat did not sink, and she did not get angry.

She was quiet a second. "Harvey, I'm sorry. It's dispatch, it's always dispatch, and it feels big to me because my whole career is proving I can hang with the cargo guys. But it's not bigger than you. It's never been bigger than you."

"Could've fooled me."

"Yeah. Well. Fooling you was never the goal." She took a breath. "Okay. New rule for the next sixteen hours. No dispatch, no rosters, no 'did you pack the charger.' We have to actually talk to each other like people. Deal?"

"Deal. What do people even talk about?"

"I don't know, we'll figure it out. We used to be great at it." She picked her glass back up and clinked it against mine. "To the ferry. And to unlearning whatever we learned this past year."

The boat hummed under us. The last bit of Helsinki went dark at the edges. Trina came up to collect our empty glasses and said the kitchen does a decent salmon if we get hungry, and we both laughed at nothing much, and we ordered it, and it was better than decent, and it felt, for one second, like a Tuesday five years ago.

Then Krissy asked me a real question. An actual real one, the first in months.

"Do you still want this? Us? Because I do, but I need to hear you say it, not just nod."

I said yes. I said it plainly. And she said good, because the hard part's coming, and I didn't ask what the hard part was, but I had a feeling I'd find out before Tallinn.

We went down to the bar around nine. Deck five, the one Trina runs, all dim lights and little round tables and a window wall full of black water. The place had maybe eight people in it. A couple of trucker-looking guys playing cards. Two women arguing happily about a crossword. Us.

Trina lit up when she saw us. "The salmon eaters! Sit, sit. Same drinks?"

"Is that a question?" Krissy said. "Yes, please."

I was maybe two sips into my forest juice when a voice behind me said, "No way. Harvey Kowalski?"

I turned around and there was Bruno. Big Bruno, forty-five now, gray creeping into his beard, wearing the same windbreaker he's worn for the five years I've known him. Captain of this exact ferry, as it turns out, which nobody mentions in the crew newsletter.

"Bruno! You work this route?"

"Three years now. Best job I've ever had, I drive a floating building in a straight line and people pay me." He shook my hand and then, bless him, shook Krissy's too, remembered her name and everything. "Krissy, right? Cargo? You two still flying?"

"Still flying," she said.

"Still married?" he asked, and then he winced at his own question. "Sorry. That came out wrong. Sit, both of you, I'm buying the next round, that's my apology."

He pulled a chair up backwards and sat on it like a big kid at a lunch counter. Trina brought three of the pale drinks without being asked. "You're on duty," she told him.

"I'm the captain, Trina, I'm always on duty, that's why the drink is for the off-duty version of me that starts in eleven hours."

Krissy laughed at that, a real one. Bruno has always been funny in this effortless, half-asleep way. He used to keep whole crew rooms entertained on layovers.

"So how long has it been?" he asked. "Since I flew with you, I mean. Must be, what, four years?"

"Five, maybe," I said. "Right around when Krissy and I got married."

"And how is married life? Honest answer only. I get couples on this boat every week, I have data."

"Data," Krissy said, eyebrows up. "What kind of data?"

"Sit tight, I'm getting there." He took a sip and got this look like he was deciding something. "Okay, story time. You two are pilots, you'll appreciate this. Last summer, this exact route, I'm up on the observation deck off shift, and there's this couple about your age sitting in the corner chairs. Not talking. You know the kind of not talking I mean? Not comfortable quiet. The other kind."

I felt Krissy go still next to me. Just a little.

"So I'm watching them, the way I do, it's a hobby, and after an hour the woman gets up and goes to the railing, and the guy follows her, and I think, okay, here it comes, either a fight or a fix. And she says to him, loud enough I heard it because the deck was empty, she says, 'I looked at the ferry schedule for two weeks before I picked this one. I picked the one where we'd have the most water and the least wifi.' And the guy says, 'I know. I checked too.' And then neither of them says anything for ten more minutes."

"That's it?" Krissy asked. "Is that the complete story?"

"That's the setup. Here's the ending. They come down to my bar, this is near midnight, and they order two of the forest drinks, and the guy says to Trina, my wife and I used to talk all the time, and I don't know where it went, and I'm scared to look for it because what if it's gone? And Trina, being Trina..."

"I said, it's not gone, it's just parked," Trina called from the taps. "I stand by that."

"You would," Bruno said. "Anyway. The two of them stayed up on deck five until almost two in the morning. Talking. I know because I came back down twice and they were still at it. The woman was crying at one point but in the good way, I can tell the difference, I've seen every kind of crying this sea produces. And at breakfast in Tallinn the next morning they were feeding each other off one plate like absolute weirdos. Happiest weirdos on the dock."

"That's a nice story," I said, and my voice did something strange on the word nice.

"Yeah," Krissy said, and she was looking at her glass. "Nice."

Bruno looked between us, and I watched the exact second he understood. He's not a dumb man, Bruno, whatever his windbreaker says. "Oh," he said. "Oh, I did it again. I put my foot in it. You two are in the middle of it, aren't you. The not-talking thing."

"Sixteen hours into fixing it," Krissy said. "Ask me again in Tallinn."

He held up both hands. "Then forget the story. New topic. Trina, tell them about the guy who tried to bring a bicycle into the sauna."

So we got the bicycle story, which was genuinely funny, and the one about the Estonian wedding party that took over deck seven, and for a while it was easy, and I was grateful to Bruno for that, I