Changes in Latitudes Read online

“Impressive symbolism, Roo.” Despite my stomach woes, I can’t help teasing him with the nickname I gave him as a toddler, when he was way into Winnie-the-Pooh. “No offense, but I’m not sure death metal is helping my seasickness. Got anything on there that’s a little more mellow?”

  Drew makes a face. “Fine. No one appreciates a good electric guitar solo these days. How about Jimmy Buffett? King of the boat jam?”

  I shrug, and his head ducks under again. A minute later soft acoustic strumming spills out from below. I don’t recognize the song, but I lie back on the deck and let the happy melody wash over me.

  It’s those changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes, nothing remains quite the same, Jimmy Buffett sings.

  Ha! How many latitudes will we cross on this trip? I can’t speak for any changes in attitude, because I certainly don’t have any plans for those, but the “nothing remains quite the same”? You sure got that right, Buffett.

  Mom calls from the cockpit, “Hey, Drew, come back up. Let’s trim the sails and get this baby racing!”

  Um, yes, because nausea at whatever number of knots we’re going now isn’t enough fun—let’s make things interesting.

  But at least she’s keeping up her end of our bargain and only asking Drew for help. In Mom’s attempt to make me believe she valued my input about this trip she’s forcing on me, she allowed me to strike a deal with her. My terms: I don’t have to help with any sailing. Hers: Fine, but you do have to know enough to stay safe.

  That mandate bought me a boating safety course last month, where I learned the parts of a boat; to watch out for the boom, a long metal bar that holds the bottom of the bigger sail and swings when we’re changing direction; to wear my life jacket; and that you always pass green buoys on the port side and red buoys on the starboard side. I also learned which sides the port and starboard are. Left = port. Which I can remember because both words have four letters. Right = starboard. Which is kind of like Starburst, and it is very, very right to like all Starbursts (except the orange ones).

  But we were in the middle of Oregon for the class. We didn’t actually sail. No one bothered to mention how difficult it is to move around up here, with all these rope and cleat booby-traps everywhere on deck. I clumsily retreat to the bench seats of the cockpit and sneak peeks as my brother takes the wheel. Mom is pulling on ropes like she last did this yesterday, instead of however many years ago. The sails billow with air as the boat angles south and begins to skim—fast—along the coastline.

  Another helpful tidbit the class didn’t mention: how much every single wave would send us—and the contents of my stomach—rolling around. On a long list of things Mom has been wrong about lately is the insistence that the waves would calm down once we hit open water. If anything, they’re tossing us even more than before. My mother and Drew don’t appear the least bit affected, but in a supreme analogy to how everything this year has somehow managed to hit me ten times harder than anyone else, my body revolts.

  I lean over the stern and regurgitate my lunch into the choppy waters below.

  This is gonna be one hell of a trip, all right.

  5

  By the time, hours later, that Mom adjusts the sails again to turn us toward the inlet river where we’ll “pull in” to meet and spend the night with the two other sailboats making the trip with us, my stomach is so empty it’s hollow.

  There’s nothing I wouldn’t give right now to be home in my soft bed in my cozy house.

  Except someone else has laid temporary claim to that soft bed and the cozy house.

  Although we’ve stayed within distant sight of it all day, the coastline looms closer now. It’s not escaping me that our journey is a whole day under way and we’re actually nearer to home now than when we started. The marina where Sunny-Side Up got her seaworthy checkup and was lowered into the water was far up the coast, and we’ve now sailed to a point almost exactly parallel to Pleasant Hill. A quick jaunt across the 126 and I could be hanging with my friends tonight.

  Which is a thought. A definite thought. My phone is clipped to my waist in its new bulky, plastic waterproof case. I subtly slip it out and send a series of quick texts to Tara.

  With Mom shouting instructions, she and Drew wrestle the sails down, and Mom switches on the motor as we approach shore. Soon we’re chugging along a narrow river, winding our way inland the few miles to the town of Florence, where we’re supposed to drop anchor and meet with the others. Mom sends Drew up front to keep a lookout for any old deck pilings hiding just under the surface, because apparently one of those could do a number on our hull.

  “Cass, I know we had a deal,” she says, “but would you mind just keeping an eye out on the port side, so Drew can cover starboard? It would be hugely helpful. And not technically sailing.”

  I sigh, but I’m secretly glad to have a role of my own. While I would never give Mom the satisfaction of asking for anything to do, it’s a little boring just observing, especially since my seasick woes won’t allow me to curl up in the cabin with a book or my laptop. I stake out a spot on the railing and peer into the faded-denim waters, trying to train my eyes to see below the surface like a sailor a hundred years ago on iceberg duty. I’m deep into a fantasy that my superior eyesight would have saved the Titanic when Drew calls out, “Piling!”

  Damn. I wanted to do that.

  Mom swings the wheel. I peer below me, but all I see is the sandy bottom. It . . . looks kind of close, actually.

  “Um, how much clearance do—” I begin, but the horrible skidding-to-a-stop sound of boat meeting riverbed silences us all.

  Mom stares at one of the computer screens on the dash above the steering wheel in disbelief and whispers, “That can’t be.”

  I choose to peer at the actual visible evidence that we have run into a sandbar camouflaged just below the water’s surface and whisper my own, “Oh yes, it can.”

  Drew dangles over the railing. “Well, sheeeeeeeeeet.”

  There is no stiff sea wind masking his curse from Mom this time, but she chooses to ignore it, leaning over the side herself. “How—but—”

  The boat is at a dead stop, which feels strange (and not as tummy-soothing as I’d have expected) after so many hours of having constant movement under us. Mom plops onto the bench and puts her face in her hands. It’s the silence that follows that turns me from perplexed to scared. She doesn’t speak or move; she just sits clutching at her head. Drew and I exchange worried glances.

  Is this worse than maybe I’m making it out to be? I mean, there are ways to get boats unstuck from sandbars, right? Or could we have somehow messed up the hull so badly we’ll have to abandon the trip and head home? Am I a terrible person for wishing this could be true?

  “Um, Mom?” I venture, after a bit.

  She raises her head. Her eyes look haunted. “I got us grounded.”

  Uh, yeah. We know.

  “I was so preoccupied with avoiding the piling that I stopped paying attention to the depth meter and I knew—I knew—this river had shifting sandbars all over the place. I can’t believe I was so stupid!”

  Drew rushes to her defense. “You were trying to keep from hitting something. Anyone would have done the same thing. What if I hop in and see if I can push us free?”

  He strips off his shirt, climbs to the narrow lip of decking on the outside of the railing, and balances there for a second before jumping. He treads water, trying to find a place to stand so he can leverage his pushing efforts, but while the bottom of the boat is wedged into the sandbar, it’s still too far below Drew’s feet for him to touch.

  He eyes the current and calls up, “Get changed! Maybe the three of us working together can find a way to budge it.”

  If it was Mom asking, I might resist, but I know how much it would mean to Drew to save the day, so I trail my mother into the cabin and tug on my bathing suit. Ten minutes later, all three of us are floundering in the murky water, trying to push a who-knows-how-many-tons sailboat out of the sand. No
t. Gonna. Happen.

  Twenty minutes after that, the water has receded so much that the boat is basically beached, and Mom declares us stuck until the next high tide rolls in overnight to flood the riverbed and lift us back into the water.

  Despite the fact that someone will have to wake up at two thirty in the morning to drop an anchor once that happens, it sounds like a pretty low-key solution that certainly won’t derail the whole trip or anything. The entire situation would almost be comical if Mom weren’t acting like we’d just gotten word of the zombie apocalypse. I mean, we’re only one day into our trip and we’re already freaking grounded. It’s sitcom-funny, right?

  Not to her.

  We slump in the cockpit, exhausted from our efforts and smelling like slimy river gunk. It’s bad enough to be trapped in such close quarters with a “remind me what deodorant is again?” pubescent boy, but now we all stink like rotting fish.

  “What’s the plan?” I ask. “The other boats are probably waiting upriver by now, right? Do we need to let them know we’re gonna be really, really late to dinner? Should I use the radio thingy?”

  I admit, my tone might be a little smug. After all, this trip was Mom’s brilliant idea, and it’s not totally the worst thing to see her discouraged so early on. Even though the problem has a simple fix, maybe realizing her ineptitude will be enough to make her change her mind, and we can go home.

  However, I’m 100 percent taken aback when she bursts into tears. My mom never cries. Like, ever. She watched completely dry-eyed as my dad packed up every last belonging and got on a plane to the other side of the world, for a visiting professorship he’d turned down a dozen times before. In fact, that little incident is number three on my List of Things That I Currently Hate about My Mother. (Number one being the cheating that caused him to leave in the first place. Number two: insisting on this trip.)

  As much as her usual stoicism baffles and annoys me, I also kind of count on it. If Mom’s in charge, everything will be handled. Simple McClure family fact.

  But this? This is not Mom in charge.

  “Umm . . . ,” I venture, as Drew disappears below deck.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, pressing her eyelids with the heels of her hands.

  I have no clue how to act in this situation.

  “I’m so . . . embarrassed,” my mother finally says, swiping at her cheeks. “I just—I just needed this one thing to go right for us. Is that too much to ask?” She raises her eyes to the sky like she’s addressing the heavens. “I thought, I really thought, if I could get us all on this boat, I could fix everything. I wanted to have my feet firmly under me and feel in control again.”

  It’s almost amusing to hear her use the words “feet firmly under me” in relation to sailing, now that I know full well what it’s like to try to maneuver on deck with waves pitching us left and right.

  “I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure an ocean isn’t something that can be controlled, Mom.” I don’t bother to mention that she’s got some nerve complaining to me about not being in control of anything.

  I hate to admit, though, that seeing her like this is throwing me off guard.

  She uses the thin shoulder strap of her bathing suit to wipe her nose. “This isn’t the ocean, Cass,” she says. “This is the piddlydunk Siuslaw River Bar. Oh my god, I’m in so far over my head.”

  Drew returns with some wadded-up toilet paper, which he hands to Mom in place of tissues. “If we were in over our heads right now, we wouldn’t be beached on a sandbar. I’d say the problem is more that we’re under our heads. Or at least the water is.”

  Leave it to Drew to make jokes at a time like this, but it totally works. Mom cracks a tiny smile and reaches for his hand. “Hardy-har. I’m serious, though. If I can’t keep it together here, what does that say for us once we get out there?” She gestures in the direction of the ocean.

  Drew catches my eye and widens his, in a plea for me to help.

  Crap. He obviously knows I’m beyond upset about the divorce. We’ve both vented plenty to each other about it. He also knows I’m more upset with Mom than Dad. He’s seen me act out around her, even if he doesn’t understand the reasons behind it. But I’ve tried really hard to reign in the worst of my rage whenever he’s around to bear witness—mostly by staying away from her altogether.

  Being confined to just forty feet of boat doesn’t allow for many avoidance tactics though, and he would not understand my refusing to help cheer her up now.

  So I take a deep breath. Then I stroke my chin with my hand comically and offer in the goofy “Australian commentator” accent my dad and I spent the last summer Olympics perfecting, “She’s right, Roo. We’re pretty much doomed. No doubt Sunny-Side Up is going sunny-side down before this trip is over. Looks like it’s gonna be watery graves for all of us.”

  Drew grins and plays along. “I’ll start drafting our wills. Does anyone have a bottle I can send them to shore in?”

  “Fresh out of bottles,” I say. “Although, if you toss them over the port side, they’d stay perfectly dry. In fact, if you throw hard enough, you could probably reach a mailbox on the other side of that dune.”

  Mom picks her head up and looks between us. A tiny smile teases the corners of her mouth.

  “You two are goofs.”

  She’s right. We are. Inappropriate joking is another staple ingredient in the McClure Family recipe, even if we haven’t exactly done a ton of it lately. If the divorce hadn’t happened and Dad were on this boat with us, he’d probably be belting off-tune sea shanties right about now.

  Before the thought has even fully formed in my head, Drew stands and tugs Mom up. He turns her in a circle as he sings in a horribly off-pitch voice:

  What would I give, if I could live

  Out of these waters?

  Okay, so sea shanties, Little Mermaid soundtrack, same same. I have to give him credit for remembering the words, even if I did force him to listen to that song with me approximately four billion times when I was ten, after Mom and I went on a Girls Weekend to see a traveling production of the show in Portland.

  In the last six months, Drew’s grown a full head taller than both Mom and me, and although he’s still “awkward teen boy” in his too-big feet, he’s doing a pretty good job of breaking down my mother’s defenses as he dances her around. Watching them starts a warmth fizzing in my chest, much as I’d like to pretend it doesn’t.

  I’ve missed this so much.

  Missed us being us.

  Drew finishes with a bellowed “PART OF THAT WORRRRRRRRRRLD” that sends a few seagulls into the air, and I swallow, wishing I could let go and be part of his and Mom’s world right now. Wishing I could unknow everything I learned about my mother and just enjoy this silly moment with them.

  Mom grins and straightens her shoulders. “Okay, I guess it’s possible I’m completely overreacting. So what if I’m meeting the rest of our merry band of travelers after making the most ridiculous rookie mistake there is? Maybe it will ensure they don’t attempt any techniques that are outside our depth.” Her eyes twinkle. “Get it? Outside our depth? Little pun on this whole situation?”

  It’s such a quintessential Mom reaction—the one I expected when this whole thing first happened—that I can’t stop from cracking a small smile, even though I’m groaning. Mom steals a glance at me, but doesn’t comment.

  Beside me, Drew snorts. “Nice one.”

  Mom winks. “Still got it, kiddos.” She brushes sand off her legs. “Okay, so we clearly can’t abandon ship to go to a restaurant. Let’s go radio a big, fat N-O RSVP to the group meal that was planned. Cass, time to try on your chef’s hat.”

  Ah, yes. In exchange for not having to take on any sailing duties, I’m designated Spoon, which is some military term for the cook on a ship.

  Drew’s still humming Ariel’s song to himself as he follows Mom down the stairs. I give a long last look at our boat, jauntily propped at a precipitous angle on a sandbar surrounded by wa
ter, and follow.

  The downside to this development is that, if it only takes a few Mom tears to crack my defenses this much, what does that say for my hopes of surviving this trip with my righteous anger intact?

  The upside to this development is that, as firmly as we’re wedged into the sand, at least there’s no chance of getting seasick down below.

  6

  “Mama says you either encountered a redhead before departing or you have bananas on board, because it’s the only way to explain luck like this on the very first day!” A small girl of maybe eight or nine, with white-blond hair straight out of a Nordic tale, swings a leg over the back of the boat and slides into our cockpit like she’s been executing this exact move her whole life.

  My eyebrows go up, but before I can think of a suitable response, a woman’s laughing, wind-burned face appears behind her. “Sorry about Abigail. She’s nine-tenths precocious and one-tenth egomaniacal. Doesn’t always make for the best first impression.”

  The girl tilts her head and squints. “What’s egomaniacal, Mama?”

  The woman, who has only slightly darker blond hair than her daughter, climbs aboard. She squeezes Abigail’s shoulder and answers, “It’s another word for utterly lovable, my kitten.” Her smile stays in place as she holds out her hand to me. “Hi there. I’m Amy, and you must be Cassandra.”

  “Cassie,” I reply, shaking her hand. The palm she slides into mine is covered in calluses, and her grip is firm. I guess living full-time on a sailboat means never having to ask for help loosening the lid on a jar of tomato sauce.

  When we radioed the others to explain why we couldn’t make our meet-up, it was somehow decided that the party would come to us instead. I’m wondering how it’s going to be possible to fit five more people into our cabin for dinner, but also really curious about the group we’ll be spending every day of the next four months with. So far, so good. Amy seems completely normal and friendly.

  “Cassie it is, then,” she says. “My wife and our other daughter, Grace, are catching a ride with Christian, the third boat owner. He won them over with his Zodiac, which is far fancier than Liki Tiki down there.”