The sound made me relax into a small smile. “I remember sitting next to her on the futon when I was little. I don’t think I remember her face outside of photos, but I think I remember her body? Cuddling into her. But I wish I remembered more.”
“Do you miss her?”
I squeezed my legs closer. “Sometimes I think I remember themissing more than her. I remember so much crying and confusion after she died. Like a limb had been cut off.”
“I’m so sorry.”
It was what everyone said, but I was still glad to hear it.
Ethan and I stayed out for another hour, watching the streaks of white light across the dark sky. Even knowing they were rocks burning up in the atmosphere, the meteors were magical. What would it look like if we pushed all the space debris into Earth’s atmosphere so it burned up? Small lines or fireballs dashing across the sky? I wondered what Gibson’s comet would look like. I’d never seen a comet before.
At some point, we lay down and our hands found each other’s. We didn’t kiss, but this felt almost more intimate, lying side by side, comfortable with no words or motion between us. We watched until our eyes started to drift closed more than once, then made our way quietly down to our cabins.
We paused outside our doors. It was very late—or very early—and like Andrea Darrel, I didn’t entirely know what I wanted. I didn’t want to say goodbye, I knew that at least. Maybe I wanted to just lie together, to sleep side by side, to feel Ethan’s arm around me.
But I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. Or at least, not what I wanted him to.
“Good night, Jordan,” Ethan said, and kissed me gently, and turned away.
Eighteen
“Ahoy, matey!” Dad said the next morning at breakfast, and I didn’t even roll my eyes. “What have we here?”
“It’s pretty good,” I told him. My plate overflowed with scrambled eggs, spinach quiche, and a tiny cinnamon roll. “Not bad for a ship.”
“Much better than in the eighteen hundreds,” Dad agreed. “They’d be eating hardtack and salted meat.”
“Ew. What’s hardtack?”
“It’s an unleavened biscuit sailors ate, made from water and flour.”
“Like matzo?”
Dad smiled. “A little worse. It was twice-baked for short voyages and baked four times for long trips, to make it last. You couldn’t eat it by itself. Sailors dunked it in liquid to soften it up.”
“Gross.”
“But,” Dad said, on a roll now, “the salted beef and pork the navy gave sailors was high quality. Better than they’d get if they stayed home, where most people only ate meat on holidays. Sailors were lucky in a way, guaranteed protein. American sailorsin the early eighteen hundreds ate an average of four thousand calories a day.”
“Dad,” I asked, curious, “what are you getting out of this trip for the book? You can clearly do some of your research elsewhere. And we’re not eating hardtack.”
“No, though I have made it and eaten it before.”
Of course he had. “How was it?”
Dad tilted his head. “You know, I didn’t mind it.”
“Yeah, well, people don’t mind matzah, either, on the first night of Passover.”
He smiled and returned to my question. “A lot of my writing is atmosphere. This ship helps me accurately paint a picture of what life would have been like for the people I’m writing about. If I haven’t tasted the salt wind, felt how chapped my lips get, seen the scatter of the stars—I can’t describe it as well. And then my writing isn’t as good.”
“So you’re doing it for the vibes.”
He grinned and said, with great relish, “Yes. I’m doing it for the vibes.”
Oh no. I knew that tone, which appeared any time he’d learned a new phrase. He’d say he was doing it for the vibes for the next two years. “Do you have particular things you’re trying to get here?”
“Well, I’m working on a section about how the US Coast Survey mapped the coastline. When we come back, we’re going to sail around Nantucket—we need to make a circle to avoid the shoals—so I’ll be able to see what it’s like, trying to map thecoast. And right now, I’m trying to pinpoint the exact feeling of finding your sea legs.”
