12

The sloop glided through Watch Hill Passage into the Atlantic and wind arrived immediately, blasting the sails and driving the boat hard into the open sea. Andy hurried into the cockpit to trim the sails. On the leeward side, close to the sea, Mitchell pushed off the steep angling of the deck into tremendous downward force from the tiller, matching his will against the boat’s tonnage. This was the price he would pay for the fixed seat, his inability to get to the high side, blocking his view to starboard now. Ahead he could see only a vertical slice of blue sky between the mast and the genoa, and a triangle of sea and sky rising and falling under the sail-foot where the genoa lifted outboard over the lifeline. The horizon rose and fell, rose and fell. "Soon," he said, his voice a silent prayer under the wind. "After Portland and this proving ground. I’ll be out here forever."

Andy tapped the back of Mitchell’s tiller hand and hollered above the wind tumult, "Do you have it?"

"I'm good," Mitchell shouted and Andy slid forward along the bench to climb below.

Towering overhead the sails soughed plaintively, whistling low. Mitchell glanced at the compass to keep his mind off the strain of the helm. Under the genoa he glimpsed the tiny black shadow of an island growing on the horizon. Twelve miles he figured and steered for the island. Andy leaned through the companionway to hand him a sandwich.

"I can't," Mitchell shouted above the wind blast. "I'm using my hand to push off. You eat. Spell me when you're done."

With both arms locked and straining to extend the heels of his hands Mitchell muscled his weight into the relentless force of the tiller. His mind cursed again the uselessness of his palms, his hands like loose hinges since the syringomyelia. Force on his palms would break his wrists. His strength was his back and shoulders and a will that had somehow outlived the losses. And my balance he thought, breathing deep into the numbness descending from his chest through his hips and legs and on the outside of both arms and hands. He exhaled a sort of thanks for the deep muscle sensation throughout his body, a blessing and a curse now that the pain was constant. He never thought of himself before the paralysis, only before the syrinx when he’d had triceps carrying the weight. Pectorals too, but he still felt a profound loss for the triceps that had made the difference between freedom and this life of dependence.

He was sure he had rolled with it. He had fallen more than once and picked himself up and grabbed on even with paralyzed hands because some distant unformed truth kept pounding at his heart’s door. There was something out here he needed to know.

Andy climbed up with the sandwich sagging in his hand, his face was small and egg-shaped, black curls streaming around his face inside the tightened hood of a burgundy windbreaker. He sat on the bench and took the tiller. Mitchell slid his hand off for the sandwich. Up on the high side with both hands on the tiller Andy leaned back to marvel at the sea.

The island shaped itself gradually out of the deep into far away golden bluffs. A black swift careened high above the sails, its intent on the island returning Mitchell to landfalls on the coasts of Vietnam and the Philippines and to the harbor at Singapore. He drank the wild ocean in every glint of white and gold light. His mind celebrated the ringing of the halyards and the gear’s peculiar strain as the sloop cut effortlessly through small swells. "Jesus Christ," he breathed. "I'm alive again."