The sun shone from the west when he woke. Wind on deck groaned through the rigging. Sunlight through the hatch and companionway lit the galley but the cabin was hushed in shade. Mitchell raised himself with the sail tie and turned onto his side, he reached under the blanket to bend his legs then paused in the quiet exchange of light and shadow. "Listen to me boat," he said, studying the sloop’s interior construction. "I need just once in this life to get where I’m going." The silence almost entered him. "Just once," he said.

He reached for the water jug on top of the cooler and took a long drink, admiring the battered spines of his old books on the shelf above his berth. He thought of the books as his companions now. The others were long gone, the quick-tempered sailormen who drank hard and drove themselves under the influence of anything that would drag the pain into the abyss. In his mind he saw them again, swelling up into the winds of change, blown apart like spray upon the crest, driven toward their separate shores. They had never shared their thoughts. They had never known each other really. They were selfish like that.

The dinghy bumped the hull and Andy climbed over the stern pulpit. He hurried across the cockpit and swung below and landed almost gracefully on his feet. "It's really blowing out there. Small craft warnings are up at the Coast Guard station." He shivered and rubbed warmth into his hands then tore off his windbreaker and turned into the galley and opened the food lockers two at a time. Dry goods fell to the counter. "What do you want to eat?" He was speaking into the box of crackers.

Mitchell watched him, a young man now, graduated from college and the university and at the beginning of a career. But Mitchell was seeing the high school kid that second summer, when Andy knew his way around the place. And on the mountain...

In the cobalt dawn the land had slept long. Night was most beautiful then, warm and heavy with moisture, distractions silenced by profound clarity, the stars fleeting but full of promise. "They’ll come again those sailor’s lights," Mitchell assured himself. "They’ll come forever."

He had waited out the night at the train stop in the cab of his old Chevy truck, a small behemoth with low rails on a dump body made of oak. The bottom of the truck’s door was five feet from the ground, he had transferred into it from the porch of his cabin. The cab’s rear window was six inches behind his head, with no space for his wheelchair behind the bucket-seat, so he had left the chair on the cabin porch. He had driven the treacherous descent off the mountain in the evening light.

In the farthest distance he heard the train’s plaintive horn. He saw its great eye of yellow light probing uncertainly in the darkness along the mountainsides. "Here we go," he said and envied the track’s emptiness. "It’s just two weeks. Then we’ll be waiting for a south-bound."