SEPTEMBER WOODS GARLAND

Seas the Day

The couple chartered a floatplane to Squirrel Cove to retrieve the family boat and sail it home after the wife’s parents were found dead on Cortes Island. Local authorities confirmed the veteran sailors had been attacked by a cougar while enjoying a picnic ashore. To die by the claws of a land animal seemed ironic to the unfamiliar, but folks on the island knew well enough not to venture into the wilds unarmed.  

When the couple arrived at the boat—a thirty-eight-foot Catalina with the moniker Seas the Day—the wife sobbed in the cockpit, clinging to a beach towel that had faded in the summer sun. Images of her mother sunbathing in the cove flooded her mind.

Maybe this trip was a mistake, she thought. I fear I’ll drown in my grief.

The sun hung lazily in the sky. Cormorants fished in the shallows and giggling children rowed by, life jackets hugging their bouncing bodies. Unlike visits past, the wife felt no sense of wonder here. The Sunshine Coast and all its treasures had turned an apathetic grey. Pulling her knees into her chest, she stared blankly toward the shore.

I’m going for a swim, the husband said.

The thought of dipping into the water knotted the wife’s heart.

Go ahead, she said. I’m not ready.

She dozed in the cockpit with a worn paperback, its pages encrusted with a fine layer of salt. Once in a while she would glance up from her book to check on the husband. The sun glinted off the water and she had to hold her hand up like a visor to get a good look. He had popped up at regular intervals, but it had been close to twenty minutes with no sign of him.

The wife called for him repeatedly. When her calls went unreturned, she took the dinghy out and stopped at each anchored yacht where she was offered sympathetic words and dry martinis.

Better not, she declined.

Rowing around the cove, she kept panic at bay by counting neon starfish exposed by a lowering tide. They clung to barnacled rocks alongside blue-black mussels, and the sight sent her mind reeling back to her childhood and summer days spent exploring tidepools. Nurtured by the islands, not yet aware of their dangers.

When the wife returned to Seas the Day, the husband was below deck. A pan sizzled and dishes clanged.

Where were you? she demanded.

Gathering oysters.

You could’ve been hurt, she said. You can’t just take off like that.

I’m fine, said the husband. I only slipped once.

He pointed to bright red scrapes on his shin, irritated by saltwater. He was smiling, his forehead glistening with sweat and his hands coated in oil and herbs. The galley was a mess of shells and spilt breadcrumbs.

As the wife set the table, her anger cooled. The husband plated their meal, smiling at his accomplishment. Hunger had been a rarity these past weeks, but the sight and smell of the pan-fried oysters stoked the wife’s appetite.

Filling up on the oysters, the couple grew tired and retired to the forward berth. The husband held the wife as they drifted to sleep. The wife dreamt of a cougar swimming alongside Seas the Day. The beast crept aboard in the night, wet and hungry, and leapt for the wife as she woke crying out for her parents, having forgotten their fate.

*

The couple pulled anchor just after sunrise the next day. There was no sense in lingering; Desolation Sound had lost its romance. The warm glow of the maritime wonderland had proven untouchable to her now.

As the couple left the cove, the wife peered back at the shore, wondering where on the island her parents had eaten their last meal. She pictured the picnic basket, the embroidered tablecloth. Mai Tais and open-faced sandwiches. The pounce of a cougar.

The couple traveled in relative silence, communicating when to tack and when to hoist the genny. Hour after hour, they sailed at a steady speed: six, seven knots. The wife spotted eagles’ nests among the wooded islands as they passed. A pod of orcas engaged in a game of tag, swimming alongside Seas the Day with playful grace.

The wife thought about her loss as she stood at the wheel. She could not get the image of a cougar gnashing into her parents’ flesh out of her mind. As she imagined their deaths—damning the media for releasing the grisly details with no respect for the family’s privacy—the oysters roiled in her belly.

*

On the third day of sailing, they reached the Strait of Georgia. The waterway’s window for entry demanded precise navigation. Whitecaps and storm clouds signaled rough weather ahead, but they had navigated this strait through tempests and gales before.

As conditions intensified, they lowered the sails and relied on the motor. Visibility worsened as they traveled south, the wife at the helm, the husband leaping from stern to bow as he battened down the hatches. Rain came down in sheets, pummeling the two in their rain slicks. The choppy waters rocked the boat and the oysters in the wife’s belly churned with each unexpected jolt.

She clung to the helm. Her bare hands tingled with numbness on the cold, wet metal, and a chill shot through to the bone. The husband clipped their tethers to the jack line and stood in the cockpit, bracing against the wind. The height of the waves had become worrisome. With each lashing, the Catalina lumbered along, heeling in the gales.

Watch the waves, the husband yelled. He pointed to a particularly menacing swell. If we hit that one, he hollered, she’s going to pitchpole.

The wife steeled against the possibility and gripped the wheel as visions of Seas the Day somersaulting through the squall swirled in her mind. The wind was loud in her ears and whipped from all directions.

She swore she heard a growl. A cougar, stalking them like it did her parents. They knew better than to hike the islands unarmed, she thought. But I know better too, she reasoned, than to believe these grief-fueled illusions.

Tack! The husband yelled. Tack!

The wife turned the wheel, pointing Seas the Day’s bow away from the offending wave. As the boat turned, the boom swung wildly, knocking the husband from his perch in the cockpit. He tumbled head-first down the companionway, landing on the galley sole with a thud.

The wife strained to gauge his condition, but visibility was worsening by the minute. She dared not leave the helm. The oysters lurched up from her stomach and spewed from her mouth. Their rank smell mixed with the salt of the air.  She kept her grip, the boat pointed in its intended direction. She yelled for the husband, but he did not respond. He lay motionless as the world around them threatened to upend.

The wife managed to avoid the surge but lost the dinghy in the process. When the second came, the husband was still unconscious—or dead, she did not know. Out of nowhere, this wave dwarfed the last. She wished the husband were awake to see. He would never believe her; no one would. A rogue wave was a rare occurrence. The wife had heard of them but never encountered one; now she was facing down a second.

There was no avoiding the monster wave. It came upon Seas the Day in an instant and all the wife could do was hold on. There was a stillness in her, a thought that if death now were inevitable, she felt lucky. Lucky to have loved and to have been loved, and, in this final event, witnessed the marvel before her. It was like nothing she’d seen before: water reaching toward the heavens like giant columns, solid as steel. The rogue wave towered over the wife and Seas the Day, moving at once with grace and magnitude, an unexpected pairing, one that did not reconcile in her mind. As the wall of water crashed down on the Catalina, the wife thought of her parents, their faces ripped from their skulls, limbs in the jaws of a snarling beast.

Great swells engulfed the deck, the cockpit, and the cabin. The world tipped, port to starboard, and Seas the Day rolled. The wife held her breath and closed her eyes against the rush of the ocean. A great pressure thrust upon her from all sides—a sensation of being both pushed and pulled. She felt the last of the oysters in her belly and the taut tension of the jack line that secured her to Seas the Day. The vessel creaked while it moved through the brine, its mast pointing to the bottom of the ocean.

The cold of the sea cut to the soul. She cried, her tears swirling with the ocean. Her lungs burned, starved of breath. If I make it, she bargained, I’ll live and love each moment. Seek magic and romance in the everyday.

The ship lingered in its unnatural position, time suspended. The wife willed her vessel to return upright. Pictured her mother and father aboard, taking the helm. Seas the Day fought to right herself, channeling the spirit of her crew, past and present. The wife held firm as unearthly echoes emanated from the depths. She feared that phantasmal cougar stalking them now and yearned for the husband’s embrace.

*

After the boat righted itself and the rogue wave continued south, the wife sat clinging to the helm, her safety tether still attached. The harrowing trip below had destroyed her sense of orientation. She coughed up the sea, heaved. She held tight to the wheel and forced herself to keep control, directing the bow according to her coordinates and baling water from the cockpit. The wind tore through, fluttering the windscreen and sending the boom back and forth. Dread overwhelmed her. Her hands shook and she screamed into the storm.

I’m alive, the husband called for his wife from the v-berth, his voice strained. I’m ok.

As she watched her husband ascend from below deck, the wife held her breath. Her lungs ached. When she saw him stand, she wanted to rush toward him. To touch him and confirm he’d survived. But her feet wouldn’t move. Her expression was frozen between one of fear and one of relief. It wasn’t until he stood before her and pulled her in close that she began to believe.

I thought I’d lost you, the wife said.

Their bodies trembled as they embraced.

I’m here, said the husband. He squeezed her tighter and nuzzled her neck.

They ran their hands along one another’s faces and shoulders, backs and arms. Examined their beloved’s body for injuries.

We’re banged up, the husband said as he caressed the wife’s cuts and bruises. But we survived.

We survived; the words sunk in as the knot in the wife’s heart loosened.

The couple held each other at the helm as Seas the Day emerged from the storm. Seagulls squawked overhead and the skies cleared. They approached the southern end of the strait. The husband’s arms felt strong around the wife. The images of her parents’ mangled bodies dissolved and were replaced with earlier memories: her mother’s smile as she prepared fresh-caught lingcod in the galley, her father’s calloused hands as he taught her to tie a clove hitch, the two of them lounging at the bow, cocktails in hand, as she swam in the cove amidst a school of moon jellies, their bodies slick and otherworldly against her legs.

But those rogue waves would never leave her mind. The way they tossed Seas the Day and upended the couple’s reality. The way they flooded her lungs with grief. The way the boat righted itself and blessed the couple with a new life.

No, those rogue waves would never leave her mind.

September Woods Garland hails from the Pacific Northwest where she enjoys taking long, romantic walks through haunted houses and feeding Bigfoot peanut butter & seaweed sandwiches. She works as a freelance book editor and serves as editor in chief at Weird Lit Magazine. September’s work is forthcoming in The Stray Branch and has appeared in Crow & Cross Keys, Roi Fainéant Press, The Squawk Back, and elsewhere. http://www.septemberwoodsgarland.com