Page 69 of Our Hearts Knew Better

I can’t think about my job right now. For sure, I’ll figure something out, because I’m not living off anybody else’s money—anymore, entirely—because as was just proven, again, that’sanother means for somebody to control you. But my mind is on this loop, trying to wrap around the now real thought of living in Rosalee Bay again.

Fate has decided to send us back.

My mouth waters for a honeysuckle flower, a sting in my lids for my mom, and more familiar thuds of anticipation in my heart for whose bush I’ll have to visit to get one.

I follow the light noises coming from the bedroom to Adam, having calls to make and texts to send and bags to pack.

For Summer

Levi

Weather forecasts don’t always get it right. That’s why, when sailing, you have to rely on your own knowledge of nature and your gut instincts.

Remember the five,my dad would say.Clouds. Scent. Breeze. Rings. Pressure.

He said them in that order, the first time he ticked them off his fingers like a song when I was a kid, pumped to be just like him—or a pirate, whichever happened first—but they don’t always run in that order; they don’thaveto, more often running parallel. But I memorized them that way, because while the order wasn’t important, my dad and his ways were.

They still are.

Every day, I check the forecasts, even days in advance for changes, then determine my own prognosis.

Today, the coronas have been tight, the smell of fish faint, no change in the wind, clouds huge and pillowy, a mash-up for good weather. Pressureislast, because it’s the one that throws me off. I can hardly feel a difference anymore. The only ache in my bones is in my chest, my only hunch the one telling me my dadisdead.

In the spring of last year, when he dropped off some gear at Rosalee Bay Fishin’ and Cruisin’, which I now manage, and grabbed a quick lunch with me, was the last time I saw him.

Breakfast with Mom was the last time she saw him.

Storms can be known to come from nowhere in North Carolina, and the Gilligan crashed not far from where I’m anchored.

We recovered the boat, but not him.

Mom believes he’s still out here, surviving like the newest cast member of his boat’s namesake.

But I know he’s not.

So do the crews who have stopped searching for him.

So do our family friends who’ve made searching for him part of their daily life three times a week—Monday, Wednesday, Friday—but they’d do anything for my mom.

I’d do anything for her, too, except that.

My dad’s death wasn’t my first run with heartbreak—I’ve technically been nursing a broken heart since I was seventeen—but it dragged me down the worst, no chance to go back. And even as the pressure puts an indestructible crimp in my ways now, it’s not in me to stay down, because that wasn’t in him. He’d tell me the more I lose, the more I have to hang on to.

So I had to grieve, then I had to let him go.

Nothingcan ever fill the hole of his absence, but I’ve had to leave him out to sea. My solace is knowing he died doing what he loved. No better way to go out, if you’re asking me, the boy my dad raised to be the man who loves the sea with the same immensity.

This boat is my church, the sea my therapy. My answers, no question. This life teaches strength. I’ve made a lot of tough decisions out on this boat when I needed that strength to make them. You learn how to hold on, and when to let go. I’ve never feltnearer, more solid, then when I’m cradled by the current.

And I can still feel my dad. On land, he’s gone. On water, his spirit will always be alive.

I don’t come out here chasing storms. I don’t tempt fate. But I do notice every day the weather doesn’t take a turn for me like it did for him.

And now another day is drifting into night, the sky goldened by the sunset, and my arm is numb.

I shake it out as I rise up from the cockpit, coming out here so often, whenever I can, lying in these suspended moments, that I forget to not use my arm as a pillow.

I’ll need both functioning to take care of a father who’s still alive, and more stubborn with me than his daughter.

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