Page 51 of Swept Away

I take the toothbrush from him gratefully. The timing seems a bit coincidental if this is food poisoning, and I’m not sure thatoption is all that much better than seasickness. The danger either way is all the fluid I could lose. I stand unsteadily and peer through the kitchen window.

“How big are the waves? Are we properly going somewhere?”

I look back at Zeke. He nods, dimples showing.

“Wherever we were stuck before, it obviously wasn’t on any sort of shipping route—only that one ship ever came by. But now…”

He’s breathing faster—excited, I think. Zeke is so understated it’s hard to tell. I attempt a smile back at him, trying to ignore the way my head is pounding from dehydration. I want to be positive, but I’m thinking about this boat and what it was designed to do—float down canals, sit in the marina, bob around with the ducks…

“She made it through that first night,” Zeke says.

I don’t have to tell him: he knows what I’m thinking.

“She can do this, Lexi,” he says.

I don’t know when we started callingThe Merry Dormouse“she.” I’ve always found referring to boats as women a bit pretentious, but I get it now. This houseboat is a living, breathing thing, the third person trying to survive out here. Or the fourth, if you count Eugene, who was hopping around the deck this morning while Zeke watched for boats, like some kind of rangy stray dog who doesn’t want to join in but doesn’t want to be left out, either.

“Yeah,” I say, as we move unsteadily through to the living area. “She can do this. Absolutely.”

I glance at the kitchen, where the horizon line moves in and out of view in the window. Zeke’s storm-proofing is already being put to the test. There’s a cupboard door partly open, one of our precious tins of baked beans pressed to the gap but held in place by that small loop of string. I feel a fierce wave of appreciation for Zeke and his brain, the way he thinks of things that would never cross my mind: the sail he dreamed up from the tarpaulin; his securing doors withstring; rescuing a useless seagull who’s made me smile more times than I’ll admit.

We head out onto the deck and the wind touches my face. I grip the frame around the wheelhouse. The sea has completely changed, no longer glassy and shimmering. Now it’s ruffled and thick, like icing piped on a cake.

“God, that breeze feels nice.”

I stumble slightly and Zeke puts his hand on my waist to steady me. Even with the nausea still clinging to me and the deck rising and falling beneath us, his touch zings through me. If the boat can make it through another day, I know I’ll think about his hand on me as I sit and keep watch for ships in the dark. For now, though, I pack the feeling away, like I always do.

“The sail,” I say suddenly, turning to look at the pole with its fabric wrapped tightly around it, waiting for this moment.

“I know,” Zeke says, already moving to lever himself up onto the roof. “I was waiting for you to get up before I…”

Just as I say a reprimanding, “Zeke!” he winces and drops back to the deck, a hand on his stomach.

“Sorry,” he says ruefully. “Forgot.”

“I’ll do it.”

I go around the edge, the way I did when I drunk-danced up there. As I climb up onto the roof, I flash back to the moment I hitched myself up here with a glass of wine, and I’m almost stunned by the carelessness with which I did it. So much has changed since then.

I open the sail out. It catches and gets buffeted by the breeze; I think I even feel the houseboat shift underneath me. I swear under my breath, trying to angle it in a way that feels helpful—a way that will propel us forward, not slow us down.

“I feel like we need some ropes,” I say after a few ineffectualmoments. “Doesn’t this normally involve ropes? We just need to be able to move the…”

“Boom,” Zeke supplies. “I think that’s the horizontal one.”

“Right, OK, the boom—we need to be able to shift it side to side from the deck and then fix it in place.”

It takes us almost three hours, in the end. We start by deconstructing our ladder to get the rope we need. Neither of us is particularly handy, and it turns out there’s a reason why sailors are so famous for tying knots. It’sreallyhard to fix everything where it needs to go, and the more we get into this, the more obvious it is that we’re essentially trying to learn how to sail from first principles, which is patently ridiculous.

Eventually we end up with something that means there’s tension in the sail and we can manipulate which direction it faces, but I’m starting to wonder if we’ve created a monster here.

“I think we might be going around in circles,” Zeke says bleakly, looking over the side. His voice is sticky and dry with thirst, just like mine. “Maybe we can use the helm now? Steer…into the wind? Not into the wind? I don’t even know. We just want to gosomewhere, don’t we?”

“Maybe we put the sail down for now. Just have it for if we need to navigate around something.”

“Aroundsomething?” Zeke says, eyes widening. “Why have I not worried about that yet?”

I hate scaring him, but the shower drain leak has made me so much more nervous about the boat’s integrity, and with these waves, there are a whole host of new things to be terrified about. Still, I liked using the wordnavigate. It was pleasingly nautical, and gave me a fleeting and very misplaced feeling that I might know what I’m doing.

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