Or maybe fly.
Ten
The sailboat rocked as I stepped aboard. I must not have covered my alarm well, because Dad gave me a concerned look. “You sure about this?”
“Of course.” I accepted the orange and slightly grody-looking life vest from his hands and slipped it on. It felt bulky and highly unfashionable buckled around my chest, but at least I wouldn’t drown.
It was Thursday, one of my days off. When I’d come downstairs I’d seen Ethan bouncing like a Labrador retriever, which struck me as highly suspicious. I’d insisted he bring me along on whatever adventure he and my dad were embarking on. I wanted Dad to see I could be as good a research assistant as Ethan. Besides, I was bored.
“What exactly are we doing?” I could feel the buoyancy of the ocean beneath us as I lowered myself onto a bench. Ethan had called the activity “throwing logs” on our drive to the harbor from Golden Doors, which meant exactly nothing to me.
“It’s how sailors knew how fast their ship was going.” Ethanclimbed aboard after me. We were on his family’s sailboat, with a white fiberglass hull and cushy-looking benches, and he navigated it with ease. “They threw a wooden board in the water and measured how fast it moved away. They attached it to the ship with a knotted line and counted the knots unreeled.”
“That’s where the termknotscame from? Literal knots?”
“Right. Now a nautical knot is a very specific speed—a nautical mile, about one and a half miles, per hour—but it’s how the term started.”
The day was gorgeous. Clouds pastoral, sun soaking into my skin, the soft breeze like a cocoon. Dad and Ethan showed me what felt like a hundred parts of the sailboat: the mainsail, topsail, ropes called sheets and poles called booms. “Here,” Dad said, handing me a rope—the sheet—attached to the boom. “We want the wind to fill the sail, so you need to continuously adjust the boom to make sure we’re angled to catch it.”
I tried to make sure the sail didn’t totally deflate (or luff, as Dad and Ethan said, denying they’d made the word up). Keeping track of where the wind came from was difficult, even with Dad’s tips to “look at the ripples on the water” and “listen to the wind and make sure it’s passing by both your ears equally.” Thankfully, Ethan pointed out both a weathervane and a digital tracker.
After an hour of trimming and tacking, Dad and Ethan adjusted the sails in what they called a heave-to so we could pause in actively sailing. Dad took out a tiny recorder, glanced at me quickly, then started speaking. “Seventy-eight degrees, wind from the west. The water’s dark blue slanting green, sky’s clear, a few streaky clouds. Ethan and Jordan here, Jordan’s first timeon a sailboat”—he turned away and kept muttering into the microphone.
I stared after him, trying to make out what he was saying about me. “What’s he doing?”
Ethan glanced at me, surprised. “Haven’t you heard your dad do this before? He’s taking notes so he can set the scene in the book.”
I winced. “Why on us, though?We’renot going to be in the books.”
Ethan gave me the kind of incredulous look one might give a potato that had started speaking. “You haven’t read your dad’s stuff?”
Self-consciousness squeezed me. I had not, in fact, read my dad’s stuff. I’d read the long-form article that launched his career. I’d listened to him read excerpts. But the whole book? Nope.
I’d meant to, when it came out. I was incredibly proud of my dad’s accomplishments. But I didn’t make it past the dedication:To my wife, Rebecca. I will miss you forever.Honestly, after that I just wanted to pat the books’ spines affectionately whenever I walked past them. I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to crack the cover again. “I know what they’re about.”
“Hm.” Ethan looked skeptical. “Well, they have a personal vibe to them.”
“Howpersonal?” TheAtlanticarticle was friendly in tone, framed by first-person narration but mostly focused on history. The chapter Dad read at readings began with him, alone on a boat, trying his hand at celestial navigation, before springing backward in time to nineteenth-century navigators. “Am I in them?”
This was the most horrifying thing I’d considered in a long time.
Ethan avoided my gaze. “Not really.”
I took it back.Thatwas the most horrifying thing. How could I not be in a book with a “personal vibe”? I was Dad’sdaughter. You couldn’t get more personal. WasEthanin them more than me?
It would be just like Ethan to have a larger presence in Dad’s books than me. Great. Wonderful. Thrilling.
Dad came back to our side of the sailboat. “All set. You guys ready?”
“Sure,” I said. “What do we do?”
Ethan aimed his phone at the two of us.
I glanced at him, startled. “Are you—filming?”
“Ethan takes lots of notes and videos,” Dad said. “It’s helpful for later on.”
“And for social,” Ethan said.
