Corcovado, Or Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars

"I guess, yes, but I was always interested, even as a kid..."

He looked at Ted just then, looked at Ted looking at this stranger, then back at him. And Ted was grinning, or trying not to grin...and that got to him...as in - just what kind of signals am I putting out?

"So," the woman asked. "This is your first boat?"

"Yup. Probably my last, too."

"Really? Why do you..."

"Well, it's home now. I'm not big on moving."

"You're full time? A liveaboard? Kewl!"

"Seems to be the general consensus," he said, grinning.

"What do you do?"

"I fly, for Delta."

That seemed to take her back a notch, too. "No kidding?"

"No kidding."

"My husband flew for them...I mean, my ex-husband used to fly for them?"

"Oh? What's his name?"

"Terry Goodway..."

And though he laughed at that, a little light went off in his head. "Small world," he sighed. "He flew together a lot one year. What's he up to these days."

"I don't know, besides hanging out with his brand new, nineteen year old wife. She's number three, I think, but I lose count."

And he laughed again. "You're kiddin' - right?" But he could tell by the expression on her face that no, she wasn't kidding. Not in the slightest. "I'm sorry," he stumbled, "but I don't recall your name."

"Melissa."

"Jim," he said, reaching out with his right hand.

She took it, but at the same time added: "And let me guess. Your wife got the house, and you got stuck with the boat...?"

Ted bristled. "Not quite," his son snarled, his voice dripping with sudden malice. "Dad gave her the house, and he took the boat."

"Oh, really?" Melissa said, her disbelief a little too obvious.

"Really!" Ted said - as he pushed his chair back and walked outside.

"Wow, sorry..." the woman said. "He's...uh..."

"Pretty sensitive about things right now. All this happened not long ago."

"And, well, still waters run deep, I guess. What happened, if you don't mind me asking?"

"She's had issues. We decided it was a good time to go our separate ways."

And she looked at him again, this time as if she was changing her mind, then she looked at Tracy.

"And you are?"

"Staying out of this," Tracy said, matter-of-factly.

"No, dear. Do you have a name?"

"No, not right now I don't."

"Ah, well," Melissa said, looking at him, "perhaps I'd better let you and your happy brood go your merry way."

He stood as she stood, then held out his hand again. "Nice to meet you. Hope you get to your island."

"Thanks," she said, then she went back out into the early morning drizzle.

He watched her go, saw Ted walk up to her and he watched them talk for a few minutes, then they shook hands and Ted came back inside.

"What was that all about?" he asked.

"Nothing. I just needed to clear the air."

"Okay."

The rest of their breakfast passed in silence, and when it was time to pay-up he went to the counter and had more cinnamon rolls boxed to-go, some bread, too, then they walked down to the fueling dock together.

She was there, of course, a large blue duffel at her feet, waiting for them.

+++++

He was waiting outside the operating room, pacing back and forth in quick, anxious strides. She was eight months pregnant - but had gained almost a hundred and ten pounds - and now her blood pressure was off the charts. 223 over 130 earlier that afternoon - when someone at her office had insisted she go to the hospital, and when her obstetrician arrived she'd insisted they try to induce labor, or, failing that, take the baby before he was compromised.

He'd been somewhere over Florida when the SELCAL chimed, someone on the company frequency calling. He'd taken the news calmly, outwardly at least, but he was hurt, almost angry as he listened to the chief pilot telling him what was happening. He'd done everything he could to get her to stop eating, had cooked the healthiest meals he knew how - only to find out she was eating several candy bars - an hour - all day at work. She was, he understood now, content to not merely kill herself. She was going to take as many people down with her as she could, and he wondered what he might try next.

At least he'd gotten her off the sauce. He'd begged her to do at least that much, at least until the baby came, and she'd relented, promised him she wouldn't - until he came. Now he wasn't sure about anything she said.

Pacing the floor he had wondered...had she scarfed down the most damaging crap in the world simply to put on as many pounds as possible - so she could resume drinking that much sooner? Had his faith in her fallen so low? Had his faith in himself fallen so far...?

Her doc came out a while later, told him that both she and their son were alright now, that the boy was a little premature but nothing serious, and he had fallen away inside the moment, tried to hang on to that one bit of good news for as long as he could.

+

She let him know, in no uncertain terms, that she had no intention of staying home with Ted, not even for breastfeeding, and he'd simply nodded.

"You're going back to work, I take it?"

"That's right," she said - bitterly. "And don't you dare try to stop me!" she'd screamed.

"Oh, I wouldn't think of it, Barbara," he'd whispered, then he'd gone to change the boy's diaper. Later that morning he called his mother, told her what was happening. She'd flown up that night, moved into the guest room and taken over - and had never once uttered an unkind word about anything, or anyone. In time he realized that Barbara loved his mother more than she loved her own, this his was the mother she'd never known. Babs began watching his mother, learning from her, and in time she learned to love honestly, without condition, perhaps for the first time in her life. On Ted's second birthday she had promised she'd never drink again, that she'd try to be a better mother...

But within a few weeks she was drinking again.

And his mother came back, resumed her duties while he flew and Barbara worked, then got drunk. Night after night. He tried to get her to seek help, any kind of help, but she would curse him and flee into the night.

In time they, he and Ted, started spending time down in Destin, spending time with his parents on Altair. His father's Altair. When the weather was nice they'd go out the cut and sail offshore, and Ted had always loved the bouncy rides best of all, and other times they motored down the intra-coastal waterway, all the way to Panama City, then they'd come back by way of the sea.

One day they'd been offshore a few hours when Ted spotted a weird, drooping fin of some sort and they'd altered course, gone over to see what it was...

"Oh," Ted's grandfather had said, "that's a Thresher shark. Not real dangerous, but he's pretty weird looking, isn't he?"

Other days they went out and ran across pods of dolphin and Ted would lean over and reach out for them as they swam alongside; he'd learned early on that his son had fantastic balance, and was fearless, too, though he'd held on protectively until he was seven or eight.

His father had been a pilot, too, in the war. The Big One, as it was called. Flown P-51s, escorting bombing raids over Germany, and he'd lived to tell the tale - or so James Patterson liked to say - when he'd had a few too many. Then, with the end of the war he'd come home and gone back to work at his father's place...at the family's main hardware store in St Johnsbury, in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. He'd married his high school sweetheart and they'd had one girl - and then him, though that was a few years later. His sister Becky died when he was in kindergarten, so he'd learned a little about love and loss and life and death - at an impossibly early age. Lessons, he knew now, that never slipped away...lessons that stayed with you through a lifetime.

By the time he went away to college, to Boston College, his father had already let go of of the business in Vermont and moved to Florida, but by then other things had changed, too.

Because there had been the family business lined up against all Jim's hopes and dreams, Jim taking over the family business chief among them, James holding on to an unwanted tradition. But, in the end, it had been easier to sell out than to hold on any longer. Dreams don't die easily, but when the go, they pass quickly, so James did what he had always wanted to do: move to Florida, buy a boat, and leave mankind far, far behind.

And yet, somehow this new boat, Jame's Altair, had become the start of a new life down there - for all of them. Not golf, not tennis...no, it was sailing that moved in and pushed Vermont away - something Jim had never imagined his father falling for...and yet his old man had taken to sailing with a vengeance - like a duck to water, his mother once said. His old man bought an old Greek fisherman's cap and had been known to hang out around the docks, talking the talk between his frequent bouts with Jack Daniels.

Elizabeth dropped in and out of there lives again and again, leaving her boys on their own again. James shouldered the burden as best he could, helped his son as best he could, when he could, but that first Altair became the means to an end. Father and son, tied together - forever - by a boat. Everything unexpected, and nothing what it appeared to be - because of his mother.

And yet, in a way Jim's father had not been the only connective tissue holding his family together, because his mother was there, sometimes...

But his mother's world confused Jim. He never understood where the secrets came from.

By the time Ted went to kindergarten, once he'd learned how other families were, he'd begun to wonder why his had been different, and, naturally, Jim's confusion about the past spilled over into the present. And soon enough Ted had begun to wonder if it was something he'd done.

And, of course, as a new father, Jim never saw that coming.

But Elizabeth had. And she'd done her best to answer Ted's lingering questions - but, Jim knew now, it had never been enough. Too many questions remained buried in their past.

In time Jim watched his son grow up in the shadow of benign neglect - on Barbara's part - and this countered by an almost smothering love - on Elizabeth's part - until one Sunday, against his wishes, his mother had taken Ted to Sunday School - trying to absolve all their sins.

Then dissolution, fragments falling in the aftermath, and the circle was now complete. Barbara fell away and he was left to pick up the pieces, and while he tried his best to raise his son, he was away too much to keep Barbara from tearing Ted to pieces. In time, the only comfort he found was in the cockpit - and like a womb with a view - he spent more and more time there.

Chapter 4

His mother, Elizabeth, had grown up in the Episcopal Church, and with her parents she had worshipped at St Andrew's - over on the west side of town, the 'money' side of town, every Sunday. And though James was her 'sweetheart' even then, he'd never been drawn to the church - any church - yet that didn't seem to matter to her. She talked James into going with her a time or two, but nothing stuck, yet she was true enough to him to let the matter rest in the Lord's hands. When the war in Europe started, actually during the Battle of Britain, James went down to the Post Office and signed up for pilot training; he ended up in California learning to fly the earliest fighters in the AAC, and it turned out he was a very good pilot.

They corresponded, by mail, after he left Vermont, and by now she understood that he had no interest in religion; she, at home on the other side of the country, had started going to St Andrew's several times a week - and her interest in religion only deepened. By the time December Seventh rolled around he was on his way to war and she was teaching Sunday School; when James shipped off to Britain in '42 she went to study religion at Boston College.

And so it went. They were polar opposites on a collision course from the very beginning. And at the end of James' war, when he returned from Britain, he a very different man. As different as Elizabeth had become over the intervening years.

Yet somehow they picked up where they'd left off - in each other's arms, still madly in love with one another. Weeks after his return they walked the aisle hand in hand, as husband and wife, yet, if anything, his understanding of God and His Church had only diminished over time. James had, he told his wife, been on many of the so-called 'thousand plane raids' over Dresden, he had seen whole cities disappear in flames, helped kill thousands upon thousands of human beings; so there was, he told her once in a drunken rage, "no room in God's House for the likes of me."

She had talked about salvation and confession and he told her those words meant nothing, and she thought she could see the flames of burning cities aglow in his eyes. After that, she told her husband she understood, and she never again pressed him. Not once. She was, she told him, content to let God come to him when He was ready.

They wanted to wait a few years to have kids, or so they said, so he could earn some money and build up his bank account, but she told him, late in 1949, that she thought it was time. Why he did not know, but he agreed and soon she was with child.

Yet he was too good a pilot for the Army Air Corp to let go of him completely, and because he'd signed on to the participate in the newly formed U. S. Air Force Reserves, when asked, he was soon flying fighters over Canada and the Arctic. When war broke out in Korea, off he went, and two months after he arrived in Japan his daughter Rebecca was born, though he very nearly never got to hold her in his arms.

On a mission over the North his formation was attacked by Mig15s and his aircraft was damaged badly in the brief skirmish. He nursed his F-86 back to the sea and had almost made it back to South Korea when fire broke out in the right wing; he parachuted to safety, landing in the Yellow Sea. He managed to crawl into a life raft, but both his legs were badly mangled.

His war officially ended on a hospital ship in Japan; he was back in the States a few weeks later, though he spent months at a succession of military hospitals in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and, finally, in White River Junction, Vermont, and that's where he finally met his daughter.

And though in many ways James was the same sweet man Elizabeth had always known, he came back from Korea a changed man - for the second time. Whereas he had exuded an infinite invulnerability when he came home from Europe, he now cast a wary eye almost everywhere he looked...like he was suddenly unsure of the ground beneath his feet. Still, he persevered, met his demons head-on. He walked, then he ran back to his life in St Johnsbury, and Elizabeth thought then that God answered all prayers.

When Rebecca fell ill - some sort of meningitis, the physicians told them - she prayed and prayed, and yet Rebecca passed in days. In the aftermath Elizabeth fell away from the Church, and in the fullness of time she completely lost all faith in God. She finished her graduate degree - in social work - and helped coordinate social services throughout northern Vermont...everything from helping the recently disabled to the newly homeless. She came to be regarded as something of a saint among the 'down and out' - and even to the pastors and bishops that worked the pews around the region, hers was a well regarded soul - for a woman's, anyway.

And then something horribly unexpected happened. A girl, an eight year old Chinese girl, was found - raped - one summer's evening near the old highway that went from St Johnsbury south towards the Connecticut River, and all leads pointed to a trucker who had been be passing through on his way from Montreal to New York City. When the police came to her about the little girl, this mysterious truck driver - who was, apparently, from Hong Kong - was still being pursued through the woods south of town. It was only a matter of time, she heard on the radio, until the monster was caught.

+++++

The rain had let up a little, and he could see faint patches of blue through thinning clouds from time to time. Melissa was sitting with him in the enclosed cockpit, rain and wind-driven spray still spattering on the canvas overhead, while Ted and Tracy were standing at the mast pulpit, looking for timbers on the Sound's roiled surface.

But they had said little to one another since she boarded in Lund. He didn't know what to say, and she too many secrets to keep.

Up on the bow, Ted pointed to the left and he looked that way too, saw a massive timber just awash and corrected his course to miss it - and as suddenly Ted was pointing frantically to the right - and he saw more timbers roped in a tight clump. He stood to get a better view of the way through the knotted seas, then he cut back on power, slowed to bare steerage-way and worked his way around and through the flotsam - and he found he was holding his breath more than once...until they were through the maze, anyway.

"This is really bad..." Melissa said moments after he sat behind the wheel again. "I've dealt with crab-pots in Maine, but never anything like this."

And he knew he was beginning to tremble a little - only for another reason. He'd had three cups of French roast and his bladder felt like it was about to rip apart, right down the middle.

"You okay?" she said when she saw the expression on his face, the perspiration on his forehead.

He shook his head. "Nope. Bladder's about to..."

And she stood, took the wheel - and he looked at her like she was out of her mind - until the need to let loose - from both ends - grew into a three alarm blaze. He nodded and ran down the companionway steps to the forward head - and didn't return for ten minutes.

And when he did she was still behind the wheel, steering deftly between timbers, taking the hand signals Ted gave her without the slightest hesitation.

"You tired?" he asked.

"Not in the slightest...this is, well, it's exhilarating!"

"Well," he mumbled, "that's one way to look at it."

And she laughed at that, then leaned over to look forward through the rain-sprayed windshield again. "I'm making for that buoy up there," she said, pointing to a can about a mile ahead. "That marks the entrance to the inlet, right?"

"Yup."

"Damn, this is a fine handling little ship, Jim. World of difference between my 325 and this thing..."

"Nothing beats displacement in seas like this."

"I'll say. Man, if you ever want to trade, give me a call..."

He laughed at that. "Yeah, I'll do that." He watched her watching the sea, watched the way she shifted her weight with her knees to roll with the swells and he nodded his approval. "Yours have a pedestal, or that rig under the seat?"

"Pedestal. That other rig always felt dead to me."

"So I've heard." He turned and looked forward then, content to let her steer for a while longer, and he noticed more and bigger patches of blue sky. "You may get lucky. Looks like some sun is trying to break through."

"Yup," she groaned, working Altair down the backside of a large roller.

Yet she kept her course, he saw. She bore-down on the rise, fell off the crest, never missed a lick. "You do much racing?" he asked.

"A little. Why?"

"Because you're damn good on the helm, that's why."

He wasn't looking at her just then so he didn't see the look in her eyes. Confusion, and pure love. She didn't know where that impulse came from either.

"Can you come up a bit?" he said. "I want to head straight for the inlet, not from an upwind angle."

"Got it," she said, and he watched the bow swing to starboard a little...twenty minutes later they passed the buoy and he turned and looked at her.

"You wanna take it now?" she asked.