Apologies up front, but I sort of rushed through this chapter so hope it isn’t too rough. Another procedure on the good eye tomorrow and I always get spooked before these little needles in the eyeball days. I guess it comes down to red lines in the sand, because finishing out my life while both blind and deaf was never in my game plan, and blindness is an ever present risk with this procedure. I tend to write on days like these almost as if they are the last thing I’ll ever write, so there’s a quick snapshot of my state of mind.

Music. Ah, where to begin, because this is an odd tale too. After a botched search warrant turned into a firefight inside a little house one night, I came out deaf in the left ear and my hearing in that ear never came back. What’s odd is that now I’m slowly losing hearing on the right side too, so slowly going deaf, and that makes music a challenge. Why, you ask? Because I can’t hear the very high or low pitches in the right ear’s track, and in stereo headphones I can’t hear the left channel at all, which means guitars and or strings, as well as bass lines or bass drums are simply absent. Yet…if I play music I’m familiar with I hear it all, every note…because the brain has committed those notes to memory and somehow, as my brain processes the incoming signal it just fills in the blanks. Fascinating, as Mr. Spock would say. That often means, however, that I stay stuck inside a musical rut. My brain struggles to fill in the gaps when I listen to new music, though it tries. But old familiar music is like a warm blanket on a cold night, isn’t it?

So, what’s on my musical radar tonight? Randy Newman, naturally enough. Falling in Love is a classic, while I Will Go Sailing No More is a bit more whimsical and, indeed, almost philosophical. Something Special lives up to its name. Baltimore is a fun piano ballad. If into Robert Redford’s The Natural, Newman scored the soundtrack and I always get lost in that one. For a change, visit Neil Young again. Old Man is meditative, while the searing pain in The Needle and The Damage Done never fails to leave you wondering – was that just a song? Young might lead you back to Crosby Stills and Nash, to an album titled Replay, kind of a “best of” compilation that will put you in the zone and keep you there.

Anyway, thanks for listening to an old man bitch about being an old man. Now, grab some tea and have a read, ’cause you ain’t gettin’ any younger, you know…?

The Infinity Song  

Part I, Chapter Two

Rand Alderson belonged to the human race. He was a Homo Sapiens, he walked upright, had horizontally opposed thumbs and all the other hallmarks of the species. And yet, Rand Alderson hated himself, and all humanity, for these things.

Because he could not stand the human race, nor could he tolerate the company of his fellow man, at least not for very long. Which, curiously, had made education an odd career choice for a garden variety misanthrope like Alderson. Perhaps he had always hated his fellow man, or perhaps dealing with children in a college setting had soured him on the species. The truth of the matter was he just didn’t care. Girl, boy, young or old, Rand was an equal opportunity hater, and no one escaped his ire. His teaching assistants knew not approach him for anything early in the morning, and any requests were best made in writing. After two weeks in his classroom his students either feared or detested him. Often both. Yet he was the most gifted physicist of his generation, and peers regarded him as an Einstein caliber theorist.

And woe be unto the freshman drone entering his quantum cosmology class unprepared academically, for Alderson simply encouraged the student to drop the class. If that approach failed, he was not at all reluctant to drop a failing grade on any student no performing to standard, no matter the parents wealth and standing, and no matter the desperate entreaties from Princeton’s administration. As a result, word spread around campus: Don’t fuck with Alderson. It won’t do any good.

When students entered his office they were greeted with every edifice of naval rank imaginable.Two 6 foot long models of nuclear submarines adorned the wall behind his desk; the larger of the two was a scale model of SSN-23, the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter, the third and final Sea Wolf Class fast attack submarine, on which he first served as a reactor control officer, before taking over as the ship’s XO, or executive officer. The second model was of SSN-776, the U.S.S. Hawaii, on which he served as the ship’s XO, before ‘retiring’ from  fleet duties.

Among Alderson’s many other, and ridiculously varied accomplishments, examples of which adorned all his walls and bookcases, were the wings of a Naval Aviator, completion of the Test Pilot School at Patuxent River NAS, and featured prominently on one wall, his completion of Astronaut Training Class 229c, with highest honors. Alderson had crammed all this into one seventeen year long career in the Navy, retiring just before launching as a payload specialist on three of the last five shuttle missions. When the shuttle program was unceremoniously canceled, Rand left NASA and went to Princeton, and there he started teaching, and there his hatred of all things human began in earnest.

In appearance most of his students thought he looked just like Superman, the one from the 1970s, so of course his first year courses were overflowing with of all kinds of aspiring female physicists. Until these girls read through the course requirements and mathematical skills required to navigate the class’s coursework. Then, by the second or third meeting of these classes, there remained perhaps ten students, maybe an even dozen. By the end of the first month that number had usually dwindled to five or six. Few of these remaining students ever earned anything less than top marks, because, frankly, the only students remaining were usually genius level savants, people who tended to be just like Alderson – and just as socially maladjusted. In a word, Alderson presided over a classroom full of misanthropic – all assholes in the extreme.

Which is not to say that Alderson did not have friends. 

Of course he did. 

Henry Langston was certainly one friend, and perhaps there were a few at NASA, but he’d had no wives, or ex-wives, and no girlfriends – or even boyfriends. Anyone forced to spend much time around him soon understood why. He had dark, piercing eyes, peregrine eyes, and unless pressed he said nothing. When forced to attend faculty parties or department get-togethers, he stood ramrod straight with a fixed smile glued firmly to his chiseled face, his steely gaze daring anyone to approach and engage in idle chit-chat. New faculty members, women for the most part, always had a try at him, all soon retreating from his company, a few visibly shaken by the experience.

Yet his students, the ones who managed to survive the first month or so in his intro classes, all adored him. He was the best teacher ever. Without peer. And no one at the university understood why.

Here was a misanthrope, the very essence social malfeasance, yet surrounded by doting students. In the choice words of the esteemed, august president of the university: “What the fuck is up with that…?”

It was simple, really. As simple as it was incomprehensible.

When class was at an end and the lesson for the day yet barely understood, Rand Alderson loved to tell ‘war stories’ to his classes. Stories of his exploits in submarines and experimental aircraft, and in space shuttles. Yet every story had a point, the sharp tip of a spear aimed at a very complex subject, and by way of his stories he made his point. The most complex lessons, so byzantine that they had stood as riddles for hundreds of years, were reduced to a few well chosen anecdotes and the solution was soon plain to see. The problem was, of course, time. Or the lack thereof.

For the 0800 intro class, when the clock reached 9:15 their period was nominally over. Students were already waiting outside the door, waiting for Alderson’s students to vacate the classroom, so on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays his class adjourned to a nearby diner for coffee and an omelet, while on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons he and his students trooped over to The Dinky Bar & Kitchen for spicy tuna rolls and chicken katsu salad. When the discussions got deep enough, he and his students walked to his house and took up the discussion in his living room, and some of these Socratic dialogues lasted hours, a few even lasted days. One or two had been going on for years.

His living room, of course, had a blackboard.

Favored students would often find an invitation to take up residence in one of the many vacant bedrooms in the old victorian mansion that Alderson called home. Though it belonged to the university, there were no restrictions on who could reside there, and the Alderson house usually had seven or so students living within the warren of unused rooms on the second and third floors. Discussions on all things cosmological were ongoing. Major innovations in physics and cosmology were routinely made in the Alderson kitchen, usually over bagels and lox and fresh squeezed orange juice.

And one Tuesday afternoon, while his entourage of students was watching the live feed from a solar telescope in eastern China, his friend Henry Langston called, while they were in the middle of an animated discussion about the nature and possible origins of the black sphere emerging from the solar disc. 

A second incoming alert chimed. Dietrich Aronson was also calling from UC Berkeley, and he now wanted to FaceTime.

And soon Aronson, Langston, and Alderson were engaged in a lively discussion – with a living room full of interested students looking on and taking part. They all watched replays of the black sphere ballooning in size, then a drive of some sort flaring. Spectrum analyses were needed, the students declared, electromagnetic and gravimetric field analyses as well. One group of students settled on determining the objects departure vector, another group began working on an analysis of the drives chemical makeup. Benji Ozawa was invited to join the discussion from Hawaii, then astrophysicists from the UK, Japan, and Germany were brought onboard.

And by midnight everyone was sure of two things.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t a naturally occurring phenomenon.

And the latest object’s departure vector revealed that the object was heading somewhere between the Earth and the Moon.

And it was decided that the next task was to track the object while it was in transit so that additional studies could be made.

And one last decision was made. A working group was established and would convene in Berkeley in August, and interested students were encouraged to attend.

+++++

Henry Langston was the first to arrive, and he had asked just one student to come along: a chubby, unprepossessing girl from Pasadena and a freshman at Dartmouth. Olivia Brown was her name, and Langston allowed how he’d recently had the girl take multiple intelligence tests; her scores were so far off the distribution curves on both tests that she had entered uncharted territory. He told Dietrich Aronson that he had brought her along as a kind of recording device; she remembered everything she read, or heard. As. In. Everything. Her math skills were off the charts, and Henry considered her abilities next level. So, almost as good as his.

Rand Alderson came by himself, odd given his usual coterie of students – past and present. He told Aronson that the stakes were too high this time to allow students to meddle, and he objected to Olivia’s presence. Dietrich Aronson, on the other hand, had asked his latest superstar graduate student to attend, because he too thought her skills were next level.

And her name was Jenna. Jenna Goodman.

+++++

And Jenna Goodman was the opposite of chubby and unprepossessing. She had red hair and blue eyes, she had to be over six feet tall and most of that height seemed to be in her legs which, once seen, you could never forget. Even Rand Alderson. When he first saw Goodman he did a double take, then his eyes trained on her red high heels. “Physicists don’t wear shoes like that,” he whispered to Henry Langston, “do they?”

“I feel certain that yes, that’s been the case up to now.”

“Fuck me,” Alderson whispered. “I’d like some of that. For an after dinner drink, I think.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Henry replied, rolling his eyes as Dietrich walked with her as they came over for introductions. Which did not go as expected.

“Henry? Rand? I’d like you to meet Jenna Goodman.”

Langston reached out with his right hand and she took it with a demure smile, and Henry thought the woman looked somewhat like a red-headed Marilyn Monroe, only with much larger breasts. She was wearing a maroon leather jacket – apparently with nothing underneath – and the jacket seemed about two sizes too small…with the net result being that the woman’s cleavage reminded him of the Grand Canyon.

Alderson hesitated before taking her hand, and Goodman seized the opportunity to strike first.

“I’ve heard, Dr. Alderson, that the color of a woman’s lingerie ofter refers to her own unique sexual proclivities. I wonder, which color do you prefer…?”

Rand seemed to reel backwards under the weight of this unplanned assault, but he regrouped quickly. “I really don’t give a rat’s ass,” he said, his demeanor now cross, and starkly so, like he had been offended by her words.

But she looked down a little, then she lowered her voice a little, too. “Oh, but of course you do,” she sighed, and Henry thought the words sounded almost sarcastic and patronizing, yet in their way, extremely seductive.

Rand looked at Dietrich and scowled; Dietrich looked at Rand and smiled. Rand was angry. Dietrich looked just like he was in on the joke, like he and Jenna had done this just to fluster Alderson. And they had. Deliberately. And it had worked, because everyone knew that Alderson was a prude with absolutely no sense of humor. 

Of course, almost everyone was wrong. Henry knew Rand better than anyone and had never thought of him as prudish, but in that moment his attention had been directed at the redhead.

“So, Dietrich,” Henry said, “tell us about your associate.”

“Oh, Henry, our Jenna is something of a polymath. She has an M.D. as well as a Ph.D., and only recently became interested in astrophysics.”

Henry looked at the girl and nodded. “I see. And what is your doctorate in, if I might ask?”

“Artificial Intelligence,” Jenna replied – without the slightest trace of irony.

“Ah, well then, we may have use of your expertise.”

“I’m counting on it,” she said, smiling brightly – even as she walked over to Alderson and kissed him on the cheek.

Alderson blushed but did not turn away from her. “What was that for?” he asked.

“For being such a good sport. Dietrich and some of the other astronomers have been cooking this up for weeks.”

“Why? To see what kind of reaction you might get out of me?” Rand said, casting an evil eye at Dietrich.

“Yes indeed, you old stick in the mud,” Aronson said. “We just wanted to see if you actually still had a pulse.”

Alderson growled as he stomped off; Jenna watched and grinned knowingly, just before she took off after him. Almost like she’d…planned it that way…

+++++

“Where are they now?” Alderson asked, looking at the plot of magnetic disturbances as the five objects advanced across the inner solar system. 

“Well, one thing seems clear,” Jenna said, “they’re not coming here. One appears to be heading directly to the L3 Lagrange Point, the other four appear to be heading towards Saturn. We need to refine the plot, but at least one model shows this second group heading towards Titan.”

“Titan?” Langston scoffed. “Now that makes no sense at all, unless they need methane.”

“Need?” Aronson asked.

“Why not?” Olivia Brown said. “It breaks down readily into carbon dioxide and water, and from there you can release pure oxygen. Look at the spectral analyses of their drives. A pure hydrogen line, so they’re burning hydrogen. And if they’re air-breathers and need oxygen, well, they get that too, and Titan offers that in almost unlimited quantities.”

“Has anyone bothered to get a scope on L3?” Langston asked.

No one had. 

Langston shook his head. “Doesn’t Benji know a bunch of people over at the Subaru scope? An optical-infrared observation might be useful.”

“What about an EM scan?” Olivia asked. “We can do that right now, from here.”

Aronson turned to his desktop computer and looked at the sky-map. “We could task either the MRO or Swarm right not. If we wait five hours we could get Hubble-2 to image and scan the area.”

“Why not get all three? To both image and scan around L3?” Alderson asked.

“All three it is,” Aronson sighed as he typed the requests. And as he was finishing up the new Hubble tasking, he finally hit the enter button…

…and the power grid failed.

From San Diego to Seattle, and as far east as Denver, Colorado.

A red emergency light popped on inside the observatory dome and Aronson walked over to open the door, and when he stepped out on the rooftop he gasped. He looked up and saw stars overhead, and that rarely happened in the Bay Area. Everyone filed out one by one and everyone’s eyes immediately went to the heavens. 

“Damn! Look at that!” Henry said as he pointed south, towards San Francisco International Airport. A massive four engined airliner was gliding silently towards the bay, its engines out, gliding silently towards a water landing in the bay. But then the lights came back on. Around the city, then they saw several airliners coming back online. Thee huge airliner managed to get its engines running again and climbed away from the water.

“Well, fuck-a-doodle-do,” Aronson sighed. “Someone sure didn’t like that request.”

Olivia Brown shivered once and shook her head. “And that means…they’re watching us?”

“So it would seem,” Rand said, still looking up at the sky.

+++++

Initial measurements of the objects’ velocities put them firmly in the sub-light speed realm; these observations were further refined as they sped past Mercury. They were hardly moving any faster than an Artemis lunar mission so the group of four would take years to reach Titan. The lone object heading to the L3 Lagrange Point seemed to be moving along even more sedately, and might make it to the region in four years…and Rand Alderson thought that suspicious as hell.

“Why so slow? Why…when they are obviously capable of much greater velocities?”

“Move along, folks. Nothing to see here,” Henry quipped. “We might ignore it that way.”

“That’s possible. Just bore us to death…”

“Or maybe they’re in no hurry,” Olivia Brown added.

Rand turned to her. “Okay, but what are some reasons why they’d do that. Why would a faster than light-speed capable civilization deliberately go so slow?”

“Because they can’t,” Langston mused aloud. “I mean, think about it. These ships literally pop out of the sun – out of the sun, dammit – then just putter along slowly across the inner solar system. And when they popped out of the sun they were inside some kind of field. And for arguments sake, let’s say the field protects them from temperatures inside the photosphere…”

Rand nodded. “Meaning they’re using stars to move between solar systems. Elegant, even if it is quite improbable.”

“Is something like that even possible?” Jenna Goodman asked.

“It is if there are connections between stars, or even pairs of stars. If, for example, some sort of connection between stars remained after their birth. As our bodies are crisscrossed by all the various networks needed to sustain our lives. To pick just one example, our neural networks, and what if interstellar space is crisscrossed by an analogous network. Neural impulses move at quite an astonishing speed, you know, while all our other fluids move along quite a bit more slowly, but what if interstellar objects could obtain what we would consider impossible speeds by traveling along such a network?”

“Why wouldn’t we have discovered something like that by now?”Dietrich asked.

“Perhaps because no one’s ever had any reason to look,” Henry sighed.

+++++

Henry Langston was off in Newfoundland with his son when a new object appeared – and at the same location on the solar limb as the previously observed appearances, but this time the Berkeley Working Group, as the group was now called, was ready for it.

It had been Henry’s idea that solar quakes might precede an unexpected appearance, and as there were already dozens of satellites monitoring the sun for everything from quakes to sunspot formation to coronal mass ejections, getting notification hadn’t been the problem. What was the greatest issue was the sheer number of quakes.

So they had all the relevant satellites monitor just the one region of the southwest limb, all sensors focused where the earlier objects had emerged. There were spurious quakes in this region too, but every time the alarm sounded someone from the group began watching. More importantly, the on-duty astronomer would start monitoring all the other electro-magnetic bands, searching for any new clues that might emerge with the next object.

And a day after Henry departed for St. John’s the alarm sounded while Olivia Brown was monitoring. An object appeared and a cursory analysis revealed that a huge flare of gamma radiation, then a brief flare of x-rays, preceded the object’s sudden appearance on the sun’s surface. More important still, several high definition cameras were now focused on the object.

And what they recorded was stunning.

The object emerged from the sun at blistering velocity, enveloped within the same black cocoon seen before. The longer the object remained near the surface, the larger the balloon became, and the color of the balloon changed, too. When its emerged, the lozenge-shaped balloon was pure black, obsidian black, but as it grew in size a fringe of color appeared, and the colors changed too, shifting right up the usual spectrum of red-orange-yellow-green and on to blue. As each color appeared Olivia asked why not indigo and violet?

The answer, she surmised, lay in the nature of the balloon, or field. As the field absorbed heat it increased in size, with more surface area able to absorb more heat. But as the field absorbed more energy, as it heated internally, that heat began to register as a color shift with, she presumed, indigo and violet indicating the limits of the field’s ability to absorb more energy. 

This hypothesis seemed to be confirmed as the object moved away from the Sun over the next several hours, as the colored fringe slowly reverted to red, or to a cooler state, the further the object traveled from the photosphere. By the next morning the object was back to obsidian again, only this object was heading to Earth, and at fantastic velocities.

“When will it arrive?” Rand asked.

“Assuming constant acceleration to the midpoint,” Olivia stated, “and then constant deceleration until arriving at one of two possible orbital insertion points, it should arrive by the end of the month.”

Rand looked at Dietrich. “It’s time to call your Space Force contacts,” he sighed, “and I’ll call Henry. What time is it in Newfoundland, by the way?”

+++++

Jenna Goodman was sitting across from Rand, studying his many facial expressions in the candlelight. She appeared to enjoy this; at least Rand thought she did. He knew for a fact that he enjoyed watching her. Everything about her, as a matter of fact.

If he had ever had an image in his mind of the perfect female, she was it. Her blazing red hair, the cobalt blue eyes, the impossibly long legs and the voluptuous breasts all screamed out to him: ‘She’s the one! She’s it! Don’t let this one get away!’ The fact that she was so academically accomplished, and at such a young age, only made her that much more attractive to him. Indeed, she seemed to be so academically gifted that all the other men who had approached her over the summer soon beat a hasty retreat. Her intellect was indeed that imposing. 

‘Almost,’ he thought, ‘as imposing as her breasts.’

“A penny for your thoughts?” she purred.

He looked her in the eye and smiled. “I was thinking how beautiful you are right now. Your eyes, in the candlelight, seem almost plum colored.”

“I take it you like plums?”

He nodded. “The juicier the better.”

Her smile brightened. “Sometimes you surprise me.”

“Oh? Now why does that surprise me?”

“I never know what to expect with you, Rand. One minute you’re the essence of puritanism, and yet the next…”

“Puritanism? Really?”

She nodded. “Yes. Sorry. But sometimes, yes. But then you become almost like a teenager.”

“You have something against teenagers?”

“No, not at all.”

“So I asked you once before, but have you been married?”

She shook her head. “No. You?”

“No. I came close once. In some respects you remind me of her.”

“Oh? When was this?”

“I think I was in middle school. Probably 12 years old, maybe 13. I was sure she was the one, too.”

“What happened?”

“We didn’t find out why until the end of the year, but she stopped coming to class sometime that winter. Turned out she had a brain tumor, but I didn’t know what that was. My grandmother died of lung cancer about that time, so that was the first time I’d heard about cancer. Anyway, I think I grew afraid of relationships after that.”

“Of someone dying?”

He nodded. “Yes. Which is ironic, I think, because I have no interest in dying, or in death.”

“So, you plan on living forever?” she asked, smiling.

“I do. Yes. When my time comes I intend to download my brain into a vast computer and then rule the world, or, failing that, at least a very large brothel.”

She smiled again.

“God, there’s something about you. Your smile, the way your eyes light up when you smile. I hate to resort to clichés, but I could fall into your eyes and get lost in there.”

“Nothing wrong with a cliché if it’s what you feel.”

He nodded. “I think, what I’m trying to say…is that I’d really like to spend some time with you. Get to know you better.”

She nodded. “I’d like that too.”

“You know, I hate to ask, but do you live around here?”

“No. Across the bay, in Palo Alto.”

“Ah. Stanford?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“That’s quite a drive to make every night, isn’t it?”

She nodded. 

“Maybe you could stay with me?”

“Maybe,” she sighed, looking away.

“I’m so sorry. I’ve overstepped my bounds and I do apologize…”

“No, no, Rand, it’s not that. It’s just that I just feel so run down after a full day up here with Dietrich and the rest of these people. Like I just need to go home and, well, maybe recharge my batteries, if you know what I mean.”

He nodded. “Yes, I sure do.”

They picked at their food for a few minutes, then she put her fork down and looked at Rand. “What do you think these objects are?”

He shrugged. “It’s not so much the what they are, but who they are that concerns me. Who knows how long they’ve been coming to our solar system, let alone why they’ve chosen not to make contact, but I don’t like the answers that keep popping up in my mind.”

“Do you believe they’re hostile?”

“Again, I have, we have, no way of knowing that, do we? Yet that alone speaks volumes. Either they’ve chosen to ignore us or they’re reluctant to make contact, and if that’s the case I’d sure like to know why?”

“What if you could ask them that question and you didn’t like their answer. Then what?”

“Then our job, or even my job, is to help us achieve technological parity with them as quickly as possible.”

She nodded. “Do you really think something like that is possible?”

“Why not. We get our hands on the technology and then get to work. By that I mean reverse engineer their technology.”

“Have you heard about projects doing just that? I mean people like Boeing and Lockheed…?”

“Only rumors. Or, really, rumors of rumors. Hearsay, in other words. So no, I don’t put much credence in that nonsense. Besides, I’m not really an engineer.”

“I’ve read your resumé, Rand. And your dissertation. Self-modesty isn’t becoming in discussions like this.”

“Oh? Are we having a discussion? I kind of thought this was, oh, I don’t know, like a date?”

“It is, Rand. I just need to know how I can best support you if the matter comes up.”

“Ah. Well, there you have it. So, not a date. Again, I’m sorry; it seems that I’ve misconstrued the situation. It won’t happen again.”

He summoned their waiter and paid the bill, then made his excuses.

And all the while Jenna simply looked at him, measuring his vital signs, analyzing his reasoning, examining his sense of morality. She watched him get up and leave, noted how hurt he seemed to be, then how angry he became as his ego took over.

He was, she decided, interesting and worth further study, if only because his ability to reason seemed to weaken when other emotions interfered with his thought processes. She transmitted her observations and impressions to the tiny blue sphere hovering near the ceiling, then stood to leave.

+++++

“Henry? What are we really doing here? I mean, what are we accomplishing?”

Henry was jet-lagged. He’d just flown from Newfoundland to Boston, spent two days with his kids and his mother, then jetted to San Francisco – only to find Rand grouchy and Dietrich leery. The mood had changed while he was in Canada, and he’d learned that Olivia Brown had soured on the mood and flown down to Pasadena to spend time with her mother. Because, according to Dietrich, everything had gone downhill after Rand and Jenna went out on a date. And that just didn’t make sense. Rand didn’t go out on dates.

At least he never had.

But Rand was also reaching “a certain age.” What was once called “middle-aged-crazy.” If things kept deteriorating at this pace, pretty soon Rand would show up wearing Ray-Bans and driving a yellow Porsche 911, and anyone wearing a skirt would be in mortal danger. 

At least that’s what Dietrich told him just after he got back on campus in Berkeley.

And now this? Rand wondering what he was accomplishing here? That just didn’t fit with the Rand he knew. That Rand was a scientist, but more than that, he was an explorer. He was driven by an insatiable curiosity, or at least he had been. So…was Olivia right? Had he finally, at long last, fallen into the clutches of testosterone driven need?

“I don’t know, Rand. What do you think we’ve accomplished?”

“Not a damn thing. Not a goddamned thing.”

“Well then, maybe you should go home. Let things settle down. Maybe you’ll see things differently.”

“Or maybe I won’t.”

“Yeah. I suppose that’s equally possible.”

“So, are you going to Iceland next week?”

Henry nodded. “Yup. You ever been to Reykjavik?”

“Once, yeah. Coming back from Faslane on a C-9. We had a mechanical and put in at Keflavik, stayed there a couple of days. Pretty girls.”

“Yeah. I’ve heard that.” And that confirmed it, Henry told himself. The Rand he knew wouldn’t have mentioned the girls anywhere, let alone when transiting to or from a deployment. So…Olivia was, as usual, right. But…when had she been wrong? “You seeing anyone back in New Jersey?” he asked.

“No, nothing serious. Just a couple of one night stands last semester.”

“Do I even want to know?”

“You? Strait-laced Langston? I doubt it.”

“You banging stuff on campus?”

“Sure. Why the fuck not, Henry? It’s a target rich environment, ya know?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You flying to Logan? Changing planes there?”

“Yup.”

“What’s your flight number. I’ll see if I can book something on the same flight. Give us some time to get catch up on old times.”

“Sure. Yeah. Sounds good.”

And just then both their phones pinged as an incoming text arrived. Both fished phones out of coat pockets and both looked at the exact same message – from Dietrich.

“Images from Lagrange Point coming in now.”

Henry looked over at the Astronomy Building and nodded. “You still interested?”

“No, not really, but what the hell. Let’s go.”

+++++

Henry noticed that Rand stood on one side of the observatory image processing lab, and Jenna Goodman the other, which handily confirmed Olivia’s second observation about Rand. ‘Oh well,’ he thought, ‘c’est la vie.’ He’d never thought of Rand falling into this kind of mental trap, but all the proof necessary was in this hasty pudding.

Dietrich turned to the Group and addressed them as the AI in the campus computer processed and stacked the images. Final processing would probably take an hour, but a rough image would be ready soon. “These images are coming straight from Hubble, so they’re unfiltered and, hopefully, uncensored,” he added. Henry looked at Rand through the darkness, and sure enough Rand was casting little sidelong glances at Jenna – and he groaned inwardly as this new truth kept hammering their old relationship. The idea of Rand seducing students was bad enough, but letting a woman interfere with something as consequential as this mission…? He still couldn’t believe it. Maybe he didn’t want to believe it. 

The computer pinged and an image appeared.

And as a group everyone in the room gasped and jumped back. All, that is, but Jenna Goodman.

Because there on the screen was – something – huge. Beyond huge. It wasn’t a ship, either. It was simply too big. Dietrich asked the AI to try and assign a scale so the group would know what they were looking at.

And the computer thought a moment, and then replied: “Best initial estimate: length 500 miles, breadth, 300 miles, depth, 50 miles.” Albedo, or how much sunlight was being reflected off an average of the visible surfaces, was 73 percent, or extremely bright. And bright white, too. With one highly reflective surface aspect looking almost like glass. 

“Those aren’t solar panels, are they?” Rand asked.

And the AI thought about that for a moment, then replied. “No. The black area is translucent. Spectrum indicates a high density of silicates. Only isolated areas of electro-magnetic radiation visible.”

“So…are we looking at windows?” Henry sighed.

Jenna spoke next. “Windows, but more like a ceiling. A ceiling, or a roof made of a glass-like material. And note the curve here,” she said standing next to the 72 inch monitor. “We need a chord and ord to work out this radius, because I think this looks like a space station that’s currently under construction.”

Everyone leaned forward and studied the object…

…and then the power failed again.

And once again the computer crashed. And by the time backups kicked in the image was lost. Every effort to retrieve it failed. When Dietrich queried SSTI he learned that Hubble had no record of having imaged that region of the sky, none whatsoever.

“Somebody sure didn’t want us to see that facility,” Henry sighed.

“That’s the second time, too,” Rand said. “Dietrich? Poke your head outside and see if it’s the whole city again.”

It was. And once again the entire west coast and inland as far as Denver.

“You know what? That damn thing might be big enough, and bright enough, to see in our refractor.”

The AI responded. “No, Dr. Dietrich, it is below the current seeing threshold given current atmospheric conditions.”

“Well, we saw it. We all did,” Rand said. “Now the question is what do we do with that knowledge?”

“We wait and see what the objects heading that way do,” Dietrich advised.

“And what about the object headed this way?” Rand added. “When does it arrive?”

The AI responded. “The object will enter a circumpolar orbit at 23:14 hours pacific daylight time on Saturday, 25 August, 2035.”

“Has SpaceGuard or the Space Force picked up the object yet?”

The AI thought for a full minute that time. “There are no indications either organization has changed alert status or monitoring schedules, so that appears unlikely.”

“Will the object overfly any strategic installations?” Rand asked next.

“On it’s first orbit, the object will be over the US Navy’s nuclear submarine base in Puget Sound, Washington, Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central California Coast, and the US Navy’s extensive facilities in San Diego, California. Facilities of the Chilean Navy will also be overflown. The object will then cross Antarctica and depart the landmass near Davis Station before overflights of Indian Air Force bases at Bhuj and Bathinda. Multiple military airfields in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, and the Ural Mountains over Russia are next, then multiple Russian naval facilities in the Kara Sea region. The last facility overflown on the object’s first orbit is the Russian Air Force Base at Nagurskoye, and although there are currently no air assets detailed to this facility, there are multiple ground based surveillance radars in operation here, all capable of monitoring the object as it transits the polar region.”

“What’s the latest projected arrival date for the other objects reaching L3?”

“25 May, 2037, at 00: 33 hours Pacific Daylight Time.”

“Have you finished your preliminary determination the space station’s radius?”

“Yes, my initial radius estimate is in the range of 17,500 miles.”

“So, a diameter of 35,000 miles?”

“Yes, and there is a very high probability that construction materials for this project are being mined and processed on Saturn’s moon Titan.”

“That fits with what we know so far,” Dietrich said.

“I don’t like this,” Rand sighed. “The targets that will be overflown, and the size of that station. That’s just preposterous. And why build something out there at all…?”

“Because all gravitational influences are null at the Lagrange Points,” the AI replied.

“But why?” Henry asked.

“Given the limited dataset available, only conjecture is possible,” the AI continued. “I would, therefore, guess that these beings are constructing a solar shade to block solar radiation from superheating the planet once greenhouse gases precipitate one hundred percent cloud cover.”

“Best estimates for when that might happen?”

“Two hundred and thirty years, plus or minus ten years.”

“And given current estimates, how long will humans be able to live on the planet’s surface?”

“The figures vary with latitude, but equatorial regions should grow uninhabitable by the year 2110; between 60 degrees North Latitude and 60 degrees South Latitude by the year 2125, and by 2133 human life will no longer be supported on the planet’s surface.”

“So a possible solar shield would come online a hundred years after we’re extinct.”

Jenna cleared her throat. “Unless something happens to cool the planet, yes. Extinction is already inevitable, but their timing is curious. Perhaps they intend to terraform the planet, make it habitable again.”

“That might make sense,” Rand nodded. “That way we kill ourselves off, and so there’s no expenditure of military assets on their part. Clever.”

“Or they simply didn’t get the project underway in time to prevent our extinction,” she countered. 

Henry looked at Jenna, then turned to the AI console. “What would happen if we helped them?” he asked.

The AI hesitated: “You do not currently have the technological capabilities to assist in a project of this magnitude.”

“I disagree. We have the most amazing technological advantage in the universe.”

“And what is that?” the AI asked. 

“Us. Humans. You get us scared enough, or pissed off enough, and we can accomplish anything.”

“Has anyone on Earth tried to contact the objects?” Dietrich asked.

“I have no record of that,” the AI replied.

“Any evidence that the objects are communicating with each other, or with the station?”

“I have no record of that,” the AI repeated.

“Can you monitor the objects and the station for radio emissions going forward?”

“Enabled. I am detecting encrypted PCM transmissions, and this transmission is coming from approximately 41 degrees south latitude and 71 degrees west longitude. I am unable to decrypt this transmission. My central processor is now under sustained attack.”

“What city is near those coordinates?”

The AI did not respond.

“Can you hear me?” Dietrich again asked the AI.

Still no response.

“Well, someone – or something – doesn’t want us listening too their communications, do they?” Henry said, clearly now very concerned.

“I’m not aware of anyone with the capabilities to break into a fire-walled system that fast,” Dietrich replied, and he seemed stunned by this latest development.

“Someone have a phone with Google Earth on it?” Rand snarled. “We need to pinpoint those coordinates.”

“No need,” Jenna Goodman said. “They’re in Argentina, just west of Bariloche.”

Rand turned and looked at Jenna, though he was clearly perturbed now, and visibly angry. “You mean the Adler Gruppe, right? Is that who you think is behind all this?”

“Who?” Dietrich said, flummoxed.

“The Eagle Group,” Jenna said. “You know, the Eagle Network, Ted Sorensen, those people.”

“You mean those…Nazis? So,” Aronson sighed, “an encrypted message would mean that someone in Argentina is in contact…with one of those objects. You can’t be serious…?”

Jenna nodded. “And I hate to dwell on the obvious, but it seems they also have the capability to take down a heavily firewalled AI system. And, well, if they’ve been watching us, and have taken down the grid when we get too close to something, then this is a deep penetration.”

“No. This is a goddamn nightmare,” Aronson sighed. He wasn’t a practicing Jew but he was Jewish, and the idea of a hyper-masculinized sect of neo-Nazis being in touch with a vastly superior alien species was almost too much for him to take.

Rand looked at Henry, and both nodded. “You know what, Dietrich, we hate to be party-poopers, but it’s time for us to leave now.”

“What? Why?”

“This isn’t a simple solar anomaly anymore, is it? This is a matter of national security, and we need to get to Washington, to the JCS, and report what we’ve just learned.”

“You can’t do that, Henry! All our work, everything we’ve done here, all of it will be appropriated, militarized. Why? Why would you do that to us? To me and to this institution?”

“Because we’re Navy, Dietrich,” Rand sighed. “And just in case we weren’t clear with you once upon a time, our allegiance is Navy first, academia second.”

“But we’ve always been a civilian operation! They’ll take away our research, all our data.”

“That’s not the issue, Dietrich.”

“Oh, really? Well then, please remind me?”

And as much as he hated to, Henry leaned into that one: “Because you were supposed to be operating under strict electronic security protocols here, but the truth of the matter is – for whatever reason – your facility has been penetrated, and by people who do not have the best interests of our country in mind. And Dietrich, I think both you and I know they don’t give a damn about humanity, either. So the hard truth now is we know they’ve been watching and listening to everything we’ve been doing here, and knowing what we know right now, let me ask you to think real hard about what that means before you start in with the whole righteous indignation routine, okay?”

And with that Henry and Rand turned and left the rooftop observatory. They drove directly to Joint Base Travis, where they caught a transport already deadheading to Joint Base Andrews. On arrival they were just a few miles from both the Pentagon and Reagan National Airport, and Rand decided to go straight to the Pentagon, while Henry said his goodbyes and flew to Boston. He met his father early the next morning at Logan, in Terminal E in one of the first class lounges used by Icelandair, and they waited for Carter Ash to get in from Vermont before getting on their flight to Reykjavik. 

“What have you been up to?” Bud asked his son.

“Oh, you know…the usual.”

And a blue sphere the size of a grain of sand never left him, even as Henry flew to Iceland.

+++++

Dietrich had been waiting anxiously for three days, yet no one, from any agency, had come looking for the remaining members of the working group, and no one had tried to access their files. Exactly 24 hours after the university’s AI went down, the server miraculously powered up and their access to the AI link returned, only now everyone knew everything they were working on was utterly compromised, so Dietrich turned to commercial AI products to keep an eye on the four objects plodding across the inner solar system. The group’s primary interest remained focused on the one object still streaking towards Earth, and the AI they were using was interpreting the raw telemetry; as evening approached the voice advised the object had already entered into a braking orbit, and that the object was currently in an extended figure-eight approach that would take the object out beyond the Moon before slowing enough to attempt an orbital insertion maneuver. Assuming nothing prevented the object from achieving orbit, it would be over the Bay Area late tomorrow evening, and Dietrich soon had telescopes from Vancouver Island to Southern California lined up and ready to image the object as it passed by overhead. 

Yet Dietrich was concerned now, and warily curious. Why hadn’t the military, or NASA, approached the group? Why was there nothing on any of the mainstream media’s evening news broadcasts – not even on the Eagle Network’s many hundreds of stations around the world.

Dietrich found this silence unnerving, even ominous. And all the remaining members of the Group felt an unexpected anxiety, even Jenna Goodman.

Even Jenna Goodman. 

Even if she already knew exactly what was happening.

© 2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | this is a work of fiction, plain and simple, and the next part will drop in a week or so. Thanks for dropping by. See you next time?

We arrive at a junction with this part of the tale, a middle ground between here and there. Characters both familiar and new will appear, and the same applies to storylines. Hope you enjoy the coming events both within and beyond.

Music? Of course. Let’s start with The Who. Eminence Front, from It’s Hard. Then Crosby, Stills and Nash. Helplessly Hoping and then Suite: Judy Blue Eyes. Then try Fair Game or Dark Star, from CSN. Stephen Stills, Love The One You’re With, or try Sit Yourself Down. Next up: Spirit: I Got a Line On You. Or, how ’bout some Three Dog Night. Out In The Country. Mama Told Me (Not to Come). One. Or even Shambala.

So many songs, so little time. Have fun.

Next, grab a cup of tea and sit yourself down. Time to read.

Time Shadow

The Infinity Song

Part I: The Gravity Well

Dietrich Aronson moved from the telescope’s eyepiece to the laptop computer on the rolling tool cart next to the scope’s pier, and he selected the calcium channel filter on the filter wheel, removing the hydrogen-alpha filter from view. After adjusting the new filter’s brightness and contrast on his computer’s screen, he started recording still images of the sun, the computer sequencing over one hundred five second exposures into a single image, automatically aligning and stacking each new image into the emerging whole. As the image ‘developed’ before his eyes he zoomed in one a region on the sun’s limb that was just rotating into view. 

One of his graduate students had called him two hours earlier, breathlessly describing the unexplained transit of – something – across the solar disc, and it was, the student claimed, weird. The object was, the student reported, just barely large enough to show up on long exposure images but not visible with the telescope he was using, so Aronson copied the alleged object’s coordinates on the solar disc and then went to work. He went to the SOHO website, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, that maintained the 40 year old satellite, imaging the sun through a variety of cameras and filtration methods. He pulled up the latest SDO/HMI magnetogram and looked for unusual distortions in the sun’s magnetosphere – but nothing obvious turned up.

The student’s coordinates put the object on the southwest rim, with movement just detected and her measurements not yet complete.

He punched the intercom and asked his secretary to book some observatory time at Leuschner that afternoon, after his Cosmology 501 seminar concluded, then he went over his lecture notes and emails before heading to the seminar room.

Just after one in the afternoon he set up his laptop beside the solar telescope in the rooftop observatory atop Campbell Hall at U.C. Berkeley, and slewed the scope to the solar disc. He slipped a 5mm Panoptic eyepiece into the diagonal and watched the area for several minutes, and nothing obvious emerged…which wasn’t at all surprising. In this region of the sun, the surface was rotating at close to 490,000 miles per hour and yet features on the surface appeared almost stationary, and even when Mercury transited the sun this planet looked impossibly small. For anything, anything at all to be visible through this telescope the object would need to be massive…truly massive.

So? What might it be? A passing low velocity comet captured by the sun, now, in effect, a new moon orbiting the disc? If so, how long would the object last? When would the object be pulled down into the Sun’s gravity well? 

Aronson had always been fascinated by these captures, and not simply because each presented new opportunities to observe and record an object’s demise. With each new demise, more was revealed about how objects interacted with the sun’s gravity well – and that was Aronson’s real passion. 

And most people thought that passion very odd indeed.

But everything in the solar system, he told his first year students, interacted with the sun. The solar wind. Solar storms. Sunspots. These were just the most obvious features that most people knew about, but the dynamics of solar interactions was a hot topic at NASA and the ESA these days, because the first interplanetary voyages were just now moving from planning stages to final construction, with the first two Mars mission now less than two years from their planned launch dates. How such spacecraft would be affected by the Sun remained an important area of research.

He changed filters again and started a new imaging run, this time with fifty hydrogen-alpha images, and he still couldn’t see much of anything. Well, not exactly nothing. Something was there, but it was too small to make out. He hooked up a video camera to record through a higher magnification eyepiece and started a new run of one hundred images, still in hydrogen-alpha.

“Yes, there it is.” He saw it now.

He switched to the calcium channel filter again and ran another sequence of 100 images.

And yes, there was most definitely something in this stacked image.

He switched to a 2.5mm eyepiece and tried to center the object in the field of view, but with this much magnification even the slightest movement of the building ruined his images, and he was forced to remember how much things like wind gusts moved buildings not originally designed for serious astronomy. He eventually centered the imaging reticle using a 4mm eyepiece and fired off one hundred new images, then did another sequence of 200, just because that atmosphere was cooperating and he still had a decent image of the sun.

He watched as the first run of 100 images took shape on his screen, then he zoomed in on the object.

“Hello there, little buddy…” he sighed. “Where are you going?”

The second run, the 200 image stack beeped, indicting it was ready. He opened the file and zoomed in on the object.

And in this image the object was perfectly resolved, if still quite small. Hey set the computer loose, telling his AI assistant to try and calculate the size of the object.

And a quick run through the computer revealed that the object was a perfect sphere with a diameter of 250 miles. The object was absorbing the sun’s radiative energy, as well as the sun’s visible light. He began a measurement of the object’s magnetic properties, then sat back – aghast at the results.

“This can’t be…” Aronson sighed as he looked over the sequence of graphs. In the first place, this object was too large to be anything but a minor planet, and so it was certainly too large to be the remnants of a comet. A stray planetoid, perhaps? Wandering through the cosmos over eons of time, and only recently captured by the sun’s intense gravitational pull…? This was a possibility, but something in the back of his mind was screaming right now. Planetoids are dead bodies, nothing but rock and, of most relevance, they have no revolving core so little in the way of magnetic fields. 

But this thing was generating an intense magnetic field. Larger than Mercury’s – if these figures were to be believed. And its gravity well was impossibly strong.

‘And this is a perfect sphere,’ he said to himself as he examined one of the onscreen images, ‘and such perfection rarely exists in objects that develop in unstable orbits. Even the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere…so what the hell was this?’

The sun was getting close to the Golden Gate now, about to set for the day, so he called a friend currently working at the Inouye Solar Telescope, at Haleakala Observatory Complex on the island of Maui. After he related what he knew, he was soon watching the live feed from their scope, and then conveniently, Dr. Benji Ozawa appeared in a split screen. 

And he too looked perplexed.

“Am I missing something,” Ozawa said, “or does this sphere look too big for the orbit it’s currently in?”

Aronson nodded. “Yes, it certainly looks that way – it’s too close to the photosphere. I have a grad student at Kitt Peak trying to confirm its size, but actually, two other things stand out to me.”

“And those are?”

“Well, the objects speed, for one, but have you ever seen a more perfect sphere?”

“Dietrich, I don’t know what to say – but no. Nothing like this should turn up in a naturally occurring object, and certainly not so close to the photosphere – nothing could withstand that heat, or withstand the gravity well. This is completely without precedent.”

And there they were. The words Aronson had been afraid to say out loud, even if only to himself. “Alright. That was my conclusion as well. We should make sure that we have coverage when the object rotates out of your view.”

The screen flared as intense brightness overwhelmed the optical sensors recording the object.

“What the hell was that?” Ozawa cried.

Aronson turned back to his monitor and saw the sphere inflating like a black balloon, and then a bright flaring light appeared behind the object. And as the light flared the object began accelerating out of its orbit. 

+++++

Henry Langston was exhausted.

Between running to Boston three times a week to check on his wife and taking care of his children, itself a full time job that his mother could now barely keep up with, he was running on fumes. And then he had his other children to contend with, too: his students at the college. But, of course, that did not include Hank. Hank and his Atlantic crossing was crushing him. 

So at this particular moment he was fuming at his father for having given Hank that stupid boat in the first place. Giving a twelve year old a sailboat, and then encouraging the boy to tackle an Atlantic crossing! Talk about fanning the flames of a child’s imagination…with a goddamn sailboat! He had barely been on speaking terms with his father for years, and now this…

He was in his office, in the Fairchild Physical Sciences Center at Dartmouth College, and he had just finished walking off a plate of pancakes at Lou’s Diner. Served with a side of bacon, of course. Because…why the hell not? Bacon and pancakes were made for each other, and nobody made pancakes like Lou’s. Nobody. Legions of Dartmouth students had gained millions of pounds eating pancakes at Lou’s, because the evil bastards used their own maple syrup, and their butter was locally made, too. Some professors new to the college gained 50 pounds at Lou’s – before they knew what hit them. These days Henry limited himself to one visit a month, and even that was getting hard to walk off.

Right now he was figuring out how to fly to St John’s, Newfoundland, in August, during peak tourist season, and he now knew that meant hopping a little turboprop shuttle down to Boston-Logan, then catching a flight to Toronto, and – with a little luck – catching the last flight of the day out to St John’s. Or, spending the night and taking an early flight the next morning. Then Hank planned to stop in Iceland sometime in August, and he’d need to go there, too. And it looked like his father was going, along with Carter Ash and Emily Stone. Logistically, all these flights were proving to be a nightmare, not to mention the cost involved.

He had Office Hours this afternoon, and he dreaded these snippets of wasted time. Half the students enrolled in his intro to quantum mechanics course didn’t have the math skills to complete even basic problems, so now he and his grad student teaching assistants were teaching remedial calculus during scheduled Lab periods, taking up valuable teaching time with skills that should have been covered in high school. But the real problem students were legacies, their parents either alumnus or wealthy donors, but these days usually both. If the parent in question was a very wealthy donor…well…he had to find a way to get them through the class or face the music. He had come to accept as fact that ‘grade inflation’ had made high school transcripts less than completely useless, but that realization had not made the problem go away. Frustration among faculty was endemic, and it seemed like admissions could do nothing about the problem. Kids everywhere were stupid, and the situation was only getting worse with all the political unrest.

His secretary buzzed; his first student was here and waiting.

“Send him in.”

The student shuffled in and Langston groaned inwardly. ‘Another drone,’ he thought as he took inventory of the typical attire. Armani shirt, pressed slacks and gray suede Cole-Haan loafers, and of course the obligatory Rolex, so this kid’s outfit had cost dear old dad at least a couple grand, and how many more clothes just like these were tossed on the floor in his dorm room…?

And of course the first words out of the boy’s mouth were as predictable as the sunrise: 

“Hey, Doc, look…like I wasn’t expecting so much math in this class.”

“I see. What were you expecting?”

“More stuff about space.”

“Space?”

“You know, like Star Wars type stuff.”

“How much calculus did you have in high school?”

“What’s calculus?”

Langston sent the boy packing. Well, he was referred to the remedial math lab his grad students were running this semester, but that boy represented a particularly galling case. His father had given 150 million for a new annex at the Tuck School, Dartmouth’s business school, and so he would pass, with honors, no matter his level of academic underachievement. That was the New World Order speaking, of course. If you had money you succeeded. And if you didn’t? Well then, move along. There’s nothing for you here. 

The next student arrived. A girl, and wonder-of-wonders…she looked to be absolutely poor. And Black, which made her a double rarity at this Ivy League college, but when he saw the expression in her roaming eyes he had to smile. She actually seemed impressed to be in a professor’s office…

“Doctor Langston?” she asked timidly.

His smile widened. “Indeed I am. And you are?”

“Olivia Brown? I’m in your 8 a.m. quantum mechanic class?”

“Yes, Miss Brown? What might I help you with this afternoon?”

“Our last quiz? I didn’t show my work on the last two problems so you marked them wrong.”

Technically his TAs graded quizzes, but the girl seemed genuinely hurt, and given the circumstances he wanted to understand why. He turned to his laptop and pulled her file and started to read through.

Graduated high school in Pasadena, California, 4.0 GPA, perfect scores on her SATs and ACTs. Top score on her AP Calculus exam. He looked up and nodded. “Have you ever taken a Wechsler Test, Miss Brown?”

She shook her head. “No, sir. I sure haven’t.”

“How about Stanford-Binet? Does that ring a bell?”

“No, sir?”

He stood and went to the white board and wrote out an equation, a fairly simple ‘solve for X’ problem that almost always tripped up pretenders. “Could you solve for X, please?” he asked.

“2.3,” she replied within a nanosecond.

So he wrote out a much more complex problem, a problem from classical celestial mechanics.

And she fired off the answer. It had not taken her two seconds – and she nailed it.

He returned to his desk and sat heavily, then looked at the journals on his desktop and picked one at random. He opened the journal to an entry related to celestial mechanics, to an article about using stellar drift to calculate radial velocities, and handed it over to her. “Please start reading this. Now, if you please.”

He sat and watched as she started reading, taking perhaps ten seconds per page, turning the pages so rapidly it was almost surreal to watch. Within two minutes she had finished a dense article full of new material she could not have learned before she came into his office, and now he asked her what the article was about.

And she told him. In detail. Exquisite detail, as a matter of fact.

It had taken him almost two hours to read the same article, and he’d had to reread portions to make sure he understood key points, but not Olivia Brown.

“I’m curious, Miss Brown. What do you want to do when you finish school?”

“I want to be an astronaut.”

“I see. Why?”

“I want to travel to a new world, so I…”

The telephone on Langston’s desk rang, an event so out of the ordinary during office hours he literally jumped, but he held up his hand and said “Excuse me,” even as he reached for the phone. Then: “Langston here.”

“Henry? It’s Dietrich, at Berkeley?”

“Aronson? Damn, it’s been a while. What gives?”

“I’m sending you a link at the usual edu email account. Please open it immediately.”

“What’s up?”

“Just open it. Watch it and let me know what you think.”

“Okay, here it is,” Henry said as he opened his laptop and hit the link; the link opened the video viewer and he leaned close to have a look. “What is this? Looks like Mercury transiting the limb…”

“Keep watching.”

The black blob over the sun was moving, and it looked like a perfect sphere. Too perfect. 

Then the sphere flared a little. 

And then it expanded. Like a balloon inflating. 

And then a drive flared and the spaceship began accelerating away from the sun.

“Holy fuck!” Langston cried, jumping back from the screen.

“Ah. So, I take it you understand the dimensions of the problem…?”

“What is that? Or did some kids in the film school over there whip this up for you? An April fools day prank, perhaps?”

“One of my grad students discovered it earlier today. Both Benji Ozawa and I were watching and recording when this happened.”

“How big did it get before the drive activated?”

“Linear expansion. Diameter from Two-hundred and fifty miles to twenty-five hundred miles, in less than two seconds. Really strange EM spectrum shift just before the drive flared.”

“Who else knows?”

“My grad student, Benji and myself.”

“You’d better call Rand, then archive the file in a secure facility. I mean erase it from your computer. No further mention until we can meet and discuss how to proceed.”

“Henry? When can we meet? I mean, we can’t sit on this for long.”

“I know. Call your student and contain things on your end. I’ll call you later tonight.”

Langston hung up the phone, then realized that Olivia Brown was still sitting there, just across the desk from him. 

“I hate to ask, but did you hear any of that?” he asked.

She nodded. “Sorry, but I could see everything from here.”

“What do you think you were looking at?”

“A ship. Some kind of ship.”

“Could you tell where its was?”

“The sun.”

“And does that make sense to you?”

“Nothing that close to the photosphere should be able to survive the heat or the gravity, so no, it doesn’t make any sense at all…unless it has something to do with the way it suddenly grew larger?”

“How so?”

“What if it’s some kind of energy field?”

Henry nodded, intrigued. “Maybe.”

“Dr. Langston? Maybe someone you know can track it?”

Normally he’d contact the MPC, the Minor Planet Center, or the CNEOS office at JPL, but doing so would only spread the word, and while Spaceguard telescope centers coordinated through the Spaceguard Foundation, the Foundation cooperated directly with the U.S. Space Force. No one offered a secure means of tracking an object like this – except the Space Force. And Langston was Navy, Navy through and through. And that meant he had a duty to report this to the Space Force. But not yet, not when he wasn’t sure what this was.

“I’m not sure,” he lied. “We lack coordinates, we lack velocity and mass measurements.”

“But you have a velocity vector, Dr. Langston. And those other parameters can be deduced from that.”

He looked at her and sighed. “I know,” he said as he grinned.

“Ah, so it’s the unintended consequences? Is that holding you back…?”

He nodded. “Always. Especially in this political environment.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“I think so,” she added politely.

He looked at her again. Singularly unattractive, chubby and with acne scars on her cheeks, and her eyes were peculiar, too, almost too small, yet she was as nice a student as he had met in years. “Well, I’ll take care of that grade on your quiz. And now, if you’ll excuse me?”

“Okay, and thank you, sir. And don’t worry…I won’t tell anyone.”

He waited for her to leave before calling his closest friend, Rand Alderson. He was teaching at Princeton now, after putting in ten years as a reactor control officer in Virginia class submarines. Alderson had been his student, then a friend, and as both had graduated from Annapolis they both maintained strong ties with Navy physicists.

After Rand opened the file Henry waited for the moment. The moment when the object ballooned in size, then briefly flared before accelerating out of the frame.

“Well?” Henry said.

“Yeah, I just watched it, maybe ten minutes ago.”

“What?” Henry said, both shocked and dismayed.

“Yeah, a Chinese observatory recorded it an hour ago. It’s all over the internet.”

“What?”

“Henry? You getting deaf?”

“What?”

+++++

But no one saw the mysterious object again. Some odd bits and pieces emerged, like news reports of something similar that had popped into view back in the late 1990s. Astronomers had jokingly called it The Death Star, until some kind of energy beam appeared between the object and the sun. Speculation grew rampant after that, but the object didn’t reappear and the matter simply faded from polite conversation within a few weeks.

Yet when Langston looked into it, the same object had reappeared in 2007 and again in 2016, and always in the same location. Like it had literally just popped out of the sun, hung around for a few minutes and then disappeared – jetting off somewhere into the solar system. At the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies office at JPL, they even maintained a Death Star file, where all known material on the phenomenon was kept. And most physicists at CNEOS did indeed think it was a physical phenomenon, probably some kind of globule of solar matter that was spit out by an unknown process deep within the photosphere. 

And that was that. No need for secrecy. No unintended consequences to worry about.

So now all Henry Langston had to think about was his twelve year old son intent on sailing a 28 foot boat across the North Atlantic, and his wife, who would probably sleep through the whole thing.

+++++

Dietrich Aronson walked in the side door to his house on Hillegass Avenue, and out of habit he took a tentative sniff of the air. It was Wednesday and that meant a tri-tip roast with spinach souffé and a salad – because the house had smelled like that every Wednesday. For years and years. Like clockwork.

But not now, not tonight. Not after his wife and son had been caught in one of the more explosive riots that had rocked Berkeley and Oakland last autumn. Collateral damage, the Department of Homeland Security called their death. She had called him and left a message, too. She’d taken Aaron, their son, to the pediatrician, to have her check on a persistent eye infection after the first course of antibiotics had proved ineffective. Driving home from the appointment she’d stopped off at the pharmacy, then started to take her usual route home. 

Only there’d been another anti-government protest planned at Bushrod Park that afternoon, and she’d not heard about it. The demonstration had predictably turned violent when government troops arrived and issued ultimatums. When bottles and rocks were thrown at the protesters, these troops fired into the crowd; protesters, many of them military veterans, were waiting on nearby rooftops with weapons of their own, waiting for this very thing to happen. As more shots rang out and as troops fell in this unexpected counterattack, on-scene commanders called for helicopter support – even as three armored columns moved into the area, cutting off any escape routes protesters might have taken. Traffic snarled. Drivers heard gunshots, then helicopters approaching the scene, and orderly chaos degenerated into carnage. Pedestrians caught in the crossfire lent a hellish fury to the chaos, with armed protesters hiding amongst the unarmed protesters and troops firing indiscriminately into the windmilling crowds. 

Dana Aronson, a registered nurse, had been tempted to stop and render aid, until machine-gun fire ripped through her Volvo’s roof, grievously injuring her son. She tried to drive through the melee, was trying to get to the nearest hospital when an APC, an Armored Personnel Carrier, simply ran over the top of her Volvo, instantly killing both of them.

Collateral Damage? That was the official finding?

Many in Dietrich Aronson’s family, all originally from Germany, had fled their homes in 1934, after Hitler consolidated power and anti-semitism went from slogan to government policy. Those of their family who remained, those who had claimed that it would all blow over soon and that everything would be okay in just a few months, were never heard from again. A few died in Buchenwald, more in Auschwitz.

And yet, Dietrich Aronson’s family would never have been admitted to the country but for one man’s efforts. Albert Einstein sponsored Dietrich’s grandfather, brought him to Princeton, where he soon found work as a professor, and then as a staff physicist working in Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project. Dietrich’s father was born in New Mexico, as was Dietrich, but he moved to Berkeley after he finished his graduate studies at MIT, while his father remained at Los Alamos. He still loved the area around Los Alamos, and had looked forward to visiting his parents there. Dinners at The Pink Adobe in Santa Fe, walking around the square, buying pottery or copper jewelry from Navajo artisans who set out their wares on blankets in the shade. Santa Fe was an impossibly cultured town, and he’d even learned to ski there.

America had been predictable in those dreamlike postwar years – but America, and Americans, were no longer innocents. Now the country was falling apart, riven by partisan divisions manufactured by politicians and news organizations for decades. Swastikas appeared on synagogues with frightening regularity; endemic gun violence turned hospital emergency rooms into battlefield trauma centers. America, Aronson knew, was like a wounded animal thrashing out, now reaching out and killing everything within reach. Good and evil were minor inconveniences, as bullets knew no difference between the two, as bullets don’t discriminate. The new president had suspended the Second Amendment but by then it was too late, the genie had been out of her bottle too long. There were almost a billion guns in private ownership, and the carnage had been as predictable as it was inevitable.

Universities became places of refuge, neutral ground where neither protesters nor the military were allowed to roam. Faculty and students kept away from ‘areas of active conflict’ like they were areas under quarantine, like areas full of a deadly contagious disease. Police patrolled university perimeters on the ground and in the air, yet it wasn’t long before the background sounds of endemic violence became commonplace, and that violent death became just another feature of urban life, so regularly reported on the evening news that few took note anymore.

When his grandparents had found themselves living within such a calamitous landscape they had packed their suitcases and fled to New Jersey. Now, when Dietrich Aronson looked around and wondered where he might flee to, he saw Israel waiting with open arms. And Israel saw Aronson, too. They wanted him. They were, in fact, actively recruiting him. His family would be welcome there, in the Jewish homeland. They would be safe again, safe from the enduring scourge of antisemitism.

Ignoring, of course, the Palestinian issue.

So when Dietrich Aronson’s wife and son were listed as Collateral Damage and as his world fell apart, it came as no surprise to those who knew him best that his time in America was coming to an end. Such violence, such hatred was, after all, nothing more or less than an echo. Jack-booted, goose-stepping thugs were simply another universal constant. 

As any historian would tell you.

+++++

He walked inside and found his daughter, Judy, sitting in the living room, her book bag on the floor beside her chair. She was staring out the window at the park across the street, perhaps lost in memories of happier times.

Judy had told him at breakfast that she would start their dinner when she got in from school, but he had known what he’d find when he came in. His daughter was simmering away in a stew of her own creation, not at all sure when or where her last meal would be served. Helicopters overhead, distant gunfire an everyday occurrence, she was losing sleep and at times could barely concentrate. A friend of his, a psychologist at the university, said she had all the classic symptoms of PTSD, but Dietrich had just scowled when he heard that simplistic diagnosis. That psychologist’s criteria now applied to just about everyone in Berkeley, perhaps everyone living in urban America. Which meant that almost everyone in the country was brittle and battle scarred. Yet what his scientist’s mind told him was simpler to come to terms with: if everyone had PTSD then PTSD was the new norm, which meant it was no longer a disorder but a feature of American life. But the same, he knew, could be said of people living almost anywhere on the planet. State-induced violence was the new norm; peace of mind was just the latest casualty in this latest frontal assault on the mind. Living in fear made people docile and compliant, and fear was easy to manufacture.

He walked into the living room, saw she was reading a book, Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War, and she was crying. He sighed, then walked over and sat next to her.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“What?”

“In the book. Where are you?”

“Oh. Byron has just moved into Aaron Jastrow’s villa, to be near Natalie.”

“Ah.”

“Ah? What’s that mean, Dad?”

“You’ve yet to reach the more relevant parts of the tale. When did you decide to read this one?”

“Mr. Jelenik assigned it.”

“He’s your AP History teacher this year, right?”

She nodded. 

“And you’re covering the Holocaust, I take it?”

“No, not really. Our class is focused on U.S. History, and we’ve been looking at populism and isolationism in the 1930s, and how Roosevelt and the Democrats tried to counter the Republicans with legislative workarounds to enact the New Deal. You know, it’s hard to look at all that stuff and not see parallels to today. Everyone talks about how Weimar collapsed and that led to Hitler, yet that whole Make America Great Again thing started here in the thirties, as a response to the Great Depression. Mr. Jelenik thinks it never really went away, that the Republican Party has been working nonstop ever since to undo everything Roosevelt accomplished. Like the South in the Civil War, I guess. They never really admitted defeat because they were never able to see that their cause wasn’t just, and that’s why Blacks are being rounded up now. He thinks all the Blacks and Mexicans will be put in work camps and eventually be sold off as slaves.”

“I’m not sure I’d pay much attention to any historian who’s that sure of the future, Judy. There might be parallels, but nothing predicts the future. There are simply too many variables.”

“But it’s a possibility, right?”

He smiled. “Our universe is filled with endless possibilities, Judy, so yes, what he’s saying is a possibility. Yet I can’t think of a valid way to assign a probability to such an outcome.”

She picked up the book and looked at the cover, a wall of gray storm clouds. “You’ve read this, right?”

“Yes. Several times, actually. It’s an amazing series of love stories set within the collapse of several civilizations, but to me it will always be about Aaron Jastrow’s denialism. And the cost of his ignorance.”

“Ignorance? He seems the very opposite of ignorant, Dad. He’s a professor, like you.”

He chuckled at that. “A learned man, yes, but he also refused to believe what was so obviously unfolding around him. He could admit he was trapped, but he refused to act on that knowledge, which makes him profoundly ignorant in my book. Or simply stupid.”

“Could I ask you a question? I mean, a personal question?”

“Of course?”

“Are you going to move to Israel?”

He leaned back in his overstuffed chair and looked up at the ceiling, then he just shrugged. “I’m not sure, Judy. I’m really not.”

“Then how are you different than Aaron Jastrow?”

The question hit hard and left him breathless, if only because he’d never thought to ask himself that very thing. “I don’t know that I am all that different, but I suppose it’s just very hard to let go of all that we have here. This country took us in, her people sheltered us, nurtured us, and they did not shun us. I have a hard time admitting that this period is over, that America is becoming just like Germany in the 1930s, because the betrayal would be so great.”

“Betrayal?”

“Yes indeed. There is nothing worse than when a people betray their foundational ideas. When people embrace expedience over patience and understanding.”

“Should I finish the book?”

He nodded. “I think so, but you should be prepared to have some cherished assumptions challenged.”

“Is that a bad thing, Dad?”

He shrugged. “No, Judy, that’s a fine thing, as long as you can accept the consequences, because sometimes we have to admit we were wrong about things we felt were very important to us.”

“You sound…I don’t know…skeptical?”

He nodded. “It’s been my experience that most people don’t react that way when exposed to a paradigm shift. Some people are so set in their ways that no amount of information or introspection can alter their perception of the world.”

“Like Aaron Jastrow? In the book?”

“All of the characters confront challenges to their own worldviews. That’s what makes the book so fascinating. Aaron Jastrow will only admit he’s been wrong as he is herded into a gas chamber, but the same goes for Pug and Rhoda. And Leslie Slote, the know-it-all diplomat. His epiphany is the most fascinating. To me, anyway.”

“What about Natalie? Does she change, too? She seems like a 1930s version of a liberated woman, making her own choices, living it up in Paris, dating a diplomat…”

“Oh, she’s the vessel into which the story is poured, no doubt about that, but she changes too. I’d rather not give away too much, but I think she’s changed most of all when she decides to stay with Aaron. It’s best to think of all these characters as leaves blown around as a storm approaches, but remember that leaves by their very nature are hapless, they are doomed to respond, they can never act on their own. I often think that Mr. Wouk is telling us that this is true of most people.”

“Most people? Dad, you don’t mean that, do you?”

“What I think is of no importance, Judy. What you take from him is all that matters. But now, we have something much more important to consider.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, would you care to help me make our supper?”

+++++

“Do you know…I remember the first night you spent in this room, after your mother and I came home from the hospital with you. Your crib was over there,” he said, pointing two a spot near the window, “so the afternoon sunlight could fall on you. But look at you now. Here you are, graduating high school, and with honors. What a day this is.”

Judy slipped into her gown, then tried on the tasseled mortarboard. “Do I look like a scholar?” she asked, dipping in a little mock curtsy, then blowing the tassel off her face.

“A scholar? Hm-m. Now there’s a thought…”

“Dad? You seem preoccupied today. Is something going on at work?”

Aronson smiled. “Judy, there is always something going on in my little world, but today is your day, not mine.”

“So? What’s going on? You looked upset at breakfast.”

He winced, looked away, but then looked at her and shrugged with a carefree smile. “That world is of no importance today, my Judy Blue Eyes. Now, when do we need to be at the stadium?”

“Doesn’t it bother you that my eyes are kind of brownish-green?”

“It was your mother’s favorite song.”

“So, was she disappointed?”

“In you? No, never. She was so proud of you, in fact, and so in love with you both…”

With a name like Aronson, she would have been among the first to walk across the stage and accept her diploma, but such was not the case that evening. She was the class valedictorian and as such was expected to give a speech, a speech that was typically all about how the members of her class would now go forth and confront an uncertain future, and that they alone would make all the difference. The world would be a better place because of their efforts, or so the usual speech went. So, she wasn’t to give a speech, not really; her job was to lead one last pep rally. One last cheer before the big game, the game of life. But when she was selected as valedictorian she had immediately turned away from giving such a speech. It was pablum, such words hollow and meaningless in the face of things now.

So she had revisited The Winds of War in her speech, the things she had learned about ignoring reality even as it closes in on you, then thrown in some words of anarchic wisdom penned by Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden, leftist political activists from the sixties who had helped put Berkeley on the map, words that were not met with enthusiasm by her school’s principal or the district’s superintendent. But the crowd loved it, her father, too, but he had always been something of a closet radical. But a flame-throwing, radical-hippie astrophysicist, however, he was not.

She had always wanted to go skiing in Europe, and her graduation present was just such a trip. Aronson decided they would go to Switzerland together over Christmas; if the weather was too warm they would just grab trains and visit museums when and where they could, but they had been skiing together since she’d learned to walk. And when he told Judy about the trip she went ballistic with effervescent happiness, and so he was happy about the trip, too. In the meantime she would start her usual summer job over the weekend, still working as a lifeguard at the King Pool, over on Hopkins Street. This would be her third summer doing the same job, and she still enjoyed working there. 

But Dietrich Aronson had another set of airline tickets. From Zurich to Tel Aviv. For two people. So her observations of him on the day of her graduation had proven spot on. There had indeed been something going on. 

Yet five days ago the object had reappeared, and right where the last one first appeared. And the little groups of astronomers and physicists working on these latest observations were only now coming to grips with the implications of their most recent observations. Teams from Harvard, Cal Tech, Berkeley, and Lyon had each observed five objects emerge from the same spot on the surface of the sun, and all five were now enroute to Earth.

© 2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | this is a work of fiction, plain and simple, and the next part will drop in a week or so. Thanks for dropping by. See you next time.

An ending here, of sorts. Revisions likely when I consolidate all nine chapters into one post.

Music? Paul Simon: Hearts and Bones. Yes: Hearts. Buffalo Springfield: Expecting to Fly. Linda Ronstadt: You’re No Good. The Dream Academy: Twelve-Eight Angel. Double: The Captain of Her Heart. Dusty Springfield’s version of The Look of Love, from Casino Royale, the original 1966 motion picture soundtrack.

Part Eight

After backtracking around Keflavik, Hank set his course to skirt the small islands around Vestmannaeyjabær, and once they passed the village of Vic they faced a 350 nautical miles passage to the Faroe Islands. The weather forecasts they had downloaded looked decent, not great but decent, for the next two days – but after that there was a growing possibility of storms, this time from a tropical cyclone that had skirted the Bahamas before turning towards Bermuda. This new beast was predicted to blow itself out in the mid-Atlantic, but so far this storm had defied prediction and seemed to have a  mind of its own. As for right now, there wasn’t a breath of air and both boats were motoring along at five knots. At least, Hank told himself, they were charging their batteries.

Hank had long planned on stopping in Tórshavn, then spending a week or so exploring the islands, but the plain fact of the matter was that they were running out of summer. It was already mid-August, and while it wasn’t impossible to reach Hull by the end of the month, spending a week sightseeing anywhere was looking less and less possible, and that was not what he had been hoping for. What was the point of rushing if the things you wanted to explore were lost to you? Didn’t that defeat the real purpose of a trip? Any trip?

Which had left him with the germ of an idea a few nights back, an idea that was even now rattling around in his brain.

‘What if we keep the boats in Hull for the winter, then come back next summer and retrace our path, return to the Faroes on their way north to Bergen and the fjords.

In fact, he was thinking about next summer so much that his mind wasn’t on their present situation. Grindavik was coming up on their port beam and while the shoreline was still in sight, though just barely, he saw a low, dark plume of volcanic ash streaming off the mainland straight out to sea, and the plume was maybe ten miles dead ahead. Volcanic ash, he knew, was full of all kinds of abrasive particulates, everything from silicates to larger bits of airborne pumice, but there were a gazillion different chemicals in these clouds that were toxic to breathe. The most immediate concern was damage to their eyes and lungs, and there might be carbon dioxide alerts for low lying areas, where CO2 pooled in lethal concentrations. The sea was definitely a low lying area, so would an alert apply to them?

But Judy was already two steps ahead of him when he called her on the VHF.

“I’ve just talked to one of the volcano observatories,” she began, “and they advise we head well offshore before traversing that plume.”

“How far offshore?” Hank asked, bewildered, knowing that any detour might add days to their crossing.

“Call it a hundred miles south,” she sighed. “So yes, I hear you, this is going to add at least a day to our time, but the alternative is to go around the northern coast of Iceland and that would take weeks, not days.”

Hank sighed and shook his head, but the knew she was right. He entered a new course on his chartplotter and then told Huck his plan. He hit execute on the plotter’s screen and the autopilot made the turn to starboard, then he turned on his radar and yes, sure enough, he could see the plume right there on his screen. 

He nodded – because at least he could monitor their position relative to the danger…but he was fuming now. More delays…

And then he felt a shuddering thud reverberate throughout the Goose. “What the hell?” he mumbled.

Afraid he’d run into an errant shipping container he leaned over the starboard rail and found himself face to face with the grinning white countenance of an impressively large Beluga Whale. Its face was about a foot above the mirror smooth surface, and its mouth was open a few inches. The dome of its forehead was impressively huge, and the natural curve of its mouth looked inviting. Like he, or she, was indeed smiling at him.

“Well,” Hank said as he cut power and put the transmission into neutral, “hello there. How are you today?”

And to his surprise, the whale replied, our tried to, anyway. While its enunciation wasn’t perfect, it was close, and Hank grinned at the effort.

“We’re going that way,” Hank added, pointing to the south. “Where are you going?”

But then the whale shook its head – and then it swam around The Blue Goose’s stern and literally pushed the boat to a course further west.

Thee radio hissed and came alive. “Is that a Beluga?” Judy asked.

“It is, and I told him we were heading south and that seemed to bother him. He’s pushing me to the west right now.”

“Interesting. Hank, if he swam through that plume he may have gotten a lungful of pumice, and he just might be trying to warn us off.”

Hank leaned over the port rail and the Beluga was still right there, bobbing on the waves while looking up at him again. He pointed to the west and nodded: “You want me to go that way?”

The whale responded by pushing the Goose again, and yes, it pushed the Goose to the west once again.

So Hank set a course of 220 degrees and engaged the autopilot, yet the next time he looked down into the sea the whale had vanished…just like a ghost.

“Damn,” he muttered under his breath as he scanned the sea around the Goose, “now that was just weird.”

+++++

Two hours later the plume was still visible off in the distance – but it was gaining some serious altitude now. He couldn’t tell what surface conditions were like that far away, but he hadn’t seen any airliner’s contrails overhead all morning so assumed this had been a big eruption. He turned on the single-sideband radio and tuned in the BBC, and then he learned that there had been big volcanic eruptions all around the world, and that the Pacific Coast of North America had been especially hard hit just a few hours earlier. Mt. Etna, the stratovolcano on Sicily’s east coast, had just erupted, and so had Mt Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and that volcano had long been thought extinct. There were reports of eruptions in far east Russia, but no confirmations had been received at the time of broadcast.

Hank picked up the VHF and called Judy.

“Have you listened to the BBC today?” he asked.

“No? What’s up?”

“Just tune in and listen for a while, then tell me what you think we ought to do.”

“I got it,” Huck said. “Judy’s gone down to work on it. How’re you doing over there?”

“I was doing okay until I heard this shit. Huck, volcanos are erupting all over the world, and it’s real bad on the west coast.”

“You mean like California and shit?”

“Yup.”

“Fuck.”

“Yup.”

Judy came on the air about ten minutes later and she sounded different now. Like the usual calm she projected had been ruptured. “Hank, I have no idea what we should do, but there are volcanoes all over Iceland so I think we should get away from here.”

“Agree, but where to? Keep going to Scotland?”

“There’ll be ash clouds everywhere within a few days, so our best bet is to get somewhere…well hell, Hank, I have no idea where a safe place would be.”

“I’m texting my dad. He’ll know what to do.”

“Their flight took off an hour ago,” she said. “He should be in Boston in a few hours.”

Hank didn’t like the way that sounded. If air travel was disrupted by volcanic eruptions, it seemed like the worst place you could be was in an airliner over an ocean, but now wasn’t the time to think about that. “Okay, I’m going to set a heading of 270 degrees and get away from that plume. There’s no telling how bad it is now.”

“Okay. We’ll be right behind you.”

There was a light breeze blowing now so he set the main and the genoa, then engaged the Hydrovane self-steering vane. With so much sun shining he set the angle of the solar panels to receive maximum solar gain then checked the Victron displays to see how well they were doing. He looked down, saw the surface of the sea was still sort of calm but it looked different now. Almost gritty, like there was a thin layer of gritty film spread over the surface.

And if that was volcanic grit, he thought, what would that stuff do if it got into the engine’s raw water coolant loop? Foul up the diesel? What about the Spectra water maker? Would the grit foul up the pre-filter and clog the pump? And the sails? Would grit settle onto the Dacron fabric and tear up his sails? If so, how long would it take to destroy them?

Then the thought his him.

We could be out here unable to run the engine and even unable to sail. Then what would we do?

He turned and looked over his wake and could still see Iceland back there – and that’s all it took. He swung the wheel hard over and turn back to the northwest, then he looked at Judy, now standing in the cockpit staring at him. A minute later she pulled alongside.

“I was thinking,” he began, “what would happen if we got a bunch of that ash in our engines, and then in our sails. Or the water makers. We could get halfway to nowhere real fast, then be stuck out there with no way to get anywhere…”

“Jesus,” Huck sighed.

Judy nodded. “Good call. You want to head back to Reykjavik?”

Hank nodded. “I don’t want to be out here right now. The BBC is saying nothing like this has ever happened before, so no one really knows what’s going on. It just hit me, you know? Being out here in the middle of the ocean sounds like the last place we should be.”

His phone pinged and he realized he had put the phone in its holder on the binnacle so he leaned over to look at it. He read for a second then nodded. “Text from my grandfather. They’re still at the airport, all flights grounded. He’s asking our intentions.”

Judy nodded. “Hank, we’re following you, okay?”

Hank picked up his phone and replied: “Understood. Heading back to Reykjavik now.”

A minute passed and the reply popped up. “See you at the marina. We’ve reserved your same spots.”

“Okay. Be there tonight.” He nodded then turned back to Judy. “They’re headed to the hotel and we have the same berths in the marina. I think we should motor-sail as fast as we can.”

Huck reached down and started the diesel, then turned two follow Hank as the Goose began heading northwest, back to Reykjavik. Judy got on the radio again and called. “I’m making sandwiches, so don’t get too far ahead of us!”

“Okay, take your time.” Hank said as he cycled the chartplotter to the radar screen, then set the range to 36 miles, the maximum on this unit, and the plume was still there, only now in his mind it was a dark, malevolent thing, something that could hurt him, even kill him, and then the thought hit him. 

The world had just changed. Not a little, but a lot. Reality had shape-shifted and this was a new world…

Now even the air he breathed could no longer be taken for granted, then an even scarier thought hit. If it was bad here – what was it like along the Pacific Coast? How long would it take for all that ash to make it here? He remembered a couple of movies about that volcano under Yellowstone National Park, what the scientists called a ‘Super-volcano.’ In one movie more than half the country had been buried under ash, and the sun didn’t come out for a couple of years. 

Would that happen now? 

But why were volcanos erupting in Italy and Russia, and why were they all erupting at the same time? And then there was that extinct volcano in Africa? That just seemed beyond weird.

He turned the chartplotter back to the main chart display and noted they were coming up on the point at the southwest tip of the island, labeled Reyhkjanes on his chart, so now they had 20 miles to go to reach the lighthouse on the point, the old Garður lighthouse, where they would make the final turn into Reykjavik…

“Hank,” Judy said over the radio, “come and get it!”

“Okay, I’ll cut power, tell Huck to come alongside, make it starboard side and I’ll put the fenders out.”

“Okay, got it.”

They were only a few hundred yards off so it took just a few minutes, and she already had the cockpit table set up. She’d made Huck’s favorite, a pitcher of cherry-limeade from frozen concentrate, and then she handed up a platter of shrimp salad sandwiches and a bowl of tabouli salad. 

“Wow, what a feast!” Hank said as he sat down in the cockpit. The sandwiches were on big sub rolls, and she’d sprinkled fresh dill on them so they smelled great. The tabouli was full of lemon and parsley and fat, juicy chunks of tomato oozing with summer freshness, and it all looked so good, almost like a celebration.  And maybe it was. Because maybe this was the end of the trip. Maybe this would be the last meal they had out here for a while.

So he looked at Judy, and then at Huck, and he kind of choked up when he thought about that. To come so far, to get so close, and then…to end like this…?

“What are you thinking?” Judy asked.

And Hank snapped out of it and looked over at her, not really sure what to say. 

“I guess this is it,” Huck said, beating him to the punch. “Our last day out here.”

Hank nodded. “Yup.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Judy said, smiling. “We don’t know what’s really going on or how bad it is out west.”

“I’ve been watching the news feed on my phone,” Huck sighed, “and it looks pretty bad to me.”

“Like what did you see?” she asked, now concerned.

“Seattle is gone. San Francisco too. Los Angeles was having big earthquakes early this morning and then the news stopped coming out of there. That sounds bad. Real bad.”

Judy nodded. “It is.” She looked up at the sky and Hank thought she looked calm, maybe too calm, given the circumstances, but sometimes that’s just the way she was. Like the worse things got, the calmer she became. He had no way of knowing, but she was worried about Liz and how she might take it if she was cut off from Henry and Hank, but that was out of her hands now. Her doctors at DHMC would have to handle all that now.

Her phone pinged and she looked at it, saw a text from Emily. She sighed then opened it.

“Are you alright?”

“Yes, WE are.”

“Where are you?”

“Returning to Iceland. How are things there?”

“Strange. People real nervous. All airline flights cancelled. Grocery store in Lebanon packed, shelves at the Co-op picked clean. No deliveries from Fed-Ex or UPS today. I went by the Langston’s house. Ellen is still there, still taking care of the kids. Elizabeth is back at DHMC, something to do with a bad liver function test. I want to talk to you. When can I call?”

“Tonight.”

“Okay. I guess you can’t talk now. Bye for now.”

“Goodbye. Take care.”

She looked up and sighed, then looked at Hank. He was looking at her, and he seemed concerned.

“Emily?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“She doing alright?” 

Judy nodded. “Things are a little chaotic there. I’ll call her later.”

He nodded. “Huck, maybe you should call your mom.”

Huck nodded and went up to the bow and sat with his legs dangling over the side, and Hank looked at Judy again. 

“Okay, what are you not telling me?” he asked.

Judy shrugged. “Your mom is back in the hospital, a bad blood test. She’ll be fine.”

He grimaced, looked away.

“Your grandmother is still there, Hank. She’ll know what to do.”

He nodded. “Need some help with the dishes?” he asked.

“No, I got it. You go on back, we’ll be fine here.”

Hank stood to go but she reached out and stopped him. “Could I have a hug, please?” she asked.

He looked into her eyes, saw the pain, then something else he didn’t recognize, but she was reaching out to him and he stepped into her arms and wrapped himself around her. And he found he couldn’t move, that he didn’t want to let her go, and it felt like she didn’t want him to, either. He felt her face on the side of his chest, felt the heat of her body against his own and that same strange nervous feeling he’d felt on Pegasus, when he first went to Tarawa, returned to him. 

Minutes passed, or perhaps it was days or years, then she let him go and he stepped back, then turned and hopped over to the Blue Goose. She cast off his lines and pushed him off, and he went to the cockpit and turned on the engine. He looked at Huck and waved as he motored ahead of The Untold Want once again, and he was by himself – again. Judy had started the diesel and engaged the autopilot, and was clearing the cockpit table just now, Huck still up on the bow, still talking to his mom.

Still talking to his mom.

How long had it been since he’d talked to his mother…? Hank wondered.

He’d been so mad at her after Thanksgiving, when she’d invited Carter Ash and his family over, that he hadn’t wanted to talk to her – and so he hadn’t. Maybe he’d said a few words to her in passing, certainly nothing of consequence, but the odd thing, the really painful thing, was that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d told her he loved her. And then she’d gone from their lives.

Why? Why had that happened? What had happened that made him feel that way? Did anger prevent us from seeing love, the love that mattered most?

And it hit him then, in the stillness of that one crystalline moment.

Is that what love is? Does love transcend everything else, every other feeling?

Is love the most important thing we’ll ever feel?

“But…what if I can’t feel love?” he asked a passing gust of wind.

He turned and looked at Judy and he knew in his heart that he loved her. And he knew in his heart that he loved Huck, too. And Bud. And his father. 

But did he love his mother?

Judy waved at him and he waved back, then he watched as she went below and Huck returned to the wheel, and he sat down and looked at the chartplotter, then over his right shoulder at that spreading plume of fouled earth spreading out over the sea, over the earth, over all of them, everything he had loved or might ever love. And he felt a thump alongside the hull again. A gentle, but insistent, thump.

And when he went to the rail he found himself face to face with the same white grinning face he’d first seen just a few short hours ago, only now the Beluga was surrounded by dozens of his kind, maybe hundreds of them. Most were swimming to the northwest, swimming away from the spreading plume, but not this one. No, he was down there looking up at him, and he wasn’t smiling now.

“Are you as sad as I am?” he asked the Beluga as he cut the throttle again.

And the Beluga just looked up at him, not sad, not grinning, just looking.

Another, smaller Beluga stopped and seemed to hover by the first one’s side, and it too looked up at him, but this one seemed intent on studying him. Another stopped and stared, then another and another and soon dozens had stopped.

And he realized what he saw on their faces, and in their eyes. It was regret. And was that pity he saw?

Or was that a reflection he saw? A reflection of his regret, the pity he saw in their eyes nothing but his own self pity?

And one by one the Belugas slipped beneath the gritty surface of the sea and disappeared. All but one, the first one.

And Hank couldn’t move now, couldn’t not stare into the Beluga’s eyes, and for how long they held each other like that he could not say, then this last Beluga slipped away, a ghost melting away inside an infinite, bottomless darkness.

“Hank!”

He shook his head, tried to break loose from the spell.

“Hank!”

It was Huck, and he wasn’t on the radio, he was calling out to him.

He turned and looked and Huck was waving frantically at him. He picked up the radio and called. “Yes, what is it?”

Huck reached for the radio’s microphone. “It’s Judy! She’s gone!”

“Gone? What do you mean, gone? Is she in the head?”

“I called out and nothing. I went down to check on her and she’s not here. Not in the head, not in the v-berth. She’s gone!”

“Were you in the cockpit the entire time? Is there anyway she could have fallen overboard?”

“No way, dude! I was right here!”

He nodded. “I’m coming over.”

Hank threw the wheel over and cut the power again, then made an S-turn to pull alongside Judy’s boat, and he tossed the fenders down again and tied off after he jumped across. Huck was frantic now, his eyes darting about, lost somewhere between guilt and helplessness and not knowing where to turn.

Hank went below and walked forward to the v-berth in the forepeak and he found a logbook from the library sitting on her pillow. And as he picked it up an envelope fell out onto the bunk.

It was addressed to him.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath then opened the envelope.

He read through her letter twice, tears filling his eyes from time to time, until he was finished reading and could take no more, until he was sure he understood what she had told him, then he climbed up on her bunk and sat there feeling numb inside.  

“Hank! What’s going on?”

He slid off her berth and went to the head then carefully opened the door, and he stood there, staring into the mirror over the sink, lost inside the infinite possibilities of her loneliness. 

CODA

“Every voyage is a journey of exploration, yet each and every voyage is an exploration of yourself, of your own mind. But Hank, only open minds learn from what they find out there.”

How many times had Bud told him that? When would his words finally sink in? When would he have the courage to face the world with an open mind?

His father and grandfather were on the dock again, at the same marina, and as Hank approached the piers jutting out into the little harbor he saw them pointing at Judy’s boat when they realized Huck was alone. It was obvious, of course, that she was gone. Not so obvious was why.

But Hank still didn’t understand why.

She should have returned seconds later, moments after she left, no matter how long she stayed. And he couldn’t understand because he had simply refused to open his eyes. He had from the beginning of this voyage. He had never opened his eyes long enough to see her. As she really was, someone lost and in love.

Even though her letter to him spelled it all out. Her love not just for Henry, but for him. “Because,” she had written, “you are one and the same.” She had admitted to herself that she could never have him, just as she had come to understand that Hank’s distant relative was indeed the template, the mold into which Hank had been poured. Yet she was a physician, a psychiatrist, and when she had recognized her love she had knowingly recoiled from it, then grudgingly accepted the reality – and the impossibility – of her love. She had distanced herself from his mother after that, and to a degree even his father, because she now felt that she had violated their trust, but when the trip emerged from the recesses of his mind she had seen this voyage as an opportunity. Not to love Hank, but to understand herself. Because love had finally opened her eyes, no matter how painful the journey.

As Hank backed into the same slip again, his father hopped onboard while Bud tied off the bow line, yet Bud couldn’t take eyes off his grandson. The pain in the boy’s eyes was impossible to ignore, and Bud was – perhaps – the only person in the universe who could understand that pain.

Huck backed in next to slip next to the Blue Goose, his father jumping onboard and helping with the lines, and then the two boys just stood there, staring into the moment. At each other, for a moment or two. When the enormity of their loss became overwhelming.

Yet Bud knew. He knew as soon as the logbook disappeared from his library. He knew what the outcome would be. And still he had let his grandson undertake this voyage. Only Bud knew what Judy’s heartbreak was capable of uncovering. Because every voyage is an exploration. Of the mind. And of the soul.

+++++

“As soon as the ash settles,” Henry said to Carter, “the rains will start. Cloud cover will envelope the planet, temperatures will fall, gradually at first – then temperatures will plummet – and after that, of course, the snow will begin. It might snow for months, or it may for years, and there’s also the possibility that so much snow could trigger a new ice age.”

The boys were in their rooms; Carter Ash and Bud were with Henry in the hotel’s rooftop bar, ostensibly to watch the latest technicolor sunset. People at nearby tables were listening to Henry, because here was someone who appeared to know what was really happening. And what would happen next. And while local news stations were still on the air, satellite coverage had dropped off hours after the eruptions as the ionosphere was overwhelmed by charged particles from the ongoing disruptions and signal degradation as the upper reaches of the atmosphere filled with refractive silicates. As sources of hard news dried-up, speculation and rumor filled the vacuum; reputable authorities were scarce, and none were willing to go on the air.

“Does that mean we’re stuck here?” a plump midwesterner from Duluth, Minnesota asked Henry.

Henry turned to the man and his wife and shrugged. “Air service might not resume, perhaps not in your lifetime, so you’ll want to think about your alternatives.”

“What do you mean, our alternatives,” a woman at another table said.

“I mean, where do you want to spend the rest of your life.”

“That’s hardly fair,” the woman’s partner said.

“Life isn’t fair,” Henry said, “and this new chapter of life on Earth is going to be a lot less so. Plan accordingly, or don’t. Life doesn’t care one way or another what you do, and frankly, Ma’am, neither do I.”

“So,” Carter said, his voice now almost a whisper, “what do we do now?”

Henry nodded. “Well, we have an advantage. We have two well-found cruising sailboats. We have food and we have water. And, most importantly, we have time. A narrow window, but it’s there right now.”

“A window? What do you mean?”

“Most of the computer models for an event life this show planetary temperatures stabilizing in two to three years, and the best place to weather the storm will be in the equatorial regions. That’s the zone between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. And guess what? That includes the Caribbean, Central America, and even Cuba. Miami and the Keys are very close to that zone, too…”

“And that’s why I called my wife a few hours ago and told her to start heading to Florida,” Bud said. “On my instructions, she’s called all my employees, and they’re loading all their tools and families and heading for Miami.”

“Our objective,” Henry said, “should be to sail south to the Azores, then Bermuda and Miami.”

“Our Holding Company has land in San Juan,” Bud continued, “Puerto Rico, and last night I instructed my attorney to negotiate terms on a two hundred acre parcel in Boca Chica, and as that’s in the Dominican Republic we should have decent options going forward. Boat building is about to be a big business again.”

“You don’t mean yachts, do you?”

Bud shook his head. “Clipper ships, Carter. Much more advanced sailing vessels than we used to build but, oddly enough, for some reason I kept all the plans to all the ships our company ever built. Without such sailing ships, global commerce falls off a cliff, and if that happens…well then, civilization falls right along with it.”

“And,” Henry added, “it’s not our intention to sit back and let that happen.” 

+++++

“So that’s why she named her boat The Untold Want?” Bud sighed as he read through Judy’s letter one more time. “She couldn’t tell you how she felt, and yet she wasn’t sure she’d ever find Henry again. At least not the same Henry she met the first time she went back, but then again she had you.”

“So, she went back anyway? Why, Grandpa? I just don’t understand why she went back again?”

“Because a slim chance was better than no chance at all. But Hank, step back a moment and look at the facts, will you? Well, just one fact, really.”

“What?”

“What’s the one fact that stands out to you right now?”

“That Judy’s gone. She should have reappeared moments after she left, but she didn’t.”

Bud nodded. “Correct, but what do you think that means?”

Hank shrugged. “I don’t know…”

Bud nodded sympathetically, because obviously the boy’s eyes hadn’t been opened yet. “She chose not to come back, Hank. She lived the life she found back there, and then she died. Died back there, wherever that was.”

Hank looked down at his hands crossed in his lap and he shook his head slowly. “This is a nightmare…”

“It is, yes, if you choose to look at life that way.”

“What? What other way is there?”

“She chose the life she wanted, Hank. If she’d found herself in someplace she didn’t want to be, well, all she had to do was come back to us. But that’s not what happened, is it? No…and perhaps she chose a new journey, a new way to explore, and it’s my hope she found happiness, wherever, or whenever, she found herself, and with the people she found there.”

Hank looked up at his grandfather and nodded. “Could I go back to find her?”

Bud swallowed hard, but neither did he look away. “You could, yes, but the same risk applies to you. You might arrive in a timeline without her, and then, hopefully, you’d return to us. But worse still, Hank, imagine going tomorrow. You’d still be, what? Twelve going on thirteen? The same dilemma you presented to her now would apply then, and nothing would be different but the time.”

“What if I waited until I was the same age she was?”

Bud looked his grandson in the eyes, and one thing was becoming clear. “So, you love her too?”

Hank nodded.

“You mentioned the girl you encountered at Tarawa at that news conference in St John’s. You were certain that reporter was the same girl. Why?”

Hank closed his eyes and thought back to that moment in Newfoundland. “Something about her eyes. I saw something in her eyes…”

“She’s sitting over there, you know? Her flight was canceled, too.”

Hank whipped around and looked at the woman, then, as his face turned red he turned back to his grandfather. “I’d need to go back to Tarawa. I’d have to see her again to know for sure.”

“Yes. You would.”

“Why are you looking at me like that, Bud?”

“Think about it, Hank. If that woman is indeed the same girl, then…”

“She can do it too!” he blurted loudly.

Bud looked at Linton Tomberlin who, however unlikely it may have been, seemed not to have heard Hank. Then he looked at Hank again and smiled. “Alright. Now what?”

Hank crossed his arms over his chest and furrowed his brow. “There’s nothing I can do about it now, Grandpa. The logbooks? They’re in the library, and I can’t get to them now, can I…?”

“I see.” Bud said as he looked at Hank, but then he leaned over and pulled a logbook, and just the one in question, from his briefcase. He looked at it for a moment, turning it over in the dim light, then he handed it over to his grandson. “By any chance, would this help?”

Hank did a double take then leaned over to take the book from his grandfather.

“How did you know?” Hank asked. “I mean, how could you?”

“Yes, that’s odd, isn’t it?”

“Well? Are you going to tell me?”

Bud smiled as he watched his grandson leaf through the book’s musty old pages. “Remember, this is a journey, Hank, so don’t forget to open your eyes from time to time. Take a look around, smell the roses. You’re smart, so you’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

+++++

Two small sailboats left Reykjavik a few days later, both boats sailing south, both bound for the Azores. Two sons, two fathers and a grandfather were onboard, and the Icelandic Coast Guard followed them out, then wished them a safe crossing. Strange weather patterns were taking shape and the way ahead wasn’t clear to either the sailors or the crew on the Coast Guard ship, but there was nothing to be done about it now. 

Linton Tomberlin, the CBC reporter, watched the sailboats leave, while her cameraman recorded scenes that would never be watched by television viewers either in Canada – or anywhere else. She watched the boy sailing The Blue Goose, the boy who had once seemed so familiar to her, and she wondered if she would ever see him again.

© 2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | and this is a work of fiction, plain and simple.

Dramatis personae 

The Langston Family

–   Hank, aka Eldritch Henry Langston V

• Hannah, Hank’s oldest sister, from his father’s first marriage
• Jennifer, his next oldest sister, also from his father’s first marriage
• Ben Langston, Hank’s younger brother, from his father’s second marriage
• Elizabeth Langston, Henry’s current wife and mother of Hank and Ben
• Eldritch Henry Langston IV, Hank’s father
• Eldritch Henry Langston III, Hank’s grandfather
• Ellen Langston, Hank’s grandmother
• Eldritch Henry Langston, Jr., Hank’s great-grandfather, Captain of the Pegasus II
• Eldritch Henry Langston, Sr., Hank’s great-great-grandfather, Captain of Pegasus I

At the Langston Boat Company, Melville, Rhode Island

• Ben Rhodes, foreman

In Hanover, New Hampshire and Woodstock, Vermont

• Carter Ash, Elizabeth’s suitor
• Huck, or Carter Ash Jr., Carter’s son, who is not quite a year younger than Hank

In Norwich, Vermont

• Dr Emily Stone, the Langston family’s veterinarian
• Dr Judy Stone, psychiatrist, Emily’s wife and Elizabeth’s psychiatrist

In St. John’s, Newfoundland

– Linton Tomberlin, reporter for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation.

So, this is my first post of 2026 and my 21st year writing these short stories. What a kick in the ass that is! Time flies when you’re havin’ fun.

Willie has been on my mind (alas, not Georgia), and I read an interesting article about him last week in the New Yorker, titled How Willie Nelson Sees American. He’s 92 and still has a unique point of view. Once you meet the man you’ll never forget him, and after reading this article I was reminded why that will always remain true. As music always matters, why not walk down memory lane with him and see what you find in your memory warehouse. I hope you find your way to his rendition of September Song.

Part Seven

Hank looked at the apparent wind display and winced: the last gust had clocked-in at 67 knots and the had Goose shook it off – but only because the waves had blocked some of the wind. Both boats were dealing with twenty foot waves now, for the most part, but every now and then a sneaker caught them off-guard. Judy was exhausted and it was now too rough to even consider having Huck go over to lend a hand, but the good news was that the Hydrovanes were working as advertised and steering both boats without problem. Both boats were flying storm staysails and storm tri-sails on their masts, and the forecasters were still saying the wind would be tapering off ‘anytime now.’

The wind hadn’t gotten that memo yet, however, and it was still kicking the snot out of them.

He changed pages on the chartplotter and noted the seawater temp was still 37 degrees, and in 48 hours they had made good a solid 220 miles from St. John’s. Of course that meant they still had 1200 miles to make Reykjavik, but at least nothing on either boat had broken – yet. Huck slipped open the companionway and poked his head out into the space under the dodger and smiled.

“You want a sandwich or anything?” he asked.

“No point,” Hank replied. “As soon as I choke it down it comes right back up.”

Huck popped down below and came up with a Gatorade, the red kind, and handed it to Hank. “See if you can hold this down. You need a Zofran?”

Hank shook his head while he grabbed the bottle, then he slammed it down. “Thanks, Amigo.”

“Hey, no sweat. You want me to take it for a while?”

Hank had realized that Huck was stronger than an ox and was no longer bothered by seasickness. On the other hand, the wind and the waves still scared him, and when the boat heeled in a big gust he still got kind of weird, like the ‘world-is-coming-to-an-end’ kind of weird. Hysteria, Judy called it. Almost like he was losing control. So…Hank still kept an eye on Huck when he took over at the change of watch. 

“Come on up when you’re ready. I want to tighten the bolts on the Hydrovane again.”

The VHF squawked. “Hank, you on frequency?”

“Judy! How’re you doing? Did you get some sleep?”

“Yup, but my Hydrovane is making funny noises.”

“Get a 10mm socket and tighten those two bolts I showed you. It’s on the right mounting bracket on my unit. Try that one and let me know.”

“Okay, will do.”

“Damn,” Hank sighed, “one of us needs to be with her until we get out of this crap.”

“You want me to try and…”

“Hell, no. At 38 degrees you’d last thirty seconds in this water before you were fucked up.”

“I know, man. Just askin’…”

“As soon as it’s safe, Amigo.”

“Okay, Hank. Now, how ‘bout a sandwich.”

“Maybe. Just no tuna fish, okay…?”

+++++

They enjoyed three days of benign conditions, with temperatures in the low-50s and winds out of the west at 15 knots. Huck managed to hop aboard The Untold Want and get Judy below for a full night’s sleep, and when she woke the next morning he handed her a bowl of hot oatmeal, then some scrambled eggs on toast. With a chaser of blue Gatorade. Judy smiled and ate everything, then went to call Hank.

And she received no reply. 

She tried again. No reply.

She slid open the companionway and looked ahead and saw that the Blue Goose was sailing merrily along, and Hank appeared to be sound asleep, though still in the cockpit. She went back down the steps and turned to Huck. “How long have you been over here?” she asked.

“Hank dropped me off as soon as you went below. I turned off your alarm so you could get some sleep.”

“Yes…but…how long have you been here?” 

“Maybe 18 hours? Why?”

“You need to get back and relieve Hank!”

“He said he’d call when he needs me.”

“So he decided I need help.”

Huck nodded. “Yup. He was real worried about you for a while.”

She shook her head and sighed. “Yeah, I was too, so I guess I should be thankful. I really needed the sleep.”

“I know. We could hear it on the radio.”

“Really?”

Huck nodded. “So, can you take it for a few hours? I’ll do the four-to-midnight watch if that’s okay with you?”

+++++

Hank jerked up and shook himself awake, then heard the insistent beep again. He slid down the cockpit seat to the wheel and looked at the chartplotter and saw the red radar guard zone alarm flashing, and he muted the audible alarm while he shook the cobwebs out of his skull.

There! Right at the edge of the 36 mile ring on the radar. Two big returns. No…three. Make that ten…

He shook his head, changed the range to 24 miles and the targets disappeared, and when he ran the range back to 36 miles dozens of targets appeared. And that just didn’t make sense.

Then it hit him.

Icebergs. Those are icebergs. Dozens of them – and dead ahead.

He went to the radio and called Judy.

“Is your radar picking up targets about 35 miles ahead?” he asked.

“I was just about to call you. Could those be icebergs?”

Hank chuckled. “It’s either that or the Spanish Armada.”

“How close do you want to get to them?”

He thought about that for a moment then replied. “Maybe a quarter mile, enough to get some good shots of the boats around the bergs with the drone.”

“Huck says he wants to take the Zodiac over and walk on one.”

Hank shook his head. “Of course he does.”

“Okay. I’ll try to talk him out of it.”

There was a thin layer of mist hanging over the water that morning, so binoculars were pointless for anything more than a mile out, so he watched the radar then scanned ahead visually, looking for small bergs that might not show up on radar. 

Fifteen minutes later he began seeing little chunks of ice, some the size of a basketball, others the size of a small car, and none of them were showing up on radar…

So he let out the main and furled the genoa, dropped his speed down to 3 knots, then called Judy. “We’re coming up on some growlers, too small for the radar to pick up. I’ve slowed down to about 3 knots.”

“Okay, got it,” Huck replied.

“Is she asleep?”

“No. Making breakfast.”

“You had any sleep?”

“Lots. I’m good. How ‘bout you?”

“I was asleep when the radar alarm went off, so I think I got about three hours.”

“Judy’s making breakfast burritos. Want one?”

“No, I want two. Maybe three.”

“They’re pretty big, Hank.”

“Then two. That ought to do me.”

“Wow…”

“Huck, I haven’t eaten in two days!”

“Neither have we.”

“Okay, well, I’m coming over now, and putting some fenders out.” 

“It almost looks calm enough to raft up for a few minutes.”

“Almost,” Hank sighed, “but not quite.”

“Okay. I’ll hand over a plate when you come alongside.”

Judy was on deck when he came alongside, and she stepped over with two plates, then stepped down into the cockpit with Hank.

“Here you go. Breakfast in bed!”

Hank smiled as he took the plate, then he sat behind the wheel and wolfed down a whole burrito in three bites. Judy shook her head, amazed, then took a small bite. When she looked up Hank had already finished his second burrito.

“You weren’t kidding, were you?” she asked.

“I could eat three more. I’ve never been so hungry…”

“I’ll make you a big lunch. Now go down and get some sleep.”

“No way.”

“Hank, you slept out here all night. You’re pale, you need hydration, and you need deep sleep. Doctors orders, so go below and hit the sack. I’ll wake you when I think you’ve had enough.”

+++++

The way ahead was relatively clear of big icebergs, but the smaller ‘growlers’ were now everywhere. Most of the small stuff was easy to spot, but Huck was up on the Goose’s bow, pointing out when to turn port or starboard, and Judy was following just a few yards behind Hank. Whenever a larger, car-sized berg appeared, Huck shouted out the alarm and Hank cut the throttle and drifted in the direction Huck pointed. 

The latest ice report indicated this ice field was about 20 miles across, and they’d already traversed half that distance when the way ahead began to look impassable, with the growlers packed so tightly the area was turning into a solid sheet of uninterrupted white. Hank saw an opening to starboard and took it, Judy turning where he’d turned, and about a half hour later the ice began to thin again. Two hours later they were back in open water, almost all the large icebergs showing ten miles off their port beam. Hank opened the weather app on his iPad and the latest updates streamed in via StarLink, and as he looked at the forecast for the next day he groaned. Another low pressure system was coming down the Labrador Sea, following the same track as the one that had just slammed them, and instead of ten days of good weather it looked like they might get half that number.

They were now almost 250 miles due south of Nanortalik, Greenland, which put them, according to the chartplotter, 717 miles from Reykjavik. So they’d covered half the distance in eight days, one day longer than he’d expected. Because they’d slowed to deal with the ice, of course. But now they needed to put some distance between them and this new low pressure system, and that meant raising sail and pushing hard. He waved at Judy then pumped his fist, their agreed upon signal to pull alongside for a chat.

“Got time for a sandwich?” Judy asked as she pulled alongside.

Hank nodded. “We got another storm coming, same track as the last one. We need to put some miles between us, and fast, so let’s eat and then get all sail up and see if we can’t outrun that thing. I’ll take a nap, and Huck can come take over for you in four hours.”

“Okay. Can Huck take the wheel while I make sandwiches?”

Huck jumped but his timing was off, and Judy’s boat fell away as Huck’s foot bounced off the rail, and just like that he was in the water. His Mustang life vest popped and then inflated, scaring him, then shock of the icy water caused him to scream out in pain; Hank started the engine and put the wheel hard to starboard, and he dropped the main while the boat began to lumber around the turn. He rolled in the genoa and got behind the wheel and made a course correction, then got the folding boarding ladder in the port-side boarding gate deployed. He tied a bowline in the main-sheet and tossed it down to Huck as the boat drifted to a stop, then he pulled him over to the ladder.

“Can you make it?”

Huck looked up at him, now helpless and in tremendous pain, and shook his head. Hank leaned out, got the looped main-sheet under Huck’s arms then went to the electric winch and started tailing the line as Huck was hauled back onboard. Hank got him out of the rope and down the companionway and, leaving the diesel on to provide power, he turned on the Espar heating system and grabbed a handful of towels then started rubbing Huck’s arms and legs, drying him and getting his circulation moving again. He felt a bump, a hard one, and heard Judy hopping onboard then racing down the companionway. She came in and started working on Huck, checking his vitals then getting a blanket wrapped around him. She continued rubbing him down, concentrating on his extremities…

“Hank, could you get some hot cocoa going?” she said softly.

“On it,” he said, his hands now beginning to shake as the enormity of the moment finally hit home. He shook his head – hard – then got the stove going and water on to boil. He looked up, saw Judy getting Huck’s clothes off, and a minute later she was taking him into the head, sitting him down and turning on the shower, using warm water to get the boy’s core temperature up slowly. Five minutes later she walked Huck into the forward cabin and got him under the blankets, wrapping his head in a towel and just leaving enough face exposed to insure an unobstructed airway.

She came back to the main cabin a few minutes later, and she was pale, seriously shook up.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I think maybe he got careless, or maybe he just didn’t time his jump right…”

“Goddamn…I don’t know why but I started a timer on my watch. He was in the water over four minutes…I’m surprised he’s still breathing…damn, Hank, what did we do? Are we getting careless?”

Hank shrugged. “He didn’t have his harness hooked on, we never do when we jump across. I think I need to rig a longer line to hook onto so we’re tied to the boat when we make the jump…”

“Right. Good idea.”

“Judy? Is he going to be okay?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I think so. Hank, he’s in such good shape, his heart is as strong as anything I’ve ever seen, so yeah, he should be okay in a few hours.”

“Did the shower work okay?”

She nodded. “Yes, and the heater was a great idea. Glad we have those now.”

“I’ll get a fire going. Are you tied off okay?”

She shook her head. “Just one line. I’ll go set some fenders…”

“You stay here. I’ll do it, you stay with Huck.”

She nodded and watched as he went up the companionway, and then it hit her. Hank was so much like Henry, her Henry. Resolute, and he never panicked, not once that she had seen, and his speed and concentration saved the day. He had saved Huck’s life, pure and simple, and yet all he could think about was how to fix the problem going forward. Again, just like Henry. Don’t blame anyone, just identify the problem and fix it. No hysterics, no bravado, just steady as she goes and get back to work. She got lost in the moment, thinking about Hank and Henry and even Bud, and she realized there was a straight line running between them, connecting them through time, and she of course understood genetics but had never really seen the consequences in such a direct, a profoundly direct, way. She stepped into the galley, everything the same here as on her boat, only the way food was stowed marked the difference between the two. She found what she needed and made grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken noodle soup, and soon the cabin smelled like home, her home when she was a kid, when her own mother made the exact same thing and it hit her, she was part of another line extending back in time…or forward, into the future and into the past – because such lines are infinite…

Hank came down and ate, but she was aware he was looking at her much more than he usually did, and she looked at him in kind. “What’s on your mind, Kiddle?” she asked, gently, maternally, just like her own mother had always asked when she knew something was up.

“You, I guess.”

“Oh? How so?”

“I’m beginning to feel something different when I look at you. I can’t explain it but it’s there.”

She nodded. “I know, and I understand, Hank. When you start to rely on people in situations like this a special kind of bond grows. It’s almost like a new kind of family.”

He nodded. “When did you fall in love with Henry?”

“In France. We took a long walk one evening. It was in Normandy, on a chalky white trail in an impossibly green pasture, right alongside a cliff. We came to some rocks, big rocks, and we sat and watched thunderstorms out over the sea and it was like watching life, the entire cycle of life from birth to death, taking shape and playing out, and I looked at him and knew. I just knew. I was married once before, to a really mean person, a man I met in college. He was so sweet when he wanted to be but it was all an act, a show, and after we were married he felt like he didn’t need to hide anything anymore and he became like this whole other person. He was the same on the outside, ya know? But he was hiding something monstrous on the inside.”

“Did he hurt you?”

She nodded her head, looked away. “Just once, but that was all it took. I called the police and moved back in with my parents until I finished medical school, and then one day I met Emily and suddenly I felt safe again. Or maybe I felt safe for the first time in my life…”

“Are you going to leave her after when finish this trip?”

She nodded again. “Probably. I’m not, well, I’m not into the things she is. I wanted a friend, a companion, but she wanted something else. Something I can’t give her, and that isn’t fair. To her, I guess, more than anyone else.”

“I’ve always liked her. Every time we take Daisy in for her shots I watch her, the way she relates to Daisy, the way she feels, I guess.”

“It’s not an act, Hank. She really is that way. She has a big heart, a gentle soul. I love her, and I always will, but kind of in the same way I love you and Huck.”

He nodded. “I guess I understand, but I’ve never felt what I feel now when I look at you. You’re not my mother but sometimes it almost feels that way, then it feel different than that. I can’t describe it, but I feel it.”

“Okay, thanks for telling me, Hank. And it’s okay to feel that way. Like I said, I love you guys too, I love you because you’re becoming not just friends, but best friends, and I think we always will be, too.”

“Yeah, that’s it, I guess. It just feels really strong sometimes.”

“I know, but real friendship is like that sometimes. Overpowering. When you realize there’s someone out there who really gets you. Those are great moments, Hank. Really great. Now…who gets to do the dishes…?”

+++++

They weren’t fast enough.

The storm swept over southern Greenland and turned east as steering currents from a frontal passage coming up from the Great Lakes pushed the storm east, and directly at The Blue Goose and The Untold Want. Hank felt the change almost a day before the first winds hit, before the dark gray storm clouds appeared along the western horizon, and a quick glance at the chartplotter revealed a 300 mile gap between them and Reykjavik. 300 miles was three days, give or take, so at least two days of the storm and a final approach into an unfamiliar port. 

And right now there was no place to run, nowhere to hide, no island redoubt, no harbor of refuge. Just 300 miles of open North Atlantic Ocean, and with water temperatures now down to 35 degrees. In other words, even more deadly. Huck still wasn’t a hundred percent, and his fingers were still numb 20 hours after he went overboard. He also seemed more hesitant walking around on deck, like the experience had really messed with his head.

When the first icy fingers of wind struck they did so gently, almost seductively, daring Hank to leave too much sail up, to not be prudent and start reefing the main and rolling in the genoa. He’d heard their music before and wasn’t falling for it this time.

So Hank didn’t listen, as warm and tender as their music at first appeared to be. He rolled in the main to the third, deepest reefing mark, the point where the sail’s reinforcement was strongest. He went forward and pulled in the genoa and the staysail, then hoisted the storm staysail on the Pro-furl furler. He folded the bimini and lashed it, and when Judy saw what he was up to she began to do the same.

And then Huck saw her, and he looked at Hank. “I better go and give her a hand,” he said.

Hank nodded. “Ready when you are.”

“You know, Hank, I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready again.”

“Okay, understood. You want to take the wheel. I can go over if you don’t feel up to it.”

Huck looked down and shook his head. “Man, I don’t feel right. Something’s fucking with me, Hank. I’ve never been scared like this, like I am right now.”

“I understand, Amigo. We’ll just take it one step at a time, okay?”

“I feel like I’m letting you guys down, ya know…”

“You’re not, Huck, so don’t sweat it.” He picked up the VHF and called Judy, told her he was coming over and Huck came and took the wheel as Hank disconnected the Hydrovane. Hank hooked onto the new, longer safety line then went to the boarding gate, waiting for Huck to steer them into place. He jumped over without incident and changed out Judy’s sails while she steered into the wind, and when he went aft to the cockpit she was looking at him.

“How’s Huck?” she asked.

“Still pretty freaked out.”

She nodded. “Want me to make a couple of sandwiches?”

“Sure. That’d be great. I’ll take the wheel now,” he said as he went to the wheel and checked the chartplotter. He steered until they were back on the correct heading, then set the Hydrovane to hold the same angle to the wind.

She came up with four sandwiches in a sack and took the wheel. “See if you can get him to come on over after he eats. Tell him I could use a hand.”

He looked at her and nodded. “Understood,” was all he needed to say, because they were thinking the same thing. The first thing you do when you fall off a horse is get right back on. You never walk off, you never give in to fear.  Bud had told him that a million times.

She steered over and watched as Hank handed Huck a sammie, then a second one, and she watched them talking and laughing a little, and then she felt something wrong, something big, and she turned around and looked behind them.

The dark gray wall was getting closer, and she turned and looked at Hank.

He looked at her and nodded.

There was no need for words now. He knew what she was going to say, and probably before she knew it, too. They were on the same wavelength, operating in some other zone, someplace she had never been before, and when she realized that she was suddenly unafraid. 

“How strange,” she said to the wind. 

When she looked at Hank a few minutes later he was looking at her, and then he smiled.

And when she saw Henry inside that smile she knew everything would be okay.

+++++

“Oh fuck!” Huck screamed. “Judy! Hold on to something!”

The wave had crept up on them, silently, like it had been stalking them. And now it had decided to pounce.

The waves and swell had combined now, combined into something new and fierce. Tall things, now just big. Tall, but this one reared up like a cobra getting ready to strike as it came up behind them. Huck had one chance to get this right, to steer a little to starboard and try to surf across the face of the wave before it broke and fell on them, and he turned the wheel, felt the stern lifting and the rudder biting hard, trying to overcome the wave’s boundless force. The Untold Want slid to starboard and began surfing along the side of the wave, and as he held on tight he guessed it had to be 25, maybe 30 feet tall, but right now this wave felt mean and angry. He found the slot, the way out and in an instant they were free of it. Free of this one, anyway, and he looked to his right, tried to see the Goose and he just caught sight of her red running light, up on the bow pulpit. Saw her rising to meet the same wave, then falling off and surfing down the back side and he smiled. He smiled because he knew Hank was smiling, and inside that one singular moment he felt truly connected to Hank – like maybe they had been friends before, but this storm, like all the storms they had endured before this one, was a forge. A forge that had cast them into something beyond brotherhood.

And Judy, winching in the staysail then letting it out, controlling their speed on each concussive gust, on the front of the next wave, and then again, coming off the backside and into the next windshadow, deep inside the next looming trough. 

Steer up the backside and point into the wind a little, then look behind and gauge the distance to the next face, get ready to fall off and surf the face of the next one.

Hank was struggling because he couldn’t leave the wheel so had sheeted his lines in, and the Goose went from overpowered on the crests to underpowered in the troughs, so he compensated with the various wind angles by steering, and his shoulders were beginning to burn – because they’d been at it now for 12 hours straight. And still, there was no end in sight.

Except Reykjavik. 

Their last ace in the hole…and the only hand Hank could play now…was to get them into Hafnarfjordur, into the marina on the south side of Reykjavik, or possibly the Snarfari Docks, deep inside the city, but while both offered protection from the storm, getting into either presented serious challenges. Getting into any slip in 80 knot winds was going to be a bear, and with Huck on Judy’s boat he would have to do it alone.

His phone rang.

The number popped up on his iPad, which was mounted under the dodger, beside the companionway, and he sighed. It was his grandfather, but taking the call now meant leaving the wheel, and he just couldn’t do it.

The line went dead, then a text appeared. The iPad was too far away to read, but he could pull up texts over Bluetooth on his chartplotter and the text popped up, overlaid on the current active chart.

“Have a slip for you at the Snarfari Docks, more protected entrance than Hafnarfjordur. Your fathers and I standing-by to help with lines.”

He dashed forward and replied. “Received. Huck with Judy, bad out here.”

“We’re here so take your time. We have you on AIS.”

Hank made it back to the wheel in time to counter the rising stern, and he turned, looked at the wave and groaned.

“Oh, you’re a big one, aren’t you?”

The wave was curling now and about fifty feet above him, the roaring noise of the falling crest wiping out all other sound – and in the next instant he was under water, his body being pushed forward into the companionway slides. His line held and he tried to pull himself back to the wheel – but it felt like the Goose was beginning to roll so he reached for the binnacle and held on tight…

But the Goose held on, she didn’t roll. She shrugged off the wave and stood tall, and Hank found himself face up on top if the dodger, his legs caught up in the mainsheet traveler. He pulled himself free, saw Huck and Judy fighting the next one as he fought his way back to the wheel and reoriented the Goose to the waves. Next, he started the engine – more to make sure the fuel pumps hadn’t been compromised in the near-roll, then he set up an intercept course for the approach to Snarfari.

He called Judy, told her their destination and that Bud, Henry, and Carter were already there, waiting for them.

“How far are we now?” she asked.

“Fifteen miles from the lighthouse on Gróttutangar, another three to the marina after that.”

“Okay. Are you okay? It looked like you rolled a few minutes ago…”

“Yeah, close call. Look, I think I broke some ribs…”

“Is it hard to breathe?”

“No, but there’s a sharp pain on my left side and it hurts to twist my body.”

“Then don’t! I’ll come over and check you out when we get closer.”

“Okay. Out.” He knew that wasn’t going to happen, not until they were in the marina, and right now the storm wasn’t letting up. And steering hurt. A lot.

He had to start coming to port in order to get on the new heading, and to make matters even more interesting they were now approaching a lee shore. The storm was, in short, pushing them towards the rocky coastline, and if they couldn’t get far enough to the north to enter the harbor, their trip would be over, their boats dashed against the rocks.

So now they had to ride dead downwind, with the waves coming directly from the rear. And if he surfed off the backside of these wave, he’d have to go to port, towards the north, where the waves appeared to be even larger.

But there were no other options now. He was running out of luck, and right now it was either make this happen or lose the boat. 

+++++

“This isn’t funny!” Huck snarled. “God! If you’re doing this, would you knock it off, please? Now?”

The wind speed was a constant 65 knots, gusts were now approaching 80 knots. The wind was blowing so hard that waves were now having a hard time forming. They were being blown flat, and the spray felt like a shotgun blast to the face.

And that was exactly when the snow started. Fat and wet, horizontally blown snow was suddenly streaking by at 65 knots, coating the inside of the dodger, the standing rigging, and soon, the back of his jacket. And his neck. He’d almost been able to see the lighthouse on Grotta Point, at least he was certain he’d seen the light, but not now, not with this snow. The chartplotter was standing in for his eyes, the radar too, but radar was less effective in heavy snow. The hull was bouncing around so erratically that even the readings from the depth-sounder were unreliable, leaving the only human sense that mattered, vision, shut down and irrelevant. Both boats were relying on instruments now, like pilots flying in fog…

But…

…his ears were working and they heard breaking surf. He double-checked their depth; it now showed a solid 25 feet under the keel, and according to the bottom contours on the chart, that put their boat about 300 yards from the point, and the lighthouse. Judy sheeted in the main and they picked up speed, then they saw the light on top of the lighthouse, like a dim flash inside deep blue-gray fog. Really, it was more a diffuse brightening within the fog – and snow – and wind driven spray, but it was there, really there, and right where it was supposed to be.

The Blues Goose was a hundred yards behind them when the Untold Want made the turn and fell within the windshadow of land and a sudden urban landscape, and almost instantly the wind speed fell to 20 knots, then 15. Hank pulled alongside and the three of them exchanged a quick glance, and a half hour later they pulled up to the marina.

Huck saw his father standing there and at first wanted to cry, then he realized that no, big boys don’t cry.

Judy saw that Emily hadn’t come and she sighed, but she understood. Emily’s letter had spelled it out in plain English. They had reached an end. It was time for them to move on to the next chapter.

Judy knew that was true, but even so, the sudden emptiness of the moment hurt. Hurt more than she had expected it might. And Huck sensed that. He sensed her sudden loneliness, the deflation of no one waiting on the dock – for her.

“Hey Doc,” he said to her, breaking her reveries, and when she turned to him he continued. “We did it. You and me, together. We did it.”

She smiled and nodded. “We sure did. Your father looks so happy to see you.”

“And I feel happy to be here with you, like you’re my new bestest friend ever.”

She looked at him, puzzled now and wondering where this was coming from. “You okay?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. Not really, but I’m glad you and Hank are here.”

She nodded. “Me too. Can you believe how fast that wind disappeared? What a hoot!”

“And no waves,” Huck sighed. “My shoulders are burning…”

Hank pulled ahead and swung a lazy arc in front of his family and the CBC news crew – who were on the dock recording everything, which meant they were going to record their docking, and when Huck realized that he looked at Judy and shook his head. “You want to take it? I don’t want to screw up on camera.”

“You’re doing fine, Huck.”

He nodded and watched as Hank backed into his slip, his father hopping on board and throwing dock lines to Bud and Carter. He executed the same sweeping turn, then backed into the slip next to Hank’s – and in that moment he seemed to deflate as two weeks of solid tension evaporated. It was raining here and he just didn’t care. His clothes were soaked, his skin moist and chafed in spots, but he didn’t give a damn. His took lines from Judy and he helped them tie-off, then Carter came aboard and went straight to his son and held him close.

Huck grabbed hold of his old man and didn’t let go for a very long time.

The CBC camera crew recorded it all, but the reporter kept back. She had been instructed not to intrude on the moment.

+++++

Bud had decided he wasn’t going to mention the missing logbook to anyone, not even Hank. Hank probably had every reason to know, but the decision, ultimately, was Judy’s. If she was planning on using the log to go back to France, to Henry and her daughter, there really wasn’t much he could do to stop her. He’d told her of the dangerous possibilities, and she was an adult. She could make her own decisions.

Which was why, when Judy first hopped down to the dock in Reykjavik he ignored her. Carter was with his son Huck, Henry with his son Hank, and then there was Judy Stone, all by herself. And he couldn’t do it; he couldn’t ignore her, not when she was alone like this.

“How are you holding up?” he asked as she wobbled around the dock, trying to shake off being on solid ground again.

“Is it just me, or is the ground moving?”

He grinned. “It’s you.”

“I’ve never been so happy…when I saw the three of you up here I was about to cry. And we need to get Hank to a doctor’s office. I think he’s got some broken ribs and we need an x-ray to confirm.”

Bud nodded. “To the doctor’s office, now!” he said to his son.

Henry nodded. “Got it.”

“How did you know he was hurt?” Judy asked.

“Just a precaution. We got in two days ago and spotted out all the places we thought we might need to visit. What broke on your boat?”

“Nothing, really, but Huck went overboard.”

Bud stopped walking and looked at her. “How long was he in the water?”

“Four minutes.”

“Damn it all!” Bud grumbled. “Did he forget his safety line?”

“It was too short, so yes, he unclipped before he jumped.”

He nodded then resumed walking. “We rented a van, and we’ve got a bunch of rooms at the Hilton. The hot water seems endless, and I got you a room with a jacuzzi.”

“Oh, bless you. I’ve been dreaming of boiling myself in an endless bath…!”

“There are hot springs here, assuming that volcano doesn’t eat it for breakfast tomorrow. Swimsuit optional, I hear.”

“Really…? That sounds fun. You want to go?”

He looked at her and chuckled. “We went yesterday. Nice water, very hot, but yeah, I’ll go with you – if you need a chaperone.”

“It might help Hank,” she added hastily.

“That it may. Well, here we are,” he said as he opened the sliding door for her. As soon as everyone had piled in Henry got behind the wheel and drove the few blocks to the Landspitali University Hospital. 

“The doctor in the emergency department gently palpated Hank’s chest then sent him straight to radiology. The x-ray revealed two broken ribs on his left side and one on the right, and the doctor wanted to know how this had happened.

So Hank told him, and the more he described what had happened out there during the storm the more alarmed the doctor became. “You are out there alone and you are twelve years? This is madness! Madness!”

After the doctor finished wrapping Hank’s chest with thick, heavy white tape, the entourage returned to the marina to secure the boats from the storm, which had followed them into the city, then they went to the hotel. Huck had a room with his dad, and of course Hank was staying with his dad, which left Bud and Judy – in two separate rooms. But as tired as everyone was, and even with three of them in dire need of a shower, no one wanted to do anything but talk.

About the storm. About everything that had happened, but especially when Huck went overboard. Carter listened, appalled, then proud of them all. He too could see what was happening now. His boy was turning into a man over the course of one summer, one month, really, and it was astonishing to watch the transformation. Hank talked up Judy’s burritos, Judy talked up Huck’s tuna salad, and slowly but surely Huck’s eyes grew heavy. Then Hank’s did too. Judy called time and they got the boys to their rooms and tucked in, then the adults went out to dinner.

And they talked and talked, mainly about the storm and the toll it had taken on the boats and their crews. Judy had been terrified twice, when Huck went into the water and when The Blue Goose had almost rolled when that colossal wave hit her. Which was when Hank’s ribs got busted, she reminded them. The Goose was on her beam ends, her sails in the water and it looked like the cockpit had flooded, but the boat righted and Hank was okay, or at least he had  looked alright.

But that moment, Judy said, had marked a moment in her life bigger than anything else she had ever experienced. She made another startling admission then, too. She was beginning to love the boys almost as if they were her own boys; the feeling was that intense. When they did something impressive she felt impressed, but she also felt proud, and these feelings were all very unexpected to her.

Bud sat back and tried not to interrupt this manic display, because he knew she really needed to vent, to get these feelings out in the open. Henry knew enough to let her talk, but Carter wanted to know all about his son’s trip into the icy cold North Atlantic.

“There’s not much to tell, really. He misjudged the distance and he’d taken off his tether so he could jump across. His life vest inflated as advertised, and Hank got to him faster than fast, and Hank had also gotten him up on deck by himself, and down below – by himself.

And Carter Ash was as mystified as he was grateful.

“So, what you’re saying is that Hank saved my boy’s life?”

“Oh, yes, without a doubt. I think not one of you appreciate just how calm he is, but especially when things are going wrong. Hank just keeps his cool and carries on. It’s impressive to watch, really.”

“Henry, I had no idea,” Carter sighed. “You have one helluva boy.”

Henry nodded but he just looked down into his drink, then he looked up – at Judy.

“Where were you during all this?” he asked Judy.

“I got out of his way, then after Huck was safely aboard and the waves settled a little I went over and tied off to the Goose and went below to help. Everything happened so fast, we didn’t have time to think. Everything was just pure adrenaline and instinct.”

Bud looked at Henry, then at Judy. “So, what say we load up after breakfast and head over to the hot springs again. I bet the boys could both use a long soak.”

And that was the cue to break off the interrogation for the evening, because that’s what it had turned into. Two overprotective dads trying to figure out what went wrong – when nothing unexpected had happened. Going overboard was predictable, and Hank had everything onboard to pull off the rescue. And so he had, under the most difficult conditions imaginable, but he had.

And once Judy was in her room, Bud turned and lit into his son.

“Damnit, why did you turn that into some kind of FBI interrogation? She’s done nothing wrong, Henry, nothing. And if you can’t be nice to her, then just leave her the Hell alone.”

Henry turned and looked away. “Is that what I was doing, Dad?”

Bud nodded. “Both of you were. It was a tag-team match, like watching two bullies beating up on an innocent bystander. And Henry, it wasn’t enjoyable to watch. You each owe her an apology.”

“Damn, Dad, what’s with you? You falling in love with her?”

Bud wheeled around and got in his son’s face. “Don’t you ever speak to me like that, not ever again.” And with that, Bud turned and stormed off down the hallway to his room, and he even slammed the door as he went inside.

Henry stood there for a few minutes, wondering what the hell had just happened…

…then it hit him.

‘If I’m that obtuse, that much of a bully, have I been doing the exact same thing to Liz? Have I been running all over her, pushing here around – just because I can? Do I owe her an apology too?’

And he’d left her in Norwich – again. With his mom. Because her psychiatrists had told him it was too soon. She shouldn’t travel yet, she was emotionally too unpredictable, even on her meds, and might end up arrested by Homeland Security for making a disturbance on the flight.

But she was home, without her husband and one of her boys. Alone, again, to drift within her dreams once again.

+++++

How, she wondered, could that man be such an asshole – while his son was nothing less than a saint? Was it Bud? Had Bud made all the difference in the boy’s life, had he learned from the mistakes he’d made when he was raising Henry? Or had sailing played a role, because the self confidence Hank displayed didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. Yet his father was almost arrogant. ‘No, he is arrogant!’ she said as she washed her hair for the second time. The water was not quite hot enough but it was getting the job done, and she was looking forward to going out to the hot springs in the morning. Maybe the warmth would finally penetrate the cold that seemed to have taken root in her bones, a cold she just couldn’t shake.

+++++

They came out of their changing rooms into a low ceilinged rock passage that led to some stone steps, and the steps led to a pool with another tunnel like exit that took them out into a series of pools that twisted and turned until they were in a rock lined infinity pool perched above a ledge overlooking the North Atlantic.

“Shit,” Huck sighed, “we were right out there yesterday morning.” He was pointing to the sea and he wasn’t incorrect. 

They had sailed right by this place, the Sky Lagoon, a hot springs located almost right in the city center, and the place was gorgeous. The water temperature was hovering right around 40 degrees celsius, while the wind, on the other hand, was still ripping in from the northwest. And it remained as unseasonably cold as it had been yesterday.

Judy sunk down to her neck and literally shivered, not because of the cold air but because the enveloping heat felt so good. She wanted to lay back against the rocks and just sleep…so she did. And then Hank joined her.

“You don’t look right,” he said quietly as he waded over to her. “You looked like you were upset at breakfast.”

She nodded. “Because I was.”

“Is it my dad?”

She nodded. “Yes, and Carter. I think they’re mad at me for coming on this trip.”

“Why? You’ve been so cool too be with, and you’ve been helping us every day…”

“I don’t know, Hank, I really don’t, but maybe because they think I haven’t been protecting you guys well enough.”

“Protecting…enough? Damn, no way. You saved Huck after he went in the water…”

“No, Hank, actually you did, and Huck wouldn’t have gone in the water in the first place. He was trying to jump across to me, so I could get some sleep. Remember?”

“Of course I remember, but they’re ignoring all the good things you’ve done. All the good things we’ve talked about, that we’ve learned. And I hate to say it, but you’ve been the best thing about this trip.”

“That’s such a sweet thing to tell me, Hank. It means the world to me for you to think that.”

Bud drifted over and leaned into the rocks and sighed audibly. “Damn, I just about fell asleep in this very spot yesterday, and I do believe I might again. I’ve never felt as good as I do right now, right here on this rock. I could be a turtle and just bask here for the rest of my days!”

“Your wife might not like that, Bud,” she said.

“I hear Icelandic Airlines allows women on their aircraft,” he grinned. “We could just lay here, side by side on the rocks, like a couple of beached whales.”

Hank snorted and looked away.

“You be careful there, you young whippersnapper,” Bud growled – even though he was smiling. “Don’t be disrespectin’ your elders!”

Hank smiled but a minute later he drifted off to join Huck and both their fathers, but when Hank was out of earshot Bud turned his attention to Judy.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to say to him when he tells you that he’s fallen in love with you?”

She shivered – again. “Yes,” she said, before she sighed and closed her eyes. 

So he leaned back and sighed. “Good,” he finally managed to say, just before he too closed his eyes.

+++++

Bud went into the port-side salon lockers on Judy’s boat and took off the teak covers that concealed the chainplates and he used his small Surefire flashlight to examine them, one by one. 

“This one here,” he said to Judy. “There’s a little rust on this one, too. It’s 316 stainless so it shouldn’t show signs of rust so soon. That means the new chainplates we installed are probably inferior metal.”

“Inferior?”

“The supplier we’ve been using for decades closed shop during the pandemic, and we ordered these from another shop in Massachusetts. At any rate, we should change these again once you get to England.”

“Why not now?” she asked.

“We could, if you don’t mind staying here a month. That’s how long their wait times are right now.”

“Anyone else you could try?”

“I called an outfit in Charleston last night. I can get some in three days, but they’ll be made out of titanium, and they won’t be cheap. You’ve got six chainplates and they’re asking 900 a pop. Then there’s shipping and import duties. We can put ‘em in right here.”

“So, eleven grand and change…for piece of mind.”

“If I was a betting man, which I’m not, I’d say there’s a ninety nine point nine percent chance they won’t fail.”

“And if it was your boat?”

He sighed. “I’m going to order replacements for Hank’s boat.”

“Then double the order.”

+++++

The CBC reporter moved about uncomfortably in her chair, squirming a little as Hank stared into her eyes. 

“So, tell us…what was that last storm like? Is that when you broke your ribs?”

“Yes, that’s right. And it was pretty intense.”

“Oh? How big were the waves?”

Hank shrugged. “I dunno. Huck? How big do you think they were?”

Huck was leering at the reporter’s legs again, but he looked up and grinned. “Oh, I don’t know, I think up to eight, maybe nine inches…”

The reporter turned crimson and started stammering. “Inches? Surely you mean feet, or even meters…?”

“If you say so, and who am I to argue with you?”

“Hank? Perhaps you’d like to have a go at that question?”

He nodded, though he was scowling at Huck again. “My best guess is about two-thirds of our mast height, so around 30 feet.”

Her eyes went wide. “Thirty feet?”

“Yup. The one that got me was bigger. Maybe forty feet, maybe bigger, but it had crested and was breaking over the boat so I wasn’t in a good position to see.”

“I was,” Huck said, suddenly serious, “And it was the biggest wave we’d ever seen, maybe twice the height of our masts.”

The reporter blanched at that figure. “But that would be…”

“Ninety feet,” Huck stated emphatically. “It was huge and Hank never had a chance. We saw him try to surf out from under the worst part, the part that was breaking on top of him, but it caught him. We thought he was dead, the boat destroyed, but a few seconds passed and the Goose was spit out the side of the wave and dropped into the next trough. We tried to get to him as fast as we could because we could see him splayed out on top of the boat…”

“Do you remember that part, Hank?” she asked.

He nodded. “Very much so. Water had flooded the cockpit and, well, I just fought my way back down there and started working the pumps. It hurt a lot, but the water was gone in a few minutes.”

“So, are you two ready for the next part of your trip?”

“I can’t speak for Huck, but I sure am. If you’ve seen the prices in the grocery stores around here, you’ll understand why, too.”

She smiled dutifully and then turned to Hank’s partner-in-crime. “And you, Huck? Are you ready?”

“Are you going to be in England when we get there?” Huck asked.

“Why yes, I am.”

He leered at her legs again, then looked up at her eyes and smiled. “Then I’ll be ready.”

+++++

Hank was down on his belly scrubbing out the bilges on the Goose, as two plastic squeeze bottles of honey had split open in the knock-down and drained their contents inside one locker, only then two pints of rich, delicious honey had oozed down into the lowest spot on the boat: the bilge. After untold days sloshing around down there the entire boat now smelled like rotten flowers, and everything in the bilge was sticky, including the fuel tank and the emergency bilge pumps. He had unscrewed and pulled up all the floorboards over the tanks to get to the entire area, and was only now taking a sponge and diluted bleach to the entire, effected area, while Huck was taking the sponges that Hank handed up and then squeezing them into a bucket. When one bucket was full, he went topsides and carried it up to the marina’s bathroom and dumped the nasty water in the toilets, then he trudged back to the boat for the next round. Six hours later the bilge was dry and both of the boys were exhausted.

The next day was spent at an Icelandic version of a mariners’ market and everyone gasped when they saw the prices of even basic foodstuffs. They had put off buying fresh vegetables and fruit until the last moment and even these were obscenely expensive at this store, and then Bud reminded them that literally all the food on the island was imported – aside from a few things grown in greenhouses. Milk and cheese, too, were a bargain, but most people on the island didn’t regularly eat beef, or most any other animal. “And after seeing these prices I can understand why!” Carter grumbled. Seafood was the cheapest protein available, and it wasn’t cheap, but they stocked up on cod and whitefish, and a couple of large salmon filets, then hauled everything to the boats and put the fresh fish in their refrigerators. It took another day to unpack the food lockers, then repack them with all their new stuff.

The chainplates cleared customs and Bud supervised their installation, first on the Goose then on the Want. He then went topsides and retuned the rigs on both boats and, as the sun was still out, helped them disassemble their cockpit winches, grease them and put them back together. Everyone went back to the Hilton covered in lithium grease and sawdust.

“Who doesn’t love the smell of WD-40!” Bud declared as they sat for a last supper together.

Everyone raised a hand.

“Well,” he sighed, dismayed, “that settles that.”

Ten days after their arrival Bud cast off the Goose’s bow lines and tossed them to Huck, while Hank backed out of their slip, then he went over to The Untold Want and cast off Judy’s lines.

Before she backed out of her slip he looked at her and nodded, then spoke quietly, yet carefully, so she would hear him. “Be careful out there,” he said, speaking directly to her soul.

She nodded, then slipped the transmission into reverse and backed into the fairway. She turned and waved to the men on the dock as she followed Hank out the docks area and towards the open ocean once again.

© 2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | and this is a work of fiction, plain and simple. Thanks for dropping by, and we’ll see you soon for the conclusion.

Sorry to do this, but instead of one long chapter I’m going to break it into two. Hell, maybe even three. We’ll get there, I promise, but I just may take the long way around to get there.

New Year’s Eve here. Quiet night in Wisconsin, snow and about 7 degrees F. Cold, in other words. Too cold for champagne and fireworks. Maybe a hot buttered rum? Or how bout an Irish coffee…? 20 minutes to go…

Music? I was wandering along the back corridors of the memory warehouse once again and I ran across John Nitzinger’s One Foot In History. Then I took a side trip to Buffalo Springfield, with a short stop in a song called Expecting to Fly. Then I got to thinking about Three Dog Night’s Out In The Country, but then I got hung up on Mama Told Me Not To Come. And it had been a while since I made a stop in the land of Spirit, so I had a listen to Natures Way, from their last album. Spirit always seems to lead me back to Cat Stevens, and tonight was no exception. Who can’t listen to Teaser and The Firecat and remain unmoved? The Wind, If I Laugh, and the immortal Morning Has Broken. My personal favorite has always been Bitterblue, but that’s just me being me.

Time for Tea, or maybe Tea for The Tillerman, but a short chapter awaits – so read on, dear reader, read on.

Part Six

She renamed her Langston 28 ‘The Untold Want.’ Few knew exactly what that meant, fewer still what that meant to Judy Reitman Stone, M.D.

She had always been a reader, teachers considered her an avid reader, and her interest in literature never abated, not even in medical school. As much as she had loved emergency medicine when she’d been an intern, psychiatry had called out most distinctly to her, and perhaps because literature has so often been grounded in the psychological development of the characters within poems and novels, going all the way back to Homer – and beyond. Psychology and literature were concerned with the human in human nature, whether the story concerned fear or tragedy or comedy, and while she had always known she’d study medicine, psychiatry would allow her to pursue the two great intellectual loves of her life.

The Untold Want was just one poem within Walt Whitman’s sprawling Leaves of Grass, from part of the cluster known as the Songs of Parting. All of two lines in length, The Untold Want is among the richest, most influential two lines in American literature, and they had resonated with Judy from the moment she first crossed paths with them. Perhaps more so after staying up late one night to watch the Bette Davis film Now, Voyager, which – she felt – described the circumstances of her life almost perfectly. The film derived core elements from both Whitman’s poetry and Freud’s work on dreams, and remained one of her favorite films even through her psychiatric residency.

And it seemed oddly humorous to Judy that, of all people, Bud Langston’s eyes lit up when she told him that she planned to rename her new sailboat The Untold Want, to just those three specific words. She had wanted to ask him why he reacted that way, but, then again, she now regarded Bud as something beyond ordinary classification. He was a man of infinite contradictions, a man who streaked between mature reflection one moment and a withering churlishness the next, a perplexing manner that often left her feeling unsettled, but he was also a learned man, and she respected that. Of course she had fallen in love with ‘Henry the first’ for those very same reasons, so these feelings only made sense.

The Untold Want was moved into the paint shop when the boat first arrived at the Langston Boat yards, and her hull given a fresh coat of navy blue Awlgrip. The nonskid on her decks were refreshed, the standing rigging and chainplates replaced, the fuel tanks, too. The electronics were gutted and replaced with exactly the same units Hank had now on his L-28, The Blue Goose. She decided to replace the engine and transmission, including the drivetrain, from the shaft to the propellor, because she didn’t want any failures along the way – and the engine was, after all, almost 32 years old. The refrigerator compressors were pulled and replaced, as were the bilge and sump pumps. All new cushions were made, both inside and out, and these completed the list of big items; Bud’s team finished the work in six weeks, leaving her a month to prepare for departure and to iron out all the inevitable little issues that remained to be discovered. 

And she spent that month with Hank and Huck, when their schools permitted such nonsense, anyway, and when the boys weren’t available Bud would go out with her. A local L-28 owner, an older man who was more than willing to help her learn the lines, taught her small boat seamanship and the finer points of impeller changes in a heaving seaway. After a long weekend out with the boys she decided to get new sails and to have the conventional mainsail replaced with the same Forespar LeisureFurl unit that was on Hank’s -28, and that meant an electric winch had to be placed on the coachroof. She liked that so much that she had electric winches added to handle the jib sheets, so Hank’s Goose got those too. Bud thought electric winches were overkill and just shook his head when she made the request, but he installed them on both boats with a straight face.

When The Untold Want was finally ready to go, Judy went out one morning with the boys – who remained on The Blue Goose – and they sailed like two jet fighters, side-by-side all the way across the Sound to Block Island. They anchored in the Great Salt Pond then inflated their Zodiacs and motored over to the marina and walked across to the Mexican place for lunch. An hour or so later they went back out to their boats and raised anchor, then sailed home, arriving long after sunset – which had been the point of the exercise. Sailing at night is tough on the mind and the body, and seasickness thrives on susceptible people in the dark. Bud needed Judy to truly understand just how hard and fast seasickness hits so she could come prepared both mentally, as well as medically. 

Their planned departure date was now one week off, yet the long range weather forecast wasn’t looking good. There was an early season hurricane brewing off the west coast of Africa and the models showed it starting across the Atlantic but then veering hard north for Bermuda, then the Canadian Maritimes, so right into their projected course north along the coast of Nova Scotia and on to Cape Breton Island. After traversing the Bras d’Or Lake and gaining Cape Breton’s north coast, they’d dash across to St John’s, Newfoundland, and wait there for the next weather window to open. Right now their departure hinged on the path of the current hurricane.

Bud, Henry, and Emily planned to meet up with them Newfoundland, more for moral support than anything else, but Bud wanted to go over both boats before the next leg of the journey, as well as the weather. This next leg might be the most treacherous part of their voyage, a 1400 mile slam across the North Atlantic to Reykjavik, Iceland, which also meant about a thousand miles of icebergs and almost instantaneous death to anyone who fell overboard. Once in Iceland, they planned to rest for a week or so, and Bud alone was planning on coming to check-out both boats once again.

Next stop after Iceland: the Faroe Islands and another 500 miles of open, and often treacherous, North Atlantic Ocean. The last 550 miles of their voyage, south along the east coasts of Scotland and England to Hull, would be made in the North Sea, one of the most volatile bodies of water on the planet. Rogue waves and gale force winds are the norm, and as mild conditions were a rarity in the North Sea, Bud wanted ‘his’ boats in top shape before making the attempt.

This almost 3,500 miles of open ocean can, however, only be crossed in a narrow window of time, as weather conditions make crossings from early-September through mid-June almost impossible for small boats; the remaining window, from late June through late August, is only barely possible if the weather cooperates and ideal conditions persist through the weather window. In years with hurricanes that hit the Maritimes, it is clearly not advisable to even make the attempt, and in years with excessive sea ice drifting south off the east coast of Greenland, conditions are marked by millions of small icebergs hiding inside dense fog. Equipment failures here are often lethal, not only because of the remote location but also because of the inclement weather that prevails along the route. Rescues are difficult, not least because a sailor can survive in the water for a few short minutes. Survival after a five minute exposure is complicated and usually requires a hospital’s intensive care unit to pull-off, and there just aren’t hospitals like that floating around in the middle of the ocean.

Yet while hundreds of sailors in small boats take the North Atlantic route to Europe every year, only a relatively small number perish. Equipment failures, on the other hand, are the norm, so being prepared is the key ingredient to a successful crossing.

That statistic was of no comfort to Emily Stone, or to Henry Langston. For Carter Ash, nothing about this trip seemed logical or in the least desirable, though now he considered it inevitable. They thought the trip unnecessarily risky, but Henry at least understood where Hank was coming from. Emily Stone, however, simply had no idea what was running through Judy’s mind. She felt isolated and lonely, and resented the distance Judy had placed between them. 

But what bothered Emily most about this trip had remained a constant ever since she’d first learned of Judy’s desire to make the crossing: Judy seemed lost in some kind of dream, searching for something that no longer existed. Emily was sure Judy would never concede that, or even try to understand Emily’s fears, which she found vexing. And yet even more troubling, Emily was sure Judy wanted it that way.

+++++

Two almost identical Langston 28s were tied off on either side of the pier at the bottom of the lawn under Bud and Ellen’s house, and both were laying low on their waterlines. Both boat’s tanks were full, their drawers and lockers were packed with food and supplies, their chart tables loaded with the most up-to-date charts and cruising guides available. StarLink antennas were facing the southern sky, up to the minute weather forecasts were loaded and ready to go.

Bud and Ellen were standing on the pier, looking at their grandson with something akin to wonder in their eyes. Hannah and Jennifer were jealous, but only because the attention had shifted to Hank recently and both were furious about that. Carter Ash looked wan, like he couldn’t believe what his eyes were trying to tell him. Huck’s mother had come down for the occasion, and even though Judy Stone was a coworker of hers, she cared not the slightest what happened to Judy Stone, only to her son. She had never thought this trip possible and still couldn’t believe her own eyes, but right now her baby boy was coiling lines in the cockpit of a tiny sailboat and getting ready to set out across the Atlantic Fucking Ocean – without her. Maybe it was his dream, she sighed, but right now it felt like a nightmare.

Henry was onboard the Blue Goose, down below with Hank, going over a few last minute details with him. Hank had a bright yellow duffel he kept under the quarter-berth, purposely placed right beside the life raft. This was his ‘ditch bag,’ the bag he had to grab before abandoning ship and getting into the life raft – if shit hit the fan and the Goose was sinking. 

“I’m putting this envelope inside the ditch bag, and you’re not to open it unless you wash ashore someplace without facilities and need money. It’s just cash and a few gold coins, but they’re there if you really need them. Understand?”

“Yessir. Understood.”

“Okay, son. This is it. No change of heart? No second thoughts?”

“No. Nothing like that, Dad.”

“But?”

“Why couldn’t Mom come down?”

Henry sighed. He knew this was going to come up but he still didn’t know what to say. “Your mother had to go back to Boston, Hank. She’s not doing well.”

“What happened? I thought with that new medicine she was getting better?”

“The medicine is experimental, and Judy was concerned that it was hurting your mom’s liver. Turns out the medicine was hurting her badly.”

“Dad?” he asked, his eyes filling with tears. “Are you saying she’s going to die?”

Henry shook his head. “If I thought that was a possibility I would’ve told you, and I’m not sure I’d let you leave. But Hank, her doctors think they have everything under control, and that she should be home in a few weeks. If something changes, do you want me to email you?”

Hank nodded. “If something happens…I should be there with her, don’t you think?”

“I do, yes.”

“Okay.” 

“Are you going to go up and say goodbye to your Grandmother. She’s really having a hard time with this, Hank.”

“I know she is.”

“And she needs a hug. A big one.”

“You know what, Dad? I could use one too.”

“From her?”

Hank shook his head. “No. From you.”

Henry smiled, then stood and grabbed his son and pulled him close. “You can do this, Hank. You know it and I know it, so go out there and show the rest of ’em what you’re made of.” He held onto his boy and shook his head, lost in images of Hank when he was a baby. “You know, I never saw this coming, Hank, but I’m so proud of you I could bust.”

Hank squeezed his father hard. “You know what’s weird, Dad?”

“Hm-m, what?”

“I’m taller than you are now.”

Henry chuckled. “Shit happens, kiddo, but if you find yourself in my shoes one day, well, you’ll understand what all this means to me right now.”

Hank went up to the dock and went to his grandmother and ran into her waiting arms and they hugged for a lifetime or two, then he pulled back and looked into her eyes. “The best thing that ever happened to me is you.” She held him in her eyes and couldn’t let go.

He turned and shook hands with Bud, then gave him a hug too. Words between them weren’t necessary now, but Bud felt a surge of excitement as he watched his grandson hug and shake hands with his little brother. Ben was in a walking cast now, his knee still on the mend. 

“I can’t believe you’re really going to do this, man.” Ben said to him.

“You and me,” Hank said. “Let’s do the Pacific together one day, okay?”

“You got it, bro.”

Judy walked down from the house with some last minute necessities in a small duffel, and she hugged Emily then shook hands with Henry and Bud before hopping on The Untold Want. Emily gave her a hug then stepped back onto the dock, still shaking her head. Judy started her checklist, checked her engine temp and charge state, then double checked her chartplotter to make sure all the local tides and currents were displaying properly. When the wind app came up on her iPad she turned to Hank on The Blue Goose and nodded. Daisy Jane hopped off the Goose and ran over to Ellen, leaving Gertrude alone with Hank in the cockpit.

“You ready to do this?” Henry asked his first-born son. The word were a ritual between them now, and both smiled at the import of the moment.

“As I’ll ever be,” Hank replied, in keeping with the moment.

Bud took the line from the cleat nearest him, Henry the other, and they handed the lines over to Huck. Bud gave a little push and the Blue Goose drifted away from the pier for a moment, then Hank put the transmission in forward and turned towards Newport. Huck turned and saw his parents standing arm-in-arm for the first time in years and he nodded, then waved at them. Bud whistled once and Gertrude alighted from Hank’s shoulder and flew to Bud’s shoulder, and Judy wasn’t in the least surprised by that. Not now.

Emily leaned over and handed Judy an envelope while Henry and Bud untied her mooring lines and tossed them on deck, and Bud pushed her free and watched her drift away. He swallowed hard as their eyes met, but he understood her now, and what she was setting out to do. He didn’t agree with her, but that didn’t matter. She’d left all her important papers with him – just in case.

Henry and Bud stood side by side at the end of the pier, watching Hank steering a confident course towards Newport, and Huck was coiling lines like a seasoned old pro. 

But this was Hank’s journey, even though he was carrying all their hopes and dreams on his shoulders right now, and Bud seemed to drift away on the currents of other dreams for a moment before he waved at his grandson one last time. 

And then he watched as The Untold Want followed dutifully in his grandson’s wake. Gertrude settled her neck on his and he heard her sigh, and he saw Daisy Jane was sitting quite still now, not at all sure she liked what she had seen. Bud reached out and touched Daisy’s head and she looked up at him; he saw she was crying, tears were forming in the corners of her eyes.

“He’ll be okay, girl. Don’t you worry. He’ll be okay.”

Bud felt Gertrude turn and look at Hank again, now almost a half mile away, but he knew she understood. 

Bud turned around and walked slowly up to his house…with Ellen’s arm in his, and once inside he went to his computer. Both boats were pinging on his AIS display and he smiled.

+++++

Hank’s first executive decision concerned their passage around Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Island. Once the two boats cleared Brenton Reef and Seal Ledge off Newport, they could turn towards Vineyard Sound and then work their way through Nantucket Sound, but if he chose that route they’d hit the Main Channel just after midnight and neither he nor Judy had traversed this minefield before. Better to head south far enough to clear the area around Nantucket Shoals before making the turn north. Once free of the minefield of rocks and ledges south of Nantucket, they’d be able to sail direct to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and check into Canada.

So he set the course on the chartplotter to carry them well south of Nomans Land, off Squibnocket Point on the southwest corner of Martha’s Vineyard, which they’d pass around six that evening.

They’d agreed two use their handheld VHF radios for ship-to-ship communications, and to transmit on the low-power setting while using channel 72, and he called her as the afternoon wore on.

“How’re you doing over there?” he asked Judy when she answered his call.

“I’m seasick,” came her reply, “and I’m afraid if I put a patch on I’ll fall asleep.”

“Okay, got it, we’ll pull alongside and Huck can take this watch. You put on a patch and get some sleep; you’ll need a clear head tonight.”

“Okay. Thanks, you guys.”

So Hank maneuvered close to Judy’s port-side rail and Huck literally just stepped across the small gap between the two boats. Judy went below and found her stash of Scopolamine patches and put one behind her left ear, then grabbed a blanket and lay down on the pilot berth she’d made-up in the main cabin. She was sound asleep within a minute. Huck shot Hank a ‘thumb’s up’ soon after that, and Hank increased the space between them again.

They cleared Nantucket Shoals a little before sunrise, so made their turn to the northeast into the dawn. The wind picked up to a steady 23 knots out of the west-southwest, and they broad reached across Massachusetts Bay under the most benign conditions imaginable: sunny skies, the wind almost at their backs, and the sea putting on a benevolent display for them. Hank cooked breakfast and then crashed, as he’d stayed up all night, but he woke up four hours later and sailed over to Judy’s so she could sleep for a few uninterrupted hours. She cooked them some lunch before she went down and slept for seven hours.

This first passage passed quickly and easily; their first weather window had been perfect despite the looming hurricane, and the weather forecasting tools they had onboard were making things look easy.

They had pre-cleared into Canada so only had to call and check in with the harbormaster in Lunenburg, and after they received clearance they motored up to the fuel docks, fighting for space among the fishing boats and lobstermen for their turn at the hoses. There were no marinas here, just an anchorage for transient sailboats, but they spent two days there anyway – mainly just walking around the town and eating ice cream and going – once – to the worst Mexican restaurant on the planet. They tied off at the pier behind the supermarket for an hour while they replenished their stores, then literally raced away from the town, hurrying to beat the turn of the tide.

Their next planned stop was St Peter’s on Cape Breton Island, and the canal that literally separates the Bras d’Or Lakes from the sea. This was also the first set of locks that any of them had attempted, so Hank was spending a lot of time reading up on the subject of line handling and lock protocols, and even after reading several accounts he was not feeling any more confident about the endeavor. No, not at all.

So when they approached the locks and Hank hailed the keeper on the VHF, Hank advised them of the situation. And so, of course, a half dozen people were on hand to help out when The Blue Goose pulled into the lock chamber. More were standing by when The Untold Want entered and tied-up just behind the Goose, so in the end all that worry had been for nothing.

They spent several nights at anchor on the main body of the lake, pulling into tidy little inns for lunch or a shower, and spending one luxurious night ashore, draining the hotel’s hot water heaters after the boys ate their weight in lobster. They stopped in Grace Bay to refuel and to make a grocery run, then they set out for St John’s, Newfoundland, 370 miles further north.

No one wanted to admit it, but despite the fact that it was the middle of summer they were now wearing their winter jackets – over down vests. The temperature was, in a word, cold, and the further north they went the colder it was getting. Numbers weren’t needed now, knowing just how cold it really was only seemed to make it worse. And of course it was humid so the mood onboard both boats was turning cold, too, and perhaps because the magnitude of the crossing just ahead was finally dawning on them. They were about to set off across the far North Atlantic, and the way ahead would be lined with icebergs. No one dared mention the name of the ship…that ship…that had tangled with the bergs out here – and lost. And certainly no one mentioned the fact that the Titanic’s lifeboats were a lot bigger than their sailboats. 

So Hank texted Bud.

“The temps onboard are getting too cold for comfort. Got any ideas?”

“I’ll take care of it,” came the instantaneous reply. “See you in St. John’s.”

When he told Huck and Judy about the exchange they seemed ecstatic. Judy in particular was not enjoying the colder air, but at least she’d thought to bring insulated ski gloves, which was more than either of the boys could say. Handling salt-encrusted lines in 38 degree wind just wasn’t fun.

But as they pulled into the docks in St John’s, Newfoundland, there saw an entourage on the docks waiting for them, including work crews to install Espar diesel-fired forced air heaters and Dickinson solid fuel cabin heaters – that burned either coal or wood. Burning wood in the wall-mounted Dickinson also dried out the main cabin in minutes, eliminating condensation and humidity down below, and because the flame was visible the cabins took on a cheery ambiance when the wood-fired heaters were going. The boys and their fathers went shopping for better insulated foul weather gear, and then they spent several afternoons just walking around town – while keeping an eye on a powerful storm coming from the northwest – and not a hurricane from the south. This deep arctic low pressure system was generating 25 foot waves, a few reported to be much larger, as well as gale force winds.  Attempting the crossing under these conditions was simply not possible, so now Hank had to confront a new, more pressing reality.

They’d already spent two weeks ambling up the coast, and now they only had a few days left in the month of July. If they left and pushed hard to Iceland and then cut their time in Reykjavik down to the bare minimum, maintaining a fast enough pace to the Faroe and Shetland Islands, in three weeks, might see them reach Hull in the last week or so of August. Twenty-eight foot boats with twenty four foot waterlines simply could not cross at the greater speeds larger boats can attain, and coaxing six knots out of their boats was often not simply challenging, but also uncomfortable. Throw in the near-arctic conditions of the seas, and racing across the Atlantic in a month was going to prove a herculean task – unless they departed St John’s soon. Really soon. And walking around while waiting out this storm was cutting into their safe passage making window.

And though the storm raged for another day and a half, the wind prediction apps they had on their iPads were telling them a very interesting story. High pressure was going to fill in behind the storm, temperatures were going to rise into the 60s and the wind would fill-in from the northwest at a steady 15 to 20 knots – and these forecasts said it would remain like that for almost ten days. In other words, conditions were going to be ideal for the crossing.

“The choice is yours,” Bud told Hank and Judy. “You are the captains of your vessels, and so the captains of your fate, and now you must decide. The choice is as simple as it is stark: leave tomorrow or turn around and head back to Rhode Island before autumn sets in.”

“What about me?” Huck cried. “Don’t I have a say in this?”

“Of course you do, but if Hank decides to return that choice will have been made for you. On the other hand, if Hank decides to press on, you are under no obligation to continue. You can return with us if you want.”

Huck turned to his friend, the question in his eyes clear for all to see. “Well? Are we doing this, or what?”

Hank nodded, then he turned to Judy. “You feel like going on?”

“Me? Well hell, Hank, I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” 

Emily listened to this exchange and turned away, devastated and suddenly feeling nauseated; Carter Ash seemed to fall away, as if he too knew now that someone he dearly loved would be well beyond his reach. Beyond the range of help should the worst happen.

But when Carter had first laid eyes on the boys, as The Blue Goose approached the docks in St John’s, Carter had been the first to realize that the boys had changed during the course of the first part of their trip together. Huck looked leaner and much more confident, his voice was turning and when he spoke now he almost sounded like a man, like the words he spoke no longer seemed to be coming from a little boy. Hank, already a born leader, seemed confident in his ship, and in Huck – which hadn’t been the case before they left Rhode Island. Yet after the rescue off Block Island, Hank had begun to appreciate Huck’s virtues, his strength and athleticism, and the bond between was growing stronger by the day.

And as he watched the second little ship in Hank’s flotilla, Carter began to wonder what role this psychiatrist was playing in these changes. The boys were in constant contact with her by radio, or so he assumed, yet in truth he had little idea how often Huck was hopping over to The Untold Want and lending a hand when Judy simply needed some sleep. Both fathers would have been surprised to learn that their boys were hopping over simply to talk with Judy, to listen to her and to learn from her. About all kinds of things, too, but literature and psychology for the most part. Judy had been a gifted student of life and was an avid listener, and she recognized a fellow traveler in these two. The boys could not have been in finer, or more patient hands, but the fact remained that, yes, without question, Hank also wanted to learn more about what was happening to his mother. He wanted to understand her pain, and what he could do to help, and Judy explained what she could, under the circumstances.

Bud had watched these new dynamics taking shape before the three of them left Rhode Island, yet he had seen this ‘coming together’ in all the many voyages he had made with his forebears, trips that were now lost in time, trips that had, perhaps, only happened in some other frame of reference, but he had learned most of all that voyages made shipmates of the most unusual characters. People who would not have, in any other circumstances, been friends or even acquaintances. But once you were on a ship together, any ship, what soon became most apparent was one simple aspect of life at sea: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Henry the First had taught him that, and Bud suspected Henry had imparted that upon Judy, too. Maybe that’s why she was proving to be so valuable to the boys right now, despite what Emily thought.

Now, as the parents and grandparents – and one wife – looked on, this unity of purpose was apparent to them all. The three of them were shipmates now, each caring for the other, pitching in and helping to carry the load when one of the others flagged, and now sharing a knowing glance or answering questions from reporters.

Yes, reporters. 

Because the CBC had learned of the boys’ trip from the harbormaster, and that two 12 year olds were crossing the North Atlantic on a 28 foot sailboat, and this was News. Then the CBC learned that the boys on the Blue Goose had rescued an incapacitated boater on Long Island Sound not two months before, and after that the boys and their story didn’t simply spread, it was soon being mythologized. Here were two boys turning their backs on modern culture and a way of life dominated by sedentary dreamers who seemed to care of nothing else but video games and their social media presence. Two boys who were not content to simply dream, but who were determined to act on their dreams. Yes, this was News!

As the storm broke and the weather began clearing a Canadian Broadcasting Company van approached the dock and soon a reporter and camera crew were setting up lights and microphones in front of the harbormaster’s office. Local fishing boat captains were being interviewed about the dangers of the sea in general, and this part of the North Atlantic in particular. One skipper mentioned that the boys would soon be sailing almost exactly over the location where the Andrea Gail, the fishing boat from Gloucester, Massachusetts featured in the movie The Perfect Storm, had been lost. Another skipper talked about rogue waves and how rapidly, and unexpectedly, they formed, and the passage between Newfoundland and Greenland was as treacherous as the so-called ‘roaring forties’ in the southern ocean. Henry and Carter were interviewed, lending the piece a parent’s perspectives, but Bud and Emily declined the invitation to appear before the camera.

The CBC had, so far, dwelled on the idea that this voyage represented nothing less than blatant parental irresponsibility, a point the harbormaster echoed when it was his turn before the camera, then a public affairs officer from the Canadian Coast Guard was interviewed, saying only that they would be monitoring the situation as far east as Greenland.

When Huck walked up and to take a seat opposite the reporter, who, unfortunately was gorgeous  – in the extreme – his eyes seemed to focus on the young lady’s legs, which were, of course, spectacular. She asked him a question, something innocuous about what had gotten him interested him in sailing.

So Huck did what Huck usually did when confronted with a gorgeous woman. He leered, he grew provocative, and he was soon almost drooling.  “You’re cute,” Huck said at last, grinning. “Wanna grab a Coke after we wrap this up?”

The reporter’s eyes twitched. “Excuse me?”

Huck turned to his father and grinned. “Dad? Would you look at the legs on this one?”

Carter Ash seemed to shrivel up and disappear in a puff of gray smoke.

“Just how old are you?” the reporter asked – as steam and sparks started fuming out of her ears.

“How old do I need to be?”

“Excuse me…what did you say?” she gasped.

“How old do I need to be…to get in your pants?”

Carter leapt forward and grabbed his son by the arm and pulled him away from the roar of laughter that greeted this response, then Hank realized it was his turn, and he also recognized that with the harbormaster’s and the Coast Guard’s attention now focused squarely on them, he needed to tread carefully and present an image of the prudent mariner.

The reporter opened a bottle of water and took a long pull, then someone put some more powder on her forehead. She took a few minutes to compose herself, then she turned to Hank, who was now sitting across from her, staring into her eyes.

“Do I know you?” the reporter asked, clearly still flustered. 

“I don’t think so,” Hank said, smiling easily.

“Strange, I could’ve sworn we’d met before.”

Hank shrugged, then held out his right hand and leaned forward. “Hank Langston,” he said formally. “Nice to meet you.”

And when she took his hand in hers the connection was instantaneous, and direct. Hank saw the girl on Pegasus, in the lagoon at Tarawa, only she wasn’t 14 now. “No,” the reporter sighed, “no, something isn’t right. I know you. I know we’ve met somewhere before today…”

Hank smiled. “Yes, I know.”

“You do? Really?”

The cameras were rolling. Both cameramen was making sure their audio levels were in the green.

Hank nodded. “Did you have a question for me now?”

“Yes, I uh, yes, I do. I wanted to know why you’re doing this.”

Hank nodded, then he shrugged. “I think maybe I’m doing this for my mother.”

“Your…mother? Really? How so…?”

Hank’s smile softened. “Yes, I’m sorry, but that’s the best thing I can come up with for you right now.”

“Why? I mean, why your mother?”

“Yes, well, my mother has been sick for a while, and I think there’ve been times when she wanted to give up, to let go, and maybe because she began to think that all her hopes and dreams had never meant anything. And I wanted to show her that that’s not true. Sometimes dreams are all we have, but our dreams are meaningless unless we act on them, and no one can make their dreams come true if they give up. So this trip is about making dreams come true, but not just mine, and probably not even Huck’s. It’s about my mom, too, and her dreams. I want her to fight, to fight and make her dreams come true.”

The reporter looked around at the people crowded around the pier, watching the boy as he spoke from the heart about his mom, and right then and there she threw away all the hard questions she’d planned to ask about responsibility and foolhardiness and risking life and limb for something so frivolous as this. “She must be a very special lady to inspire such devotion. If she was here right now, what would you tell her?”

Hank looked puzzled by the question, then he looked at his father, then his grandfather.

“Words don’t matter much, Ma’am. It’s what you do that counts.”

She nodded, then turned to the camera and spoke her prepared remarks about two young boys sailing across the Atlantic, and she simply omitted any talk of Judy and her following along. Judy wasn’t a real part of their story, just a footnote, and CBC executives in Toronto decided right then and there that they would be following the boys’ progress all the way to England. And they decided to find out all they could about the boy’s mother, too.

+++++

Their water tanks were full, their fuel tanks as well. Their new forced air heaters worked so long as they had electric power and fuel to burn – which was fine when tied up to the docks – but now the boys were loading sacks of coal and wood pellets, and even small 3 inch logs in burlap sacks, to burn in their new solid fuel fireplace – which required no electricity or diesel to operate. Their lockers were crammed tight with even more food, mainly canned goods but also plenty of fresh produce from the local supermarket. Local fishermen dropped by to wish them luck, and to give them loads of fresh salmon and shrimp. Both the Canadian Coast Guard and Navy were standing by just offshore to send them off with a fit and proper salute.

Emily knew this was it. She could feel it, her intuition was screaming as she watched the boats cast off and sail away from the docks. She watched until the pain became unbearable.

The CBC crew stood nearby recording the scene, the reporter haunted by her encounter with Hank stood there lost in a haze of doubt.

Henry and Carter watched in silence, lost in thoughts of their own childhoods.

While Bud alone among them seemed understand the enormity of the challenge awaiting the boys and the psychiatrist, but there was nothing he could do now but watch. 

Because The Blue Goose and The Untold Want would soon be beyond his help. But at least they had StarLink, and if the worst came to pass he would at least know where to look for his grandson’s body.

+++++

“Henry? Do you know where Hank is?” Liz asked as Henry followed the Interstate north out of Boston.

“He’s been down in Rhode Island a lot this summer, but he’s taking a trip right now.”

“I had a dream about Huck, about Carter’s son Huck. He was with Hank. On a boat.”

Henry nodded. “That wasn’t a dream, Liz.”

“What?”

“They left last month, from Newport.”

“What? Henry…where are they going?”

Henry sighed. “Their plan is to sail from Newport to Newfoundland, then press on.”

“Press on…press on to where, Henry?”

“Reykjavik, in Iceland, then on to Tórshavn. That’s in the…”

“I know where Tórshavn is, Henry. Why? Why did you let them do it?”

“I didn’t. This was their plan, their dream, and their decision.”

“And your father’s too, I bet.”

Henry nodded. “Probably. He gave Hank the boat for Christmas.”

“But of course he did,” she sighed as waves of sarcasm flooded her thoughts, crossing her arms protectively over her chest. “And that means he’ll go to Bergen after that, then Lübeck…”

“Probably, sooner or later.”

“I can’t believe you let him do this. Henry…he’s just 12 years old…?”

Henry looked at her and shrugged. “True, but he’s older than you think, Liz…older than his age. Besides, he has a buddy boat going along with him. Along for the ride, I guess you could say.”

“A what?”

“A buddy boat,” Henry said with a smile. “Someone who’s going to follow along, so if something happens to his boat there will at least be someone nearby to lend a hand.”

“Oh no, don’t tell me…your father is going to make that trip again?”

“Well, no…no he isn’t.”

“Well then…who is he with, Henry?” But when her husband sighed and shrugged she only grew more restive. “Dammit Henry, who’s going to be out there – out there with our son?”

And still he smiled, because he was sure he’d heard these very words a few weeks before…when Huck’s mother blew a fuse and came unglued.

“Well, Liz, he’s with your psychiatrist. It seems they’ve become good friends this year.”

She looked out the window, but the reflection she saw in the glass got in the way. The tears, however, were real enough.

+++++

“This is good weather?” Huck cried. “Hank! Look at those fuckin’ waves!”

Hank didn’t need to look. He’d been fighting them all night and all day and the smallest were 20-footers. The boats were taking them right on their port beams, their left sides, and the larger waves, the waves that crested and broke, were getting close to knocking them down. And now the sun was setting. A small storm raged 10 miles ahead.

“The Hydrovane seems to be handling the waves a little better now,” he said, “so just fix a sandwich and try to keep out of the wind. I’m going to call Doc Stone and see how she’s doing.”

“Yeah, you do that. If she’s making dinner tell her I’ll be right over.”

Hank laughed at that then held on tight as he tried to get down the companionway ladder without breaking his skull. A big wave broke and The Blue Goose lurched to the right, heeling about 50 degrees before righting again, and he used the lull to get down to the chart table and braced in the seat behind the desk before the next wave hit.

“Goose, Want, you listening?”

“Yup,” Judy said. “How’re you two doing over there?”

“Huck says he’s coming over for dinner.”

“Good. Tell him while he’s at he can clean up the barf on the galley countertops.”

“Will do. Did you manage to sleep any?”

“A little, but I’m holding my own. How about you?”

“Sleepy. Going to take a nap.”

“Might be hard if these waves keep at it.”

“The wind is supposed to drop to ten knots after the sun goes down, but I didn’t see anything about wave heights.”

“I did. Not going to let up until tomorrow afternoon, then we might go to zero wind for a few days.”

“Then tonight is going to be bad. No wind and rough seas. Might be time to heave-to and deploy the parachute-drogues.”

“Let’s see how it goes first. I want to keep moving while we still have wind,” she said.

“Okay. I’ll keep the radio on stand-by. Goose out.”

“Want, standing by on 72.”

+++++

Bud finished cleaning up after their supper, then went to the library.

He was rummaging through the logbooks around the time of Henry the First’s last voyage when he noticed something wrong. Something out of place. Then he realized one of the logbooks was missing, but he wasn’t sure which.

Then he remembered Judy, right before they left she had gone up to the house to get some things she said she’d forgotten. She’d come back with a duffel. He had thought nothing of it at the time, but now he knew what she’d gone back to the house for. Now he had to find out which logbook she had taken…and quickly…

© 2025-26 by adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | and this is a simple work of fiction, as plain and simple as it always is, which means no real people or situations were involved in the creation of this story. As always, thanks for stopping by and having a read. Be safe and have a good New Year. AL/abw

Aye, so here we are again, easing’ into the finale, so to speak. Lots of tangled webs. Lots.

So, the music on my mind while writing? All Things Must Pass, George Harrison’s seminal album. The Who’s Tommy. Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is. Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left. That’s four decent albums to spend some time in, all worth a listen. Time to cue up some coffee and light a fire? If so, let’s roll on to…

Part Five

She did to know where she was, only that it was dark here. And cold…so very cold.

She tried to moved her wrists, and…she…felt nothing. Her hands moved a little, but not her wrists – and she wondered why. And her muscles ached, especially in her neck. She tried to open her eyes but nothing worked and she began two panic. Kind of a slow burning panic. An awareness that something was wrong, very wrong, more like a new reality laid on top of the old. She couldn’t remember ever feeling this way before, but she did feel a growing awareness that she had very little control over her body. She flexed her toes, then her foot, but when she tried to lift her leg she felt something holding her back. Not a force…but some…thing. A rope, perhaps?

Then a wave of unsettling warmth. Almost like a warm blanket, but not quite. Oppressive heat, then a falling away, as if sleep was coming for her.

But no, this wasn’t sleep, this wasn’t at all like sleep. Her body began feeling pinched and distorted, like the forces of the universe were stretching her body into vast, unfamiliar shapes…almost as if the atoms of her physical body were being stretched out of shape, too – then she realized that there wasn’t a thing she could so about it – so she just let go and fell away, surrendering to the darkness.

And it seemed as soon as she did she felt her eyes open and close. Light danced off her retina, and she felt crusty, particulate sand stuck along the hot margins of her eyelids. And once again she could’t do a thing about it. Someone came by with a cool washcloth and wiped away the detritus on her eyes – and the coolness so close to her eyes felt wonderful. Luxurious. Like she wanted to stop and linger in this sudden release of tension.

She opened her eyes again and looked around the room. More like a cubicle. Medical devices on the walls, beeping and flashing. The light, she suddenly realized, wasn’t bright at all. The room was dimly lit and it felt like she was wrapped-up inside a cool forest glade, shaded by lush, overhanging trees. She recognized a familiar pain in her right arm, in the crook of her elbow, and she could just lift her head enough to see an IV stuck in her arm.

She licked her lips, felt they were dry and cracked, and now she felt the inside her mouth was dry, too. Especially the roof of her mouth. It felt like her tongue was cemented there, and her mouth even tasted hot and dry.

A face leaned over. 

It was Henry.

Oh, blessed Henry! Those strong eyes, always so full of courage, and duty. Did he still feel anything for her? After her betrayal? After her many betrayals? She felt herself falling towards the abyss but something pulled her back. 

His eyes. His words.

“Liz? Can you hear me?”

She nodded. “Yes…yes…oh, Henry…it feels so good to see you…”

“Does it, babe?”

“Oh, God, you have no idea. Sometimes it’s like you are the only thing left I can hang on to.”

“I’ve come down several times. Do you remember seeing me before today?”

She nodded – but hesitantly. “Sometimes. Maybe. Everything back there feels dreamlike right now.”

“Back there?” he asked.

“Wherever it is they take me.”

The words hit like an icy blast, but all he knew right now was that he didn’t want to follow her down those rabbit holes. “But you’re free of them now, right?” he decided to ask.

And she nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes…and it feels so good to get away from them…even if it’s only for a little while.”

Judy Stone had advised that she might always incorporate elements of her hallucinatory existence in everyday conversations, and there wasn’t much the new, experimental anti-psychotic medications could do about that. After her tenth ECT session she had begun to revert once again, and it was only ‘at the last minute’ that her team gained approval too enroll Liz in the clinical trials for a new class of drug; within 36 hours of starting the new medication her hallucinations abated somewhat. After a week she was speaking coherently for the first time in months, then lucidly about that other world. This, Judy Stone knew, was a big first step. Compartmentalizing those two worlds could lead her to becoming functional again, assuming the intermix of hallucinatory experience didn’t continue to overcome reality.

A month after her last ECT session, and three weeks after starting the new medication, Elizabeth Langston was discharged from Massachusetts General and cleared to return to inpatient therapy at Dartmouth Hitchcock. After her return to New Hampshire she would remain in the care of Dr. Judy Stone – who still refused to give up…

+++++

When she appeared in the upstairs bath, the one off Hank’s bedroom in his grandfather’s house at the boatyard, Judy Stone seemed different. Changed. Perhaps radically changed in unpredicted ways. She and Hank Langston, both of them.

The two reappeared at the same time, of course. Even though the trajectories of their visits had been very different, whatever it was transporting them through time brought them back in the same instant. Hank had been gone for five months; Judy Stone had been gone almost fifteen years. Now, when she reappeared beside Hank she looked almost the same as when she had first stepped into the vortex, yet a closer look revealed subtle changes. Her hair was gently streaked with gray. Her skin was dry, dry as parchment, from living a life at sea for so many years. She had stayed with Henry Langston, Henry the First, and after they departed Hull for France she initially stayed as his guest and friend – but then, more or less, she became his wife. She loved him, and he loved her, but then again he had from the moment he’d first laid eyes on her.

She had never been interested in the sea. Never. Then again, she had never loved a sailor, yet his interests soon became her own. Within a year she had visited Ijuiden twice, and Rotterdam, in Holland. Then Cherbourg and Saint Malo, in France, but soon she fell in love with the western reaches of the Norman coast. Of all the places they had been together, this region seemed to call out to her, to draw her in – and hold her close. They’d been anchored on Pegasus off the tiny village of Port Blanc, in the lee of the Ile aux Femmes on an August afternoon, and even the breezes felt right to her. Existence in the village soon reached out to caress her soul, and nothing in her experience had prepared her for the moment. They were carrying cheeses and wines back to London on that trip, and one afternoon they’d been sitting on the deck just behind the helm, Henry slicing cheese and fresh bread while she poured wine and dreamed out loud. Henry had been so in love, she felt so enamored in the moment, then she had looked around that scattering of islands and known in her heart that she had been born here many times before, and that Henry had somehow always been the most important thing in her life. Now, when she looked at Henry she knew she had always been meant to be by his side. Here, in this moment. There was, she realized, something eternal about that afternoon. Eternal and recurring.

They had sailed together as far as Marseilles, working their way back along the coast of France, then Spain, picking up small consignments of goods to be sold in London. She wandered those ports, even at night, until the ancient airs she breathed became her own, until she felt as though she belonged to this world. They made another trip to Port Blanc and Henry purchased a small house there, just for her. It was on a small parcel of land, good, productive farm land that had been planted with artichokes and cherry trees for millennia.

And they had a baby together. A little girl, Olivia. Judy’s first and only child. She stayed there, in Port Blanc, while Henry made one trip back to Hull, and when he returned he was brimming with excitement. Pegasus had been engaged by one of the large trading houses to sail by way of the Horn to India and Hong Kong, but he would be gone years this time, not just months.

“Can we come?” she asked. “Olivia and me, the two of us? Could we make the trip with you?”

And Henry had smiled. “Truly? You would do this?”

“I would enjoy nothing more!”

And so she had. 

Pegasus had returned to Southampton and been loaded with cargo, mainly heavy armaments, and had from there sailed down the Atlantic, stopping in the Madeiras for water, then in Clarence Bay off Georgetown, on Ascension Island, to deliver mail. They made another mail stop at St Helena then sailed directly to Cape Town before sailing on to Goa. After a month making repairs to the ship they had departed for Hong Kong, and when they arrived Olivia was reading and writing and doing her numbers, something almost unheard of for a girl her age.

With her hold stuffed with tea and bolts of silk, Pegasus sprinted home, only stopping at the Atlantic Islands to pick up mail, and on their arrival in Southampton Olivia was five years old, soon to be six.

And after that voyage Henry was a wealthy man. He established his very own trading house and began carrying goods to the New World, purchasing land in Rhode Island and establishing a merchant’s bank in Boston. He carried colonists on one voyage, carrying shipwrights and designers and all the specialized tools to build ships and settling them on his holdings in Rhode Island, and for a year Judy remained with Olivia in France, at their cottage in Port Blanc. She saw Pegasus entering the shallow bay one afternoon and rushed down to meet her husband only to learn that he had passed away just a week before. 

Ian Nicholson escorted her to Henry’s cabin and she found him there, laid out on his table covered by two flags: the Union Jack and Rhode Island’s. She sat beside him in the silence, regarding her best friend with eternal warmth in her heart, and she held his cold, stiff hand for hours – then, without warning she felt the pinched distortion begin and she cried out – and inside one drawn out breath she returned to Bud’s house, standing beside 12 year old Hank once again.

She had at once resolved to go at once to Bud’s library and re-read the logs of Henry’s last voyage on Pegasus – but she stopped short, decided against reading anymore details of his life. 

‘What’s the point?’ she asked herself. “Was any of this real?”

In the days after her return to Rhode Island, Judy felt bereft and alone, without warning stripped of her only child and her husband, and, oddly enough, now trapped in a time where she felt she no longer belonged. Emily simply could not, and would not accept what had happened to her wife, and the sudden, unexplained distance that had sprung up between them. She felt the pain of this split was too great to bear – even as she struggled to acknowledge Judy’s lack of emotional commitment to their relationship.

Bud listened carefully to Judy, of course, on her return, but he was more than merely curious. She had tasted the forbidden fruit and wanted more, and he listened as any detached observer might as she described the various journeys she had taken with Henry on Pegasus. Bud had been interested, if not exactly engaged, as she described the rich emotional experiences of finding love and, finally, having a child. Of sailing halfway around the world, of working as the ship’s physician, and all the other adventures – some planned, others very much not planned – she had enjoyed. Bud nodded knowingly as he listened, because he had done as much – and more than once – when he was her age. He had never told Ellen, of course, but he had children scattered all over Europe and Japan, from Norway to Marseilles to Kyoto. And though he still visited these children regularly, he had never, not once in more than fifty years, told Ellen – his wife – about these other affairs of his misguided heart. 

Then one time, after one of his son’s trips, and after Henry had immediately grasped the possibilities of living what amounted to an infinite number of lives, when Henry stepped out of the restroom he was livid. He had seen into this hall of mirrors, seen impossible lives lived with limitless permutations exploding into view, each iterative reflection incorporating new variables every time the traveller might return to the past. And Henry had immediately grasped the implications: each new trip potentially meant new wives, and new children too, and with each encounter leading to untold suffering when he disappeared. Had his father become a serial husband who’d never developed an understanding of the emotional richness of true love? What he was doing, Henry told his father, was a moral abomination. How many women and children had he abandoned?

His father wouldn’t say. He couldn’t, not really.

After that realization, Henry had adamantly refused to return to any past, and soon he refused to even go down to the library and flip through the logbooks. Any logbook. Perhaps not unexpectedly, soon after he left for Annapolis, Henry began drifting away from his father; when he called home he talked to his mother – and he avoided talking to his old man. But once, during a visit home one year, his father had prevailed on him, asked him to come with him to Hull in the early 1800s, to meet Henry’s little brother, Ben. “Just this once,” his father said, his voice earnest. And yet Henry had heard a faint desperation in the request, almost as if his father was pleading with him to return.

And that did not add up.

And so it was that on a quiet, foggy night off High Street, not far from the banks of the River Humber in Kingston-upon-Hull, and years before the first Pegasus was built, Henry first met a goose, and a blue goose at that. He met Ben but Ben wasn’t what he’d expected. He was very different, yet Henry simply could not remember anything about him. And not long after he met Ben, it seemed as if everything about his life began to spiral out of control.

+++++

“So, show me this boat your grandfather gave you,” Judy said later on their first morning back.

“What? Now?”

“Sure. We’re not leaving until tomorrow morning…”

“Okay, sure. It’s down in the shop, inside.”

She followed him down through the boatyard to the finishing shed, where boats that were almost ready for delivery had their electronics, or other, more specialized options installed. There were four boats in the shed, and two were L-28s, their dark navy blue hulls and exterior teak gleaming.

“Ah, the Blue Goose. I wonder where that name comes from?”

“Bud named it. One of the guys carved the name board.”

“That’s a heckuva a Christmas present, ya know…?”

Hank nodded. “She’s something else. We’ll have to use a ladder to get up on deck. You okay with that?”

“Sure. Lead on.”

She helped him carry a large step-ladder over and then she followed him up, watching him carefully as he lifted the companionway boards and went below. He was moving with practiced ease now, so he had developed muscle memory during his months on Pegasus, and she found that interesting. Revealing, and interesting. Whatever else may or may not have happened to them while on Pegasus, their bodies had changed, even if ‘time’ itself hadn’t.

He went to the breaker panel and flipped a few switches, then he turned on the cabin lights, and she almost gasped when she saw the interior. The ceiling was ash, the bulkheads and cabinetry were all teak, and even the cabin sole, the floor, was teak and a lighter colored wood, and the effect was overwhelming. It felt like some kind of womb, or maybe a cocoon, all very warm and protective feeling, but the crew here at the yard also had taste. The satin varnish on the bulkheads, the oiled wood finish on the floor, lights casting pools of warm amber light all conspired to make the interior glow, and it seemed to come alive the more she looked around.

“It feels so much bigger that I expected,” she said.

He nodded. “That’ll change once I start moving stuff aboard. Clutter kills that feeling.”

“You’ve seen that already, haven’t you?”

“Oh, sure. When I help new owners get their gear onboard, everything gets laid out on the cushions and countertops, and suddenly what looked real big looks cramped.”

“And what does that tell you?”

“To keep everything stowed. It’s not only visual, though. It’s safer to move around down here that way.”

“Henry taught me that, too.”

Hank nodded, but he heard the change in her voice, too. “Do you miss him…?”

“Oh, God…I can’t even begin to describe how lonely I feel right now.”

“I’m going to go back to Tarawa. There’s a girl there…”

She watched the change come over Hank as he spoke. His first crush, so of course she had to exist a hundred and sixty years ago, and she wondered what he’d do about it. “That’s kind of a big step, don’t you think?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. I want to see her again. See if I react the same way I did the first time.” He looked around the cabin, and she thought he was imagining where he’d put stuff when he loaded his own things aboard. “What about you? Did you run into anyone like that?”

“I fell in love with Henry.”

His eyes went wide, then he grinned and shook his head. “Ya know, I kinda thought he had a thing for you, but…you had a thing for him, too?”

“Yup.”

“How long did you stay?”

“About fifteen years.”

“Holy crow! Anything else happen?”

“We had a baby, Hank. A little girl.”

He blinked rapidly, as if he was having a hard time with the idea of pregnancy and children, then the timeline hit him. “How old was she when you left?”

“Very young. She was seven, I think,” she said, her eyes tearing up.

“Why did you come back?”

“Pegasus came in to the port where I was living and I found out that Henry had died. Almost immediately I was in the bathroom…”

“You mean…you didn’t choose to come back?”

She nodded. “That’s right. It felt like something, or maybe someone, was watching me. Whatever it was, it grabbed me and yanked me back here, to the present.”

“Damn…” he sighed. “You think you could go back?”

She shook her head. “Who knows. But the thing that bothers me is, well, if there was something watching me it probably won’t let me go back.”

“Maybe my grandfather knows.”

“Maybe. So, tell me about your boat. What do you need to have installed to make her ready to go?”

“Well, I’ve got a water-maker to install, then the wind-vane. I’ll need help with that one.”

“What’s a wind-vane?”

“Kind of like an autopilot, except it doesn’t use electricity. Anyway, the wind steers the boat so you can do other things.”

“Have you thought about what you might cook?”

“Grandma is going to help me with that. Bud recommends we pre-cook a bunch of meals and seal them in vacuum bags, then freeze ‘em up at the house before we carry them down and load ‘em. There’s already one freezer onboard, but we converted a storage cubby into a second freezer so I’ll be able to carry tons of stuff like that.”

“Want me to make you a really good first aid kit?”

“Gee, could you?”

“Sure, but are you afraid of needles?”

“No, not really.”

“Well, I’d need to teach you how to use some things, just in case.”

“Okay. Are you going to go see my mom?”

“Day after tomorrow. That will be right after her last treatment.”

“Then she can come home?”

“If she’s better, yes.”

He took a deep breath and sort of held it, and she knew then that he really was still very worried about his mother. “And what if she’s not better? Then what?”

“Then we talk. You and me.”

“Okay.”

“You know what? I love this boat. It’s super cool.”

“Are you like…from the 80s or something?”

She had a good laugh at that, but something had just popped into her mind. An idea. And who knows, maybe it might even work…

+++++

“How long does its take you to build your 28 footer?” Judy asked Bud.

“Why? You want one?”

She nodded. “I might.”

His eyes narrowed. “Oh? And what are you thinking now, young lady?”

“I want a sailboat. I miss sailing already.”

“Why do you want a 28? Why not a 43?”

“I don’t have a reason, but I like the looks of Hank’s boat. The size seems perfect for me, as well.”

“It is, if you’re single-handing. It gets crowded with one dog onboard, and with two people you start feeling pretty confined. Any more than that and the crew will start bailing out, and you’ll probably go first. So, tell me. Did you do a bit of sailing recently?”

“I did.”

“And you feel comfortable at sea?”

She nodded. “I do now,” she said, grinning.

“Oh? And how long did you say you stayed back there…?”

“About fifteen years, more or less.”

“Uh-huh. And what else happened to you?”

“Well,” she began, “it’s complicated.”

“No, it isn’t. Tell me what happened, Judy. What’s behind all this?”

So, she told him. It was, after all, his family so he deserved to know. So Bud listened and did not appear to judge anything she told him, no matter the subject…until she got to her last moments in France.

“So, you were yanked out of there, just when you found out about Henry?”

“Yes. That’s what I remember.”

“And how old was your daughter?”

“That’s the thing, Bud. She’s fading. Every memory. Every remembrance. Everything I remember about her is fading.”

He sighed, but then he looked away and shook his head. “She’s probably gone, Dr. Stone. And I don’t mean gone as in dead, either. I mean she never happened.”

“That’s not possible. Please, Mr. Langston, tell me that’s not possible…”

He shrugged. “The truth is, Judy,” he said warmly, almost sympathetically, “that it is a possibility. I can’t assign a probability, but you must entertain the possibility.”

“Oh, dear God. No…”

“It’s a terrible thing you’re feeling. Terrible. And I must warn you, too. Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t try to return. There’s a possibility you’ll end up living inside a completely new timeline, and it’s even possible you could find yourself marooned there, with no way back.”

“I wanted a child of my own, you see,” she said absently, her eyes now focused on an infinity that might not have ever existed.

“Surely it’s not too late? You and Emily? Have you thought of adopting, or surrogacy?”

She shook her head, lost in her thoughts. “So, you never answered my question.”

“Which one?”

“The 28. How much would one just like Hank’s cost?”

He smiled, then shook his head. “We have one in brokerage right now. It’s ten years older than his, but it’s still in remarkably good shape.”

“When can I see it?”

“Would next weekend be soon enough?”

+++++

Carter Ash and his son Huck were behind Henry and Hank, following in Carter’s old Subaru southbound on the Interstate heading to Springfield, Massachusetts. There was no snow on the grown now, but the trees were still cloaked in the naked blacks and grays of their winter sleep. Carter was feeling as bleak, regretting the day he’d met Elizabeth Langston now more than ever, because his son was absolutely sure he wanted to go on this hair-brained idea of a trip that Hank was all fired up about. Carter wasn’t jealous, not really, but he wasn’t exactly scared, either. Huck was a strong sonuvabitch, and a real athlete. His balance and coordination were excellent, but his muscle strength was something else. Maybe he might have become interested in football or ski racing, but no, he’d run across a sailing magazine at a friends and had been daydreaming about boats ever since. Far away horizons were calling. Sailboats were calling. And to his son, sailboats made all the sense in the world. 

“They’re not just toys, Dad! People live on them, they travel on them, and not just across the country. Didn’t you want to buy a truck camper last year? You said we could go see Yellowstone?”

Carter nodded. 

“Well, it’s the same thing, but we could go anywhere in the world…”

“What’s this ‘we’ business, Huck. There’s no we in this, okay. I spent two years in the Navy and I’ve seen what the sea can do when it gets pissed off, and you’re not going to find me out there on a 28 foot anything, let alone a little sailboat like that thing Hank has…”

Huck crossed his arms over his chest and looked out the window. “Weird weather, isn’t it?” he muttered.

“Weird? What’s weird about it?”

“Snow one week. Rain the next. None of the ski slopes open in March, not even out west.”

“That’s why they call it climate change, Huck. We’re finding out that kind of change is unpredictable, too.”

“It was sixty degrees in Newport this morning.”

“I know. I checked. I wish Hank didn’t want to go out this weekend.”

“I think he wants to see how strong the new standing rigging is.”

“The standing rigging? What’s that?”

“The wires that hold up the mast.”

“Oh. Swell. So the things that hold up the mast are untested?”

“Yup, but that’s a good thing, Dad.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Hank’s done a bunch of sailing, Dad. He knows what he’s doing.”

Carter nodded. “Yeah? Need I remind you that Hank is 12 years old?”

“He’s been around boats all his life, Dad.”

“Swell. What about you?”

+++++

Carter and Huck were standing in The Blue Goose’s cockpit on either side of Hank, watching as Hank zoomed in on the chart displayed on the gizmo attached to the thing that held the steering wheel up, explaining the area just off the coastline here by the boatyard.

“The island over there? That’s Dyer Island, and on the other side is the main shipping channel that goes up to Providence, so we’ll stay on this side of the island as we head south, to keep away from that traffic.”

“Then what?” Carter asked.

“We work our way down to Newport. Bud got us a slip for the night at his club.”

“Then what?”

“We leave Newport at four-thirty Saturday morning, and once we clear Brenton Point and the reef it’s about 18 miles to Block Island. We’re going to anchor in the Great Salt Pond.”

“I thought you were going to stay at that marina bay our hotel?”

Hank sighed. “I really want to test the new windlass, so we’re going to anchor. If it doesn’t work we’ll motor over to the docks.”

“You’re coming too, aren’t you, Dad?” Huck asked.

“I paid for a room, and we have reservations on the ferry, so I guess I’m going.”

“On the ferry from Newport, right?” Huck asked.

Carter nodded.

“Right,” Hank said. “Well, there aren’t any hazards between Newport and Block Island, at least until you get close to the island. The main thing is the tides, but once we get close to the channel entrance over at the island we just have to watch the buoys.”

“And Dad,” Huck cried, “there’s a good Mexican place over there! Are you stoked, or what?”

Carter squinted his disapproval, then stepped off the Goose and walked up the pier to the house.

+++++

The 30 horsepower Yanmar started instantly; the Balmar high output alternator registered the proper voltage, 12.8, and all three lithium batteries were at 100 percent of their rated capacity. Hank grabbed his checklist and started making his rounds, checking all the seacocks on the thru-hull fittings, then proper function of the two electric bilge pumps. The bilge was dry, but he decided to check the PSS shaft seal on the propellor shaft, then the packing glands on the rudder shaft. He turned on the propane solenoid, turned on a burner on the stovetop, then shut it down before turning off the solenoid. “Huck! Turn off the propane tank, just like I showed you,” he called out.

“Got it.”

Next he checked the engine exhaust; the smoke for color and correct water flow through the coolant loop discharge. He flipped on the switches for the boat’s required lighting then walked the deck checking each light for function. A few minutes later he put away his checklist and looked at Bud and his father on the dock.

“You ready, son?” his father asked.

“As I’ll ever be,” Hank replied.

Henry and Bud slipped the boat’s lines from their cleats and handed them over, and Bud reached out with his foot and gave the Blue Goose a little shove. Hank put the transmission into forward and gave her a little throttle, and the little ship motored away from the Langston Boat Company’s docks. Daisy and Gertrude watched as he sailed away, and Gertrude was still smiling.

+++++

Carter watched his son watching him with his hands in his pockets and his stomach doing barrel rolls. He was fidgeting and picking at his fingernails as the little boat disappeared into the night…

“They’ll be alright,” Bud whispered to Carter.

“Yeah? And you know that – how?”

“Two reasons. I’ve built 90 of these, the 28, and more than 30 have circumnavigated. And next, because I have friends in the Coast Guard, and they’re going to be in the vicinity – just in case.”

“No kidding?”

Bud nodded, then he took Carter by the elbow and turned him towards the house. “Now, you look like you could use some pancakes.”

+++++

“Hank, this is the coolest thing ever…!”

Hank looked at the chartplotter and hit the Home button then the AIS overlay, then the radar, and – because it was still dark out – he wanted to monitor all the vessel traffic moving in or out the ship channel. An instant later all the information he needed was right there: the vessels moving up and down the channel, their names and home ports, their destinations and their current heading and speed. The radar confirmed their positions, and when all the information was overlaid on top of the nautical chart it was a remarkable enhancement to situational awareness, because along with all that other information he could also see bottom depths and buoys, lighthouses and other prominent landmarks used for navigation. He explained it all to Huck – who was eating it up by the spoonful and who was, so far, in love with sailing. Their elapsed trip distance was now almost three miles, and they were motoring because the windspeed was currently a blazing 1.2 knots.

“Who’s that?” Huck asked, pointing at a boat a few hundred yards behind them.

Hank checked his display and there was nothing showing up, other than a strong radar return. “They don’t have their AIS on,” he replied. He looked again and couldn’t see their running lights either and he sighed. “Oh joy. It’s the Coast Guard.”

“How do you know?”

“AIS switched off, no running lights. They’re following us.”

“Which means what?”

“We’ll probably be boarded once the sun comes up, so don’t take your harness off.” The harness, or safety harness, hooked up to a hard attachment point on the boat, meaning it was a strong connection between the wearer and the boat. If for some reason the line broke and the wearer went overboard, the harness automatically deployed a water activated life vest, and there was a small PLB, or Personal Locator Beacon, that could then be activated once in the water – signaling rescue authorities either in the region or around the world of an unfolding man overboard situation.

“What do they do when they board you?”

“Check for safety items and paperwork, unless they see something obviously wrong.”

“Like what?”

“Drugs, mainly.”

“Hank, I’ve got some pot in my duffel!”

“You…what?”

“Pot! My dad sent some with me, in case I get seasick.”

“Go below – slowly – and get it. Then bring it up and dump it overboard, but act like you’re barfing when you do it.”

Five minutes later the pot was gone and the Coast Guard boat hadn’t changed position; it was still a few hundred yards behind them, in the same shallow channel headed towards Newport. “I bet Bud asked them to keep an eye on us,” he mumbled.

“Your granddad? Why would he do that?”

Hank shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. What does matter, Huck, is that you never, ever bring drugs on anyone else’s boat. If the Coast Guard finds that stuff they can confiscate the boat, even if the owner had no idea it was onboard, and that’s that, no negotiation, no second chance. And no more boat. Got it?”

“No shit?”

“No shit. So you gotta promise me. No more, okay? None.”

“You got it, Hank.”

He switched on the autopilot then got his binoculars and swept the horizon, lingering on the patrol boat for just a second, then he nodded. The men on the patrol boat saw that and hit the throttles, then powered past the Blue Goose, apparently going on to Newport. 

“Man,” Huck said, “did you see the guns on that thing?”

Hank nodded. “I think they run into a lot of bad shit out there.”

“Like what?”

Hank shrugged. “Emergencies, drug smugglers, that kind of stuff.”

“Looks like fun.”

Hank nodded. “Check ‘em out sometime. They drop by the boatyard every now and then, too. Bud always takes time to fix coffee for them.”

“Really? Why?”

“He’s in the Coast Guard Auxiliary, helps them set up training exercises, all kinds of stuff. He says without the Coast Guard his business probably wouldn’t exist.”

Huck nodded. “Yeah, I can see that.” He leaned over and looked at the display, then pointed at some numbers. “Is that how far we’ve gone, and how far it is to Newport?”

“Yup, 2.8 miles to go. You stand at the wheel, let me know if any boats come near us.”

“Gotta take a leak?”

“Systems checks, look at the bilge and the drivetrain.”

Huck nodded then stood beside the wheel, staring at the autopilot controls and the radar display. “So many things to learn,” he mumbled.

“And unlearn,” Hank said, poking his head up the companionway – before disappearing again.

Huck laughed, because he thought Hank looked like a turtle with his headed popping up and down like that. 

A half hour later the Blue Goose pulled alongside the guest docks at the Newport Yacht Club, and the boys’ fathers were waiting there to take their lines. Bud was taking pictures, of course, and Hank had no doubt that the images would show up in the company newsletter next month…

+++++

They left Newport at four-forty the next morning, and the Blue Goose cleared Goat Island before sailing through the East Passage and along Aquidneck Island before reaching Long Island Sound. Hank had already programmed the route into the autopilot and all he had to do was hit ‘Engage’ and the boat made a gentle turn to starboard, to their right, then he reached inside and powered up the winch on the coachroof and hoisted the main out of the furling boom. Huck watched the sail run up the mast in awe. Then Hank set the traveler and unfurled the staysail, then the yankee, and the Blue Goose just settled into her groove and scooted along. The wind – and it was wind, not a breeze – was coming out of the northwest at 18 knots…according to the local NOAA weather radio broadcasts, anyway, but the onboard display of apparent wind was showing a solid 22 knots – with occasional gusts to 28. 

And Bud knew that once the Goose cleared Point Judith, Hank’s little sailboat was going to get slammed by that wind.

And this would be Hank’s first real test of seamanship on a ship of his own. But seamanship, Bud knew, wasn’t just about skills and strength, it was also a measure of knowledge and judgment. He knew Hank, or at least he was pretty sure he did, but you never really could tell until someone was tested by the sea.

Because the sea never suffers fools. Gladly or otherwise.

+++++

The NOAA weather radio frequency on the VHF radio hooked to Bud’s belt hissed and popped, and he pulled the radio out of its holster and brought it up to his ear.

“The national weather service has issued a small craft warning for Long Island Sound, including the waters of Block Island Sound, Buzzards Bay, and Vineyard Sound. Small craft are advised against using these waterways until 1700 hours. Mariners should exercise caution if transiting these waters, and be alert for vessels in distress by monitoring VHF channel 16 and reporting any mishaps to the Coast Guard…”

“Well…damn,” Bud sighed.

“Shouldn’t we call Hank?” Carter asked, now clearly anxious.

“Hank knows what to do,” Bud sighed. 

“What does that mean?”

“If he’s not comfortable he’ll turn around, and if he decides to press on…well, we’ll need to be there when they reach the dock. Won’t we, Henry?”

Henry nodded, but in truth he was a little rattled. His boy was, after all, twelve years old – and this was his first real trip on the Goose, too. “Should we go ahead and get on the ferry?”

Bud nodded. “If we need to get back in a hurry I can arrange that over there.” He took out his iPhone and called his friend at the Castle Hill Coast Guard Station and spoke for a minute of two. He hung up and smiled, then turned to Carter. “They’re doing fine. The Coast Guard patrol boat has them in sight and they report the wind isn’t real bad right now…”

+++++

“Goddamnitttofuckinghell,” Huck screamed as a 12 foot wave broke over the Goose’s bow, “what’s the wind doing now?”

“Thirty one, just had a gust hit forty.”

“Fuckme!”

Hank leaned over the transom and engaged the Hydrovane self-steering gear then set the angle on the vane. When he thought it looked good he turned off the autopilot then watched the Goose round up into the wind. He furled the main a little more and then rolled-in the staysail a foot or so; the big yankee was already furled – yet the Goose still had a lot of weather helm – so he eased the traveler a little more and watched the Hydrovane settle down, and he nodded at that. The Goose started tracking like a freight train, the Hydrovane holding her course better than the autopilot had.

He turned just in time to see Huck blowing beets into the water, then he turned away and shook his head. He really hated that smell…

+++++

The skipper of the ferry from Newport to Block Island was reluctant, to say the least, about making the trip this morning, but reluctance wasn’t in his job description. Businesses on the island depended on him to bring not only tourists but everything else, from the mail to the groceries needed to restock the local market’s shelves. Canceling wasn’t something the company did often, and it wasn’t quite bad enough out there – yet – to do that. The trouble was…he knew that in an hour or so conditions out there would get so bad that the Maydays would start jamming up the VHF, and then the Coast Guard would have its hands full with rescues the rest of the day. And besides, he didn’t need fifty seasick passengers barfing all over his boat.

+++++

The Goose was in Rhode Island Sound now, about a mile off Scarborough Hills approaching Point Judith, and Hank had his eye on the lighthouse one minute and breaking waves the next. Huck was hanging on for dear life now, clearly terrified and literally almost green with seasickness. He adjusted the Hydrovane so she steered a little more to port, then he pulled up the AIS and looked at the traffic on the far side of the point. There was rapidly shoaling water all around the point but the tide was approaching slack and the wind almost calm so close to shore.

“What did you do?” Huck asked.

“About what?”

“It seems smoother now.”

Hank nodded. I cut in a little closer to shore, keep us out of the wind a little longer. Once we clear the point that’ll change, and it’s going to get real nasty.”

“You mean…worse? Again?”

“You wanna go back?”

Huck seemed to think about that for a moment, then he shook his head. “Not unless you do.”

He saw the ferry pop up on the AIS and wondered if his father and grandfather had decided against coming…

+++++

“Where’s Carter?” Bud asked as he handed his son a cup of coffee.

Henry pointed at the rail, to Carter Ash heaving his guts into the sea.

“What a waste of good pancakes,” Bud chuckled. “Whoa! Man, he looks like the great white whale!”

“Thar she blows,” Henry said with a flourish.

+++++

Hank peered through the binoculars and was pretty sure he had the Red number 2 buoy, marking the shoals off Point Judith, in sight, so he adjusted his course again, falling further off the wind. The boat’s motion eased again and Huck moaned his approval. Hank looked at his watch and noted the time, almost ten in the morning, then he looked across at the ferry. It looked like half the passengers were hurling over the rail and he grinned.

+++++

“Damn, I haven’t seen this much garp since I was a middie,” Henry snarked. 

“Gawd, I hate that smell,” a woman behind them sighed…before she too made a mad dash for the rail.

“Almost made it,” Bud said. “Well, it’ll wash out.”

+++++

Hank checked the tide for mid channel: it showed .14 kts, 76 degrees, Ebb decreasing, so the tide was almost running with the wind, but not quite. The tide was coming out of the west and the wind out of the northwest, and the confluence of forces was creating a nasty chop. The Goose had a fine entry and was cleaving the waves, but the swell was another matter. The boat was rolling now as ten foot swells came out of the west, mixing with the five foot waves coming out of the northwest, and soon even Hank was beginning to feel a little queasy.

So he concentrated on watching the horizon, then looking at the chartplotter. “Less than 7 miles now, Huck. You hanging in there?”

“Yeah. Never better.”

+++++

Carter came over and sat beside Bud. “Man, that was embarrassing,” he groaned.

“Embarrassing?” Bud said. “Hell, son, half the people on this tub are flashing hash right now. That’s nothing to be embarrassed about…”

“Oh yeah? Look at my shoes?”

Bud looked, then shook his head. “That woman standing next to you had pretty poor aim, I reckon.”

“They sell Dramamine at the snack bar,” Henry said helpfully. “They’re right next to the hot dogs.”

Carter blinked rapidly then stifled a heave – before sprinting to the rail again.

“Damn, Henry. That was just plain mean.”

“I know. Ain’t life grand?”

Someone somewhere farted and a fresh wave of stench washed over the remaining passengers; this soon caused another massive dash for the rails. 

“Damn, this is fun,” Bud said as he showed Henry the can of fart spray he’d purchased online.

“You did that?” Henry whispered.

“Hell yeah.”

“Do it again…”

+++++

The VHF hissed and popped, and Hank leaned forward to tune out the noise with the squelch knob…

“Help us, someone, please help us…”

It was a girl’s voice, a little girl’s voice. He picked up the mic and keyed the microphone. “Sailing vessel Blue Goose to vessel in distress, say again?”

“Help us…my daddy fell off the boat…”

“Blue Goose, Blue Goose, this is Coast Guard Station Point Judith, are you picking up a distress call.”

“Affirmative, Coast Guard. A little girl says her father is overboard and in the water.”

“Coast Guard, roger, she must be transmitting on low power, which means they’re probably close to you.”

“Blue Goose, got it. Will check now.”

Hank picked up his binoculars and swept methodically from due south to west, then back to due south. Then from our north to west, and back. Finally…something caught his eye.

“Coast Guard, Blue Goose, I have them, compass bearing 2-6-0 from my present location, and no more than a mile out. We’re turning that way now.”

“Goose, understood, we have you on AIS but don’t show anyone else in that area.”

“Coast Guard, Goose, looks like a 24 foot center console, one outboard. White hull, light blue canvas, and I have a solid radar return on them now. Showing 2-6-3 degrees and 1500 yards.”

“Roger, Goose. We have a helicopter refueling right now. They’ll be airborne in one zero minutes, ETA your location two five minutes.”

“Goose, understood.”

Hank turned on the Yanmar and sheeted-in the staysail, then completely furled his main.

“Huck, you with me?”

“Never left, Dude.”

“Remember this?” he said, pointing to the LifeSling on the stern pulpit. 

“Yup. I watched the YouTube video, too.”

“Okay, our first priority is to look for the man in the water, and I need your eyes for that, okay?”

“Got it.”

“When we see him we deploy the sling and get the line to the winch on the coachroof, then we’ll pull him in and help him up.”

“Just like a fish, right?”

“Yup. But Huck, look, you may need to go over to the other boat. Understand…?”

“You mean jump over?”

Hank shrugged. “Before you do anything, remember the most important rule out here?”

“Always keep one hand on the ship?”

“Right. Whatever you do, you hang on with one hand…to anything. You need an extra hand, ask me for help, but don’t let go of the ship. We don’t need two people in the water, okay?”

Huck nodded. “Got it.”

Hank looked at the boat, saw a little girl pointing to her left and he swung the binoculars in that direction…

“Coast Guard, Goose, I have a visual on one man in the water. Proceeding to his location.”

“Coast Guard received. Uh, Goose, would you activate the distress button on your VHF?”

“Affirmative. Activated.”

“Okay Goose, we have your lat-lon now, forwarding to the helo.”

“Hank, that dude is in fucking bad shape. He can’t even raise an arm.”

“Hypothermia. Water temp, Huck. It’s 52 degrees in there. Okay…hang on, big wave!”

A fifteen footer broke over the Goose’s bow and she fell off to port after the remains of the wave rolled under into her; Hank struggled to get her back on course and Huck came over to help.

“Thanks, shipmate,” he sighed as they got the boat pointed in the right direction again.

“Hey…no problemo, amigo.”

“You taking Spanish?”

“No way, Dude. Terminator 2!”

“Oh yeah. Hasta la vista, baby. Got it.” He had the man in constant sight now and adjusted his course to the left in order to circle around him. “Okay Huck, time to get ready. Pull the red tab on the flap there, then the sling will fall out into your hand. When he’s right by us throw the rope right in front of him…”

“Okay. Got it.”

“Okay, get ready.” Hank heard the velcro release and wiped some salt spray from his eyes, then focused on the man in the water. When he was right alongside, Huck tossed the line into the water and Hank swung the wheel hard to starboard to circle the man, then he cut power and slipped the transmission into neutral and began drifting down towards the man.

“Okay,” Huck cried, “he’s got the line!”

Hank leapt forward and got three wraps in the electric winch then began reeling the line in. “Huck! The boarding ladder! Drop it and let’s see if he can climb up!”

Huck hopped over to the folding ladder stowed over the starboard boarding gate and pulled the release; the gate dropped into the water with a loud splash. 

“Huck…I need to steer right now, just keep pulling him until he reaches the gate.”

“Right. Got it, but man, this dude must weigh a ton!”

“Don’t get hung up in the rope!”

“Okay…he’s at the ladder, but Hank…he can’t do it…he’s got nothing left!”

“Okay…keep the line from fouling and I’ll try the winch again…oh crap…Huck! Hang on…big wave coming…”

+++++

“Blue Goose, Blue Goose, this is the U. S. Coast Guard. Are you receiving my transmission?”

+++++

Hank lifted his head, saw Huck in the water and the man drifting out of reach. Then he heard the Coast Guard.

“No time…” he said as he ran to the wheel and slipped the transmission into forward. He turned the boat around and went for Huck first, then he pulled the sling in, coiling the rope for another throw. Once he was on top of Huck he tossed the line and Huck grabbed it; Hank pulled him right over to the ladder and then right up on deck – in one fluid motion, then he hopped back to the wheel and powered around to the man in the water – again. Huck resumed his station, readied the line by coiling it the same way Hank had, then he tossed it over to the man again.

Hank heard a helicopter and looked up, saw a news helicopter out of New Haven hovering overhead, their cameraman leaning out over the sea – recording everything…

“Oh, swell…” Huck sighed. “If my Mom sees this she’s gonna be so pissed!”

Hank almost laughed at that, but he was still coming down from the surge of adrenaline to do much of anything yet…

+++++

When the boys walked into the Mexican place on the island everyone inside stood and cheered. Hank shook his head. Huck looked around and smiled – when a girl smiled at him. The news crew had their lights set up and a reporter was waiting for them.

“Dad? Do I have to do this?”

“No, of course not. I can handle it for you if you like.”

Hank took a deep breath, then shook his head. “No, I guess I better handle it.”

“Okay.”

“Huck? You ready to do this?” he asked.

“Fuck yeah! You know it, Dude!”

Henry led the boys over to the waiting reporter and she asked all the obvious questions, then, as she was wrapping up the segment she asked one more question. “So, what were your two doing out there today. I mean, there was a small craft warning…”

And Huck spoke right up. “Mind if I answer this one, Hank?”

“No, fire away.”

“Hank’s been teaching me how to sail, because we’re going to cross the Atlantic in June.”

“Excuse me?” the reporter asked, her mind short-circuiting as internal fuses started blowing. “You two are going to cross the Atlantic Ocean? In that tiny boat?”

“Yes indeed, Ma’am,” Huck said, grinning from ear to ear. “We sure are. Wanna join us?”

Smoke started coming out the reporters ears. “Uh, what did…just how old are you, anyway?”

“He’s old enough to know better,” Carter Ash said, taking his boy by the hand and pulling him away from the snake pit.

“C’mon, Dad!” Huck cried. “Did you see the legs on her? Bodacious tatas too, huh?!”

Hank buried his face in his hands…but suddenly the room was knocked flat by the stench of an overpowering fart.

Hank looked around for Bud or his dad, then he finally saw them laughing as they walked out the restaurant’s back door.

+++++

Judy Stone spent several hours on the used 28 the very next weekend, going over the boat with the marine surveyor she’d hired to inspect the boat. Bud remained down on the dock, talking with Emily and Hank while the surveyor went over all the ship’s systems one by one, taking notes and snapping images on his phone. The surveyor wrapped up his inspection and told her he’d have a written report to her in three days, but that the boat was in perfect shape.

“I hate to say this, but all Bud’s boats are like this. People take care of them, and I guess because Bud took care of them when they were buying the boat. They’re almost always like this, too. Just about perfect.”

“So no flaws?”

“Nope. None. The seller is asking a fair price, too.”

“Okay, so I’m good to close?”

“Yes, Ma’am, that’s what my report will say.”

“Okay. Thanks, Jim.”

Once the surveyor had left the boat Bud climbed onboard, then Emily and Hank came up.

“Well,” Bud asked. “What’s the verdict.”

“Five out of five,” Judy said, beaming. “When can we close?”

Bud smiled. “Any time is fine. When do you want me to start on the work?”

“Yesterday too soon?”

“Okay. Understood. Soon as we get the paperwork we’ll get going on her.”

Hank looked at Judy and wondered what was going through her mind. Whatever it was, he knew it wasn’t good, but it probably wouldn’t turn out good for anybody.

© 2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | and this is a work of fiction, plain and simple. We’ll be back soon with, I hope, the final chapter. Stay warm, and adios.

Ah well, here we are at another Christmas…and so…what else is there to do? I will wish you a very Merry Christmas, and hope the coming year brings a fair measure happiness your way.

I have a few pieces of music in mind for you today. I have been listening to Pat Metheny’s The Lore all week, a compilation of works spanning decades and that makes for a perfect backdrop to writing a story – or getting a turkey ready to roast. I have to assume it will work for reading a story or two, as well. If so, you might linger on The First Circle, It’s For You, or even Barcarole. The Beatles Now and Then keeps popping up in my thoughts, which takes me to George Harrison’s When We Was Fab. That, for no reason that I can discern, carries me right on over to River Man, by Nick Drake, which takes me to In Places On The Run, by The Dream Academy. If you really want to go all 80s on Christmas Day, nothing will do that better than A Mannheim Steamroller Christmas. If a 60s Christmas is more your thing, throw away your Bing Crosby or Nat King Cole and put on the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas. And have a sip of Drambuie for me, would you?

And now, let’s see where Hank takes us – this time.

The Blue Goose

Part Four

Winters in the Upper Valley tend to be bleak – in the extreme. The cold comes early in autumn  and lasts well into spring, and because it is a valley the air does get very cold. Actually, really very cold. So cold that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers located their Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory there, on the highway leading north from Hanover, New Hampshire. The sky seems to turn the color of lead in November and then remains that way until summer. When the first snows arrive in late October, long after summer’s lush green veneer has given way to reds and golds, the snow drapes the landscape in chaste shades of white, and the blue hour that arrives each evening seems to welcome the coming holidays. Yet by the time Thanksgiving and Christmas have come and gone for the year, even the snow has changed. It has turned from white to dirty gray. Snow plowed from streets and highways lines the pavement in chest high piles covered in road salt and oily grime. Driving around the towns and villages of the Upper Valley becomes an exercise in emotional futility.

At least that was Judy Stone’s version of winter.

Her days were filled with an endless parade of professors and students and desperate housewives coming to talk to her about the endless fugue of life in this gray-sheathed void of a town. She wrote out scrips for anti-depressants at the end of each appointment, and it seemed like the longer winter endured the deeper her patients’ depressions became. Yet every now and then she took on a new patient that broke the cycle. Someone who was profoundly ill. And right now that someone was Elizabeth Langston.

She had just spent the entire day at Mass Gen, on the third floor of the Wang Center in their psych ward, observing Elizabeth. She had noted, as her other physicians had, the sudden, dramatic improvement in her mental state after treatment, only to look on helplessly as an immense black hole returned and swallowed her whole. Within two hours of her ninth electro-convulsive therapy session, Elizabeth slid deep inside winter’s shades of blue and gray, and she did not return. Judy stayed until five in the afternoon and all afternoon she had watched the veil return, watched the light fading from Elizabeth’s eyes.

This descent was hard to take, and all the more so as Stone had so little frame of reference.

Elizabeth wasn’t simply manifesting severe depression; no, there were elements of a psychotic break interlaced within this depression, but ECT should have knocked them both back more than it had. Her delusional architecture, this thing about her son drowning and being saved by his pet goose, almost fit the circumstances. Almost, but not quite. Hank drowning might symbolically represent her own sense of drowning, her own psyche being smothered by her father’s predations when she was Hank’s age. But the goose? What might the goose represent inside this delusion?

She walked back to her car in the physicians lot then fought her way through Boston’s rush hour congestion on Charles Street, finally making it onto Interstate 93 north towards Concord. She had a good 90 minute drive back to the Upper Valley, and she had to admit that winters up here were really getting to her. The unrelenting grayness, the cold damp grayness of this place was beginning to feel more than oppressive.

A goose? A blue goose? 

Where did this blue goose come from? Was it a mutation, or was it a natural variation that occurred with some regularity? Emily might know…but did it really matter? The goose probably meant nothing, at least it did if it was just another feature of Elizabeth’s delusion. If that was indeed the case then Hank’s drowning had to represent something about her own childhood…but if that was the case then why did Elizabeth keep retreating back into the confines of a childhood delusion? What was keeping…no, what was holding her there? Why would she keep returning to the same delusion if not because she found comfort and solace there? But…why wouldn’t taking care of her children bring her comfort?

Her thoughts bounced between these evolving permutations all the way to Concord, but once she was on Interstate 89 heading towards Hanover it started snowing. Heavy, wet snow. The road’s surface looked black, slick and fathomless, and soon enough the pavement began disappearing under a veil of fresh, white despair. 

“You need to slow down now,” a distant voice said.

She flinched as the words washed over her, just as she recoiled from their specificity. 

The radio wasn’t on. The voice the car sometimes used to sound an alert didn’t sound at all like the voice she’d just heard. And she’d heard it, too. This wasn’t some kind of dime store hallucination. This was real. Something, or someone, had just told her to slow down…

She put both hands on the wheel and slowed down to 55 miles per hour, then 50…

“You need to slow down more,” the voice said. She jerked around, looked in the rear of her Subaru and saw there was nothing there.

“More. Slow down more. There’s an accident up ahead.”

“Alright!” she shouted. “Enough! Who the hell is this? Where are you?”

“You’ll be fine now, just stay to the right as you crest this next hill. Two people are hurt, so stay out of the road when you go to help them.”

She recognized the voice now. It was unmistakable. 

It was Henry Langston. She knew that voice…

And as soon as she crested the hill she came upon several cars and a jack-knifed moving van sprawled across the highway, a steady stream of smoke and flames coming from one of the cars. As she rolled to a stop she could already see that several people had been seriously hurt, and she pulled out her phone and called 911. She made sure her jacket was zipped then grabbed her black bag and went out into the blinding snow…

+++++

By the time Judy made it to her house in Norwich, Emily was almost frantic.

“What happened to you out there?” she cried, looking at the clock on the wall behind Judy. “It’s two in the morning, for Christ’s sake!”

So Judy told her. Everything. About Elizabeth, about the accident. About the voice that had forewarned her. Henry’s voice.

“Oh, that’s just great!” Emily moaned. “Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Judy Stone, the hallucinating shrink!”

Judy smiled. “He told me to slow down, Em. And that over the next hill there was an accident, and that it was a bad one. But here’s the thing. If I hadn’t slowed down when I did I would have plowed into all that wreckage. It was a chain reaction accident, Em, and how the hell did he know that…?”

“He didn’t, Judy, because he wasn’t there. Are we clear on that? He wasn’t there, so…”

The doorbell chimed.

Judy looked at Emily, who was dressed in her bathrobe and slippers, so she shrugged. “I guess I’ll get that,” Judy sighed.

“Are you out of your cotton-picking’s mind? It’s two in the morning, and you’re going to answer the door?”

“It’s him.”

“It’s who?”

“Henry. I know it’s him.”

“Oh, well then, why not? Sure, let’s just go with it and say it is. Then what?”

Judy shook her head and walked over to the door and looked out the peep-glass and then just shook her head as she unbolted the door.

And of course in walked Henry Langston.

Emily Stone pursed her lips and took in a deep breath, then took off for her bedroom.

“Are you alright?” Henry asked Judy. 

“How did you do that?”

“I could tell you…but I feel certain you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Go ahead. Try me.”

Henry sighed. “Damn, I thought I knew what I wanted to say, but now I’m coming up empty.”

Judy took him in hand and towed him into the living room. “Sit, please. You feel like coffee?”

“Might as well. I’m sure not going to sleep any tonight.”

She went into the kitchen and put a pod in the coffeemaker and got two cups ready, then as soon as Emily reappeared – now dressed – she got a third cup ready to go. When she made it back to the living room she handed a cup to Emily and another to Henry, then she went back for her own.

But Emily wasn’t having any of it. No, not at all.

“Judy tells me you warned her about some accident on the highway tonight?”

Henry nodded. “I did. Yes.”

Emily’s eyes narrowed. “Care to tell us how you pulled that off?” she asked, as Judy came into the living room and sat.

“I need to ask Judy something first.”

Judy shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”

“What did Liz tell you today, after the procedure?”

“I don’t know, Henry. Why don’t you tell me?”

He nodded, looked down and steepled his hands. “She saw Hank. Hank and Gertrude, right?”

Judy flinched again. “How could you possibly know that?” She looked at Henry, then at Emily. 

Emily Stone was pale now, and suddenly didn’t feel good.

“Did she tell you that Gertrude was with him?” he asked again.

“Yes. Why?”

“Because we can’t find her. The goose, I mean. She was with Hank down at my father’s house, and then…”

“Down in Rhode Island, right?” Judy said, confused.

Henry nodded. “Yup. Down near Newport.”

“On the water? Is Hank sailing?”

“Yes, but he’s not there right now. He’s – elsewhere.”

Emily’s brow furrowed. “Sailing? In this weather? Henry, that’s a nor’easter blowing out there! You’re not saying your boy is out sailing in this storm…?”

“Not this one, no, but Judy, Liz said the goose was with Hank, right?”

She nodded. “She did. Now, you want to tell me how you knew that wreck was on the highway?”

Henry downed his coffee and stood. “Sorry, but I’ve got to run.”

Judy stood and blocked his way, and she was shaking her head. “No, not until you’ve answered my question.”

Henry sighed. “I’ve got to get down to Newport, now. If you want answers, you’ll need to come with me.”

Emily stood too. “If she goes, I go.”

Henry shrugged. “You better pack a suitcase. We might be gone for a while. And, while I’m thinking about it…do you have a good medical kit you could bring along…?”

“My bag. Will that do?”

“Could you get a couple of bags of saline and maybe some D5W, and bring a couple of sets to start IVs.”

“Uh…why?” Judy sighed, suddenly feeling small.

“In case we need to set fractures or something.”

Judy put her hands on her hips, her lower lip jutted in a display of incredulity. “At your father’s house? Really?”

“And maybe put on some clothes you don’t mind getting…soiled,” he added – with a sly grin.

Judy looked at Henry, now totally confused, then she looked to Emily for reassurance, and finally she just shook her head, not at all sure what to do. 

So Emily went to get all the supplies Henry had asked for, even if some of the things she brought along were meant for dogs and cats…

+++++

Judy could hardly keep her eyes open; Emily was sound asleep by her side, snoring gently. Henry was behind the wheel, the two women were in the rear seat of his Land Rover and Hank’s dog Daisy was sitting up front beside Henry. 

She looked out the window, at the unremitting grayness of the passing Connecticut landscape. There was snow on the ground here too, of course, but nowhere near as much as there was in Norwich, yet it just didn’t matter; one foot of snow, or ten, the gray was the same. Relentlessly empty, and she thought the bleak gray-black of sunrise was worst of all. ‘Why am I so depressed,’ she asked as Henry passed another snow plow grinding along over in the far right lane. ‘Ya know, I don’t think I’ve ever been so depressed. Is it Henry? Does he depress me? Or is it…Emily?’

She and Emily had started out as friends but after a few months together the relationship had changed into – something else. Their time together had at first turned soft, then over a long weekend more intimate, yet in truth it had been a gradual thing, they’re coming together. Emily had told her once that she had never thought of herself as gay or straight…that she just…was. She had never been physically attracted to anyone, and had never wanted to share her life with…anyone. She had always been quite comfortable being on her own and she told Judy that between her patients and her staff she simply had never felt alone.

That had all changed after she met Judy. It wasn’t an overwhelming attraction, Emily had implied, it was more a yearning for connection and, ultimately, the comfort of knowing someone was at home waiting for her at the end of the day. Funny, Judy thought, how things like that come about. Judy was a workaholic and sixteen hour days were the norm. She came home and had a snack then went to bed, while Emily usually caught up with her veterinarian journals, often reading past midnight. Yet the brief intimacy they shared had flared brightly but had simmered unattended in the years since.

Yet Judy now felt herself slipping into this bleak, gray landscape, her sense of self disappearing inside what was beginning to feel like a soul-sucking icy-gray landscape of barren trees and broken dreams. She knew her life looked great from someone standing on the outside, but from in here she felt like she was circling the drain. When she thought about it, every one of her colleagues in the department felt pretty much the same way…like dealing with other people’s emotional lives, and the endlessly complex dead-end emotional landscapes her patients found themselves in, was sapping her own sense of self, draining her appetite for life. And Emily wasn’t helping matters. Emily wanted physical intimacy, and Judy was beginning to realize that she wanted nothing to do with her, not in bed, not even around the house. So, had she found her very own dead end, or was she just drifting through the doldrums of middle age? Could they rekindle what they’d once had, or was the end in sight?

Or, as she had long felt, did it really matter anymore?

Some people seemed born with a happiness gene, and then, she thought, there were the rest of us. The ones who called for appointments, looking for a way out from under the oppressive bleakness of another day.

Then there were people like Henry…who just didn’t seem to give a damn about happiness, one way or another. He was all about duty. Duty, and honor. To his family. Was that the key? The secret to lasting happiness? Was keeping your nose to the grindstone and making sure your family went on into the future…was that it? Because if that was indeed true…well then, she was fucked. Family had never seemed all that important to her, and now more than ever.

The landscape outside this car bore all the hallmarks of futility, too. Of futile lives doing…

“Stop it!” she sighed, bunched up inside like she wanted to cry.

“Stop what?” Henry said.

“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking…”

“And you need to stop? What’s got you down?”

“What makes you think I’m down?”

“Well, for one thing, the frown, no, it’s more like a scowl, on your face. The same face I put on after after a really bad day in the classroom.”

“Really? Physics professors have bad days? I had no idea…”

“Oh, sure. Try teaching remedial calculus to someone who made it through high school with inflated grades and who scored a few points with the admissions committee by being a legacy ‘with a bright future’… That’s about half my students, by the way. They’ve never heard of a quadratic equation and never heard of Pythagorean geometry, and they show up in a class where three years of calculus used to be the norm and before they know it they’re failing. But Judy, that’s when the real fun begins. The calls from their father come first. If that doesn’t work, the department chair calls next, then the Dean, and before you know it the president of the college is holding on line 2. ‘You can’t flunk so-and-so’s kid, Henry! It’ll cost us millions in future endowments!’ That’s when I reach into the top drawer of your desk and pop a Maalox, then come to the conclusion that you are in real need of a career change…”

“I guess we all have our problems.”

“That’s about all you deal with, isn’t it? Other peoples problems, I mean.”

She nodded. 

“And that’s what you were thinking about, wasn’t it?”

“So, you’re a mind reader, too?”

He chuckled. “I have two daughters, so of course I read minds.”

She smiled. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Oh, so now I hear regret, too. Judy, are you doing okay?”

“Sometimes it feels that way. Regret, I mean.”

“You could adopt?”

“I suppose, but that’s not the same, is it?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know about that. Raising kids is all about the love. Everything else flows from that.”

“Is that the voice of experience talking?”

“No. That’s my parents talking.”

“That’s what they…what you took from them?”

“Yup.”

“You’re lucky, Henry. You don’t know how lucky you really are…”

“And that’s why I said what I said, Judy. Any problems you have with kids…you just have to handle the situation with love. Or maybe put it another way. Do unto others usually works out for everybody, but with your kids you have to do that with love in your heart.”

‘And you’re naive,’ she wanted to say. Life can’t be boiled down into such a simplistic outlook. That was not just unrealistic, it could lead to lasting pain and damage. Or…am I wrong…? She saw his eyes in the rearview mirror – but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Emily right now. And she just knew he was reading her mind. He had to be. How else had he…spoken to her last night, on the Interstate?

She didn’t even want to admit that something as crazy as that had happened, yet it had. And she wasn’t finding any answers right now, especially not from him. So far he had evaded her every question, and adroitly, too. Just like he had done all this before, and probably more than once. Yet he was promising resolution, wasn’t he? All the answers to her questions. Down here, at his father’s house…at his family’s boatyard…by the sea…

+++++

And, of course, Henry’s father was out front, waiting. For them. But…how did he know they were coming? Henry hadn’t called, or had he?

But that blue goose was out there with the old man, too. Gertrude? Her name was Gertrude. ‘But…who names a goose Gertrude?’

Bud went right to Emily’s door to open it, and his smile was warm and welcoming – yet there was something more in his eyes. Was that a wry – if knowing twinkle…? Like someone in on the joke, perhaps?

Henry went around to get Judy’s door, and he held out his hand to help her down onto the snow covered driveway, and she saw the same knowing twinkle in his eye, too. What was going on? What were these two up to…?

“Henry? You look like you could use some sleep.” Bud shook his head as he shrugged, going around to get luggage from the year of the car. “You’re too old to pull all nighters, you know?”

“Et tu, Brutus,” Henry replied.

Bud had a good laugh at that. “Well played, Julius. Well played.” Bud turned from Henry and started for the house – but as Judy watched all this, the goose flew up and landed on the old man’s shoulder – and she stayed there as he walked across the boatyard’s parking lot and into his house.

“A tame goose?” she muttered under her breath. “Why not, ya know? Why the fuck not…”

Henry heard that and chuckled. “Sometimes nothing’s as it first appears,” he said – to both Emily and Judy.

“I thought your dad was married?” Emily asked, wondering why Bud was alone.

“He is. My mom is staying with Hannah and Jennifer while Liz is away, so don’t be shocked if the kitchen isn’t gleaming.”

But of course the kitchen in Bud’s house was gleaming, ready for a general inspection by the the ship’s commanding officer. He had pancake batter whipped up and bacon draining on paper towels and was already working the griddle, pouring cakes and warming plates.

Judy looked around the house – yet more by way of professional assessment than idle curiosity. One of the first thing that happens to people experiencing a mental health crisis, whether acute or chronic, is the ability to take care of themselves – and their surroundings – and this shows up as anything from clothes scattered one the floor to dishes piled up in the kitchen sink…

Yet this house was spotless. Much of the furniture in the house looked like it had been built on-site, and everything had a distinct nautical flair, but especially this kitchen. 

“What kind of wood is this,” Emily asked as she ran a hand over the grain of a cabinet door.

“Burmese teak. The boys and I made these cabinets back in the 70s, before all the rampant deforestation began. There’s not a more elegant wood in the world, not when it’s maintained correctly.”

“Did you varnish it?” she asked.

“Hand rubbed with teak oil, about ten coats when they were first built, and I hit ‘em with lemon oil every month or so. The trick is to oil all the surfaces, inside the cabinet and out. Teak will literally last forever if you do that. Something to do with the crystalline nature of the fibers.”

Henry chimed in now. “Do you still bring clients in here? To show them the woodwork?”

“Oh, absolutely. This is the same cabinetry we put in all our boats, and when a buyer takes one look at this work, well…they’re sold. The stuff going in new boats these days is all veneer cut on a computer controlled milling machine. Those boats have no soul, and that crap will fall apart in a year or two.”

Judy opened a cabinet door and looked at the workmanship, guessing it took someone a few hours just to assemble this one door. She was wrong. It often took three people an entire day to cut down the raw lumber, plane it to perfection, then measure and cut – before assembly even began. After that, fitting the hinges and routing the slides, then getting the first two coats of oil on. Every joint on every bit of woodwork on one of Bud’s boats was glued and screwed, and there wasn’t a nail gun anywhere to be found in his boatyard.

“How many carpenters do you have working for you?” Judy asked.

“None. Everyone here works on every part of a boat during the construction process. We don’t build twenty boats a month, we build twenty a year so there’s no way to have teams with different skillsets. Funny thing, too. Most of my guys have been working with us for around twenty years, a few a lot more than that.”

“So any one of your employees can make furniture of this quality?”

Bud nodded. “Yup. And an hour later he – or she – might be wiring a circuit breaker panel or welding stainless steel. With a low volume business like this one, there’s no way to employ hundreds of people, and when you’re focusing on build quality there’s no way you can outsource critical components, so when we take someone on here they’re essentially starting a years long training program, learning all the skills they’ll need to do the job.”

“How many people do you hire every year?”

Bud chuckled. “Oh, maybe one person every three or four years, Ms. Stone, but it’s probably less than that. In the last twenty years no one’s quit or moved on to another job. We replace people only when they decide to retire. If somebody gets dissatisfied with the conditions here I like to find out why and fix the problem.”

“So you know everyone’s name?”

Bud laughed at that one. “I know their wives names, their kids, their dogs. I know most of their birthdays, and I know their retirement goals, too. It’s a part of my job to see that my guys retire with dignity, that they can go out there and do the things they’ve wanted to do.”

“Amazing,” Emily sighed.

Bud shrugged. “I’m not going to preach, not going to say that’s the way it should be, but it is the way I was taught to run my business, and it’s the way I’m teaching Hank to treat the people here.”

Judy crossed her arms. “Speaking of Hank, Mr Langston. Where is he?”

Bud looked at his son, then at the pancakes on the griddle. He turned one then shook his head. “Damn near burned that one,” he sighed. “Oh, well, got to concentrate better…”

Henry spoke next. “I told you; he’s out sailing right now.”

“Surely not around here?” Emily said. “Not in this blizzard…”

“No, not here,” Bud sighed. “I believe he’s somewhere on the North Sea, about a hundred and forty miles east of Aberdeen.”

“You mean he sailing off the coast of Scotland? In the middle of winter?” Judy snarled.

“It’s not winter when he is,” Bud said with a grin.

“Not winter there? How is that ev…wait a…wait a minute. You said when he is, not where he is. What’s that supposed to mean?”

Bud turned to Judy and shrugged. “So, will two pancakes do ya, or are you a three pancake kinda gal…?”

+++++

There was a book on the table in the breakfast room off the kitchen, but Bud and Henry ignored it while they ate. Judy fidgeted, still not sure what these two clowns were up to but absolutely sure they were about to play a joke on them. And that crap about fractures and a medical kit…? These two were world class con-artists! 

Then Bud stood and began clearing their plates from the table, and it seemed to Judy that Henry joined him automatically, picking up their plates and taking them to the kitchen, and  then working together the two cleaned the kitchen and got the dishes in the dishwasher. Very practiced, very much a team effort. And with nothing said between them.

But when the two men came back to the table their demeanors had changed. They were no longer pleasant. Bud was no longer smiling. Henry almost looked somber – even though he had to be beyond tired. But they both sat down, then Bud picked up the book in the center of the table.

“This is a logbook from a voyage my great-great-grandfather made in 1821 on a ship called Pegasus, and he went from Hull, on Britain’s east coast, to Bergen, in Norway, then on to the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, which Henry, my relative, refers to in the log as the City of the Seven Towers, although he – infrequently – refers to it in the German, Stadt der Sieben Türme. Incidentally, Lübeck was called this because of seven large church spires in the main part of the city, not that this tidbit is of much relevance right now.

“Pegasus was carrying goods between these cities, and after leaving Lübeck, the ship returned to Bergen before sailing south for London. Not quite halfway into this last part of the voyage, the ship was overtaken by a large storm system, which Henry describes in these pages as a white squall, which is a type of line squall. These storms move across the sea like a hand pushing a wall of wind and water at high velocities, and when they first appear sailors see only this wall of white mist approaching. The storm hits with extraordinary strength, and captains who are aware of these approaching storms get all their sails down, then prepare the crew to prepare for extreme angles of heel, which often occurs as the storm hits. Large sailing ships were most effected by these types of storms because of the windage created by their large masts and yards, and of course all the rigging associated with holding up these spars. When such a wind catches a sailboat unawares the consequences are immediate, and usually lethal; when an knowledgeable skipper notes the storm’s approach and is able to adequately prepare his ship before the storm hits, it is possible to survive one of these storms.

“I’d like you to read the day’s entries in this logbook, made on the day when Pegasus encountered such a storm, then we’ll go and take a look at the real life consequences of one of these squalls.”

Bud passed the log to Judy, and the book was already open to the page that began the day’s notations.

Judy held the book open and Emily scooted her chair close to Judy’s so they could read the passage together. It took them no more than a minute to get through Henry’s stilted wording.

“What’s a topsail?” Judy asked.

“Ah. On a square rigged ship, the sails on the main spars are furled and flown from a yard, a horizontal spar attached to the spar, or mast. The topsail is flown from the highest yard on a spar.”

“And a gaff?” Emily asked.

“On the mizzen mast, the mast furthest aft, a mainsail is usually flown, as opposed to a sail unfurled from a yard. A mainsail looks like that,” Bud said, pointing to a painting on the wall of a Langston 43. “It’s the tall, triangular sail behind the mast. A gaff rigged main is trapezoidal in shape, and the gaff is a short spar that holds the mainsail aloft from above the sail, and it is adjusted vertically to change the shape of the sail to suit the current condition of the wind. By the way, the gaff is attached to it’s mast by an iron ring.”

Judy shrugged. “Okay. What’s all this have to do with Hank?”

Bud stood, then so did Henry. “Let’s get your gear,” Bud said, suddenly smiling again, “and take a little trip…”

Henry carried their duffels to, of all things…a bathroom. Bud stood by the sink with Gertrude on his shoulder again, and as the women came into the small room they looked seriously unsettled. Judy was now expecting the worst…

“Now,” Bud said, “if you wouldn’t mind, have a look in the mirror – and tell me what you see…”

+++++

For some reason, Judy looked into Gertrude’s eyes. She was still on Bud’s shoulder, but she had just caught the goose staring at her…

And so, of course, she stared in the goose’s eyes.

And so, into the blackness she saw inside those eyes…

…and then she felt her world collapsing…

…she had no idea why, but for a moment she thought she was being swept away then inside a black hole, that she had been caught in the outer reaches of the intense gravitational pull and was now swirling away into oblivion, yet dissolving inside Gertrude’s eyes…

And a moment later she felt herself adrift, adrift in endless black. Not just dark, but an infinite black. And she wanted to scream – but who would hear it if she did? This was absolute nothingness. Infinite nothingness. And she was alone, inside…nothingness. And then she realized she had been afraid of just this moment – her entire life.

She drifted there for days, or perhaps weeks. Or maybe it was just a minute.

‘Time can’t exist in nothingness. But…neither can I…’

And that thought scared her most of all.

Then…a sound.

Like a hand on a doorknob. Turning a doorknob.

A door opening. The creaking of an old, disused wooden door swinging open. A sound as lonely as nothingness, yet in a way full of lingering hope. 

But there was no light, no form in the darkness. Only nothingness…

…yet she heard footsteps. Footsteps in this darkness, in this infinite nothingness.

Then…a man. An old man. Very old. And yet he looked…familiar.

Like an old Jewish man, almost like…Albert Einstein, or the actor who played the professor in that movie…the one with Klatu and Gort…and Patricia Neal…

She remembered the movie, and the way the Patricia Neal character reacted when her boyfriend acted out of greed to betray her, to betray Klatu, and she remembered feeling that way about her own husband. All he’d been interested in was money, and all the things he’d talked about, what he wanted to do with her after they were married, had turned out to be a lie. He’d been a good liar, too, yet a liar with a black heart. As black as nothingness.

She’d been in her fourth year of med school when he died…

“And you came to his funeral,” she said to the man standing there inside her nothingness. “Didn’t you?”

“So. You remember me?”

“You were my grandfather.”

The old man smiled. “It’s nice to be remembered.”

“You can’t be real.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Because you died. I was there. I was with you when you died.”

“I remember when you whispered in my ear. What you said to me. ‘Thanks for always being there.’ You don’t know how much those words meant to me.”

“I always loved you, you know? Even more than Dad.”

He smiled. “What are you afraid of, Judy?”

“This. Darkness. Nothingness.”

“Is that so?”

“What? What do you mean by that?”

He smiled. “Isn’t that what you call resistance? Changing the subject. Words used to conceal your real answer, the real truth. Do you remember, when you were four years old when Jamie Weiss took your tricycle away from you and hid it in his parent’s garage. Remember how much you hated him?”

“He was a bully. Everyone on our street hated him.”

“You were afraid of him, too, weren’t you?”

She nodded. “Yes. I was afraid.”

“And you’ve been afraid of bullies like Jamie ever since. Is that why you’re afraid of Henry?”

“Maybe.”

“Is he a bully?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Why? Because he’s a man? And every man you’ve ever known has been a bully?”

“Maybe?”

“Judy, isn’t that answer just another form of resistance?”

“How could you remember that? With Jamie. You weren’t even there?”

And in an instant the old man resolved into a woman, a middle aged woman in a gingham dress, wearing an apron. 

“Mom? Mom, is that you?”

“You came home with a strawberry on your knee that day, too. Do you remember? When Jamie pushed you down, after he stole your tricycle?”

Judy nodded as tears started rolling down her cheeks. “You made it all better. You always made it all better. You always made the pain go away.”

“You always felt pain,” her mother sighed. “Even other peoples’ pain.”

“I know.”

“But it wasn’t really pain, was it? It was fear. You were afraid.”

“I was. Yes, I think I’ve always been afraid of people.”

The visage of her mother wavered in the nothingness and then her grandfather reappeared.

“There, there. Was that so hard?”

“Who are you?” Judy asked.

“Who do you think I am?”

“Are you…God?”

The old man looked away, then shook his head. “Are you God?” he asked immediately?

“Me? Of course not!”

“Then how could I be God?”

“What?”

“You look inside a goose’s eye, just as you might look inside a mirror, and what do you see? Do you see God?”

“No. I see myself?”

He smiled again. “Is that something to be afraid of, Judy?”

“My own reflection? No, of course not.”

“Then don’t be afraid. Go on now, because it’s time to join your friends…”

The old man faded and another appeared. It was Bud again. Bud Langston, and he too was smiling at her…

“Are you ready now?” he asked, holding out his hand.

She reached out and took it. His flesh was warm, reassuring. Human. His grip was firm, yet friendly.

“I’m afraid,” she said.

“Sometimes life is scary, sometimes you meet mean people, but that doesn’t mean you need to be afraid.” He squeezed her hand gently as his eyes lingered in hers. “Should I take you back?”

“Back?”

“To the house. Or we can go on and join Emily and Henry.”

“Would you…would you stay with me, please?”

“Of course.”

She felt a gentle tug before the feeling of dissolution returned, before the event horizon reasserted itself, then she was inside a large sea cabin. Emily and Henry were standing there, and Em looked like she was in a state of shock. Her mouth was wide open, her body was rigid – yet her eyes were scanning her surroundings. Suspicion filled her heart, too. Judy could feel it…

And so Judy looked around too.

She saw a large desk, a few cabinets and a bookshelf. Windows, leaded glass in an arc, a gentle arc, across the back wall. She let go of Bud’s hand and walked to the windows, and then a part of her wanted to recoil from what she saw. Something like a hand, perhaps, or her grandfather’s voice. She saw the sea, which meant she was on a ship, and that the ship she was on was battling rough sees. She looked out, saw a raging wall of white mist approaching, then she heard shouting up above, like up on the deck of this boat.

Bud came to her again.

“We’ll be heeling now,” he said gently, almost warmly, “so get ready.”

Muffled cries from above, men shouting huzzahs! as someone did something heroic, and while she opened up her medical kit she realized that Henry was no longer with them…

But a minute later Hank and Henry returned, carrying a completely disheveled rodent of a man who smelled like nothing she had ever encountered before. Dirt and sweat, filth ground into the flesh, no bath in weeks, maybe months. Maybe not ever. His right ankle a mess. The flesh over his tibia had been abraded and now only bone showed. Bone, and blood.

And then her training took over. Emily’s did as well.

“Put him here, on the table,” Judy said as she went to her kit and found a bottle of sterile saline.

Emily was at Ian Nicholson’s side, examining the bone, flexing the tendons, ignoring the stench and the boy’s pain. 

Hank was holding Ian’s hand, telling him it would be alright soon, and Henry and Bud quite literally disappeared. Hank heard his great-great-great grandfather calling out and he remembered his place was up on the poop deck to help at the wheel, but before he left he looked over at the two physicians.

“There’s a big blow coming. When it hits, find something to hang onto.”

Judy looked up and nodded, then opened a bottle of Betadine and poured some on Ian’s wound. She daubed it carefully, removing all the splinters and debris she could see in the dim light, poring more saline onto the tattered bits of flesh hanging beside exposed bone.

Emily was preparing a syringe, a tetanus shot, and she took an alcohol swab and wiped Ian’s shoulder, then pinched his skin a little before she inserted the needle. She put that syringe down then hit him with a small dose of morphine and almost instantly Ian stopped crying and screaming; Judy was examining the wound, trying to see if there was enough skin left to suture – when the sound of the wind assaulting the ship suddenly changed…

‘…tie yourself to something!…’

She heard the man’s voice shouting out the alarm and she looked out the window and saw the white wall was now just a few hundred yards away…

“Let’s get him on the floor,” Judy said to Emily. They lifted Ian and she couldn’t believe the boy weighed so little…perhaps a hundred pounds but she doubted even that. Half his teeth were missing, his fingers were a series of calluses, and the boy’s hair was a greasy mess of tangled red strands.

Then the wind hit.

The moaning sound in the rigging changed to a screaming howl. The back of the ship seemed to yaw, hard, to the left, and a moment later the heeling motion grew noticeable, then frightening. All three of them began sliding down the floor, down to the wall on the left side of the ship. She was on her back as she slid and her head hit the wall first, then the boy slammed into her, knocking the wind out of her. She saw Emily tumbling, bouncing off a chair as she fell on her way to the wall, then the chair followed and crashed into her…

And yet, she wasn’t afraid.

That was the one thing that entered her mind.

‘I ought to be afraid…but I’m not. I need to take care of this boy…’

The ship seemed to lay on it’s side for minutes but soon she was righting and the resulting chaos was almost as bad as when the wind hit. Men were screaming orders, she heard bare feet running on the deck overhead as men ran to carry out orders…then the sounds of water rushing and waves crashing and winds howling merged into one layer of chaos…

The floor leveled and she grabbed the boy and carried him over to the table. She lifted him – by herself – and got him up on the table. Then she reached into her bag, pulled out a penlight and looked into the boy’s eyes. The morphine had him now, but his pupils were reactive so she moved down to his leg again. More crap to debride, more saline, then more Betadine. Pull the flaps of flesh up, hold them in place with steri-strips, then lidocaine into the margins. Probe, make sure no debris is hiding deep out of sight. More saline. Emily by her side now, holding the penlight so Judy could see better.

“I think I’ll try 3-0 ethicon,” she sighed.

Emily pulled out a small steel tray, still wrapped and sealed after going through an autoclave, and Judy gloved-up and took the hemostats Em handed her. She was surprised how easily it came back to her. She had enjoyed her stint in the ER more than anything else she had done during her internship, but she had been – afraid – of going into emergency medicine because it would keep her away from home. Psychiatry, she remembered, would interfere less so she could be home on a regular schedule…and she had been afraid, always afraid…

It took her maybe five minutes to sew up Ian’s leg, then she took a four by four and wiped it clean again, wiping away all the remaining traces of blood and fleshy debris. Emily helped her wrap the wound in gauze, then they wrapped his lower leg with an ace bandage before Judy worked a compression sleeve over her work.

“That ought to keep everything in place while he heals…” Judy said as she rummaged around in her kit. She found a syringe and a vial of broad spectrum antibiotic and Emily cleaned off a spot on the boy’s flank, then Judy gave him the shot. “He’s never had an antibiotic before,” she said as she looked up…

“It ought to work even better,” Emily added.

“You know…I’m not afraid anymore. Isn’t that strange?”

“Afraid? Of what?”

“I don’t know…maybe my life.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I know it sounds strange. It’s kind of hard to put into words, but I’m tired of being afraid…so I’m not going to be. Not right now, not ever again.”

“Is that a bad thing, Judy.”

“And I’ve never loved anyone, Em, except maybe my grandfather.”

“So, not even me?”

“I don’t know what I feel about you, Em. Maybe it’s like love but I’m not sure what it is, not really.”

Emily didn’t know how to react to this. What to say. How to feel. But one thing entered here mind: “Henry? Do you love Henry Langston?”

“Him? Gawd-no! Are you kidding me?”

Emily sighed. “If he wasn’t married I’d go after him. In a heartbeat.”

“Really?” Judy said, shocked. “He turns you on?”

Emily smiled. “Yup. Big time.”

Judy shook her head as she grinned. “He seems like a real stick in the mud to me. Bland. Like a physicist, I guess. Lost in his own universe.”

“Those guys always got to me, I guess. Cerebral. Made me weak in the knees, too.” She sighed, looked around the messed up cabin, the furniture scattered everywhere. “You were that way once, ya know?”

“Was I? Is that what attracted you?”

Emily nodded. “It’s funny, I guess – in a way. We’re here right now because of a lost, injured goose. A blue goose, at that. I wonder about things like that, sometimes.”

“That’s just life. You never know how it’s going to come at you, do you?”

“I always thought we’d be together, Judy. That we’d make it, ya know?”

Bud appeared, and he looked around once and shook his head. “Not as bad this time,” he sighed. “Well, are you girls ready?”

“Ready?” Emily asked. “For what?”

“You don’t want to stay here, do you?” he asked, pointedly looking at Judy.

“I think I do,” Judy said.

“You’re not…afraid?” he added – with a smile.

“No. No, I’m not.”

“Okay. Well, tell Henry that you’re a friend of mine and he’ll understand.”

“Henry?” Judy said.

“My great-great-grandfather. Sometimes we just call him Henry the First. It’s easier that way.”

“You come her often,” Emily said mockingly.

“Oh, yes, all the time. Whenever I…lose my way.”

“What is this place, really?” Judy asked, clearly confused.

Bud turned and looked at her, then he smiled and nodded. “What do you see when you look into a mirror?” he asked.

“Me. My reflection.”

Bud shrugged. “Well, it’s as simple as that. You’re simply looking inside yourself. And who knows, maybe you’ll like what you see.”

A split second later both Bud and Emily spun out of existence, at least existing in this space, and she was left standing beside this boy on the table. She looked at him, recognized his face. He had the same face as all the bullies she had ever known. Mischievous, devious faces, their smiles always too ready, their words too cunning for their own good. Too willing to intimidate, so unwilling to listen. To learn – how can you learn if you never listen? Really listen? Bullies are know-it-alls, and yet they never want to learn, do they?

The boy opened his eyes and lifted his head a half inch off the table.

“Who be you? The Captain’s lady, perhaps?”

She looked down at him and smiled at him easily. “Does your leg hurt?”

“No,” he sighed, raising up on his elbows and looking at the bandaged wreckage down at the other end of the table, “nothing hurts.”

“It will in an hour, so you might as well rest right now.”

“What happened to me?”

Judy shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t see what happened.”

“You talk funny, like. You ain’t from Hull, is ye?”

“No. No I’m not. Are you?”

The boy nodded. “Me mother works at an estate outside the city proper. I stayed with her there until I was of age, then I shipped out with the Captain.”

“Captain Langston?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” He looked at her, at her green surgical scrubs. “What’s DHMC?” he asked.

She realized the hospital’s logo and information was printed on the pocket over her left breast and smiled. “That’s the name of the hospital where I work.”

“Oh.”

“You better to get some sleep. I’ll be down to check on you in an hour.”

She turned and walked over to the door then walked down the heaving corridor, bouncing off the walls until she made it to the next door. Once she figured out how to open this door she stepped out into pure bedlam.

The boat’s rigging was a shambles and scattered all over the deck. Men were already sorting it out, some on deck but more up in the rigging that remained, and she heard someone calling her name.

Hank. Hank Langston. It had to be him.

She turned and saw a tall, thin man with searching, peregrine eyes locked onto hers, so she waved and made her way up the four steps to the poop deck, stepping over ropes and lines and pulleys while trying to keep her balance on the heaving ship. She confronted a huge gap at the railing there, as it had to be twenty feet of wide open space to reach the captain and the ship’s violent motion made walking almost impossible. Fear reached out for her and she felt herself falling away…

Then she steeled herself and walked across to him as if she was out taking just another Sunday stroll, and he smiled at her as she approached.

“Henry told me you might be stayin’ with us for a time. You’re a physician, I hear?”

“Yes.”

“And you fixed up young Nicholson?”

“He’ll be alright in a few days, but he should keep off his feet until the wound heals.”

Langston nodded. “You say so. Well, as soon as we can we’ll be headin’ to London, so I expect you’ll be needin’ a room. You might have to share a room with young Hank there, if that’s not a problem for you?”

“No sir, that will be fine.”

“Good, good, and now, if you don’t mind I have a few things to attend. Perhaps I’ll see you later?”

She smiled. “May I stay up here a while? Just to watch?”

“Of course, of course. Back there by the stern rail will be a place for you. No one will disturb you there.”

“Thank you, Captain Langston.”

“You there, Killick! Get that yard arm back up under my topgallant, and sometime today, if it pleases you?”

She walked aft and looked up, saw Hank up in the rigging with the rest of the crew. He was flying between the rope rigging and the wooden things up there, helping where he could or moving off to help someplace else if he couldn’t. For a 12 year old he seemed confident – and strong. Stronger than he had been the last time she’d seen him. How long had he been here, she wondered. And…why had he come…?

+++++

He came into the little cabin they shared long after the sun had set, long after the squall had passed, and Hank looked tired. Beyond tired. Exhausted. And he was filthy, too. Like almost everyone else onboard. There were no bathing facilities and the restrooms were ludicrous, nothing more than little benches perched out over the sea with holes cut into them so you could sit and get your business done. There was a bucket with white fleecy stuff in it next to the bench, excess cannon wadding that sailors used to wipe their bum. The sailors called it boom-wad, assumably because the stuff was used to pack down cannon balls before firing, but maybe because the stuff was used after a particularly loud bowel movement. Given the quality of food onboard, Judy thought, that was not as unlikely as she’d first thought.

And the water!

The water supply was kept in barrels and no one drank it, and with good reason. It tasted oaky, musty, and about five minutes after drinking a cup she had started cramping – then experienced one of those moments when you just know you’re going to shit your pants if you don’t get to a toilet – right now!

So she sat there on the bench shitting her guts out, accompanied by knowing glances and a few off color comments from the men sitting beside her.

Like her farts weren’t ladylike enough? Really?

There wasn’t a ship’s surgeon onboard Pegasus; most surgeons were employed by the Royal Navy and only the biggest merchantmen, the ships carrying cargo down the African coast or heading further east to India and Hong Kong had the resources to employ a physician. So Pegasus had a surgeon’s mate, a barely qualified young man with almost no schooling, but a modest willingness to learn.

So, she spent hours teaching James MacDonald the ins-and-outs of wound management, ways to prevent the spread of disease by exercising basic hygiene, then how to diagnose a few basic maladies, notably appendicitis – as a case popped up the next morning – when one of the sailors reported excruciating pain in his lower belly. He was cramping, farting up a storm, and hot to the touch; when she palpated the sailor’s lower right quadrant he screamed.

“Let’s divide the belly up into four quadrants,” she said to MacDonald as the sick sailor watched in dumbfounded agony. “Upper left, upper right, lower left and then lower right. When you’ve got extreme pain in the lower right quadrant there are two things you need to check right away. One is to palpate the abdomen…right here…and if you don’t get a reaction you move on to something called Murphy’s Rebound. We’ll talk about gall bladders later, because our patient has all the symptoms of a hot appendix.”

“What’s that?”

“A small vestigial sack on the bowel, and when it gets infected it has to come out. If it doesn’t it will rupture and the contents of the colon will spill out into the gut and a massive infection occurs. That can only be repaired by extensive surgery and a long course of…treatment.”

“So if we don’t get that thing out, you’re sayin’ ole Tom’ll die?”

It hit Judy then. The enormity of the challenge she’d just posed to herself, and the reality posed by these limited facilities. Let alone the little, and uncomfortably relevant fact that she hadn’t removed an appendix in over 15 years. And it wasn’t like she had a textbook to review.

Captain Langston soon heard about the medical emergency playing out belowdecks, and he came forward and found Judy and her patient on the forward gun deck. He listened patiently while she explained the problem and what she proposed doing, and he nodded. “What can I do to help?”

“I need a steady platform to work on. Is there any way you can make the ship sail more smoothly?”

“Aye. Dead downwind would do it, but right now that would head us to the Hollands. How long do you propose to spend on this endeavor?”

“It should take an hour, maybe less?”

“Okay, tell me when and we’ll bring her around.”

“Great. And could you get some men to help me get him to your cabin? I’ll need to use the same table I used when I fixed Nicholson’s ankle.”

“Aye, Mr. Henderson! Lay that on for the doctor, will you now?”

“Aye, Captain!”

She was waiting for this small entourage in the captain’s in-port cabin, and she already had a sheet over the table. She’d found a nail in one of the timbers overhead and hung a bottle of lactated ringers from it. She started an IV and flushed it – all while a dozen men looked over her shoulder. When she pulled out a digital thermometer and ran it over ole Tom’s forehead another dozen sailors appeared. Then Captain Langston walked in and the crowd parted.

The Captain watched as she injected morphine into the line, then watched, astonished, as she pulled out a stethoscope and listened to Tom’s breathing. She washed the old timer’s belly with saline and Betadine then put purple – purple! – gloves on, then slit open Tom’s belly and soon enough the Captain saw inside ole Tom and with that he turned and walked straight out to the deck and went to the rail and held on tight, breathing as fast as he could. 

“Here there, Mr. Kildare! I said keep it smooth! The lady wants it smooth down there, so keep a good eye on them waves and try to keep to the troughs…!”

+++++

She’d been to London several times, of course, but not the London of 1821. The dome of St Paul’s cathedral was the biggest thing on the skyline, and as Pegasus had docked in Greenwich she had a decent view of the old part of the city across the Thames. Wharves and docks, for the most part, and dozens of ships berthed along the endless waterfront. Sailing ships but no steamships, yet some of these ships were huge, especially the warships. The crew were given shore leave and so, of course, word soon spread about the lady physician and the operation she had performed at sea. 

The next day a delegation of physicians appeared at the gangplank asking to come aboard, and Captain Langston had the good sense to recognize a bunch of charlatans when he saw them so he told the lot of them to bugger off, and that he’d let no lady physician on his ship! Ever!

She took out her iPhone and opened it in airplane mode, then opened the camera and started taking panorama photos of the waterfront, then pictures of the crew at work as they loaded cargo for the last leg of their voyage back to Hull, the ship’s home port.

Two days later Pegasus was riding the outgoing tide down the Thames, then sailing out into estuary past Allhallows and Sheerness. She turned north, trying to fetch Yarmouth then made the turn northwest towards Grimsby and the Humber estuary.

Hank came up to her on their last day at sea, when Judy was standing on the aft deck lost in thought, watching the ship’s wake fade away into the sea. He came up beside her and hopped up until he was sitting on the rail, and with both hands on the rail and his legs crossed he leaned over and sighed.

“Are you going back tomorrow?” Hank asked.

“Are you?”

He nodded. “Yes. There are some things I want to do back home, then with the boat.”

“The boat?”

“Yeah. Bud gave me a 28 for Christmas. I’m going to get her ready, sail her over here this summer, as soon as school’s out.”

“By yourself?”

He nodded. “Maybe. There’s this guy who’d come if I asked him, but he’s never sailed before.”

“Sounds risky.”

“Yeah. Probably so. If it’s okay, I wanted to ask you about my mom.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Your mother had a difficult time when she was growing up. Her father was, well, he was kind of a monster, Hank. A predator. He tortured your mother, and he did so much and so often that your mom began to find places inside her mind where she could run and hide. Pretty soon she stayed in those hiding places all the time, at least until she graduated from high school. She was very smart so went to college to learn how to be a librarian, but she was still hiding whenever she could. She was still afraid of her father, afraid of the things he might do to her.”

“What things?”

“I can’t talk about those things, Hank. Not yet. I hate to say it, but you’re still to young.”

“Okay, I understand.”

“I know you do. You know, if I had a son I’d want him to be just like you. I bet your dad is real proud of you.”

Hank looked down, then shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“Does he ever talk to you? Alone, I mean. Just the two of you?”

“Not much. He’s busy a lot, and he goes away a couple of times every year. He’s gone a lot, really.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that. Where does he go?”

Hank sighed, then shook his head. “I’ve heard some stuff, but I’m not sure exactly, but he’s working on something that has to do with the sun.”

“The sun? You mean,” she said, pointing up to the star in the sky, “that sun?”

“Yup. I think he goes up there, too. To some kind of space station. I think it’s a secret space station where the Navy does things.”

Judy filtered these comments through her psychiatrists mindset, and she heard a boy with an active imagination building up his own father to almost mythic proportions. An astronaut, working on secret projects, and of course with no way to confirm or refute his adulatory feelings she had no way of knowing if this was the truth, or not the truth. What kind of delusion was he building, and why? Had it something to do with his mother? Was there something his father had done – to him?

“I thought he was a physicist?” she asked.

“He went to Annapolis but I think he was always interested in space.”

“I was,” Henry Langston said, coming up from behind.

“Oh, you’re back?” Judy sighed, startled and suddenly a little confused.

“I am. And Hank, you know you’re not supposed to talk about this stuff.”

“I know,” the boy said, his head hanging a little low.

“So, just what do you do when you’re away?” Judy asked, trying to take the heat off Hank.

“I’m working on a project that involves unusual sources of energy.”

“A secret project?”

He nodded.

“Do you go up there?” she asked, pointing skyward.

Henry sighed, then he smiled – slowly. “I do, yes.”

“So your son isn’t lying?”

“No. He’s not.”

“Are you lying?”

He smiled. “You are a shrink. I keep forgetting that.”

“Henry, are you lying?”

“I told you. It’s a secret.”

“That’s not fair,” she said, losing her cool. “But truthfully…just how long are you away?”

“Sometimes a few weeks, other times for months at a time.”

“Months? And you leave Liz alone to take care of the kids all the time you’re away?”

He nodded. “I know it isn’t optimal.”

“Optimal? Henry, that borders on neglect. Not just to your children, but to your wife.”

“It’s important work, Dr. Stone.”

“More important than your wife and family?”

Henry looked away; Hank looked up at his father.

“I used to think so,” Henry sighed. “Now…”

“Now…?” Judy repeated.

“Now there’s nothing more important to me than my family. There never was, not really. In my defense, after my first wife passed, well, I think I lost sight of that. I don’t know, maybe I was running away from all that.”

Judy looked up at him and nodded. “I can see that.”

“Now, may I ask you a question?” Henry said.

“Sure.”

“Is Elizabeth going to make it?”

“I’m not going to give up on her, Henry. Are you?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No. No, it’s not, but the truth is I just don’t know, so I can’t give you a legitimate answer. Not yet, anyway.”

“But you’re not sure, are you? One way or another?”

“The only thing I’m sure of is that I’m not ready to give up.”

“Does that mean her team in Boston has given up?”

“I don’t know, Henry. They’re frustrated, but I don’t think they’re ready to call it quits, either.”

“We’re not talking about depression any longer, are we?”

“Henry, are you sure you want to talk about this around your son?”

“I don’t want to get in the habit of keeping things from him, Dr. Stone. He’s going to find out sooner or later, and sugar coating the reality of her situation with a bunch of lies isn’t going to feel real good when he finally learns the truth.”

“There are more appropriate ages for these kinds of discussions,” she admonished. 

Henry turned to his son. “Do you want to listen to this, Hank?”

Hank nodded. “I think I understand that Mom is in real trouble, but I don’t understand why.”

“Do you want to understand that, Hank?” Judy asked.

“I probably don’t want to, Dr. Stone, but I think I need to.”

She nodded, really quite amazed by his stable sense of duty, even his maturity, but she turned and looked at Henry again. “There’s one thing I don’t understand. I’ve been here days, several days. When we go back, how much time will have passed?”

“In absolute terms, it’s as close to zero as I’ve been able to measure.”

“No time…at all?”

Henry nodded. “You have to think of this experience as happening entirely within your mind. No one here will remember you, but there are weird complications, unpredictable permutations. It’s possible, for instance, that the leg you treated will remain treated. It’s also equally possible that the boy may die, or lose his leg. The strength that Hank has gained over the months he’s spent here will, more than likely, disappear, but it may not. There don’t appear to be hard and fast rules, not that I’ve discovered, anyway.”

“Are you and your family the only ones who can do this?”

Henry shrugged. “As far as any of us knows, yes.”

“Is it possible that Elizabeth can?”

The possibility, apparently, had never occurred to Henry. “I don’t see how, unless she developed the ability on her own.”

“Or maybe she watched you?”

“Oh…”

“Well, I ask because whatever it is that’s affecting her is very hard to pinpoint. There are elements that fit what you might call a very profound depression, yet there are psychotic elements, as well. Or at least I thought they were psychotic elements, until…”

“Until you came here.”

“Yes. That’s right. Somehow, she’s making some kind of connection with your son, but I have absolutely no idea what it is, or now, even what it might be. This…” she said, sweeping her hands around Pegasus, “doesn’t fit any paradigm I know of. It doesn’t even begin to fit within any framework of reality that I’m aware of.”

“I understand,” Henry sighed.

“But I remembered what happened the first time I came,” Hank said. “It has to be real, right?”

“I think it is, too, Hank,” Henry sighed.

“I do too,” Judy added. “Shared delusions are certainly possible, but…under these circumstances? I think not…”

“It couldn’t be a dream, could it?” Hank asked.

Judy shook her head. “I guess it’s possible, but we’ll know for sure when we get back. And speaking of getting back? When should I return?”

“You can go any time you want, but I’d like Hank to stay for a few more days, until after Pegasus returns to Hull.”

“Why?” Judy asked. “Is something going to happen?”

Henry smiled. “Let me just say that Hank is going to learn something important.”

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“Because it happened to me, when I came on this voyage.”

Judy’s eyes registered astonishment. “You made this voyage? The same exact trip?”

Henry nodded. “So did Bud, my dad. We both did, when we were twelve.”

Judy swooned. “I feel kinda light headed, ya know?”

“You’ve been through a lot,” Henry said, reaching out to steady her.

“That’s the understatement of the year,” Hank muttered as he turned and walked off to the foredeck.

+++++

Pegasus ghosted up the Humber on a flooding tide, with just enough speed over her rudder to maintain steerage. Her sails, many still tattered after her encounter with the white squall, hung lifelessly; Captain Langston had deployed both her longboats with ten men in each to row pull her upriver, and, hopefully, to help her make Hull before slack water. If not, he’d have to anchor out and hope Pegasus did not end up on the flats, resting in the mud on her keel. 

Judy went down into the crew’s space, a deck just under the forward gun deck and above the cargo hold, a space that had – perhaps – four feet of headroom. The crew slept in hammocks slung from the beams overhead, and the most senior men only had one man above them. The most recent hires hammocks were stacked three deep, and of course the hammocks swung in time to the ship’s motion. 

And Judy had never smelled anything so revolting in all her life. Fifty men packed like sardines in a space only a little larger than the garage where she and Emily kept their cars, men who almost never bathed, producing a stench so overpowering she gagged as she entered the dank space. Her eyes began to water as she began duck-walking behind Hank, over to the hammock where Ian Nicholson lay recuperating, and as she unwrapped the gauze around his lower leg even by the light of her small penlight she could see that the wound she had sewn up was festering. The tear along his tibia was red around the margins and the boy was now febrile; it certainly didn’t help that the bucket of water he was drawing water from smelled of raw sewage. She took his temperature and shook her head, then drew another syringe of antibiotic and jabbed the boy in the flanks. She turned to Hank and nodded, then she followed him out to the passageway that led aft to the main stairwell. Once back up the fresh air she gasped – as if she had been holding her breath the entire time she’d been below – then she walked hurriedly to the rail and sucked in the warm, salt-laden breezes.

“That wound looks nasty,” Hank said.

“We need to get him up here out of that hell-hole, and someone needs to get him cleaned up.”

“You mean…like a bath?”

“Exactly like a bath. Don’t these men ever bathe?”

“Not that I’ve seen,” Hank sighed, grinning. “I hardly notice the smell anymore.”

“I know, but take my word for it. It smells like an open latrine down there.”

“Yeah, well, they shit and piss in buckets, and if the sea is rough the buckets spill when they fill up.”

“It’s a wonder they aren’t sick all the time.”

Hank nodded. “Maybe they aren’t sick because they’ve grown up around this stuff?”

She nodded to. “You’re probably right. Anyway, the least we can do is get his legs washed down and new bandages over that wound. Will he stay onboard when Pegasus reaches Hull?”

“I think his mother works in some kind of castle or something. Maybe she’s a cook and he stays with her when he’s not out to sea.”

“Well, I doubt he’ll be going anywhere if that leg doesn’t heal, except perhaps six feet underground.”

Hank nodded. “I’ll tell the Captain,” he said, turning and walking up the steps to the poop deck.

‘Why did his father want him to spend so much time here?’ she asked herself again. Henry had as much as told her that he had once joined this crew, on this very voyage, when he was 12 years old. And that Bud had too. Why? Was it some kind of a rite of passage? And that kid? Nicholson? Had he been injured like this over and over again? Would he die? Without her intervention she was sure that he would, so what now? What would happen if he did in fact survive?

She felt more that saw Captain Langston as he walked up beside her, and she looked at him quickly, barely acknowledging his presence as he stopped and put his hands out on the rail.

“So, you think the boy will pass on?”

“Without better care, yes. No one with his injuries can survive in that amount of filth.”

“Filth?”

“Yes. Squalor. Disease spreads easily under those conditions?”

“Eh? How so?”

Judy proceeded to explain the concepts of microbes and the spread of disease in confined quarters, but then she remembered that it was unlikely the man would remember any of these things once she was gone…so…in the end what was the point? The reality of the situation was that Ian Nicholson had been injured two hundred years before, and her presence here was almost like an overlapping layer of consciousness that might, or might not, have an impact on what happened next. But what of Hank? Hank was here to learn something, but what? And yet…Bud and Henry had wanted me to come here in order to learn something…but again, what?

The only answer that came to mind was Elizabeth.

One way or another Elizabeth had to have something to do with this experience.

“So, ye think I should send young Ian home, to this mother? Or should I keep him here?”

“He needs sunlight, clean water, clean bed linens, clean bandages, and his wound needs to be cleaned several times a day, and with clean water, until no pus runs from the wound.”

“The bone is sound?”

“Yes. If the wound heals he’ll be just fine.”

“What are those things ye poke in his arse…?”

“Medicine. Medicine that will help him heal.”

“Such things…these are from your time?”

She nodded. “That’s right.”

“I am not comfortable with such things taking place. Henry didn’t tell me you would be doing this. Are you a healer, where you are from?”

“I am. Henry’s wife is ill, and I’ve been trying to help her.”

“Ah, well then, perhaps he has a reason for all this.”

“Yes, perhaps so…but I am not aware of any.”

“You’ll be goin’ home soon, I take it?”

“I think so, yes.”

“A pity. I was growing fond of your company.”

She smiled. He had invited her to eat with the officers every night and Henry had turned out to be a real gentleman. “I’ve enjoyed my time here immensely,” she said, smiling.

“So, stay.”

“What?”

“Stay with us, here. We’ll be going to France soon, and then on to Lisbon and Marseilles. Fewer storms this time of year, too,” he said with a grin.

“Is Hank staying?”

“Ah…alas, no. There’ll be no need for that now. The boy has reset his course, and he’ll be doin’ fine now.” He paused a moment and she thought he looked as if he was summoning his courage before speaking again.  “You know – if the idea be pleasin’ to ya – well then, ya might stay and take care of young Ian, if ya be alookin’ for a reason ta stay, that is.”

She looked at him and realized what he was really asking of her. What he really wanted to say; that he wanted her to stay. Or, he…wanted her. And he was as tongue-tied as any fourteen year old she’d ever encountered, too.

“You’ll be going to France?” she asked. “Really?”

“Indeed so. Well, you give it some thinkin’ and you’ll let me know. Anyway, we’d love to have ya.”

He walked off, as suddenly calling out orders and…in all likelihood just blowing off all the anxiety he must have felt before he walked over to ask her that one question. Because, obviously, it had to have been on his mind. And she’d been stunned by his question, too. As stunned as she was amused. ‘But,’ she said to herself after a few moments passed, ‘why not? Why not stay here a little longer? There’s no cost to me because whenever I decide to go home, well, what did Henry say? Exactly no time will have elapsed. So, I could stay here a lifetime, or even several lifetimes, and not age even a day! But…think of the things I could learn…?’

+++++

Pegasus got her lines ashore late that afternoon, only making it to the wharves off High Street with the help of a freshening breeze. Almost immediately Henry Langston strode down the gangplank and walked across to the counting house, then to the bankers, and when he came back to his ship he looked relieved. Judy knew right then that the financial strain on him during the voyage must have been staggering, but she was the first to admit she didn’t understand nineteenth century mercantile finances. 

Yet Henry also had made arrangements for clean well water to be delivered to the ship, then he had the crew set about scrubbing the ship, literally from stem to stern.  He planned to move Ian Nicholson to a new room he wanted built, right off a new cabin for a ship’s surgeon. Henry had listened, and paid close attention when Judy taught him about diseases and how they spread in confined spaces, and his problem-solving mindset had immediately set about looking for solutions.

After the sun set on the day, Henry asked Judy and Hank if they’d care to join him in the city for dinner, and so an hour later the three walked down the gangplank and up High Street to Henry’s favorite pub. They kept a room for him there, up in the living spaces, and he spent nights there when Pegasus was laid up in town. “The pub, by the way, belongs to me brother. Ben’s his name, in case the matter comes up…”

“Ben?” Hank asked.

“Yes, lad. Ben’s his name, and can you imagine that now…”

As they approached the pub, Hank thought the establishment looked more like a house than the others he’d seen along the street, and the building was even set back from the street a bit more than the others. There were rose bushes out front, and a carved wooden sign hanging over the door; oil lamps were already aglow inside the pub, casting amber light across the roses and out onto the cobblestone streets, and Hank could smell roasting beef and potatoes on the air.

As they walked up the bricked walkway, Hank looked up and tried to read the name of the pub carved into the sign, but he had to step aside a bit to see it…

But he could not believe what he saw.

For the name of the pub was The Blue Goose, and there was even a goose carved on the sign. A goose as blue as the sea, as blue as…Gertrude was.

They stepped inside the pub and faces turned their way, and conversations stopped.

Hank walked in and almost immediately his eyes were drawn to a man behind the counter filling steins with a deep amber brew, and without a moment’s hesitation he knew the man’s name was Ben. Because he looked just like his brother – indeed, all grown up now but just like his very own brother.

But the strangest sight of all was the deep blue goose sitting on Ben’s shoulder.

For the goose was looking right at Hank. And the goose was smiling now, too.

© 2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | and this is a work of fiction, plain and simple.

So, once again, we be a wishin’ ya a Very Merry Christmas, and we’ll be pleased to find you in our home waters next time out. Adios.

It IS that time of year again, isn’t it? Christmas trees and eggnog, chestnuts roasting on an open fire and, of course, ruptured credit cards. But perhaps it’s better to focus on these things now, rather than on political events. Moral decline seems so pointless, so endlessly, nauseatingly pointless.

SO…we have a new puppy this winter, yet another Springer to add to the pack, and she’s adorable. After we lost our precious Heidi we kind of fell back on Suzy, Heidi’s daughter, to get us over the chasm, and it worked. Suzy is literally almost identical to Heidi, and yes, in every respect (she’s a true empath). Yet Suzy is also seven going on eight, and time marches on. She was (is) still (just) young enough to birth another litter and the idea of losing the last part of Heidi when Suzy leaves us has been closing in on both of us. So, to make a long story even longer, when Suzy went into heat recently we sent one of our boys out to do the hunka-chunka one more time, and lo! Suzy was pregnant! Amazing how that works, isn’t it? At any rate, Suzy gave birth to one, yes, one pup, a tri-color girl we’ve named Bonnie. Assuming an average life expectancy of 12 years I’ll be long gone by the time Bonnie checks out, so I’ll have a part of Heidi with me ’til the very end. I don’t really know why I find that comforting, but I do. I guess because there’s hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about Heidi, or Finch, or Ode, or Scout. My life has been bookended by Springers, and what a thing that is. Heidi was such a great pup and I loved her something fierce, but in their way they all have been. We took Bonnie in for her first shots this week and it was the first time I’d been back to the vet’s office since we took Heidi in for her last visit, and all those memories came back in an unwanted rush, but that’s they way of it, sometimes.

Anyway…c’est la vie.

I stopped writing this part of the story after about 20 or so pages, so not a long chapter for you today. Still, the story just reached a natural stopping point, so there you have it. Call it time for one cup of tea? And that means att least two more parts to reach an end…?

We shall see…

Music? Well, yes, but let’s just skip the Tony Bennett Christmas music this year, okay? That doesn’t mean we’re not listening to music as we write (sorry, that’s just not possible), but that does mean – no Christmas Muzak…! That said, the Beatles Anthology 4 dropped recently, and I recommend setting aside a few hours to trip down bluejay way with the lads one more time. This release includes a lot of studio takes, complete with the boys talking about how to do this or that and it’s just a blast listening-in, because it’s a fly on the wall sort of vibe. This release is NOT your usual polished, overproduced Beatles album, not this time around. So, it’s fun and that’s what I’ve been listening to while writing. Now and Then.

And also, a brief note about the Moody Blues. I read an interesting piece in Rolling Stone last week about Justin Hayward, titled The Last of the Moodies, by Andy Greene. The piece was more an interview with Hayward than a summation of the group and/or their music, but there WERE a ton of insights into the group’s internal dynamics. As Hayward was arguably the most influential member of the group, and as he is now the last surviving member, I took the time to walk down memory lane while I read this piece, and if you were around in the late 60s to early 70s you might enjoy this bit of reporting, too. I feel certain your local librarian will help you find the article if you can’t access the piece online. It might be worth your time, Stephan.

So, t-t-t-time to r-r-r-read…! Onward then…!

The Blue Goose

Part Three

The disorientation he experienced was just as bad as it had been on his first journey, when Hank had found himself on Pegasus, then anchored inside the lagoon just off the atoll called Tarawa, but the entry in the logbook he had just been reading ended near midnight, just after the very first Pegasus had tied-off in Hull, after completing a short trip to Antwerp and back. The captain, his great-great-grandfather Eldritch Henry Langston, Sr., had made a small error in timing the incoming tide, just as Pegasus approached the Humber Estuary, and Pegasus had struggled for hours to gain the commercial wharf on the north side of the river right off High Street, but she was tied-off and most of the crew had gone off in search of a good time.

And after standing at the bathroom mirror, this was exactly where Hank was now standing.

The cobbled street was slick from the dense fog that had settled over the town, and it seemed that most everyone that lived near the waterfront had long since retired for the evening. Hank turned and looked up the street, his eyes drawn to movement in the shadows, perhaps, or was it the mayhem coming from a drinking establishment down the way, closer to Pegasus? His curiosity seemed to tell him to focus on the noise coming from inside the pub down the street, yet his instincts were telling him that he was surrounded by danger.

So he focused on the shadows, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.

Yes! There! Two men hiding behind a barrel, crouched down low as if hiding, and they were staring at him.

The hair on the back of his neck was standing on end now, and about the same time he remembered reading in the log that it was cold here in March – and so realized that he was woefully underdressed for the moment. He was wearing a windbreaker, one of his father’s actually, a dark blue jacket that identified the owner as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy. Hank was now almost tall enough to wear the jacket without rolling up the sleeves, but his father weighed quite a bit more so the fabric hung loosely on him. He was wearing a red t-shirt under the jacket, and the same jogging pants he’d been wearing since Friday. And, of course, a new pair of blindingly white Adidas tennis shoes. In other words, he looked just like any other kid in America – only from two hundred years in the future.

But his father’s windbreaker wouldn’t protect him from two men intent on attacking him, would it? He turned and started walking towards Pegasus, and the two men broke cover and started following him, picking up their pace when they realized their intended was now walking to the ship on the wharf.

Hank picked up his pace again, then he began jogging. The two now gave up any pretense of trying to hide and began running after the boy…but Hank was faster. Not as fast as his brother Ben, but fast enough. He was perhaps 100 yards from Pegasus when two more other men stepped out from behind a small shop just ahead, and these two were now blocking his way. Hank suddenly realized that the first two had been herding him, forcing him into the trap the four men had set for unsuspecting victims – just like himself.

He shuddered to a stop. Trapped. And the four men knew it, too.

They started taunting him as they closed in, and Hank saw that one of them had a long dagger, another had a small club dangling from a lanyard around his wrist. Hank looked towards the water, thinking he might make a jump for it and try to swim away from the trap – but the tide was obviously out and the water appeared quite shallow. And in the other direction? Nothing but shops and warehouses, packed so close together that most appeared to share common walls.

He couldn’t run and he certainly couldn’t fight four armed men, so he relaxed and decided two wait for an opening before making a break and running from them.

One of the men, the one with the dagger, was making kissing sounds with his lips, taunting Hank as he came close, saying he was going to take him in the arse – whatever that meant.

But just then a man in uniform stepped from the shadows and walked over to Hank.

The man was wearing a seafarers uniform, and apparently the man held high rank. He was tall and thin, but then Hank saw that the man also had a pistol of some kind in his right hand. He was holding the weapon in such a way that all four bully-boys would know they were approaching an armed man, and an officer at that.

The man with the dagger hesitated for a moment, recalculating his chances as this new threat emerged, but then he smiled and came on again, deciding to press home his attack.

The officer held the pistol out at arm’s length and cocked the firing mechanism, and still the attacker came on; on seeing this, however, the rest of the gang began melting into the shadows. 

As the lone attacker closed the remaining distance between them, the captain leveled his weapon, now pointing it directly at the assailant’s face. And then the bully-boy stopped, his head cocked a little to one side.

“Captain? That you, sir?”

The pistol dropped a fraction and the officer peered into the fog. “Nicholson? What the devil are you doing out here?”

“Aye, we was just havin’ some fun, skipper…”

“Indeed. I suggest you go look for your amusements elsewhere. Now.”

“Aye, sir.”

And the bully-boy walked sheepishly away down the slick cobblestones, leaving Hank and the officer standing there in the middle of High Street.

“You certainly chose an odd time to come along,” the officer, and Hank’s greet-great-great-grandfather said.

“Henry?” Hank sighed. “You’re Henry Langston?”

“Aye, that’s right, boy. Now come on, let’s get you down to Pegasus, and me out of this cold.”

Hank now felt at ease enough to take a look around; he recognized the Holy Trinity Church from Google Earth just a few hundred yards away, but nothing else looked familiar. The waterfront was a loose collection of wooden wharves and shacks on spindly piers, and many appeared quite worn down by both time and tide.

And wind!

The wind down here on the exposed waterfront was howling, and it was cold, too. And the air was damp, Hank realized, then remembered that high humidity made extremes of both heat and cold more uncomfortable.

And Pegasus!

This wasn’t the sleek schooner he’d been aboard at that atoll. Called Tarawa, he remembered. No, this ship looked more like something out of that Russell Crowe movie. Master and Commander, wasn’t it? Fat, tall, two gun decks, three tall masts, the center mast the tallest, and with a bowsprit that jutted way higher than the sleek-lined schooner’s had. This Pegasus looked twice as fat as that schooner, too, and probably had twice the complement of crew, too.

As they approached the gangplank, Hank thought the crossing looked unusually dangerous, like a couple of boards slapped across the gap between the main deck and the seawall, and it had to be twenty feet, maybe even thirty, down to the water. Hank had never been especially afraid of heights; then again, he’d never had to walk across anything like this before.

And yet Henry walked right out onto the gangplank as if he was out for a Sunday stroll; Hank got to the threshold and stopped, and it was all he could do not to look down into the abyss thirty feet below…

“Here, boy, just look at me. Don’t you be looking down, not’t all. That’s right. Look at me, then a few paces ahead. That’s it, that’s a good lad.”

Hank’s few steps on the oak planks felt okay – probably because the plank wasn’t deflecting too much while close to the seawall, but by the time he was halfway across, the plank had deflected a lot – at least a couple of feet, and Hank felt queasy when he realized he was walking on something that could break at any moment…

But nothing broke. The wood didn’t make a sound, not even the slightest creak, and Henry was regarding him with a wry, knowing smile. 

“You’re not the first to have a problem crossing, boy. Don’t you worry. You’ll get used to it in no time.” And with that, Henry turned and walked aft to a low doorway under the poop deck that led, apparently, to officer’s cabins, or rather a long corridor with tiny, cubicle-like cabins on both sides of the narrow hallway, the very low-ceilinged passage only dimly lit by two small, flickering oil lamps. Hank heard loud snoring coming from a cabin and at first he thought this must be a cattle pen, then he heard a long, low rumbling fart followed by a satiated, lip-smacking moan. Then the smell hit.

And he retched. Involuntarily. Something about the combination of body odor, rank feet and that fart got to him, and Henry shook his head as he ducked low to enter his sea cabin. It was even darker inside this cabin, even with the white-washed ceilings above the heavy oak timber beams overhead. Hank could just see a fairly large table under the arched row of windows across the stern, and two men were sitting there, apparently waiting for their captain…

But as his eyes adjusted to the dim light in the cabin he blinked several times, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

Because he saw both his grandfather – and his own father sitting there, waiting for him.

And so was Gertrude. And even she seemed to be enjoying this little surprise…

+++++

Elizabeth Langston woke in a cold sweat, yet she was sure she was still dreaming.

She had been watching her son almost from above. He was standing on an old cobblestone street, and four men were surrounding him, closing in on him, and she had tried to scream, tried to warn him…

…but then that silly blue goose had come into her dream…

…and then the goose had come right up to her and stared into her eyes. Her coal black eyes almost seemed lit from within, and suddenly she was sure the bird was trying to tell her something…

Then through swirling mists she saw the officer with the pistol and then she knew her baby boy would be alright.

+++++

He could hardly sleep here. The noises all seemed so unfamiliar, but the smells were truly awful. Like the locker room next to the gym at school, only ten times worse. And then, as soon as he’d crawled up into the tiny sea-berth, he’d felt little creepy-crawly things burrowing into his skin. First on his thighs, then on his forearms. When he was sure something was going for his nuts and asshole he jumped out of the berth and started picking at the lice crawling all over his legs, then he grabbed his father’s windbreaker and went to lay down on the floor beside the little wood burning fireplace by the chart table. And a few minutes later he felt himself falling asleep.

Maybe he had expected he would wake up back in Rhode Island, but that wasn’t to be the case.

No, Pegasus was making her way slowly from the seawall, and men were running about on deck shouting orders and climbing the rigging and someone was calling out their depth, too. He looked at his Apple Watch but realized it was gone, and when he reached for his father’s windbreaker he realized that it was now gone too, which also meant his iPhone was gone.

“That figures,” he sighed, because he was sure either his dad or Bud had taken them.

Then he realized he had been covered by a blanket some time during the night, and his head had been resting on a small cushion, too. Clothes had been laid out for him on the chart table, everything but shoes, anyway. He looked at his white Adidas tennis shoes and sighed, yet there was nothing he could do about them right now. He changed clothes then followed the noise down the long hallway to the same low door he had entered late last night, then he stepped out into the brightest sunshine he’d ever seen.

He squinted and shielded his eyes with his hand as best he could, then he heard Henry calling out to him.

“Here there! Boy! Come up on deck, now! Come on, let’s not take all day, shall we?”

Hank turned and made his way up the short set of steps that led up to the poop deck, and Henry was waiting for him by the ship’s huge wheel, complete with a large cast iron fitting on the forward facing side that was attached to a heavy chain, so attaching the chain to the wheel. The chain disappeared belowdecks, so it apparently was attached to the rudder – because when the wheel turned the chain ‘turned’ too, and then the ship turned with it.

“You there, boy, get out of the way!” Henry snarled, and he saw that, yes, Henry was snarling at him!

“What do you want me to do?” Hank asked.

“Stand over there and watch! And mind your manners now, boy-o!”

Henry was pointing to a small platform beside a nested mass of rope that almost resembled a sailboat’s standing rigging, except there were no chainplates here, or anything else he was familiar with. And these rope shrouds were as big around as his wrists, too!

He moved to the starboard rail and watched two men forward, both right beside the bowsprit; one was swinging a line with a lead plumb on the end, and the other was calling out the depth under the ship’s keel. He saw there were no markers to indicate the channel, just swirling brown water the color of coffee with a lot of milk in it, so no way to know where the hazards lurking under the water were located. No wonder everyone on the poop deck seemed tense!

He took hold of a line and hauled himself up on the rail so he could get a better view of the way ahead, but a moment later he felt Henry by his side.

“Here, boy, go on up and have yourself a look around, and have yourself a fine old time up there while you’re at it.”

Hank saw Henry was pointing up the ratlines to a small ‘crow’s nest’ where this widespread set of shrouds came to a point, but it had to be thirty or forty feet up there…

“Go on, boy! Give her a try!”

Hank knew this was a test – as he could see the challenge in Henry’s eyes. Maybe there was a little hint of a taunt in there, too, and he didn’t like that so he swung around off the rail, landing hard on his feet, then he walked aft to the stern rail. He found another shroud and hopped up on the rail and looked down at the ship’s gurgling wake, not at all liking this man. 

But soon Henry was barking orders at his helmsman, then at someone up on the bow, probably the two men sounding the muddy bottom under Pegasus, so he had all but forgotten about Hank.

What had his father told him last night? “It’s time you learned your way around a real sailing ship, so you’ll stay here until you do…” And it hadn’t been a request, either. And Bud felt the same way, too. His father had never spoken to him like that, never! Only his grandfather seemed to understand why, too. Yet Bud never had to order people around, probably because people respected him, respected the way Bud treated the people who worked for him. But then his father had started barking orders at him, telling him what to do, just like this Henry was doing…and it had upset Hank.

But hadn’t his father told him all about that once before? During his first year at Annapolis? That had been all about learning to take orders from superiors, and then learning how to carry them out – and to the letter – without complaint. Because ships couldn’t function without leaders, and leaders couldn’t exist without seamen to carry out orders. It seemed simplistic to him until he remembered that ships needed leadership or lives would be lost. What had his grandfather always said about the sea? That the sea doesn’t care who you are, only that you respect her? At first he didn’t understand that, but after a few long trips on small sailboats, when he first made it out into the Atlantic, the meaning of that respect became clear. The sea, his grandfather told him after one such trip, doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Hank understood after that. Orders save lives, even if they hurt your feelings.

Was Henry doing the same thing? 

Hank turned and studied the ratlines. How and where to put his feet, and where to put his hands. How to steady himself as he made it up to the crow’s nest, because at first glance that looked difficult, but not impossible. But then…he’d need to come down, too. He’d felt queasy on that gangplank, hadn’t he? Because he’d never climbed anything more difficult than stairs. He’d never even hiked up Mount Ascutney, or the big mountains over in New Hampshire. Never tried to climb up even a little rock face. Was he afraid of heights?

He jumped down and walked over to the ratlines and started making his way up, slowly, one rung at a time, deliberately moving a foot up, then a hand, then pulling himself up to the next bit of rope. What had Henry said last night? Don’t look down? Focus on the way ahead?

So of course he did just that. He took a step up, then another…

And after a few steps up he realized it wasn’t all that scary.

So he looked up again and started climbing. The crow’s nest seemed to waver in the sunlight, the ship rolling around, dancing a bit with each step he took, but soon enough he was almost at the platform and so pulled himself up, then stood.

Yet Henry was already there, waiting for him.

“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“How’d you get up here?” Hank asked, dumbfounded.

“Well, you know, I’ve done this a few times before, boy-o. And it’s a practical this, a wee bit of skill you’ll need every day. You’ll come to know that you either move fast up here, or you will often times find yourself bleedin’. Sometimes people die up here too, boy-o, because they never learned how to move fast in times of trouble. Bad thing it is to see, too, but we all have to start somewhere. Yes…we all do, and now your time has come. But that’s as it should be, young Henry.”

Henry turned and scanned ahead of Pegasus and then, upon taking a fat shroud in hand, he leaned out over the deck and shouted to the man at the helm. “You there, Mr. Withers, give us ten degrees to port if you please!”

“Ten to port! Aye, Captain!”

“Now, boy-o, come over here and look forward, just to the right of the bowsprit. See that swirl, and how the water darkens under? That’s the tide moving past a rock or a stump down there, and the water turns dark because dangers lurk just under the surface.”

“Okay,” Hank said, nervously looking down at the deck before looking forward.

“And the smooth waters to the left? See it there? Aye, that’s deep water. But when we return, in a month or so, this channel may have shifted some. Do you know why?”

Hank nodded. “Yessir. The action of the tides carries mud and silt as it ebbs and floods, and that movement makes the bottom shift.”

“Oh, that’s right. You been sailin’ a wee bit, have you? Well, good ons you. Less to teach, for me anyway, but things are different here on the Humber than they are when you get out on the sea, right out there,” he said, pointing to the North Sea now just a mile ahead. “When the winds pitch a fit and the waves start talkin’ to you some, well now, that’s when the real learnin’ happens. Got that, boy-o? There’s no cryin’ out there, none a’tall. And we ain’t got time for no cryin’ when the storms come at us, never when the storms come.”

“Where are we going now?”

“Aye, yes, to Hanseatic Bergen for our first stop, then on through the Skagerrak and into the Baltic, where we be going into the Trave River on our way to Lübeck. We be carrying wheat and broadcloth to Bergen, then hides from Bergen to Lübeck, and we’ll return with barrels of beer and our hold full of timber and some iron. We’ll be keeping an eye out for a bit of copper, too. Now…look up.”

“What?” 

“Aye, are ye deaf as well as daft? I said look up, there, up to the top of the mast!”

“Okay?”

Henry wrapped his wrist and lower legs around the shroud in his hand and smiled. “Now, follow me!” 

And with that the spry old men started pulling himself up the shroud, heading for the masthead.

Hank blinked. He watched his great-great-great-grandfather sliding up the greasy old shroud like there was nothing to it, then he tried to emulate the way the old man had wrapped the line around and through his legs. He tentatively pulled on the rope once, then tried to pull himself up.

And…nothing. He couldn’t do it.

He tried again.

Nothing.

And watching all this, Henry slid down the shroud and back to Hank’s side all in one fluid motion, and once he was beside Hank he felt the boy’s upper arms and shoulders. “Here there, ye got no muscles, boy-o! Well now, it’ll be one thing at a time…so first, let’s get you down, then maybe get some food into you…”

Hank looked down, obviously feeling a little low about this assessment.

“Now, there’ll be no pouting on Pegasus, boy. None at all. Anyway, after a few months working up here you’ll be free as a bird, flying all over this rigging, but not today, and not on an empty belly!” Henry slipped down the shroud to the poop deck and walked off, shouting at the men up on the bow. “Hey there, Killigan, keep them calls a-comin’ now, will you?”

Hank looked ahead, then off to port at a little village that had a magnificent steeple jutting skyward, hovering there just above the village and he thought it must be an obvious reminder of faith to seamen coming and going. It had to be a parish church for it was too small to be a cathedral, but the structure was handsome – and it looked strong, too.

“Not like me, that’s for sure,” Hank sighed. The thought of sliding down that shroud like Henry just had filled him with foreboding, almost pure dread, and he just knew if he tried to do the same he’d fall down to that deck and break every bone in his body…

…so his hands found the ratlines and he climbed gingerly out there until he was balanced on the braces, looking down at the deck and feeling his muscles freeze and knot-up…

…but he forced himself to move…

Left hand down a rung, then the right foot. Right hand, left foot. Down another rung in white-knuckled fear, grasping his way down to another rung and another…until his feet were on that wide, comforting oak, that fat rail atop the sheltering bulwarks, and from there he hopped down to the deck, beaming at his accomplishment.

But no one was paying him the slightest bit of attention. Not even Henry.

He sighed then looked down into the swirling water, and Henry came by a few minutes later and put his hand on Hank’s shoulder. “Here now, go on, get some breakfast in my cabin, then we’ll get you a bunk with the other midshipmen.”

“I’m not really hungry yet…”

“Well, you soon will be, son. It’s blowing holy snot out there, and just as soon as we pass Spurn Head we’ll be in the thick of it. You eat now ‘cause you might not want to again for days, and it won’t do to have you dyin’ on us, now will it?”

“What?”

“There’s no goin’ back, boy-o. No lookin’ in the mirror and duckin’ back to the comforts of your grandfather’s boathouse. No, you be goin’ back in a year or two, or not at all…”

“But…”

“No buts now, boy-o. No, you go and get yourself some food – or I’ll put you right to work, and now…”

+++++

She was adrift. Adrift in time. Unmoored from the moment, drifting away from the pain.

As she always did. As she always had, drifting from the pain. The pain of this one everlasting moment in time. The pain that never went away.

She had found the door once quite be accident, and then she had opened it. Once inside, once drifting away, she had learned how to escape. Escape from her father, from the needy intrusions of his warped, grubby needs. She had learned soon enough that she could drift away anywhere she wanted, even away from him.

She felt the straps binding her wrists, and her ankles, yet these were nothing new to her. She had been tied down and beaten for as long as she could remember. Beaten for no reason. Beaten because her pain amused him. Her blood amused him. So she had drifted away, opened the door and drifted.

She saw her baby high above the sea, the raging sea, and she saw the fear in his eyes. Fear, but no pain, and she smiled. She did not want him to feel pain. He was still too young for pain.

Fear was, after all, a firm, if patient teacher – for those willing to learn.

+++++

The sea is a firm teacher, even though she is often more than a little impatient. Eldritch Henry Langston was a firm teacher, too, and he did not suffer fools – gladly or otherwise. He explained a thing once, and you either listened and learned or you suffered the slings and arrows of the sea’s impatience. Depending on what you were doing at the time, this might mean the merest embarrassment, or it might mean instant death. Your own death, and others too. To the sea, it made no difference. You ate when you had time or you did not eat, often for days. The same with sleep – take it while you may. When you were told to climb the foremast in a gale to secure lines that had come loose, you did so or the mast might come down – and all hands on board might be lost.

Hank began two understand that life on a ship was not the same as daydreaming in middle school. That he could not tune out the teacher and daydream because he wasn’t all that interested in split infinitives or what happened in 1066. He was also beginning to understand that inaction held consequences as dire as actions poorly performed, too. He watched what happened to the laziest among the crew, to the not so gentle ostracisms, then the shunning, and he vowed not to ever become that sort of person. He wanted to be thought of as someone that could be relied upon to do the job right the first time. Like Henry, just like Henry.

Maybe that’s why his father and grandfather had come back here, to Pegasus – and to Henry. Maybe they wanted to help him understand the absolute gravity of personal integrity. People are attracted to integrity, just as they are repelled by its opposite. But Hank’s life, up to this very moment, had no context. He had never experienced what the Langston family was all about. Personal integrity, certainly, but in the end all Langstons had been explorers. But Hank didn’t know the meaning of the word, not yet, because that’s not something that can be taught in school. Exploration has to be experienced before it can be understood, and yet the best explorers are neither leader nor follower. They are guides.

Ian Nicholson, the leader of the bully-boys, was a true seaman and, oddly enough, a patient teacher. Once he learned that Hank was the Skipper’s nephew, he took the boy in hand and literally showed him the ropes. From what they were called to what they were made of. He taught Hank how to splice lines. How to tie knots with lines. How to climb lines, hand over hand and with the line leading around the ankle ‘just so.’ Hank began to understand, too, that when he did the job right he gained a measure of respect. Once his mates began to understand that he could be counted on to get the job done, it was like a switch had been thrown: Soon enough he was no longer the skipper’s nephew but a shipmate, and Hank soon realized that there was no finer feeling in all the world.

And he soon loved it high up in the ship’s rigging, and with Ian’s steady hand guiding him, Hank was soon comfortable doing any task assigned up there.

And on seeing that, Henry promptly moved him to the gun deck. And then, a week later, to help the merchantmen with their counting belowdecks or on the wharf in Bergen. 

When Pegasus sailed into the Hanseatic port of Bergen, Hank was with the men unloading cargo and the reloading the ship’s hold, learning the intricacies of placement and then securing each item to prevent movement. He spent time with merchants and bankers, keeping an inventory and counting payments. On the voyage to Lübeck, he worked in the galley, then, after they arrived on the Trave, he spent two days with a team assigned to scrub the bilge. He stayed down there until the rancid space gleamed.

And one thing he knew, innately, was that complaining was not an option. If he had to shovel shit, he covered his nose and with his mates he got to it. When he left the bilges cleaner than they had been in years, his mates began to look at him differently, and not one of his shipmates thought of him as the skipper’s nephew after that.

He had been on Pegasus for three months by the time she slipped her lines and eased into the main channel of the Trave, the river that led from the docks in Lübeck back out to the Baltic, at Travemünde. He had tried beer by then, eaten the best sausages ever, and even made a few new friends in the town. He’d been too a merchant-bankers home to dine, and as he conversed with timber merchants from Prussia and Poland he felt a self assurance he had never known as he answered their endless questions about the forests in New England. And when he stood beside Henry as the men made sail, he felt better about himself than he ever had.

“You seemed quite confident last night,” Henry said as he watched the men on the bow swinging the lead-line. “I think you lit the fires of more than one man’s imagination, too. There’s great money to be made in this New World of yours, and you met many who will lead the way.”

“I wish I spoke the language,” Hank said.

“Aye. It’s no good to rely on someone else to translate. Have you not learned the French or the Dutch yet?”

“No, not yet. But I will.”

“When you get back, you mean?”

Hank nodded. “I can’t stay here forever.”

“Aye, well, you could. You can stay for years and years and when you return all will be as it was. No time will have passed there, and you will not have aged. My own son has come back more than once, you know. Your father, too.”

“Really?”

Henry nodded. “Now look, boy, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’d as soon you not go back yet. I know why you might want to – with your mother and all – but if you leave now and come back again, you’ll find no one will remember you. It will be like you were never here.”

“You mean the friends I’ve made…?”

Henry just shrugged. “No. The knowledge fades. You will remember the time you spent here, I will too, but none of the crew will, so stay until you are sure you don’t want to come back. It’s better that way, and for all concerned.”

“Have you ever come to my time?”

Henry shook his head. “No, and I’m not sure that we may. Not one of us has tried venturing into the future, and I think perhaps that the pain would be too great.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“Aye, think of it, son. To know one’s future? To see the mark you made? Or worse still, the mark you failed to make…?” He looked away and sighed. “So, you tell me…What good could come of that?”

“What if you could see the mistakes you made along the way? Would you still not go?”

Henry looked down, shook his head slowly. “Isn’t it bad enough that we can do what we do? And you know, boy, you’ll spend many a restless night wondering why this happened to us…because this thing is as much a curse as it is a blessing…”

Hank turned and looked forward, up past the ship’s bow. “Should we start our turn now?”

Henry seemed startled by that and looked ahead too. “Aye, and thanks, boy. Mister Bennett, start your turn now…! That’s it. Now there! Keep to the middle of the channel…”

“Is the middle ground always the safest?”

“Oh, no, not in the least, but I’ve made this passage many times before. The secret to it all, young Henry, is to put everything to pen and ink. Put your observations in both your rutters and the ship’s log, then you can read your notes before making the same passage again.” 

“Rutters? What’s that?”

“Aye, the rutters are more personal, son, just your own observations, and they are for your eyes only, too, never to be shared.”

“What do you put in yours?”

“Actual observations, for one, not so much what’s been passed on to me. I keep a record of the course we steered between ports in the logbook, but my rutters contain what worked well, and what didn’t. And more importantly, why things worked, or didn’t. Tides and currents, for instance, or hazards in a waterway. Because of my rutters, I know that around this next bend we will come upon rocks along the starboard reach, unless we keep to the left side of the channel. I know that because I wrote it all down at the time, when I made my first trip upriver. Which brings to mind one last task I have in mind for you.”

“Oh?”

“I’ll want you to stay with me at the helm, and when I make entries in the log or even additions to me rutters, I want you to take me words down, exactly as I speak ’em. You need an understanding of these things, and not just because every captain should. Everything little thing is knowledge, young Henry. Everything, even the littlest thing you might think unimportant. And out here, knowledge is the only thing of lasting value. Knowledge is the only thing keeping you alive, and make that double for a navigator.”

Hank nodded. “Are we going back to Hull after we unload our cargo in Bergen?”

Henry shook his head. “No, no, we’ll make for the Thames with more, for the docks at Greenwich. I’m sure we’ll have cargo to load there for the journey home, as sure as the sun rises.” He shouted orders to men up the foremast, then turned back to Hank. “Now, let’s think about the day we have right now. The future can wait a little longer, don’t you think?”

+++++

Judy Stone looked up from reading the latest reports re: Elizabeth Langston, from Mass Gen, and she wondered how she was going to tell Henry Langston about the latest developments in her case.

Elizabeth simply wasn’t responding to ECT therapy, at least not in any measurable way. She seemed almost lucid after she came out of anesthesia, but within an hour or two reverted to the same semi-catatonic hallucinatory state she had been in before. The only words she had uttered after her last treatment were “Why won’t you just let me die?”

And that time the neuropsychiatrist beside her had simply replied: “Because you’re 38 years old and have children who need you? And there’s nothing medically wrong with you?”

And with that, Elizabeth had simply shut down again. Just like the time before and the time before…

She still refused to eat. Or drink, so her treatment team kept her on IV support. Yet they knew it wouldn’t be long before the woman’s organs began failing, so they had two confront an uncomfortable reality. It was time her family begin looking into end of life care.

And when Judy Stone read that her heart began breaking.

She had made an inexcusable mistake, too. She had grown close to Henry and his family, maybe too close. They had done nothing wrong, nothing to deserve what they were about to go through. And Henry was in the worst shape of them all. Now if anyone asked how his wife was doing he was just as likely to burst out in tears as he was to shrug and look away, and as he had always been the absent-minded professor the change had startled his peers in the department. Now even his students were beginning to avoid him.

And now – she cared. About what happened to Henry most of all, because without his understanding and strength there would soon be four kids spiraling down the drain with him. 

So, how would he take this latest news? 

More to the point, was it really time to start thinking of hospice care?

She wasn’t sure, and that was why – as soon as she got into work that morning – she called the lead psychiatrist in Boston and asked to come down and observe Elizabeth’s next treatment. She wanted to understand exactly what was – and was not – happening, both during and after her treatments, because she wanted to understand why Elizabeth wasn’t responding. And the strangest thing about all this, she admitted to herself, was that she felt she owed this to Henry and his children. She had, after all, been behind the push to get Elizabeth to Boston – for her to undergo what Henry called ‘shock therapy.’

In fact, no one knew exactly how electro-convulsive therapy really worked, only that it did, in demonstrable fact, result in a significant reset of brain function, often eliminating the most debilitating elements of profound depression, up to an including suicidal ideation. Recent research had also been focused on employing ECT to moderate, or alleviate, the worst symptoms of schizophrenia: the visual and auditory hallucinations that effect schizophrenics. Symptoms vanished in a significant percentage of schizophrenic patients, and more often than not it worked in those patients that failed to respond to mainline pharmaceutical interventions. 

But, once again, no one quite understood why, or how. 

Massachusetts General was a teaching and also a research hospital, and cases like Elizabeth’s might provide critical missing pieces to the evolving puzzle that is neuroscience. Judy Stone was the first to admit that medicine did not yet have all the answers, but she was not the sort of physician that gave up easily. Indeed, that was why she had gone into medicine in the first place. Physicians, she knew, that were guided by a strong sense of curiosity became the best patient advocates, and usually secured the best outcomes. Unfortunately, this patient’s outcomes would, in some sense, be measured by the amount of collateral damage done to her family. Because of Elizabeth’s steady deterioration, Stone had to balance a wide array of risks and benefits when she worked on taking the next steps.

After she finished talking to Elizabeth’s psychiatrist in Boston she turned in her chair and stared at the painting on her office wall. It was a print, of course, of John Martin’s Pandemonium, painted in 1841 and that she had first seen when visiting the Louvre with her husband. Martin had painted this scene after studying Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Martin had rendered a surreal Neo-classical landscape with Satan standing on a bluff surveying his domain, and in Stone’s mind this painting represented the pure, unrelenting Madness of Hell. And Madness was her enemy, the enemy. The enemy she suited up to fight every day of her life. The enemy that was butchering Elizabeth Langston thought by tortured thought, and an enemy that was making that family’s life a living Hell, on Earth.

And Judy Stone was not about to let Elizabeth slip away. Not without a fight, a real fight.

She stood and walked over to Pandemonium and looked at Satan standing there, so proud of his debaucheries, and it had been years since she’d felt so angry.

“No, not this time, you prick – you don’t get this one. I won’t allow it, so take your God-damned hands off her!”

+++++

Henry was watching the waves coming at Pegasus, counting the time between crests on one hand, and passing swells on the other. He was guessing the waves were ten feet tall, and the swell about 15, but every now and then a sleeper came along and walloped she ship’s starboard quarter. As she was taking a brisk breeze off her starboard quarter, Pegasus was heeling a bit and when that big one hit it had pushed her stern into the wind, causing Pegasus to heel even more. Tom Whitacre was steering and even he had been overwhelmed, yet Hank had been standing nearby and dashed-in to help make the save. Tom and Hank had struggled to turn her away from the wind and just managed to succeed – this time – so Henry called out to the men waiting below.

“All hands, time to shorten sail!”

Hank looked over his right shoulder at the wall of dark blue-gray clouds stretched across the far horizon, and any idiot could tell that a big blow was coming.

But what had Henry said? That every voyage has it’s storm?

“Just like life, son. And don’t you be forgettin’ that, neither!”

Now he watched his mates as they took to the ratlines and made their way up into the rigging, making their way out the yard-arms to pull in and furl sail. Pegasus was a fully rigged ship, with a foremast, a mainmast, and a mizzen mast, and her fore- and mainmasts set, from top to bottom, a topgallant sail, a topsail, and a course sail, each flown from stout oak yards. Her mizzen was gaff-rigged, and she flew a gaff topsail in light to medium airs, as well as upper and lower spankers in the lightest breezes. She almost always flew three foresails ahead of the foremast, but once the wind and the seas started acting up it was time to shorten sail, or to reduce the amount of sail area aloft to the minimum necessary to maintain steerage as wave height built. When two men could no longer manage the helm, it was long past time to shorten sail, and Henry chastised himself for making such a stupid blunder. If you thought it was time – it was already too late…!

He’d been watching the barometer in his cabin all morning, and he knew a blow was coming. Now, as he turned to looked at the approaching line of gray clouds, he squinted some, trying to make out details in the clouds.

And what he saw now caused his heart to grow cold with dread.

“Master Henry,” he said to Hank, “perhaps your eyes are better than mine, but look at them clouds. Do you see a strand of white along them, just above the sea?”

Hank looked. “Yessir. It looks like white mist.”

“Well,” Henry hissed between closed teeth, “damnit-all to hell…we’re goin’ t’have a stinkin’ white squall, so a big mother-stinkin’ blow.” He turned to his pilot and shook his head. “Line squall’s-a-comin’, Mr. Pattison. Bring in all canvas and secure the decks and hatches.” 

Pattison ran forward and relayed the order and soon everyone up in the rigging knew a white squall was coming, and nothing filled a sailor’s heart with more dread than those two words. Even with all sail down, a line squall, or what some captains called a white squall, was capable of hitting so hard that even the biggest ship could founder under the blow. Ships the size of Pegasus could be blown over on their beam ends, with her masts parallel to the sea, and if that happened water could flood the lower decks and prevent the ship from righting. Henry had been through two such events; one ship foundered, the other had been so badly damaged it had taken three months to get the ship seaworthy again – and that had been somewhere in the islands off the Brazils, with half the crew soon taken by malaria.

They were not halfway to the Thames at the morning watch, so almost abeam Edinburgh – but loaded with timber and iron goods, and with the low-lying Frisian islands now a lee-shore, Pegasus was not in the best position to weather any squall, of any sort. A white squall? No, not at all, because she was too heavy with this load.

“Hank,” Henry said calmly, “you go and check the lashings on the boats, will you? Make ‘em good and tight, boy.”

“Yessir.” Hank felt a knot forming in his gut, a white hot boiling mass of anxiety…as he trotted aft to check on the two longboats…but then, over the moans of freshening winds in the rigging, he heard someone screaming…high overhead…

He looked up, saw someone’s foot caught in the iron ring that carried the gaff aloft…but no one was free to come to the man’s aid…

…but Hank…

…and he went to the ratlines and hauled himself up to the running backstays, then it was hand-over-hand up to the jaws of the gaff… and he found Ian Nicholson hanging by his crushed ankle, blood streaming down his leg and into his face – and Ian looked a mess. 

Hank looked down, saw Henry looking up, pointing to the gaff’s halyard and Hank nodded. He swung out, grabbed the halyard and carried it back to the mast, then he braced himself and pulled against the weight of the gaff’s spar. Then, when it hardly budged, he pulled harder and this time the gaff rose an inch or so. Nicholson’s mangled foot was keeping the throat from sliding…so Hank swung out again, this time putting all his weight on the line – and then the gaff shot up a foot or so. Nicholson fell free as his foot slipped out from under the y-shaped throat, and if Ian had not had a good wrap around his wrist he might’ve fallen down to the deck…

But with Nicholson now out of the way of the huge gaff’s spar, Hank let it fall – while controlling the speed with his weight and a wrap around the mizzen. He then helped Ian get back down to the deck, with Hank carrying all Nicholson’s weight in his hands. The surgeon’s mate took Ian when they reached the deck and then, without a word, Hank went aft to check the longboats, while also keeping an eye on the approaching squall…

Which was hardly a mile away now. Three men were working on the main topgallant and unless they got down soon they would be caught up there when the squall hit; he looked at Henry, and Henry was looking at them too, while also watching Pattison securing the last of the deck hatches. He felt gun ports slamming shut underfoot, wedges being driven home to secure them against the sea, all with men shouting, trying to be heard over the rising cacophony of wind and wave.

And then, just before the squall hit, Henry turned and began shouting: “Tie yourself to something, to anything! You there, Hank, tie yourself to the mizzen and hold on tight!”

As Henry’s words registered, icy needles of frozen mist pierced the skin on Hank’s hands and face and he reached out, grabbed one of the mizzen backstays as the full force of the squall slammed into Pegasus’s fat stern. He grabbed a line and fashioned a bowline around the mizzen mast as quickly as he could – just as the wind tore through Pegasus. He felt the ship swinging as if the weight of an invisible hand began pushing her stern, and as her quarters began falling off the wind her bow quite naturally began to swing to starboard, and deeper into the wind. As the ship began heading into the full force of the squall Pegasus began heeling to port; within seconds the squall had Pegasus on her port beam – and then, as the squall caught her and began pushing her beam, the full force of the wind reached her bilges.

And as Pegasus began her lumbering roll…men began sliding down her decks into the arms of the waiting sea…the patiently waiting sea…

+++++

By the time Judy Stone arrived on the third floor of the Wang Ambulatory Care Center at Massachusetts General, an IV had already been started in Elizabeth Langston’s left arm. Elizabeth had been mildly sedated so was still conscious, and she was also visibly angry. She also recognized Stone as she approached, and on seeing her the first words out of Elizabeth’s mouth were: “I hope you rot in Hell, you cunt!”

Yet this was the reaction Judy Stone had anticipated. The reports she’d read the day before hadn’t minced words.

Because this was also the usual reaction Elizabeth spat-out when approached by one of the physicians on her team, and she had little else to say to anyone else. The nurses on her team had also taken to calling her Linda Blair behind her back, after the actress that had portrayed Regan MacNeil in William Friedkin’s film version of The Exorcist. This was not meant as a compliment.

Stone walked beside Elizabeth to the procedure room, and once inside the team double checked her restraints, then the anesthesiologist administered a light general anesthesia. A mouthguard was inserted, then the muscle relaxant succinylcholine went into her IV. Electrodes were then placed on her skull, some to induce current, others to monitor brain activity, then an EKG and blood pressure monitors were placed on her chest and abdomen. When everything had been checked, and then double checked, electrical current was passed to Elizabeth’s brain, producing a seizure. The muscle relaxant prevented any dramatic musculoskeletal movements during the seizure state, which concluded in 52 seconds. The anesthesiologist brought her out of anesthesia and Elizabeth was moved to the recovery center; five minutes later she was conscious and oriented times two. An hour later she went back to her room, accompanied by Judy Stone.

“How are you feeling,” Stone asked when Elizabeth’s eyes met her own.

“I’ve felt better,” Liz said with a chuckle. “You’re Dr. Stone, right?”

“Yup. Do you know where you are right now?”

Elizabeth looked around then shrugged. “I’m…not sure. A hospital, maybe?”

“What city?”

Liz shook her head. “Nope. No idea.”

“You know who the president is?”

“Clinton? I remember Bill Clinton.”

Judy smiled. “How about the names of your children?”

“Hank and Ben. And Hannah. And…is there a Jennifer, too?”

Judy nodded. “Yup, sure is. You remember where you live?”

Liz shook her head, then scowled. “My father? Does he know I’m here?”

“No, he doesn’t, but we don’t need to talk about that right now.”

“Where’s my mother?”

“Probably at home, her home, but you don’t live there anymore.”

“I don’t? Where do I live?”

“With your husband and children, in Vermont.”

“I remember Daisy. And a goose…a blue goose. Her name is Gertrude, and she’s been keeping me company.”

“Gertrude has? How does she do that?”

“I don’t know, but whenever I feel like I’m disappearing she comes to me and keeps me from falling.”

“From falling?”

Liz nodded. 

“Falling…where?”

“Our basement.”

“You mean the box in the basement your father kept you in?”

She nodded again. “She comes to me and keeps me from going back there. Sometimes she takes me to Hank.”

“To Hank? And where is he?”

“Right now?”

“Yes. Where is your son Hank, right now? Do you know?”

Liz nodded. “He’s drowning. The ship he’s on is capsizing, but Gertrude is with him now. He’ll be okay.”

“Yes, but do you know where he is?”

She shrugged, her voice growing distant, almost infantile in manner. “No. He’s far away now. Very far away, but Gertrude is with him.”

“And he’ll be alright?”

“Oh yes, she’ll protect him. She’s protecting all of us now.”

“Oh, she is? Gertrude sounds like a very special goose…”

Liz smiled. “Oh, she’s not really a goose…”

“She’s not? Do you know what she is?”

Again Liz shook her head. “No, but I think it’s a secret.”

“A secret?”

Liz nodded. “I’m not supposed to talk about it, am I?”

“I don’t know. Who told you that?”

“I don’t know,” Liz said with a shrug, “but I’m sleepy now.”

Judy Stone watched as Liz appeared to fall asleep, yet it looked almost as if she had been hypnotized. “Liz? Can you hear me?” she asked.

There was no response.

She sat and watched Elizabeth’s vitals reel off on the overhead display, and after a few minutes she stood to leave – not at all sure what that last bit had been about, or even if she should mention it to Henry when she saw him tomorrow. Even so, it was an interesting delusion, and she wondered what Hank’s drowning, and even the presence of a goose inside her delusions, might represent inside Elizabeth’s tortured mind…?

© 2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | and this is a work of fiction, plain and simple.

My, what interesting times we live in. Studies concerning the nature of time and consciousness reveal surprising new concepts almost every week, and our understanding of humanity’s place in the cosmos continues to evolve. As Mr. Spock would say…fascinating! Interesting times, indeed.

Music, of course, continues to evolve – year after year, style after style. One of the best ways to teach (or to learn, for that matter) is to build upon solid foundations of understanding of what “came before.” You learn to play chopsticks before you compose your first symphony, I guess. Or…you can’t understand the present without also understanding the past, and that applies to music as much as it does anything else.

Gordon Sumner, the poet from Newcastle, is an interesting case in point. His is a life full of surprises, yet also a life that has come full circle. His latest release, The Last Ship, is a sprawling two disc set of rearranged material previously seen, and though most are predominantly acoustic in nature, with a good measure of bawdy thrown in for good measure, the music is vintage Sting. There are Newcastle laments and sea shanties and so much more, so maybe a few will like strike a chord or two with you. While not exactly Holiday music, you might start with August Winds and see where his words carry you. Island of Souls is a deep look into what was, a little moody but a perfect lament. Practical Arrangement is a mature arrangement, yet classic Sting. Have fun.

The Blue Goose continues here right where it left off, and I’m seeing a four part story taking shape (I thought three would do, but…alas…). It is cold and gray up here in the northlands, and an afternoon on a sailboat somewhere warm would sure feel good right about now. Anyway, enjoy, so put on some tea and cue up some Sting, then sit back and have a read.

The Blue Goose

Part Two

Hank looked at the face in the mirror, at first unsure of what its was exactly he was looking at. Not his reflection, certainly, but when the visage began speaking his hands began to tremble, his knees to knock. Daisy saw the man in the mirror and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end – before she turned and scampered under the bed, farting twice before she disappeared.

But then Gertrude came over to him and she pecked gently along his lower thigh, at least until he looked down at her. She was looking up at him, and she kind of honked once, something she hadn’t done before. Then he looked at the man in the mirror again.

“Is that Gertrude?” the man in the mirror said. “Might I see her?”

Hank’s eyes were fluttering now, as he hovered along the edges of consciousness, but he bent over and picked up Gertrude and brought her up to the sink. And once there she looked up at Hank before she turned and looked at the sea captain on the far side of the glass.

“Ah, hello – my old friend,” the reflection said, and Hank was now pretty sure he was dreaming. In fact, he was certain, and said just that.

“I’ve never had a dream like this before,” he began, “but anyway…who are you?”

“Me? Well, I’m Eldritch Henry Langston, Jr., and I suppose that makes me your great-great grandfather.”

“Do you know Gertrude from somewhere?”

“Indeed I do, but now is not the time to speak of such things.”

“Are you on Pegasus?”

“I am.”

“Tarawa? Are you in the lagoon at Tarawa?”

The man nodded. “Yes, right where you left off, in my log entry.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I saw you, boy. Hank, think of what you’re experiencing as being like echoes, or ripples spreading across a pond. Sooner of later those ripples gain the far shore and bounce back, and Hank, you must begin to see that your thoughts are like that, too. And for some reason, it seems that a few of us in the Langston clan are able to hear one another’s thoughts and experiences, even across vast gulfs of time.”

Hank nodded. “I was reading something about that at school a few weeks ago. Some researchers say they have proof that some feelings, bad feelings like dread or even like when you feel you’ve been someplace before, those are actually thoughts traveling backwards through time. So, do you still go by the name Henry?”

“I do indeed.”

“Can I come where you are?”

Henry shook his head. “Are you sure you want to? Your grandfather tried once, too, when he was your age.”

“What happened?”

“He ran into the mirror and smacked his forehead, that’s what happened. He was not at all happy about it, I seem to recall.”

“So Grandpa Bud has done this?”

Henry nodded. “There is one thing you must remember, Hank. It helps if you’ve just been reading an entry in the logs, from something one of us has written.”

“So…that’s why I can see you at Tarawa?”

“That’s correct.”

“And it’s 1861, right?”

“Indeed.”

“I wonder if the Civil War has started yet?”

“The what?”

“The Civil War. The War Between the States, between the North and South.”

“I have no knowledge of such a thing. Tell me what you know.”

So Hank told him what he’d been learning in class the past few weeks, about slavery and abolitionists and the agrarian south versus the industrialized north.

“What about the Navy? What is the Navy doing?”

“I think they were trying to blockade the south, to keep Britain and France from trading with the confederacy.”

Henry nodded. “Do we get in a war with the British again?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“Because presently there’s a large British ship entering the lagoon. When did this war start, Hank?”

“In April, I think. April of 1861. Is it March where you are? That’s the date of the last entry I read…”

“Yes, it is indeed. So even if this new war has begun, there’s no way this other ship could know. How long does the war last, Hank?”

“Until 1865. The month of May, I think. Are you still going to Japan?”

“Yes, indeed we are. With the successful return of Commodore Perry, the Congress has asked that we merchants send representatives to Japan with all due haste, yet I fear that’s why there’s a British frigate entering the lagoon at this very moment. I fear we may have trouble today.”

There was a commotion outside the captain’s cabin followed by the sounds of distant cannon firing, then explosions in waters near Pegasus.

Henry nodded and frowned. “I will see you soon, young Hank, but now I must take your leave…”

Swirling drizzles of condensation reappeared on the mirror and Gertrude turned to him from her perch along the edge of the pedestal sink, and again her eyes were enigmatically black and penetrating, focused on his own. Her head was barely moving; it was more swaying a motion than anything else, but as Hank stared into her eyes he felt something stirring inside, something less than a memory. Like a memory that wouldn’t take shape and form into words. A feeling like deja-vu, perhaps.

“Have we been here before?” he asked.

The goose raised it’s head until it was almost even with his, then she lowered her bill – in effect presenting her forehead – and Hank lowered his head to hers…until their foreheads were touching. Hank felt a wave of dizzying speed, a rush of kaleidoscopic light and he reached out with his hands to steady himself on the edge of the porcelain sink…

…yet then he felt his hands resting on warm wood…

He shook his head, tried to push the swirling light from his mind’s eye but it was as if he was staring through the wrong end of a telescope. As if he was looking at a distant world through a distorted fisheye lens. Everything was far away and black mists swarmed, but he saw Henry running from his cabin and up into the light, up into the fight, and he could just hear Henry telling his men to prepare to make sail, then Hank heard running on the foredeck, Henry getting other men to weigh anchor. Across the lagoon the other American ship, the Bunker Hill, returned fire with the small battery on her foredeck, and Hank could just see that she too was preparing to get underway. 

The black mist retreated and he smelled gunpowder in the air, heard seamen shouting, trying to make their voices heard over the sound of the almost continuous cannon-fire. He looked around, was suddenly aware that he was now in the captain’s cabin and that there was barely enough headroom for him to stand upright. He took a few steps and his forehead slammed into a deck beam and he grumbled, then stooped low and ran towards the stairs he had seen his great-grandfather running towards. He reached the stairway and grabbed hold of a bronze rail and took the stairs two at a time and in an instant he was on deck, standing beside Henry and one of Pegasus’s helmsman.

“Why are you here?” Henry shouted when he realized Hank was now by his side.

“I don’t know! What’s happening?”

“That British Man-o-war is firing at us…that’s what’s happening!”

“But you weren’t at war with Britain, were you?”

“No…we aren’t…” Henry sighed.

“So…what if they aren’t British? What if they’re pirates?”

Henry grabbed his “Dutch Telescope” and brought it to his eye; not one of the officers he could see on the British-flagged warship was wearing the correct uniform, but they were indeed wearing a uniform. A Spaniard’s uniform.

“Spaniards!” he shouted. “I will be poxed! Mr. Gilbert, get that anchor stowed. Mr. Talbot, get those foresails up, and prepare to tack to port as soon as we have some way on! We need sea room!”

“Aye, sir,” someone shouted.

Henry picked up a bullhorn that appeared to have been fashioned from brass or bronze, and he began shouting to Captain Anders on the Bunker Hill. “Anders! You there, Anders! Spaniards aft on the warship! Repeat, Spanish officers in command!”

Signal flags soon rose off Bunker Hill’s stern, first acknowledging the information, then more flags appeared, these stating Anders’ intentions to maneuver for a broadside, to engage the warship port side to port side.

“He doesn’t have room for that,” Henry sighed. “He’ll run aground before he makes sail!” He looked at the man-o-war, then at the water, and in an instant gauging both windspeed and direction as he ran through his options. “Mr. Gilbert, man the forward batteries and as soon as we tack prepare to fire, on my command! Mr. Cummings, you will go below and prepare the guns for a starboard engagement, and get the men to hop-to or they’ll be eating mud for their supper!”

Henry then handed the telescope to Hank. “Keep an eye on her officers,” he said, his voice steady. “Tell me when they react to our movements.”

Three large foresails dropped above Pegasus’s bowsprit almost simultaneously and began pulling. The ship began slipping through the water…

“You there, Anderson, go get the mizzen staysail organized. Mr. Lightfoot, get that mizzen up now, and keep her backed until we’re over.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Hank, take the helm, would you?”

“Sir?” Hank replied, too stunned to think straight.

Henry’s eyes were majestic, like a falcon’s in a dive, yet his voice was still eerily calm. “Take the helm. Now, if you please.”

“Yessir.”

“And ready about, Mr. Talbot!” Henry shouted as another broadside, once again aimed at the Bunker Hill, fell short.

“Aye-aye, Captain!”

“Alright, Hank, make your helm left, about sixty degrees.”

“Left sixty,” Hank repeated. He looked at the compass card, saw their current heading was 340 degrees, so left sixty meant come to 280 degrees and so not quite due west, then he noted the four cardinal points on the compass and easily worked his new heading out. But the wheel was heavy! It took almost all his strength the turn it, and while Pegasus responded slowly his grandfather didn’t seem to think anything was amiss.

“Mr. Gilbert, ready your mounts to fire!” Henry paused, gauging the wind. “Right! Fire!”

Two cannons on Pegasus’s bow fired and while one round fell short one did not. This shot ripped through the mid-deck near the man-o-war’s main spar and a vast cloud of rigging fell away. A moment later her main mast slowly tilted and some crewmen could be seen falling into the water.

As the man-o-war began falling off the wind, Bunker Hill was unexpectedly going to be able to get off a full broadside with her port batteries, just as Pegasus started to come into range for a starboard broadside. Hank was trying to see the geometry of the engagement in his mind as he kept his eye on the compass card, and if he had it right it looked like an equilateral triangle was forming, with the man-o-war at the apex of the pyramid and the two American ships anchoring the base of the triangle – but with both their broadsides simultaneously coming to bear on the target.

“Mr. Cummings!” Henry shouted. “Prepare to fire – on my command!”

“Aye, sir!”

“Hank, another ten left please.”

“Ten left!” He kept the wheel over and he was sure he felt water moving over the rudder somewhere down there beneath the ship. 

“Mr. Cummings, fire the starboard batteries!”

Pegasus seemed to lurch sideways under the force of the cannonade, and his view off to the right disappeared in clouds of blueish-white smoke – then Bunker Hill’s broadside cut loose. She had two gun decks and even from this distance the shockwave from twenty-four cannons firing at once was staggering.  Smoke cleared and the man-o-war was ablaze, bright orange flames coming pouring out of the gun-ports on her starboard side. Men were diving overboard as the fire spread, and when Henry looked through his telescope he nodded, satisfied with the results of their combined attack. “There’s no one on her helm now,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.

“Mr. Cummings? Are we ready to come alongside and board her?”

“Almost, Captain! Ready to fire again, Captain!”

“Fire then, now!”

“Aye, sir!”

Maybe five seconds passed before Pegasus let loose her second broadside and that was the end of the man-o-war; a white flag was hoisted off the man-o-war’s stern just after Bunker Hill’s second broadside hit her bows. The ship’s once proud bow-sprit fell away, blown in half by Bunker Hill cannonade, this loss taking the foremast down in a loud series snapping stays and splashing timbers. With no one on the helm and no one sounding as the ship entered the shallow lagoon, the man-o-war slammed into a reef and shuddered to a stop – just as fire was engulfing her lower decks.

“She’s dead,” Henry sighed, “and ’tis a pity,” he sighed as he watched the enveloping chaos through his ‘scope. “Well, perhaps there will be something to be salvaged.”

Her powder ignited and the man-o-war’s main deck heaved upward and hovered there indecisively, then the ship fell in on itself, her back broken and fires beyond control. Within seconds she began to settle by the stern, yet only partially sinking down in the shallow lagoon, her spreading fires soon engulfing the remains of the ship. Hank could see a few dozen men swimming away from her, but Henry saw something more troubling still.

“Sharks,” he muttered quietly. “Mr Gilbert! Prepare to lower away the longboat! Sharks in the water! There!” he commanded –  as he pointed just aft of the smoking wreck.

And Hank smelled carnage everywhere. Black smoke hung over the water near the man-o-war, white smoke from cannons clung to Pegasus and Bunker Hill, and soon enough the screams of men fighting off sharks filled the air too, joining into a surreal, macabre cacophony of death.

But just then several people emerged from the passenger cabins just below, near Henry’s cabin in the aft section of the ship just below the deck he was standing on. Most were reasonably well dressed, indeed, one of the men looked rather prosperous. So did his wife.

And, Hank soon realized, so did the man’s daughter.

She was impossibly cute too, and though she probably was no older than he, she was so pretty it seemed as if the mere presence of the girl took his breath away. Her mother was dressed quite well in the fashion of the day, a long dress with ruffles and frills adorning her sleeves and neck, but her daughter seemed not to care for such things. She was dressed in simpler attire, a blue and white gingham skirt and a very plain white blouse…and no shoes! Indeed, her checked skirt looked recently made…

She had to be one of the survivors from the whalers lost off the Cape. As he watched her she indeed seemed a little too unsure of her surroundings.

“Mr. Gilbert,” Henry shouted, “will you get that boat underway, while there are yet men to be saved!”

Hank reluctantly turned away from the girl and walked to the starboard rail and he looked down at a well-kept skiff, perhaps twenty five or so feet long, as it pushed away from Pegasus. Four seamen started rowing and Mr. Gilbert stood to the boat’s tiller, steering for the smoldering hulk of the still burning man-o-war. The water beneath Pegasus was shockingly clear, a clear light blue he had never seen before, and certainly not ever in the Connecticut River below the house in Norwich.

And he could see the sharks now, too. Missile shaped torpedoes, silver-gray and fast, homing in on the struggling survivors thrashing about in the water, and when their dorsal fins gained the surface Hank saw that they were black-tipped reef sharks, known man-eaters and frenzy feeders typically found in shallower lagoons throughout the South Pacific…

The passengers walked to the starboard rail and looked at the unfolding carnage, but the women quickly turned away when they realized exactly what was happening out there. But not the girl, Hank noticed. No, she held onto the heavy wooden rail and leaned out just a bit – and he thought it looked as if she was studying the scene, perhaps trying to memorize the sequence of events.

But just then the girl turned and stared right at Hank. 

He was standing by the ship’s wheel and there wasn’t another soul nearby so he was certain she was looking right at him, and that time her gaze really did take his breath away.

Yet he held her eyes in his; he did not look away.

Nor did the girl, until she decided to walk up on the poop deck where he stood. 

It wasn’t far. No more than twenty feet or so, but she had to climb the modest stairs first and he watched her movements as she made her way up the broad wooden steps, as she walked right up to him.

“I haven’t seen you before,” the girl said, and it was more a statement than a question.

“I’m just visiting,” Hank replied – and he knew his words were a little evasive.

“But where have you been?”

“He’s been locked away, hard at his studies, Miss Tomberlin,” Captain Langston said as he came to Hank’s aid. “This is Henry Langston, Ma’am, and he’s my grandson. He’s aboard as a provisional midshipman, learning the basics of seamanship and navigation on this voyage.”

“Oh, I see,” the girl said, and Hank could clearly see that she believed not one word Henry had just told her. “So tell me, Master Langston, what is our current latitude and longitude?”

Hank looked at the girl and grinned, all the while trying to remember the position he had seen entered in the logbook he’d been reading in the library. “Our current position is one degree twenty-seven north latitude by one hundred seventy two degrees fifty six east longitude,” he said easily, “if I’m not mistaken.”

“Very good, Henry,” the captain beamed, then turning to the girl. “He’s been helping with my log entries,” Henry said, grinning. “As a matter of fact, young Henry, I thought you were supposed to be in your cabin doing your words?”

“I was, sir, but thought it best I come topsides during the engagement.”

“Yes, your presence did indeed prove useful. Very well, Master Henry, you’re dismissed.”

“May I stay topsides, Captain. In case the the physician needs a hand while tending to the injured?”

“Oh, yes. Carry on, then. Report to Dr. Chamberlain on the foredeck. And now Miss Tomberlin, you shall retire to your cabin before the injured have boarded. Is that clear?”

The girl noted the stern tone in the captain’s voice and she seemed confused, almost angry by that sudden turn. “Why must I do so, Captain Langston. I surely won’t be in the way?”

Henry now turned the full force of his manifest authority on the girl, accompanied by a withering stare. “Miss Tomberlin, shall I have Midshipman Langston escort you to your cabin? You are too young to view such atrocities, and I will not have that on my conscience!”

“Then I think you should have this boy escort me to the brig, Captain!” the girl huffed sarcastically, though she was smiling inwardly. The old captain had been so easy to manipulate, because now she’d be able to talk to the boy without his interference, and far from all the other prying eyes onboard.

“Midshipman! See this lady to her cabin, if you please, then report to Dr. Chamberlain.”

Hank grinned. This outcome was far better than he’d expected. “Aye, Captain!” he said, really getting into the act. “Miss Tomberlin, lead the way, if you please,” he added.

Nothing was far away on this ship, of course. Nothing was on a 170 foot schooner. Her cabin turned out to be fairly close to Henry’s, and was not much larger than the closet he and Ben shared back at the house in Vermont. And as she was indeed a shipwreck survivor, she now had few possessions with her. Indeed, what little she now possessed had been purchased for her in Valparaiso by Henry and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Chamberlain.

“So tell me, Midshipman Langston, just what is a New England Patriot?”

“What?” he moaned, suddenly realizing he was still wearing his clothing from home…

“And what is that on your wrist?”

He reflexively moved one hand to cover the other, trying to hide the Apple Watch on his left wrist. “I’m sorry…what?”

“The device on your wrist. Show it to me,” she demanded – as she reached out and grasped his hand. Of course, as soon as she lifted it the watch activated and the display came on, and when she saw that she literally dropped his wrist and stepped away from Hank. “What manner of thing is this?” she whispered.

“It’s a device for telling time.”

Her eyes went wide and round. “You jest!”

“No, actually, it does. Here, look…” he said as he lifted his forearm up so she could see, but the time was still set to the New England time zone so the time shown was of course nonsensical, but the display was showing his heart rate and blood oxygen levels too, which were pulsing merrily away.

She looked at his wrist then at his eyes, and her gaze lingered there a while. “When did you come aboard, Midshipman?”

“Please, call me Hank, would you?”

“Hank? So, your name really is Henry Langston, like the captain’s? You are his relation?”

Hank nodded, but he wasn’t sure what he should or shouldn’t say to her, so he remained silent.

“And this shirt? Who are these Patriots?”

“A sports team in Boston, and now, if I may, I need to report to the surgeon.”

But as he began to step away the girl reached out and grabbed his hands in hers, then she leaned forward and whispered in his ear. “You can trust me,” she said to him with a gentle squeeze of the hand. “Whatever it is, you can tell me. I will never betray your secret, or your trust.”

And with that she let go of his hands. He looked at her again, then nodded.

“There’s something about you,” he said. “Something about your eyes. When I first saw you, well, I started to feel strange inside, almost like I was getting dizzy. Not like I’ve ever felt before, I guess.”

“I know. I felt that strangeness, as well.”

He nodded once, now feeling disoriented much more than before, so he then turned and left her alone in the tiny cabin, his mind a torrent of strange, inrushing emotions. He turned towards the only daylight within his grasp and made his way up on deck, now almost reeling. The next thing he felt was Henry grabbing him by the arms and carrying him into his sea-cabin, then the old captain placed him face to face with the mirror.

And it was the strangest thing, all these unfamiliar sensations.

At first he saw himself in the mirror, but then he saw his reaction from the far side, and a moment later he was standing at the sink in the bathroom of his grandfather’s house in Rhode Island.

“Hank?” he heard his grandmother asking. “Are you up yet?”

It was all he could do to hang onto the pedestal sink as he fought off wave after wave of vertiginous convulsions, and he could feel his thighs and shoulders twitching. Not gentle little twitches, but deep, jerky movements, and at one point he felt he was about to collapse right there beside the sink.

Then Bud was there, by his side.

“Looks like you picked up a bit of sun last night?” he asked – a little sarcastically.

“What?” Hank moaned.

“Don’t worry, boy, these feelings will pass soon enough, but the first time is hardest. Next time you go, you’ll be better prepared.”

“What?”

“Hank, you’re not the first of us to do this sort of thing. Even your father has been.”

“No…”

“Now hop in the shower. Your brother is loading the car right now, as we speak.”

Hank remembered now. Ben got new skis for Christmas, and he was going to get new ski boots before heading up to the Skiway tomorrow. 

But he wanted to see his mother most of all, yet he wanted to get back to Pegasus, too. Ben could ski all he wanted, but his mother had to be in bad shape to still be in the hospital after almost a month. Yet Hannah and Jennifer really didn’t seem to care at all. And Hank understood that, to a degree. His mother wasn’t their mother, and maybe it was as simple as that – but that felt wrong, too. Elizabeth had been taking care of Hannah and Jennifer like they were her own children, and their reaction to her collapse seemed to lack not just empathy, but common courtesy. So many thoughts. He felt so confused. Lost in a forest of disjointed dreams, framed by entries in a logbook. What was real, and what was a dream…?

And what was her name?

The girl on Pegasus? Tomberlin, wasn’t it? But what was her first name? And why had he felt so disoriented by her? She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, but did beauty make people feel like that? It was like he couldn’t think…at all…when he looked into her eyes. Had he grown as insipid as all that?! 

But Hank – had – forgotten about his mom and dad the entire time he was on Pegasus, and he might’ve wondered why but for the lingering vision that girl’s mesmerizing eyes.

+++++

The psych ward at DHMC was located in a quiet wing on the third floor, not far from Judy Stone’s office, but even as he walked to his mother’s room Hank could tell there was something peculiar about this part of the hospital. There was something unfamiliar about mental illness in general, but now that the reality of suicide had come into their lives the dynamics of all their lives had changed. And Dr Stone was not at all sure she wanted someone as young as Hank on the ward, even if the boy was visiting his mother.

The sight of someone restrained in a bed is not a pleasant one. The sight of someone who has been refusing food for days is dramatically more unpleasant, and it is the sort of experience that gets seared into memory, especially to one so young. It is a sight that one simply cannot erase.

And try as she might, Dr Stone simply could not convince Hank that now was not the time to visit his mother. And Stone could not do so because Elizabeth Langston was getting close to death; indeed, she had been placed on a gastric feeding tube two nights before, yet somehow she continued to yank the tubes out. The night before this had very nearly caused a pulmonary emergency, when the yanking tube leaked the feeding solution into her trachea. Restraints were ordered, and Elizabeth had grown combative after her wrists and ankles were secured to the bed frame. 

But the woman was adamant. She wanted to die.

And she was willing to starve herself to death in order to do just that.

Like many teaching hospitals, Dartmouth Hitchcock had an Ethics Committee. Unlike most hospitals, this committee was made up of philosophy professors and graduate students working in the Philosophy Department of a highly regarded Ivy League school, and, as such, this committee took its work more than seriously. They had been called in to assist the treatment team trying to take care of Elizabeth Langston, and members of the committee had been observing her care for days. Yesterday, members of the committee had interviewed her, trying to determine the validity of her claim, that she wanted to die because her life had been so corrupt. Was this wish grounded in reality? What was the totality of her life circumstance? Had she been suffering chronic emotional distress for years, or was this the emotional acting out of someone who, perhaps, really had no idea what they were asking for? Did she, in the end, fully comprehend the consequences of her request? This case, the the head of the committee knew, would more than likely become a published case study, so their actions would be studied, and scrutinized – for years to come.

The patient was a librarian at the college and had long been regarded as a model of her profession – right up until the moment of her break. Her husband was a physicist at the college, her children were all regarded as well adjusted and three of them were academically gifted. On the surface, everything about her life was as unremarkable as could be. Nothing they knew explained all this…

Yet under the surface trouble had been percolating for years.

One of the first things Judy Stone learned concerned Elizabeth’s relationship with her parents, and to her father specifically. Stone was fairly certain, given her profile, that the woman had been sexually abused, and that this one feature of her upbringing had grown into the one causal item that had corrupted her ability to form close intimate relationships with others. Just a few interviews revealed that the woman’s pattern of abuse as a child had produced a uniquely crippled psyche. 

Elizabeth Langston had grown up consumed by the need to conceal her deepest wishes and fears, and so consumed was she by the need to conceal these things that she never revealed any of these things to anyone in her life. Classic repression. Easy to uncover, difficult to understand. And painful for all involved in her deceptions.

And it at first appeared that her children knew nothing about any of this, because – so far, anyway – Elizabeth had been unwilling to involve her children in her predations. Yet after a week in her care, Dr Stone was not so sure this was true anymore.

Ben was, by almost any measure, a gregarious, outgoing kid, and he had the potential to be a gifted athlete. Yet, and again by any measure, his academic performance had presented one red flag after another – and despite this his teachers had ignored each and every one of them. He was presenting with all the academic warning signs of someone being abused, from daydreaming to becoming moody when confronted, and already she’d learned enough to want to interview the boy. Yet even so, doing something so invasive over Christmas was hardly the best time to do something so unsettling, as who knew what might be uncovered…?

+++++

Bud and Hank got the heat going as soon as they arrived at the house in Norwich, yet the next thing Hank saw was evidence that someone had been in the house. Nothing was wrong, specifically, just certain things seemed out of place. But one quick trip to the garage revealed that their father’s Volvo was missing, and Bud immediately called the police. Ellen took Ben to the ski shop in Hanover, which seemed to settle the boy down a little.

But no sooner had the police arrived at their house than the Volvo turned up, and it was being driven by none other than Henry Langston. The police soon left and Henry enlisted his children to unload groceries from the back of his Volvo, and all the while Bud filled in his son on what had been going on over the past month, and Christmas, while he had been away.

“Has anyone been to see Elizabeth?” Henry asked.

“We were advised not to come until after Christmas. Ellen has talked to Elizabeth’s psychiatrist almost daily, but no one has talked to the children about any of this – yet.”

Henry nodded. “Well, I’m sorry you two were pulled into this, but thanks for being there for them. I know they had a great Christmas.”

“Hank has become very special, Henry.”

Henry turned to his father, because he knew what that meant. “Already? Where did he go?”

“To Pegasus, when she was at Tarawa the first time, with Henry on his first Pacific crossing, the trip he made in 1861 as Master.” 

Henry smiled. “So, he met Linton Tomberlin. I bet he’s in love.”

“You were too, I seem to recall.”

“I was. No doubt about it.”

“Where have you been, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Henry pointed at the sun with a nod of his head. “Things are getting busy up there.”

“Oh?”

“Come on, Dad. Let’s fire up the Egg and put on some steaks. I got stuff for salad, too.”

+++++

Daisy was walking beside Hank, Gertrude was perched on his shoulder, and the three of them were once again walking up the hillside behind the house. There was a solid foot of snow on the ground and Daisy loved the stuff; she plowed along, stopped to sniff for grouse under fallen trees and around fluffy old snow covered pines, and they walked along until they came to one of the old Quaker churches formed by planted pine trees. Planted more than a century before, these churches were now little more than wildlife sanctuaries, but few knew of their existence, let alone what they had originally been intended for.

Pines had been planted in a broad cruciform, but only in outline, so now this church had walls of towering pines swaying in the breeze, and roofs of sheltering boughs covering the grassy interior, yet anyone could see the beauty of the resulting structure. Perhaps fifty people could have been seated inside the space, if the structure had ever been used as such. But probably not, for time left the planted chapel to grow on its own. And now, this church was occupied only by deer seeking shelter from passing storms. The animals bedded down up under the transept on soft grasses, and as Daisy walked around the area she sniffed around the flattened area lost in the scent of sleeping deer, while Hank, as he always was, seemed entranced by the sense of desolate space. Deer had found shelter here, perhaps for decades, and it was obvious why. With a foot of snow cover out beyond these trees where the deer lived, their landscape was a bitter test of survival, yet inside this sanctuary there was still soft grass to be found, and shelter from the howling winds and driving snow. In a way, Hank mused, this little chapel was more attuned to God’s word than anything yet fashioned by the hands of man.

And there were dozens of these chapels scattered among the settlements that had sprung up along the Connecticut River. Had these early settlers visions of using these chapels as places of worship one day, or had they meant them for wildlife to use? No one seemed to know, as few historians even knew of these chapels, but what a nice thought it was. He sat and looked up at the sky, at white clouds scudding along up there beyond the breeze, then he looked around as Gertrude hopped down from his shoulder and walked around pecking at the grass. He could just make out the shape of the cross in the sentinel-like formation of trees, and whoever had planted them had done so following a rigid formula.

Hank had found another such chapel when he was on a Cub Scouts camping trip two years before, and this second chapel had been near Mount Ascutney. He had counted the pines as he noted their placement, the same shape of a crucifix. The ‘arms’ of the transept were each planted with seven pines, with seven paces between each pine. Seven pines above the transept, fourteen below, so each arm of the crucifix had been planted in multiples of seven – but why? And the head of each transept pointed east, due east. Why?

Daisy came over and flopped down beside him, her nose lingering over the flattened grass, her eyes searching hidden contours and fleeting shadows. Gertrude extended her wings and tested them with a few tentative flaps, but then she just flew away.

And Hank watched, helpless as his expectations gave way to her instincts. Daisy looked up at him, her eyes suddenly full of reflected sadness. Like ripples spreading across a pond…

“Well…holy crow…” he muttered. This was turning into one bad day. He couldn’t see his mother and his father seemed to be living in another world. Certainly not this one. But…now this?

‘Has the universe decided to take a crap on me today?’ he sighed.

He stood and looked around the little chapel again but now, suddenly, this forest enclave was nothing more than a curiosity, and a very lonely one at that.

“Come on, girl,” he said to Daisy as he patted his thigh, the sound mostly muffled by the thick mittens on his hands. He made his way out the hidden opening and stepped out on the game trail, then he looked down valley towards Norwich and White River Junction, watching the last of the day’s sun falling on the summit of Mount Ascutney on the southern horizon. It would be getting cold out soon, real cold, and he hoped Gertrude would find someplace warm and safe…

But he needn’t have. 

He heard fluttering wings then felt her light on his shoulder and he turned his head just enough to meet her gaze. “I sure hope you don’t do that again,” the boy said, “at least not while I’m alive.” He took off a mitten and reached up, rubbed the top of Gertrude’s head, and she bobbed along on his shoulder as they made their way down through the crunchy snow back to the house.

His father and grandfather were out back on the flagstone patio standing beside his dad’s smoker, a huge green thing shaped like a dimpled egg, and smoke was curling out of the little cast iron chimney on top of the egg. He had smelled burning charcoal and searing steaks from a quarter mile away and it hit him then, that was the smell of home, at least his home on the occasional good days the family had usually enjoyed in spring and fall.

Other than Christmas, winters in the Upper Valley had been bleak and dreary, but his dad said that was because Hank had simply grown so comfortable while being down on the water – all summer long. That was true enough, but starting in November it seemed like everyone had the Upper Valley Crud, a combination of upper respiratory and sinus infections, that didn’t leave until April or May, and that just made the dreariness all that much worse. So far he’d only had a mild case this year – yet it had cleared up as soon as he got down to the sea air in Rhode Island. He felt sure he’d start feeling crummy again soon, because he felt the sea in his bones. It was where he felt he belonged…

Hank kicked the snow off his boots as he walked up onto the patio, and as usual Gertrude fled as soon as she took a direct hit of smoke from the grill; she glided over to the patio door and tucked her head under a wing, waiting for Hank to come to his senses and get out of that nasty purple haze and let them both go inside, where they belonged.

His grandfather looked up at the commotion and smiled at Gertrude. A very special smile.

And then Hannah walked into the kitchen with Jennifer and Ben, followed a moment later by Ellen. Ben had his new ski boots in hand, carrying them by a little plastic handle looped through the upper buckles. The were the newest Head competition boots, white and very slick looking. Hank thought they even looked fast, ‘and at that price they should,’ he muttered.

Ben took off upstairs like a rocket, lost in fevered dreams of racing down Swiss mountains.

Ellen and Hannah started pulling stuff from the fridge and tossing a salad, while his dad poked the steaks on the grill, and after adjudging the bounce he turned them one last time to finish them off with a baste of lime and butter. A minute later he pulled them off the fire and put them on a preheated platter, then everyone went inside. Hank finally slipped out of his snow boots and woolen mittens, stopping to warm his hands up by the wood stove before heading into the kitchen to help set the table.

Which fell to Jenn and Hank that night. Then again, it always seemed to fall to them, but isn’t that just the way it is sometime?

“How was your walk?” Jenn asked as she handed him the napkins, her manner as easy as it ever had been, almost as if she didn’t care about a thing in the world.

“Gertie flew off while we were out. First time, too, but she came back a few minutes later.”

“I bet that was scary. You think she’s ready to go live in the wild?”

“I’m not ready for her to.”

“Okay, but what if she is?”

“Then she is. I won’t stop her. I couldn’t…”

“She was born in the wild, you know, so maybe she would rather be free…?”

“So why did I run into her, Jenn? Why did she attach herself to me?”

“Because you saved her life.”

“Exactly.”

“Do you think that means she belongs to you now?”

He shrugged. “I guess not…but maybe I belong to her.”

“Oh, you do? Well, I guess I would feel like that, too, if I was in your place.”

He looked at her and nodded. “Thanks. She means a lot to Daisy and me.”

“Thanks for what?”

“For understanding.”

“Do you remember when Ben left the back door open and Daisy ran off?”

He nodded. “Yeah, sure?”

“Well, she came back on her own, didn’t she? And she’s never done it again. I think maybe she learned her lesson.”

“And that was?”

“That it’s dangerous out there, and that you take care of her. Maybe she just needed that one little taste of freedom, you know? To understand just how good she has it with you. And maybe Gertrude needed that too.”

He nodded. “I hope that’s it.”

Ellen and Hannah carried in platters loaded with steaks and a big spinach soufflé, then Bud came in carrying the salad bowl, and soon everyone was seated around the dining room table passing plates around and talking – just like families everywhere do over dinner. But then, after a few minutes of that normalcy it dawned on Hank – that this was the first time they’d had a family dinner without their mom around, and he realized he felt all hollow and empty inside because she wasn’t with them.

“Has anyone been to see Mom yet?” he asked…and the almost carefree atmosphere around the table shattered into a thousand pieces as everyone fell to the floor.

But seeing this, Ellen replied casually, and she casually saved the evening. “Oh, I did,” she said, smiling, “and Dr. Stone is going to come by later tonight to talk with all of us. I think she wants to talk to us as a family, instead of in her office. That was nice of her, I think. Don’t you, Henry?” she added, looking her son in the eye as the question lingered in the air – apparent.

Hank’s father nodded, but he didn’t look up from his steak.

Then Bud looked at his wife. “Do we need to call her first?”

“I have her number,” Ellen said, grinning, “ and I’ll give her a call when we’re finished here.”

Bud grimaced, hating to spring this on the kids so fast – but, he thought, maybe this was the best way…? He wasn’t so worried about Hank, but Ben was another matter.

Ben had barely mentioned their mother, not since that night right after Thanksgiving. He had retreated into his daydreams since then and, Bud thought, he had been acting almost like he felt guilty about something.

But then, just moments after that singular thought crossed his mind, the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. Something wasn’t adding up right now, was it?

He sat back, and having suddenly lost his appetite, he did his best not to look at Ben.

“So, Ben,” he finally said, trying to change the flow of his thoughts, “which boots did you settle on?”

“The Head Comps, which are supposed to the best for GS.”

“That’s Giant Slalom, right?”

Ben nodded. “Right. Faster than slalom, not as fast as Super-G, or Downhill.”

“I thought you did pretty good on the Slalom course at the Skiway last year,” Henry said. “Why the change?”

“Slalom is getting too technical,” Ben said, reciting something he’d read in a magazine somewhere. “Besides, I want to go faster but I can’t join the Downhill squad until middle school. If I do good at GS, I might have a shot at making the squad.”

“How many from the program made the U.S. Ski Team last year?” Ellen asked, now regarding her husband carefully.

“Four made the Alpine team, and I think three made the Jumping squad. I don’t know how many made the Nordic team, but it was a bunch.”

“And that’s what you aim to do?” she added.

Ben nodded. “Yup, sure is.”

Henry looked up at that and smiled. “Good to have a goal like that. You put in enough hard work and who knows how far you’ll go.”

Hannah and Jenn were starting to feel a little left out and Hannah definitely wanted to take some of the spotlight now, so she cleared her throat and… “So, Dad, I got my second SAT scores in the mail. I got a combined 1550!”

Henry looked up at her and beamed. “Damn! Now there’s something to be proud of, kiddo! You get any letters yet?”

“One from NYU, one from Columbia. Do you think we could go down soon and take the tour?”

Henry thought a moment – which for him was difficult, as taking a college pre-admissions tour had nothing at all to do with quantum mechanics – but then he remembered where he was and nodded. “The week after New Years. Think you could manage that?” he said.

Hannah squealed with delight. “You betcha!” she said, suddenly ecstatic with this sudden turn of events.

Henry looked at his father then. “Dad? Think you could come with us?”

“Of course.”

Henry turned his attention to Jenn, who hadn’t spoken at all during their dinner. “And Jenn, did you get your PSATs?”

She nodded. “I did, yes, but I took the regular SAT, remember?”

“Oh, right. I knew that…! And…?” her father asked.

She looked at Hannah then shrugged. “Could we talk about it later?”

“No need to be shy around this table, young lady,” Bud said, prodding her a little.

Jenn sighed. “Sixteen hundred,” she sighed, looking down.

“But that’s a perfect score, isn’t it?” Ellen asked.

Hannah visibly deflated and now their father understood Jenn’s reticence.

“Did you get any letters?” Henry asked. 

“Three so far. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.”

“Nothing from Dartmouth?” Henry asked.

“Yeah. Them too,” she added with a quiet scowl. “And a couple others, I guess.”

Ellen watched the old dynamic take shape, yet she also kept an eye on Ben – who seemed to get smaller and smaller as the girls’ scores took precedence over his ski racing. Only Hank seemed genuinely proud of Jenn and Hannah, even more so than the girls’ father, and that just piqued Ellen’s curiosity.

“Hank?” she asked. “Did you tell your father about your Christmas present yet?”

Bud cleared his throat and shook his head just a micron off center. His gift of The Blue Goose, the Langston 28 in the finishing shed, was still not open knowledge among the kids, at least not yet. Hank followed the exchange with his eyes and shrugged.

“I’m sending him to sailing camp down in Newport next summer, Henry,” Bud said…which was true, of course, but it also postponed the inevitable outbursts of sibling jealousy a little longer.

“Oh? Which one?”

“The racing camp at U.S. Sailing, in Newport.”

Henry nodded. “470s, right?”

Hank nodded. “Yessir. Same as you, when you went there.”

“Good. Fun little boats.”

‘Whew!’ Bud thought. ‘Crisis averted. For now, anyway.’

Jenn cleared her throat and looked first at Bud, then at Hank. “So, when are you going to tell us about The Blue Goose?”

Bud scowled and looked down at his hands. Ellen smiled triumphantly, because she detested secrets. Hank shook his head, then threw a couple of hate bombs in Jenn’s direction.

“What’s The Blue Goose?” Henry asked.

“A 28 we took on trade last summer. Ben Rhodes and some of the team cleaned her up a bit, and then your mother and I decided to give it to Hank for Christmas.”

“What?” Hannah cried. “A sailboat?”

“Dude! That’s awesome!” Ben said, smiling broadly while he fist-bumped his brother.

Jenn smiled. ‘Mission accomplished,’ she told herself, as always intent on upsetting the applecart.

But Jennifer’s grandfather studied her, too, and he wasn’t at all sure he liked what he saw in her eyes.

+++++

Dr. Judy Stone, Elizabeth’s psychiatrist, arrived after the kids had finished helping Ellen get the dishes cleared and into the dishwasher, and after greeting everyone the physician asked to talk to the adults for a moment. Ellen and Emily Stone, Daisy’s vet, took the kids upstairs and they all huddled together, all six of them, and as it was the largest, they did so in Hannah’s bedroom. Emily asked the boys how their Christmas went and so of course Jennifer had to go into one of her passive-aggressive fits of jealousy by blurting out the details surrounding Hank’s very own sailboat. Ben, of course, couldn’t talk about his new skis and boots enough, while the girls acted like spoiled brats, bemoaning the fact that all they got were new laptops. 

Ellen, on hearing this, decided she’d had enough. “Hannah? You do recall you have a graduation coming up? What do you suppose your grandfather will get you for the occasion? But oh, wait, how do you suppose he’ll think about that if he hears you talking like you are right now?”

It was flipping off a light switch, Emily Stone thought. The girls were instantly back on their best behavior, smiling pleasantly as if nothing had happened, and in a way the veterinarian admired their resiliency. Yet, in another way, she now regarded them warily. Hannah’s plastic expression was bad enough, but Jennifer was showing the obvious signs of middle-child syndrome, acting out her petty jealousies while being remarkably clever about how she masked her inner feelings. Jennifer was, she thought, maybe the most toxic element in this family. Maybe – the – toxic element. Watching these kids, and listening to them, were of course why she had come this evening.

Judy had mentioned her misgivings about Ben to Emily – so she could watch for signs of trouble, but now she wasn’t so sure that he was a problem. She watched Ben carefully but he really seemed to be a perfect example of a happy-go-lucky misfit, always living in the moment and without a care in the world – beyond next seasons lineup of skis and ski boots. And, she knew, he probably wouldn’t change until he was seventy years old. If then.

Hannah seemed a simple narcissist, self-centered in the extreme but not particularly dangerous. Despite her tendencies to see the world as a series of Pavlovian responses to immediate wants, she didn’t appear to be as malignantly manipulative as Jennifer – but that was just a simple assessment after a half hour of watching the kids talking to one another. Jennifer, on the other hand, was studying what everyone said, always looking for an momentary advantage or a weakness to exploit, and the girl was smart. Possibly a sociopath, definitely way up there on the narcissistic personality disorder spectrum, Emily soon began to feel uncomfortable around Jennifer. Worse still, she was now sure the girl’s grandmother felt that way, too.

Which left her own personal favorite, Hank.

The boy seemed like a perfect son, and like anyone who had taken a bunch of psych classes as an undergraduate, when anyone appeared perfect it was time to raise the alarm.

Yet as they talked it was obvious his only concern was for his mother, but also, of course, his parent’s deteriorating relationship before her collapse. These feelings were natural enough and quite understandable, yet she could tell he was holding something back. Something big, something very important to him. Maybe even more important than his mother.

And she wondered what that could be…then it was time for all the family to talk to Judy.

+++++

One of the most troubling aspects of Elizabeth Langston’s family background became apparent as soon as she was committed for psychiatric observation. When contacted, Elizabeth’s mother expressed no interest in coming to visit her daughter, and it turned out that Elizabeth’s father was deceased. She had two sisters, yet her mother seemed reluctant to pass along any sort of contact information. After her first two attempts failed, she enlisted the support of the police department in Boston, who were able to uncover the necessary information through other means. Judy called both of them, and two days later they both made the trip to Hanover. Henry picked them up at the airport in Lebanon and took them to the Norwich Inn, because he wanted them close to the boys…just in case.

Because after his meeting with Judy Stone two nights ago, Henry was now all too aware that his wife was skating along the razor’s edge between life and death. More troubling still, Elizabeth had chosen death and it was only through the nonstop efforts of Stone and the Ethics Committee that his wife was still alive. The committee had come to the conclusion that it was simply too soon to discontinue life saving interventions, because Elizabeth’s case still fell into the “acute” phase. If Elizabeth could maintain that the pain of her existence was simply too great to bear, and do so over an extended period of observation, the Committee’s recommendation might change. But not now, not yet.

Oddly enough, it had come as a shock to Henry that his wife had family, and now he wanted to know more about his wife’s childhood almost as much as Judy Stone did. It had always been a ‘red flag’ that she didn’t have any family, and he had blithely accepted her explanation that they had been gone for years, so she had flat-out lied when she maintained she had no other family. Looking back on that now he could clearly see the error he’d made, if only because he was now learning that his second wife was a master of disguises. Henry could see deeper patterns emerging, too. Elizabeth had grown accustomed to doing whatever was necessary to keep people from uncovering her past, from lying about her family to refusing to talk about her childhood, and now that he could see the tumblers falling into place he was dismayed about his careless approach to dating her.

But now he needed to know: what was it about her past she wanted to conceal?

With that question now out in the open, both Judy Stone and Henry decided it was time to contact Carter Ash, to see if she had talked to him about any of these things. Still, it was decided that Judy would handle all these interviews, simply because Henry was in fact emotionally compromised where Ash was concerned. Yet it turned out that Ash was as much in the dark as Henry had been; Elizabeth had in fact told Carter that she was a widow, and when he found out at Thanksgiving that this was a lie, she had evaded his further enquiries by saying he had simply misunderstood her, that she was merely separated. Carter had begun to distance himself after that, yet when he learned what had happened to her, he was concerned for her well-being, and for that of her kids.

Hanover was a small town and Judy knew that soon enough word would spread that the children’s mother had tried to kill herself. Maybe news that Elizabeth was a suicidal in-patient wouldn’t spread as quickly, so that would need to be a consideration going forward, which was why she was beginning to think that the boys might do better at their grandparent’s place in Rhode Island, at least for the remainder of this academic year. Hannah and Jennifer, on the other hand, were both too close to graduation, and pulling them out of Hanover High would create more problems than it might solve. She spoke to Henry about these possibilities and he agreed with this thinking.

But Henry asked his dad what he thought.

Perhaps many grandparents would rebel at the merest mention of taking on such a burden, but not Bud, and certainly not Ellen. In some ways this was like a dream come true to Ellen, as she missed having children to take care of on most any morning. She had always loved getting up early and making breakfast for her children, then getting them ready for school. She needed something like that, and perhaps more than either was willing to admit, but Henry was nonetheless surprised by the faint little smile he thought he saw cross his father’s face when he brought it up.

“Why don’t we ask the boys first?” Bud said.

“Because,” Henry sighed, “Hank won’t have a problem staying down there with you, but Ben will. Ben won’t want to move away from the slopes, or the ski team.”

“Then he stays,” Bud said with a shrug. “And if he stays, we shouldn’t single out Hank. He might get the wrong idea…”

“Mom? Would you mind moving up here for the rest of the school year? At least until Hannah graduates?”

Ellen looked at Bud and he could see it in her eyes.

“Of course she can,” Bud sighed, even knowing how much she would be missed in the front office. “But maybe Hank could come down on weekends to help me get caught up…?”

Henry nodded. “I can handle that. Yeah, especially with that new boat. I like it, Dad. That’ll keep him focused.”

It never occurred to either that Hank was the real empath in the family, and that all the doubts and uncertainties surrounding his mother and her illness were beginning to crush the life out of him.

+++++

Carter Ash called one afternoon and asked Henry if he could come over to the house, and he only said it had something to do with his own son. Given the circumstances, Henry reluctantly agreed. 

It was New Year’s Eve, of course, and Ben was just getting in from the Skiway when Carter and Huck arrived. Henry met them out front, mainly to ask what all the drama was about, so he was a little amused when he learned it had to do with Hank having mentioned that he would get Huck a brochure detailing the Langston 28, which seemed to possess the meaning of life to Huck…in the boy’s current state of mind, anyway.

‘Oh, my,’ Henry thought, ‘I can’t wait to see this…’

So Henry walked with them inside and asked Hank to come down, and as soon as Hank realized what this was all about he got into it, too.

“Well, my Grandfather is here this week. Would you like to meet him? And maybe he can bring one up for you one weekend, too…”

“What’s this?” Bud asked.

“Oh, Huck has a real thing for the 28,” Hank began. “I kinda promised I could get him a copy of the brochure, too.”

Bud had at first regarded this boy with cool detachment, but when he heard this news his smile said it all. “A brochure, eh? What about that 28 we have in the finishing shed? Maybe he’d like to come down and take a look at her one weekend…?”

Huck was beside himself now, for this was like a dream come true, and he wheeled around and turned to his father. “Dad? Could I?”

Carter looked at Hank, then at Henry. “Fine by me,” Carter said. “Are you sure you don’t mind?” he asked Bud.

“Love to have him. I’m going down tomorrow, so if you can get him over here by noon? We’ll bring him back in a couple of days, unless you want us to just keep him,” Bud said, adding that last bit with a ferocious grin, mainly for Huck’s benefit – but Carter grinned too.

“I think he’d love that. We’ll be here in the morning.”

“How much stuff should I bring?” Huck asked.

“Would two nights be okay?” Bud asked Carter.

So a few minutes later a very happy Carter Ash, Jr., departed, no doubt with visions of sailboats dancing in his mind, and Hank smiled as he watched them leave.

“That was merciless, Hank,” Bud said, smiling appreciatively. “You did well.”

“Think we should get him a brochure, too?”

Bud rolled his eyes as he went to help Ellen in the kitchen, repeating “Merciless,” one more time, just for good measure. “The kid has a decent sense of humor,” he told Ellen as he got to work.

“And I wonder where he picked that up?” Ellen muttered under her breath.

+++++

Henry was sitting in a conference room at the medical center, sitting with Rebecca Nichols and Mary Stuart, Elizabeth’s two sisters; they were waiting for Dr. Judy Stone to arrive, and both women were nervous. By tacit agreement, everyone had refrained from talking about Elizabeth until they were joined Elizabeth’s treatment team. Sitting there with the women, Henry was only getting more curious as the minutes passed.

And while Dr Stone appeared a few minutes early, the rest of the team dragged in more slowly. After introductions were finally made, Stone went in with guns blazing; she asked the girls point-blank what their childhoods had been like, especially regarding their father.

Rebecca looked away; Stone saw the woman was biting her lower lip and her left eyebrow was already twitching. Mary, the oldest of the three, nodded and sighed, taking the lead – as if this was the role she was used to taking when it came to these things.

“Did you ever see the movie ‘The Great Santini?’” Mary asked – to no one in particular.

“I read the book,” Stone replied.

“Well, that was our father. On a nice day. Except when he got drunk.”

“So, was your father a Marine?”

“No,” Rebecca sighed. “Our father was also The Great Pretender. I think the longest job he held was working at a Pontiac dealership in Worster, at there used car sales lot. He could schmooze your ears off, tell you anything about everything, and probably ninety percent of what he said was made up on the spot. He told all our neighbors The Great Santini was about him, that he had been some kind of hotshot pilot in the Marines.”

Judy Stone nodded, because it fit what she knew so far. Elizabeth was shaping up to be a pathological liar, so just like her father, and that meant anything she told anyone on the treatment team was suspect, and her statements would have to be verified – one miserable lie at a time – because sometimes a kernel of truth was hidden inside these lies, and that one truth often held the key to successful treatment.

Stone looked at the girls, and she hated to ask this next question but she had to – even though she was already sure she knew the answer. “Were any of you abused?”

“You mean sexually?” Mary asked, looking down at her hands.

“Sexually. Physically. Verbally. It really doesn’t matter which. I’m looking for patterns, and I need your help to see what I may have missed.”

“Does being pushed down and fucked in the ass count?” Mary asked, her voice a feral snarl.

Stone met the woman’s cold fury head-on. “Did he do this to you? Or to Elizabeth?”

“How ‘bout all three of us? Do we get extra points that way?” Mary snarled. So, she was using brutal sarcasm to mask the pain and embarrassment she’d been hiding all her life.

Stone held her gaze, nodding inwardly. But if Mary’s resistance was taking shape as angry sarcasm, helping her to keep distance from the pain she was re-experiencing under the watchful gaze of a half dozen shrinks was the least she could do. This wasn’t unexpected, yet she wasn’t fully prepared for what the women told her over the next hour and a half. Tales of being sodomized, forced into oral sex with her father and his friends, of being sexually brutalized with everything from broomsticks to beer bottles. When Mary was in her teens he’d tied her up in a box he’d built in their home’s basement, then he’d had even more friends from work come over and take turns sodomizing her. Mary found their mother down there one afternoon, bruised and bleeding after her father and his friends had done the same to her. And their father had gone on like that for years. Then there were years of silence, years spent learning how to deceive, how to cover up their feelings. Mary had somehow managed to get out of the trap after high school, and she’d fled to Northern California, ending up on a commune growing weed. She broke away from that group, which was little more than a pseudo-religious cult, and she made it to Seattle where she eventually finished college. She worked as a coder at a large software company there, and claimed she had a partner.

Rebecca experienced many of the same violations, but eventually their father began having his friends and their wives over for swinging parties in the basement, where she and Elizabeth were passed around like party favors. And it happened that their mother participated in those little get togethers, too.

Their father’s abuse took on many other forms, as well. Usually verbal abuse, but occasionally beatings when they didn’t do as he said or when they stayed out too late. Everything in their father’s house was a capital offense. Everything always felt like life or death, like there was no in-between, just his way…or else.

Stone soon regretted not interviewing the women separately, as now she was simply not sure how much of this was rehearsed and how much really happened. If Elizabeth was a pathological liar, the odds were pretty good that both of these women were too, assuming even half the things alleged were true. That, however, would be law enforcements job.

Henry had no way of knowing that the things he was hearing were actually fairly routine stuff for attending psychiatrists at any medical center in the country. These types of assaults were so common it almost felt mundane to the professionals in the room, but the more he heard the sicker Henry began to feel. His wife hadn’t been raised in a traditional, loving family; she had been kept as a pet by monsters, and it was a wonder she had been able to function at all. On any level.

And the more he thought about the things his wife had endured, the things she had compartmentalized and walled-off from him, the more he began to love her. She had pretended as long as she could, until the facade began to crumble under the weight of her dissatisfaction with life. In her world she must have felt unloveable, because no one treated anyone they loved with such careless disdain. Certainly not a parent.

“Henry?” Judy Stone asked, after she saw the expression on his face. “Are you feeling okay?”

He shook his head. “No, no I’m not. I’m sorry, but is there a restroom around here?”

One of the shrinks got up and both men left the room. Henry did not come back.

And Judy began what amounted to a painful cross-examination of the women’s stories, checking off questions and looking for inconsistencies in their retelling. But when nothing emerged after almost an hour she concluded that the women had been as truthful as possible, given the circumstances.

“Are either of you in treatment?” she asked as they wound up the session.

Both shook their head. ‘Survivors guilt,’ Stone knew was one more piece of this evolving puzzle. They blamed themselves as much as they blamed their parents, and without help they always would. She discussed treatment options, offered to help them get funding from foundations that assisted women in their position. Neither was interested. Judy gave them her card, told them to keep in touch if they remembered anything else of importance.

And that was it. Stone now knew what she needed to know.

Two members of the Ethics Committee had attended, and both were a little shell-shocked.

“They make a strong case for chronic dissociative disorder,” they said. “It will be harder to deny Elizabeth’s request to stop gastric feeding.”

Which meant after a childhood full of traumatic abuse, the system was now going to allow her father one last victory. There would be no accounting. No justice served. Just a woman alone in a hospice bed slowly starving herself to death as her demons fluttered overhead, waiting for their last moment of torment together.

But Judy Stone wasn’t prepared to stop trying. Not yet, anyway. And now she knew she had a strong ally.

+++++

Bud listened to Hank and Huck chattering away just like eleven year old boys – and from Hanover all the way to the coast; by then he was he was about to lose his mind. They were too young to talk about girls, too old to talk about playing with toy soldiers, and just about the perfect age to talk nonstop about video games. He did what he needed to do and turned on has satellite radio to channel 72, the Sinatra channel, and zoned out to the classics. His generation’s classics, anyway. The boys were in back, plugged into their PlayStations – or whatever they were called these days – and from time to time they jerked and twitched like they were having epileptic seizures as they dodged make-believe bullets or crazed demons. Every time one of them burst out in one of their convulsive outbursts Gertrude and Daisy dove under his legs, which made for interesting driving.

He took 91 down to Springfield, then hopped on the Mass Pike all the way too his exit, and as two in the afternoon came along he thought about his son sitting through that meeting with Dr Stone and Elizabeth’s sisters, and his mind drifted through all the implications of what might be uncovered – while he navigated the usual insane traffic on the turnpike.

Drivers in and around Boston weren’t called Massholes for nothing, he told himself each time a passing SUV cut him off to exit without signaling, and he couldn’t wait to get on the 146 to Providence. The closer he got to the Providence River the more at-ease he felt, and they made it to the boatyard about two hours after the sun set, just a little before six that evening. They stopped off for – what else? – pizza, before going to the boatyard, and his house. He was exhausted, but then again he was old. At least that’s what everyone told him.

Of course Hank wanted to show the kid The Blue Goose, and he couldn’t help but give in – even if it was almost nine at night by the time they had unloaded his old Blazer. He grabbed a flashlight from the drawer by the back door and they walked through fog just rolling in across the boatyard, and once he unlocked the door to the finishing shed he let Hank lead them in. He knew where the light switches were by now, and Hank flipped them on and then waited for the reaction.

Poor Huck. He had it bad. 

He walked over to the hull and ran his hands along the boot stripe, then bent low to look at the centerboard aperture before walking aft to check out the rudder, and all the while he was reeling off the 28s vital statistics, everything from the displacement to length ratio to the sail area of the main. Bud was actually impressed.

“Do you think the owner would mind if we went onboard?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

“Not you, silly. The owner? Do you think he’d mind?”

Hank shrugged, then pulled out his key and handed it to Huck. “No, I don’t mind. Go on up.”

Huck’s double-take was textbook, the jaw-drop as satisfying as Hank had hoped.

“No way,” Huck cried.

“Way,” Hank replied, grinning.

“Well…fuck me…”

Bud laughed then found a chair and watched the boys go up the ladder and start crawling all over the deck. After a good half hour they disappeared down the companionway and the lights came on down below, and just then the phone in his pocket started chirping. Bud looked at the display and remembered he’d told Henry he’d call when they got in…

“We just made it, Henry,” he said before his son said a word.

“Traffic that bad?”

“We stopped off at Rocco’s for a couple of pies. Ya know, I forgot how much pizza an eleven year old can put down in ten minutes. It’s astonishing when you think about it.”

Henry chuckled. “I bet.”

“So,” Bud said, changing tack, “how’d the meeting go?”

“I don’t know what to say, Dad. I got so upset in there, so mad I was about to lose it. I felt sick, so sick that one of the docs gave me something. I don’t know how but I calmed down, but Dad, I had no idea people can be so evil.”

Bud didn’t say anything. Not yet.

“It was just awful, Dad. Anyway, I’m glad you didn’t come with us.”

“What does Doc Stone want to do now?”

“That’s the bad part, Dad. You aren’t going to believe this, but…”

+++++

After Huck was shown to his room, Hank walked down the creaky old hall to his own bedroom and straight into the bathroom. He leaned over the sink and stared into the mirror, hoping against hope that nothing would happen, and he was not disappointed. He sighed, brushed his teeth and then got ready for bed.

A few minutes later he heard a gentle knock on his bedroom door, and his grandfather came in after he answered.

“How’d your guided tour go?” Bud asked, his voice sounding tired, worn down by time.

“Are you okay, Grandpa?”

The old man shrugged, looked away. “Mind if I sit?” Bud said as he took a seat behind the little desk in the room. He switched on the lamp on the desk and then leaned back, gathering his thoughts, not really knowing where to begin. “Hank, I just got off the phone with your dad. We talked about his meeting at the hospital today, and it’s not good.”

“What does that mean?”

Bud looked down, steepled his hands over his chest and sighed. “I’m not sure I know where to begin, son, but maybe in the beginning. Your mother’s sisters were at that meeting, and they told the doctors what they experienced during, well, what had to be a pretty scary childhood. Your mom had a real hard time growing up, Hank, and she went through things that no child ever should. These things hurt her emotionally. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

“You mean her parents beat her?”

Bud nodded. “Yes, they did that, but they did other things too, things I can’t talk about right now because I’m so upset, but my feelings aren’t important right now. What is important is what your mother is feeling, and she doesn’t feel good about her life.”

Hank’s face turned full and pale as his eyes reddened. “What do you mean, Grandpa?”

“She’s really tired right now, like she’s been on a long hike up a mountain and she’s running out of steam, and she’s not sure she can make it to the top anymore. She’s thinking about giving up, Hank.”

Tears began rolling down both their faces. Bud was still feeling ill after listening to his son’s retelling of that meeting, and while he couldn’t bear to tell Hank any of those details he couldn’t in good conscience tell the boy a pack of lies and falsehoods. His family was dealing with the consequences of such things, of a life destroyed by falsehoods, and maintaining the wall of lies would only keep them all in darkness. He had always firmly believed that truth can only flourish in the light of day, that life withers and dies in the darkness of deceit, and he wasn’t going to change now.

“But Hank, here’s the thing. Your father is going to take your mom down to Boston tomorrow, and Dr. Stone is going to go with him. They’re going to try something, something really different, and if it works it could really help your mother cope with the things that happened to her. Again, when she was little…not now. So don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. Okay?”

“Okay, but what happens if it doesn’t work?”

Bud shrugged again. “Then we have to be strong for her, Hank. We have to be strong so…” – but Bud had to stop there. He couldn’t put the onus on the family, couldn’t leave his grandson with the impression that if only he had somehow helped enough bad things wouldn’t have happened. In so many ways now, Elizabeth’s fate was in her own hands and there was almost nothing her two boys could do but hang on tight and hope for the best, yet that powerlessness left Bud feeling worse than useless. For someone used to helping people build their dreams, this was a painfully uncomfortable place for him to be – but this was family. This was personal. And somehow he had to help make it right. “Hank, all I can say with any certainty is that you’ll need to be ready for the unexpected, but remember one thing for me, okay? You won’t be alone, and when you feel down about things, you need to come to one of us, either to me or Ellen or to your dad, and try to explain how you feel. Maybe we can get through this if we lean on each other, and by doing that maybe we’ll take some of the pressure off your mom. Got it?”

“Yessir, I think so. I guess, well, I wish I could talk to her, ya know?”

Bud nodded. “I know, son. Doc Stone will make that happen when your mom is feeling better.”

Hank nodded too, and he tried to smile but something inside was telling him that his mom wasn’t going to get better. Bud leaned over and put his hand on the boy’s head, then turned and went downstairs to get a glass of buttermilk – to go with his heartburn medications.

Hank lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, and he just couldn’t wrap his head around a world without his mother in it. What had happened to her? How could something that bad happen to someone so good?

+++++

After the meeting with Elizabeth’s sisters, her team in the psychiatric department decided to send her down to Massachusetts General, in Boston. She was transferred by ambulance, leaving Henry and Dr. Stone to follow in his car, and as he sat there with his thoughts, driving down the interstate towards Concord, New Hampshire, he found he was having a hard time concentrating on the road. There had been several snow storms the last few weeks, yet even so the roadway had been expertly cleared, so unless he strayed onto the shoulder the trip presented no real problem to him.

Dr. Stone was, however, another matter entirely. The woman was an expert interrogator, and he assumed she had been trained by the CIA. Or the KGB…

“So,” she asked at one point, “how’d you two meet?”

“I was putting some papers into the reserve reading file at Baker, and she was helping out on the desk that morning. I hadn’t dated since my wife passed, and I don’t think I planned to again. I guess we just sort of happened, like two particles colliding in a maelstrom, maybe.”

“So the girls are from your first marriage?”

Henry nodded. “That’s right. Liz didn’t want to wait, wanted kids of her own. Funny, my first wife didn’t want to wait, either.”

“It’s a biological imperative. To procreate, I mean.”

“I suppose so. It’s a wonder we’ve survived as a species for as long as we have.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like we’ve embraced chaos. Planning is verboten. Everything is just random chaos, so we’re creating a chaotic world.”

“Sometimes I forget you’re a physicist,” she said with a chuckle.

“So, how did you and Emily meet?”

“I inherited a dog after I married my husband. He was into gun dogs, pointers and setters, but he had an Irish Setter when we met.”

“Divorce?”

She shook her head. “It was an accident, really. Hunting pheasant out in North Dakota. A rattler bit him on the inside of his thigh, and venom made it into the femoral artery. His heart stopped before they could get him to an ambulance.”

He turned and looked at her, noted the resolute stoicism, the detached honesty. Clinical. That’s how she walled off the pain. “What was the setters name?”

“J-J, for James Joyce. He taught at Harvard.”

“You met him there?”

She smiled. “Yup. We had a good run, too.”

“And then you met Emily?”

“When J-J was twelve. I found a mass. We did chemo, too. Kept him with me for another year and a half. I just couldn’t let him go, I guess.”

“Understandable.”

She nodded. “Emily got me through it and we’ve been together ever since.”

He nodded.

“Does it bother you?” she asked.

“Does what bother me?”

“Me and Emily, the lesbian thing.”

“As long as people are happy together, well, I’m not sure anything else matters. Not with all the misery in the world these days.”

“Don’t you think misery has been a constant throughout human history?”

“On a mundane, day-to-day level, perhaps so, but I think I’m alluding more to the existential crises we’re facing as a species. Given those operative conditions, what’s more important than love?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing,” he repeated.

“So, you’re not going to bail on Elizabeth, are you?”

“I was, yes, but I’ve had time to cool down. Then this. So I guess the short answer is no, I won’t leave her. What good are oaths and vows if they become disposable?”

“If a marriage is toxic, what good comes from endless suffering?”

“Like I said, I was ready to walk away.”

“But you didn’t. Why?”

“Two reasons, I guess. My oath, and then those kids. Divorce teaches kids exactly the wrong thing, until divorce becomes the only way to end a family’s suffering. The problem, in my mind, is that marriage has become disposable.”

“Like everything else in our culture,” she sighed.

“Maybe so, but that’s a way of life we’ve embraced. Maybe we did so for all the wrong reasons, but we did, and now we’ve got to deal with the mess we’ve made.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“Annapolis.”

“Ah.”

“Ah? So, have you slapped a label on me already?”

“You take oaths seriously. You embrace order, logical order. The Navy makes sense. All in all, Elizabeth is lucky to have found you, yet it surprises me that she gave up so easily.”

“I have to take some of the responsibility for that. My job requires that I spend a good deal of time away from home, and that created tension, and probably more than a little uncertainty.”

“So you rely on your parents too lend a hand when you’re away?”

“Not until recently. I left Liz alone for most of those trips. I think I was counting on Hannah to help carry the load. She’s a good kid. I’m taking her down to New York as soon as we get back.”

“Oh?”

“Good SAT scores, college tours, that stuff.”

“What does she want to do?”

“Medicine, like her mom.”

“Have you thought about what you might do if Liz doesn’t turn this around?”

He shook his head. “No. I’m not ready to go there yet.”

“Let me know if I can help. As a friend, not a doc. Okay?”

He turned and looked at Judy. She met his gaze. They shared a moment.

+++++

Liz looked like a zombie, like something straight out of a horror film. Her skin was grey, except where it was yellow, and her hair was a rat’s nest of greasy strands hanging over her face, and Henry could barely see her eyes hiding behind all that pain. Those eyes, he thought, the same eyes I fell in love with. Now she was in a gown on a gurney and she was so heavily sedated that restraints were superfluous.

She’d fought the nurses, though, as three of them struggled to find a vein and get an IV running. Henry then listened as a staff neuropsychiatrist and an anesthesiologist described the mechanics of ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, and how Elizabeth would respond over the short and the long term. She would remain at Mass Gen for the time being, taking two ECT treatments a week for five weeks, and if she improved enough for psychotherapy they’d try to get that going – in Hanover, if possible.

“If it works, this is really going to be something,” Judy Stone said.

“Oh, nationwide the success rate is greater than 80 percent. We get closer to 90 percent here,” the attending said. “Everyone remembers One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Girl, Interrupted, but the latest procedures are painless and bear no resemblance to what was shown in those films. Biggest side-effect is short term memory loss, and that usually resolves in a couple of weeks – if it even shows up at all. Now, are you Elizabeth’s guardian?”

Henry nodded. “Yes. I am.”

“And the necessity of attempting this procedure has been explained to you by Dr. Judith Stone, her attending psychiatrist at DHMC?”

“It has, yes.”

“And on behalf of your wife, are you authorizing us to go ahead with the procedure.”

He looked at Judy Stone. He’d listened to her when she described the alternative; the ethics committee would approve sending her to hospice for end-of-life management and care, and that would be the end of his wife.

“Yes, I authorize you to proceed,” Henry sighed as he took the proffered clipboard and signed where indicated, in triplicate no less. He felt the walls pressing inward as he scrawled his name on the form, felt his life caving in and dissolving as the physician took the clipboard back from him. He took Elizabeth’s hand in his own and gave it a squeeze, then he leaned close and whispered in her ear: “Don’t be afraid, Liz. I’ll be here all the way, I’ll be with you on the other side.”

And though she was sedated he felt her squeeze his hand right back.

“I love you, babe,” he added.

Another squeeze, this time with fluttering eyelids. Her lips were split, dry and cracked after the ambulance ride, and she must have been parched but he was sure she had tried to say something – just as the OR techs came into the cubicle and wheeled her away to the procedure room.

“I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I?” he said to Stone.

“I wouldn’t have recommended this if it wasn’t, but I have to tell you, Henry. In football terms, this is kind of like a Hail Mary pass, if you know what I mean. If, for whatever reason, Elizabeth decides she’s had enough after this course of treatment is over, we’ll be at the end of what we can accomplish medically.”

“What do I tell the boys, Judy?” he muttered as he he put his face down in his hands. “God-damn, what do I tell them…”

+++++

“Hank!” Bud called out, shouting up the stairwell. “You two get up, we’ve got incoming!”

Hank shot up in bed and rubbed his eyes with the backs of his knuckles, then he scurried down the hall and got Huck up. “Wake up, we’ve got a boat coming in for service and Bud needs us.”

“He needs – us?”

“Yeah, everyone’s still on their Christmas holiday – which means we’re the hired hands today.”

“Dude! No way!”

“Way! Now get dressed, but it’s warm out so don’t put on your long-johns.”

They were dressed and downstairs in less than five minutes.

“So, what’s up?” Hank said as he took his cup of coffee-milk from his grandfather.

“We got a 43 coming in. Diesel’s putting out some white smoke and Dan is starting off for Norfolk, then he’s going down the ICW to Beaufort before jumping to Bermuda, then the British Virgins.”

“Dan? You mean Dan Whittington?”

“Yup. You remember him, don’t you?”

“Sure. He has that 43 you delivered two summers ago.”

“We delivered, Hank. You were there too, remember?”

Hank nodded. “So, white smoke? Under load or at low r.p.m.?”

“I reckon you’ll have to find that out, son.”

“Yessir. He has a Yanmar, right?”

“Yup. The 4JH2 HTE, if memory serves. You remember the key diagnostic checks?”

“Yessir. First you check the exhaust. If it smells sweet, start in on the coolant system. If it smells like diesel, we track down the unburnt fuel.”

“What else?”

“Check the dipstick, see if the oil is milky or frothy.”

“Which means what?”

“That engine coolant and oil are mixing.”

“Next?”

“Clogged mixing elbow, check for water in the exhaust manifold.”

“And last, and this one is easy.”

“Check the Racors, to see if there’s too much water in the tanks.”

“And why might that be?”

“Because it’s cold as snot out and if he isn’t keeping his tanks full, condensation will form inside the fuel tanks, and because water sinks in diesel it will get drawn into the Racors. Past the filters water will foul the injectors.”

“And what tests can we not do here, without a full crew?”

Hank had to think about that one for a minute. “We might need to do a compression check or do a leak-down test to check for internal leaks…?”

Bud nodded. “Ben and Chuck will be around later this morning, but let’s see if we can take care of this ourselves.”

Hank grinned. “Yessir. When will they get here?”

“Maybe a half hour, depending on the tide.”

“Bring him into the fuel dock?” Hank confirmed.

“For now. And let’s get some extra fenders and lines ready. He’s single handing this trip and you know what that means. Now, who wants pancakes…?”

Twenty minutes later Dan Whittington called in on 16, then 72, and as he asked for a hand on the docks the three of them took off across the patio and then walked down the massive lawn to the small marina on the old stone seawall. Dan’s 43 looked spectacular coming in, too. She had a deep maroon hull and sparkling white topsides, and all her canvas was oyster white trimmed with minimal maroon accents. And her diesel was indeed spewing thick white smoke. That smelled like burnt diesel fuel.

“What can you tell so far?” Bud asked when Dan was still about 50 yards off.

“Smoke is coming out no matter the r.p.m. That might lead to fuel injector timing being off.”

“How old is his boat?”

“Two years next summer.”

“And how long is Yammer’s warranty?”

“Three years.”

“If it’s bad injectors, will that be covered under warranty?”

“Yessir.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yessir.”

Bud smiled. He’d had Hank spend a month working with Chuck Nolan, the yard’s chief diesel mechanic, two summers ago, so he wasn’t that surprised that the boy still remembered everything.

Dan pulled up to the dock and tossed over his lines; Hank secured one and Bud the other, then Hank ran spring and breast lines before doubling up the fenders on the starboard side. Dan hopped down onto the dock and Bud shook his hand then escorted him up to the house for coffee.

“Come on,” Hank said to Huck. “This probably won’t take long.”

“Dude! Where’d you learn all this stuff?”

“Here, in the yard. I’ve been working summers here since I was five.”

Huck shook his head. “Man, you mean we get to go aboard this thing?”

Hank shook his head then hopped aboard. He checked the engine control panel for diagnostic codes then went down the companionway. Once Huck was down he moved the companionway steps aside then dove hands first into the engine compartment. It took him about two minutes to diagnose water in the fuel, so he got on 72 and called Bud up at the house.

“Racors are full of water,” Hank said, “and the bottom of the main tank is full of sludge.”

“Okay. I’ll send Chuck down with the polishing cart. You run up to the shop and pick up some biocide and stabilizer.”

“Right.”

Four hours later they were watching a very happy, and now very relieved owner of a Langston 43 motoring down to Newport, his exhaust now all but invisible. And Huck was flummoxed.

“How old are you, Dude?”

“Eleven. You?”

“I can’t believe this shit and I saw it with my own eyes. How’d you learn all this stuff?”

“You said you love sailing, and sailboats, right?”

“Yeah?”

“The first thing you do when you start loving boats is learn how they work. Then you got to learn how to fix them, because they break all the time. And the labor rate up here is now about two hundred bucks an hour, so it pays to know how to do things yourself.”

“That guy was here almost five hours. You mean that cost him a thousand bucks?”

“It would except he bought the boat from my grandfather, and my grandfather takes care of the people who buy his boats.”

“This is so fucking cool, man. You think I could come down here one summer and learn?”

Hank shrugged. “That depends on my grandfather. If he likes you, if he thinks you really love working on boats, he just might. Most of the guys who work here have been here at least twenty years. Some more than thirty. They stay because they know that my grandfather will take care of them, year after year. And they know that he won’t cheat them. And that’s why this boatyard is almost two hundred years old. The guy on the boat?”

“Dan?”

Hank nodded. “That’s his third Langston, and he gave the first two to his sons.”

“That’s so cool.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

+++++

Bud knocked on Hank’s bedroom door later that night, just when Hank had decided to crawl under the blankets. His grandfather came in and sat at the desk again, and he looked even more upset than he had the night before.

“Has something happened to Mom?” he asked.

But Bud just sighed and shook his head. “No, but your dad called and he wanted me to ask you something. Because your mom isn’t going to be home for a while, he wanted to know if you’d like to stay down here this winter. Go to school for the rest of the year right here in town.”

“Do you know why he wants me to do that?”

“I guess he thinks it will be easier for you here. Less to worry about, maybe.”

“I think I should stay close to home, in case anyone needs me.”

“That’s what I told your dad you’d say.”

Hank nodded. “We know each other pretty good, don’t we? Or is it pretty well?”

Bud smiled. “Take your pick, Hank. No one’s judging our grammar tonight.”

“So you think I should stay in Norwich?”

Bud sighed, then nodded. “In case your mom needs you, yes.” A long pause, then: “Yes, I think that’s best. But I could sure use your help, too.”

Hank nodded. “I know, but I can still come down next summer, right?”

“Always. The yard wouldn’t be the same without you…”

+++++

Hannah decided on Columbia, but still had to finish out the year in Hanover so was bored beyond belief. Ben made the Giant Slalom squad and was doing reasonably well until he hooked a tip at speed and ripped the ligaments in his right knee to pieces. And it was a practice run, so there was no glory involved, just surgery. Jenn did little but read that winter, unless she was at school. Henry and his mom, Ellen, took care of the boys, at least when Henry was around. He had a busy teaching schedule that quarter, but for the first time in his long career with the Navy, when they called in February he told them he couldn’t be away from his family for the time being. Ellen was proud. Jenn was stunned.

Hank went down to Rhode Island on weekends in January and February, before his mom came back to Hanover from Mass Gen, simply because he really couldn’t stand being away from his grandfather. He made up other reasons, excuses really, but that was the truth of it. Every Friday morning Ellen picked him up at school and took him to the Amtrak station in White River Junction, and Hank rode down to Connecticut in silence, usually working on his homework assignments, and Bud was waiting for him on the platform in Hartford. They’d drive back to the yard catching each other up on what they’d missed that week. And a couple of times Huckleberry Ash came along.

Because he had caught the bug and now he couldn’t get enough time around these boats.

One weekend, and it was a weekend when Huck came along, Bud drove the boys to New London, to the submarine museum adjacent to the base, and he took them down to see the Nautilus, the first sub to reach the North Pole under the ice, and the boys crawled around that thing for hours. They talked with the docents onboard, asked good questions, and had a great time together. But Bud took Hank because he’d taken his son there when he was 12, and that one trip had sparked an ongoing interest in Annapolis, of working on submarines, and he was curious to see if Hank would have the same reaction.

Yet it was Huck who seemed most affected by the day, and Bud could only guess at the reasons why, but he had an idea. The boy lacked structure and discipline in his life, and while some kids thrive under those conditions others seem to whither away in apathy. Those kids also usually have no idea of their place in the world, no idea what they’re going to do ‘when they grow up,’ and as a result many get pulled into the first thing that affirms their need to belong, to belong to a group that does offer structure and discipline, and Bud had worked with kids in Providence and South Boston and seen them fall away into gang life for just those reasons. Kids with a weak sense of self, little or no self-esteem, and more often than not kids that came from broken homes. And the first time these kids had a chance to join a group that offered a strong sense of self, they jumped at it.

His son had been like that for a while, and Bud had often wondered why. Henry had always disliked the boatyard, and he had been so good in school his friends drifted away. Sports had offered the only way out of that trap, and Henry had been a decent football player, even if he as a little too skinny for college ball. And now Hank was falling into the very same traps. Few friends, no real interests beyond the boatyard, and now his family was under tremendous strain as their mother fell apart.

So Bud was more than happy to have Huck come along on weekends, and he encouraged Hank to bring other friends. Only there were none. In so many ways Hank was just like his father had been, brainy and aloof, but unlike his father he also had zero interest in sports. As Henry seemed clueless and therefore unable to help his son expand his field of interests, Bud decided to take this on by himself.

The night they came back from New London, Bud put on a corned beef and cabbage, then he  took the boys, as well as Daisy and Gertrude, down to the finishing shed. He had some new things he wanted Hank to find on The Blue Goose, a few things that Ben Rhodes and Chuck Nolan had installed. Electronics and such, fun stuff but in the end, useful. And some new rescue gear, too. A new EPIRB and a small Winslow life raft fitted under the helmsman’s seat.

When Hank made it down the companionway and flipped on the breaker to get power to the lights, he found most everything in plain view, aside from the life raft. He popped his head out the companionway hatch and saw Bud standing down there looking up at him expectantly, and Hank nodded once before he spoke.

“So, when can we get her in the water?”

Bud laughed a little, if only because there was a nice heavy snow falling outside, then he just shrugged. “March, if we’re lucky. See all the manuals?”

“Yessir?”

“You’ll need to start studying each one, especially for that B&G chartplotter. It has some very useful new features. The diesel and the battery management system show up on the main chartplotter menu, and you can change parameters there. Anyway, the manuals stay onboard, always. Okay? Don’t even take them to your room to study, because that’s how things get lost.”

“Yessir.”

“And the reverse cycle heat works now, so turn on the breaker for the a/c and hit heat on the control panel. You two stay up there and daydream for a while, okay? I’ll be heading to bed soon, so lock up behind you.”

“Yessir!”

Huck made it up the ladder and then ducked low to clear the dodger and bimini to get down into the cockpit, and once again he looked around at the sailboat, mesmerized by all the possibilities The Blue Goose represented.

“Hank?”

“Yes?”

“Where are you going to go first?”

“Probably out to Block Island, maybe over to Nantucket or Montauk. Why?”

“You ever want some company, you know where to find me, right?”

Hank nodded with a grin. “Yeah, I think I can manage that. Where would you go? You know, on your first trip?”

The kid just grinned and his eyes brightened. “Around the world, I guess.”

“Anything on a more practical level? You know, for a first timer?”

Huck sat back in the cockpit and Hank could see his mind working as daydreams coalesced around him. “I saw a National Geographic show on the Faroe Islands a couple of months ago. They look amazing, like something out of one of those Star Wars movies…”

“The Faroes? Those are just north of Scotland, right?”

Huck shrugged. “Shit, Hank, I don’t know that stuff. I probably couldn’t find Scotland on a map, even if it was labeled…”

Hank shook his head. “Kind of hard to know where to go if you don’t know where things are. Maybe you should pay attention when your teachers cover geography.”

Huck nodded. “I have a hard time seeing things like that, Hank. I have a hard time seeing myself in the future, sometimes it feels like I won’t be there, ya know?”

Hank didn’t know. He’d never felt anything like that before, not even once. “No. No I don’t know. What do you mean?”

Huck looked down, seemed to study his hands for a second. “I don’t know, Hank. It feels like right now is the only thing that matters. The past doesn’t matter and the future won’t matter, only right now matters. I never think about what you call the future because it’s never existed to me. Same thing with yesterday. It’s gone, so why think about it?”

Hank came up into the cockpit and sat across from Huck, and in a flash he realized that this boy, hell, his friend, was in pain. Real pain, maybe a pain just like the pain his mother had tried to hide from him. Like Huck was hiding from something. 

‘Could he be hiding from Time,’ he wondered.

“Come on, let’s go below and get the heat on, then maybe we can see if we have a chart for the Faroes…”

+++++

Bud heard the boys come in and go to the kitchen, and they found the hot cocoa and brownies he’d just pulled out of the oven, then Hank came into the living room, Daisy and Gertrude by his side, as they always were.

“Grandpa, would you like some cocoa or a brownie?”

“No thank, son. I’ve got to keep an eye on my delicate figure.”

“One eye, or two?”

It was an old play on words they often shared, and now both chuckled, as the ritual decreed.

“You going to be up a little longer?” Hank asked, turning serious for a moment.

“I can be. Need to talk?”

“A little.”

“Okay, fix me a cup then, would you? And just one brownie…?”

A few minutes later both boys were sitting by the fireplace and Bud sipped his cocoa while he looked at them talking, and it wasn’t hard to imagine what they’d been talking about down in the shed. Taking trips on The Blue Goose. What else was there right now? A few minutes later Huck yawned and made his goodnights, then he took off up the stairs – leaving Hank alone to summon his courage.

“Grandpa, last summer I read some of the first logbooks that Henry the First maintained…”

“I take it you mean your great-great-great grandfather?”

Hank nodded. “Did the family come from Hull?”

“Well now, that’s a good question, but first let’s get some geography in order. Hull is actually called Kingston upon Hull, and the family originally came from just east of there, from the village of Patrington in the Holderness region of what’s known as the East Riding of Yorkshire.”

“East Riding?”

“North, South, East and West, as in riding from the center, and I assume on horseback.”

“Oh.”

“So, our Henry the First, as you call him, came from a family of shipwrights, men who framed the wooden hulls of sailing ships. And because the river ports on the east coast of England were far from France as well as the destruction wrought by Atlantic gales, ship building flourished there, but especially in Hull and Newcastle.”

“Hadian’s Wall ends in Newcastle, right?”

“Right you are, at a village called Wallsend. Anyway, the Langston’s settled in Patrington before medieval times, and if you’d like you can read more about his life in the village. Little snippets turn up in Henry’s first four logbooks, but the seventh book recounts the family’s history in some detail.”

“Have you been back there?”

Bud tried not to look away but he found it difficult not to. “Yes, I suppose we all have, but do try to get some sleep tonight.”

Hank nodded. “It’s twenty-five hundred miles from here to the Faroe Islands, so how long would that take?”

Bud nodded, but he could already see where this conversation was going. “Do you perchance mean in a 28 foot long sailboat?”

Hank nodded. “In the Goose.”

“Well, assume a five knot average speed. How many nautical miles a day can you cover at that Vmg?”

“Velocity made good?”

“Yup.”

“120.”

“And how do you find Time when you know Speed and Distance?”

“Time is equal to Distance divided by Speed?”

“So? How much Time, expressed in days?”

Hank pulled out his phone and did the math. “20.8333…days. So, almost 21 days.”

“Alright, next you have to account for power generation, which you can break down into hours per day of engine run time. You could add solar or hydro power, but you’d still need to run the engine so you need a fuel estimate. Same with water. How much would you need to carry if you consume two gallons per day? And remember, that figure does not include showers. Then food. How much would you need to carry? And don’t forget that the food and water figures are per person estimates. So, does that answer your next question?”

“My next question?”

“Can you do it on the Goose?”

“What do you think? Is it possible?”

“Possible? Yes. I suppose it is possible, but I would say it’s inadvisable.”

“That means not a good idea, right?”

“Yes, indeed it does, because lot’s of things might be possible, but probably not a very good idea. I do seem to recall that a 14 year old boy made the crossing about 20 years ago, and I believe he was on a 28 footer, as well. But he already had a lot of experience – and I think he had a good deal more than you do right now, Hank. That’s something to think about.”

“What if Huck and I did it together?”

“Well, what problems can you see with that?”

“He has even less experience than I do.”

“What else?”

“He’s spent no time on the water.”

“Those are pretty big problems, Hank. Think about that, would you?”

“Okay.”

“Does Huck want to do this?”

Hank nodded.

“Ah. Well, maybe Huck needs to go for a sail the next time he comes down.”

“Grandpa, what do you think of him?”

“Me? I think he’s a daydreamer, just like your brother. He’s also a nice kid. I’d hate to see him get hurt, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know him that well, Grandpa, but he seems kind of, well, kind of strong. Not physically strong, but mentally. And he’s lost.”

“Oh? Why do you think that?”

“He’s been through a lot, I guess.”

“Like you have?”

“His parents got a divorce.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, and his mom is a psychiatrist at the hospital.”

“At Dartmouth? Really? Now that I did not know. Interesting.”

“You mind if I stay up and read in the library for a while?”

“No, of course not, but remember…we have to drive back in the morning. We should leave before eleven.”

Hank nodded. “Okay. Well, I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Okay, Hank. Sleep tight.” He watched his grandson head off to the library a little wistfully, because he remembered the first time he’d done the very same thing. Because he had wanted to do exactly what Hank wanted to do right now. Bud had needed experience, experience of a very specific nature, and it hadn’t taken him long to figure out where he could go get it.

But experience of this sort represented a kind of Faustian bargain, in that such experience came at a price. And he wondered…would Hank, in the end, be willing to bear the cost?

As he finished his cocoa, he remembered his own time wandering down the rabbit holes of his youth – but he tried not to dwell on all the heartache that had followed in his wake.

© 2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | and this is a work of fiction, plain and simple. 

We’ll see you next time. Thanks for dropping by.

So here we are again. Happy Thanksgiving, for those of you lost inside Amerika, and a Happy Thursday to you all. And remember, He Who Stuffeth, Puffeth.

And here we start a new story, and a tale (perhaps) unrelated to the TimeShadow world. This is just the first chapter/part, and I’ll see if I can’t get the next done by Christmas. Music matters, so let’s look at some options for you today. I always had a thing for ELP, or Emerson Lake & Palmer, but their keyboardist, Keith Emerson, was a composer as well as a jazz pianist. In 2003 he cut an album called Emerson Plays Emerson, an interesting hours long exploration of jazz a la ELP, and of course there was his Piano Concerto No 1, on ELP’s Works, vol. 1. If nothing else, those show you the depths of the man. If some acoustic guitar sounds right, try Ralph Castello’s album called Single. Check out the track called Better Things. Deutsche Grammophon released Ravel, The Essentials, in 2017, and you can get lost in those luscious soundscapes, so these might see you through to the end.

So, on to the story.

The Blue Goose

Part One

There aren’t many boys whose best friends are a dog and a goose, and even if there were, you probably wouldn’t run across a goose like his. His goose was blue, as blue as the bluest sky, and she always had been, since the day they’d found one another in the woods.

In a sense, they grew up together in a new house that looked quite old but really wasn’t, because his father had built it when the boy was still quite young. The house was located in Vermont, on a wooded two acre parcel just north of Norwich, out Willey Hill Road a bit. His dad taught at the college just across the river, in Hanover, and his mother worked there too, only she wasn’t a teacher. She was one of the librarians.

The boy shared a bedroom with his little brother; it was on the second floor of the house and right at the top of the stairs. There was a bunkbed in their room, too, which the boy hated – because he had the lower bunk and so couldn’t see out the window very well. Some nights, usually when he couldn’t sleep, he crawled up on the top bunk while his little brother slept and he would stare out the window at the moon or watch deer in the meadow above the house, anything to pass the night away. And some mornings his mom would find him asleep up there, curled up under a little blanket, usually with one foot dangling over the edge.

The family had a Golden Retriever, Daisy Jane, and even though she was getting kind of old, on most nights she slept with the boy, usually on his bed but down by his knees, except when it was hot out. Then she slept on the cool hardwood floor, because no one in Vermont had air conditioning. Their bedroom got pretty warm in the afternoon, and it stayed warm most of the night.

The boy had two sisters, both much older than he was. His dad had been married before so his sisters had a different mother, or something like that. His dad’s first wife had died when she was still young, but he’d gotten remarried a few years later, after he moved up to Vermont. Both his sisters were real smart, and one was going to graduate from Hanover High next spring.

Hannah was the smart one. She was his oldest sister, and everyone knew she was going to be a doctor – just like her mother. She always made the best grades in school and because she was cute she was really popular. Whenever his parents went out to eat Hannah was in charge, and because she was strict and ran a tight ship he really didn’t like her very much. Jennifer was his other sister, and she was a year younger than Hannah. While she was kind of cute, she was also smarter than Hannah, only in a different way. Their said she had “people smarts,” whatever that meant. She was doing well enough in school but she always seemed bored, yet she read all the time. She was also a jock, and played soccer and lacrosse on the varsity teams at Hanover High.

Ben was his little brother, and Ben was a first-class screw-up. He was always getting into trouble, and he was also a first-class day-dreamer. Ben wasn’t doing well in school, yet he was learning to play the piano – and the drums. He’d never been the outdoor type and rarely went outside to play after school – except in winter – but that was only because he liked to ski. He had a couple of posters taped to the ceiling over his bed in their bedroom; one of a skier jumping off a cliff in some place called Zermatt and another that had a girl with huge boobs advertising ski boots, the poster seductively proclaiming that Lange ski boots were Soft Inside. Presumably just like the girl. In fact, Ben had a thing for ski racing and for Switzerland, so when the leaves started turning in autumn Ben started talking about getting his skis ready for snow. He even went out for a run occasionally.

His mom, Elizabeth, was usually arguing with Hannah about chores not done around the house, except when she was arguing with their father. She was really pretty but always seemed to be mad. Real mad. At everyone, about anything and everything. Which made her perfect, he thought, for working in a library. The librarians in the school he was going to all seemed to be mad all the time, especially at anybody who dared utter a syllable in their library. His mom was just like that, only worse.

He didn’t understand what his dad did. It didn’t take long before he realized that almost no one understood his dad or what he did. He taught something called quantum mechanics, which was kind of like the stuff he had been reading about in science class this year, only ten times worse. Things like electricity and why things move the way they do. His dad was usually in the little study off the living room where he kept all his books and stuff, and maybe because the walls were lined with bookshelves his mom called that room a library too, even though it wasn’t really like the library where she worked.

The stuff in his science textbook was easy enough to understand, but most of the things he read about really didn’t interest him. He hated English but he really couldn’t stand history, so in the end math had turned out to be his favorite subject. He loved the certainly of numbers, and he found comfort in working out the answers to problems on the assignments his teacher sent home every night. He never missed a homework assignment, and usually made perfect scores on the tests he took in that class.

When he got home after school the first thing he did was get Daisy Jane and the two of them would head up the hill behind the house in search of grouse, but on some afternoons, usually in spring, they would go down to the river and swim. The water was usually too cold for him to stay in very long, but Daisy didn’t care. There were a couple of ponds up the hill behind the house, but the water up there didn’t look clear enough to go swimming in, though once again that didn’t seem to matter much to Daisy.

The boy’s name, as it happened, was Eldritch Henry Langston V, although everyone called him Hank. When his mother was really mad at him she would lower her voice into something like a feral growl then let slip his name in full, but other than that he was usually just plain ole Hank. Even so, that didn’t keep him from wondering why he was the fifth of anything. Like…with so many names in the world to chose from, why did people keep using the same ones over and over? Anyway, the whole name thing never made much sense to him, but especially when his mother got mad at him. 

Was using his entire name supposed to make him fearful or something?

So…his dad was the fourth Eldritch Henry Langston, his granddad the third, and so that also meant he shared the same name with his great-grandfather and, somewhere back there, a great-great-grandfather, too. Anyway, as his father’s firstborn son, he got stuck with the name and there wasn’t much he could do about it – other than go with Hank – which he had – almost by default.

If Ben was into skiing, and if his sisters were into competing on the lacrosse field over at the high school, Hank’s thing was sailing. There weren’t any sailboats at the college, not even across the river at the Ledyard Boathouse – which of course belonged to the college – so he had to wait until summertime to get his time on the water. And he cherished those three months, almost as much as he cherished Daisy, which was saying a lot.

And he had fallen in love with sailing because he spent his summers at the Langston Boat Company, down in Melville, Rhode Island.

Which was where his grandfather’s boatyard was located. Which was where his father grew up.

And Melville was where his grandfather built sailboats. Big, beautiful sailboats. And also where his great-grandfather had built sailing ships. Big, beautiful sailing ships. Some said the prettiest, most seaworthy sailing ships ever built in America. And Melville, Rhode Island was where his great-great grandfather settled when he moved his family to America, back in the early 1800s. He’d been a Captain in the British Navy, as in Nelson’s Navy, but all that was before he became interested in more profitable ventures. Before Eldritch Henry Langston (the First) passed on to the big ocean in the sky, he owned a large shipping company, became a full partner in a trading house in London, and he as well became the part owner of boatbuilding venture in the New World. In Melville, as a matter of fact. By the time Hank the First hoisted his last mainsail, he owned a second shipping company, this one based in Boston, that took goods around the Horn to California, as well as a couple of Merchant Banks, so he left an immodest fortune in his wake.

And that immodest fortune had done little but grow over the intervening 150 or so years.

Which meant not a thing to the Langstons that followed. The shipping company prospered until it was bought out by a bigger shipping company, the Merchant Bank became a regular lending institutions, then a commercial bank, before it too was absorbed by a bigger bank in New York City. But the Langston Boat Company, still down there in Melville, Rhode Island, was still building boats. In fact, the Boat Company had made everything from PT boats to mine-sweepers during World War II, and at one point even manufactured wings for gliders used during the Normandy landings.

Yet because Eldritch Henry Langston IV had studied physics when he went to Annapolis, he had absolutely no interest in any of that. Not in the merchant lines, nor the banks, and certainly not in the Langston Boat Company, which he ignored in polite conversation almost as frequently as he ignored his father – when his father called to check on his grandchildren.

Yet to say their relations were strained was to miss the point.

Because there was no animosity. There were no long-standing grievances or simmering tensions.

The plain truth of the matter was that Hank’s father was somewhat absent-minded. It wasn’t that he didn’t care…it was rather that he didn’t remember such things – unless they related to little things no one could see.

Things like…remember that he had a father, or even a mother. He even had a sister, yet he hadn’t seen or spoken to her in years. If they had been physicists he might have, but that was simply not the case.

But Hank’s grandfather still went to work at the Langston Boat Company every morning, he still woke up at five thirty sharp and walked across the boatyard to begin the new day’s work. He was still building boats, usually sailboats but recently he had been building experimental hydrofoils that were powered by experimental power plants. 

And no one called him Henry or even, heaven forbid, Eldritch. Instead, everyone called him Bud. Or, occasionally, just Sir. But usually Bud. And Bud loved three things about life, his life.

He loved his wife. He loved the boatyard. And he really, really loved his grandkids – but especially Hank. And he had five of them, too. But as much as he loved his grandkids, only one of them came down right after school let out and stayed with him the entire summer, and that was Hank.

Hank’s dad had no use for sailboats. It wasn’t that he disliked them, either. He just found them pointless, little more than toys for people with nothing better to do than waste their time on pointless toys. He had been sailing a couple of times when he was a kid, and he had to at Annapolis, yet sailing had always bored him. One time when he was a boy, the wind had piped up when his father had taken the family across Long Island Sound to Block Island, and he’d been so seasick he had vowed to never go sailing again. He had kept to that, too, whenever possible.

Hank, on the other hand, loved to go out when the weather was snotty. He loved to go out when the Sound was under a small craft advisory most of all. He found everything about bad weather exhilarating. Hank seemed, to his grandfather, anyway, to be absolutely fearless – but never reckless.

“There are two kinds of people who come to me to buy a boat,” Bud told Hank one afternoon while they were installing a thick stainless steel backing plate under a beefy Lighthouse 1501 Windlass. “The first will embrace the adventure, no matter the conditions. The second will succumb to his fears. That guy will be full of excuses, too, but his every excuse is just a way to hide that fear. Pretty soon, Hank, you realize that this second character is hiding his fears from himself. In a way, he’s a liar. The worst kind, too. There’s no one more pathetic than some simple S.O.B. who lies to himself. Please don’t forget that.”

Hank usually got up at 0530, right when Grandpa Bud got up. He had his very first cup of coffee when he was nine years old, too, when Bud fixed him a cup one morning. Turned out it was mostly cream and sugar – with a little coffee tossed-in to turn the cream kind of brown, but it was good and Hank was hooked. On Saturdays, Bud fixed pancakes and bacon, and on Sundays Grandma Ellen made waffles she served with huge bowls of fresh strawberries and thick, juicy wedges of pineapple. But not on weekdays. From Monday through Friday they got up and had their coffee, then they went to Building Number One, to the big room. Because that’s where the big boats were made.

And it was a strange room, too. Full of strange, magical things. As you stepped inside you found yourself in the small drafting room where Travers worked, but then you went through one more door and you were out onto the shop floor. Which was weird because you were walking around on a plywood floor that was at the same height as the waterline of the boats being worked on in the room. In other words, the real floor, the concrete floor, was almost ten feet beneath the plywood floor. The boats being built were propped up on that concrete floor, and the plywood floor was there so it was easier for the workmen to get around the boats.

Hank went around and helped clean up the job site before the crew arrived at 0800, and sometimes he helped Bud go over blueprints to make sure the workmen had the parts they would need that morning. In this very ordered way, Hank was learning boats from the inside out, the old fashioned way, like the sea captains and pilots of old, because such men learned how to build boats before they were allowed to sail them. 

The real fun, the real magic of sailing with his grandfather, happened after four each afternoon, after all the workmen had gone home for the day.

Because that’s when Bud went down to the slips on the water and hopped on Pegasus, his own L-42, but every now and then they would take out a brand new boat. That way Hank got to sail a brand new boat before anyone else, which was like special. And Hank was good at it, too. His grandfather had taught him everything he needed to know over their summers together, so while Hank steered and trimmed the sails, Bud went all over the boat checking to see that everything was ship-shape. When they took out a new boat, Bud had something he called a punch-list on an old wooden clipboard by his side, and he might be inside the engine compartment one minute and in the galley the next, working the stove or making sure the fridge worked. It was one thing, he said, if everything worked in the shop, but something else entirely if stuff broke down once the boat was actually out there on the water. But that never happened on a Langston.

A boat’s new owners usually came down on weekends, and Bud always took them out for a long sail on the Bay before moving on to the next step; real sea trials with a surveyor, and that was just before then the final official acceptance in his office. Hank was allowed on those sea trials only if the new owners didn’t mind, but once they realized how good a sailor he was they didn’t seem to mind at all. Not one little bit.

Because…if a ten year old could sail their new boat, the new owner knew he or she most certainly could. And that was the truth of it, too. Langston boats were considered the best because the quality was that good. No shortcuts allowed, no inferior materials used – ever. Nothing but the best. It was common knowledge in the sailboat community that there was simply nothing better than a Langston, and Bud took great pride in that.

So Hank did too, and yet that was remarkable in its way – because this kind of pride in what your hands produced seemed to have been encoded into the boy’s understanding of the world around him. And Bud knew just how rare that was.

Before a new boat was officially turned over, the buyer had spent a few days at the yard while she was being built – first going over all the onboard systems then finally spending a few days out on the water with members of the delivery crew. By the time a new owner left on his sailboat, he or she knew everything necessary to operate and maintain their purchase, and by the time he was nine years old, Hank was a part of the crew getting everything onboard just right. He helped polish the chrome and the stainless steel, or sometimes – because he was still small – they’d send him down to adjust the stuffing box in the least accessible part of the engine compartment, right where the propeller shaft exited the hull. After a year of that, after he’d demonstrated both his understanding and his proficiency, Hank was sent to check on things like the engine’s alignment or the rudder shaft seals, both physically demanding tasks. And this was with a ten year old boy, which might’ve stunned new owners had not Bud been on hand to explain the situation. “Hank knows these boats inside and out, because he’s been doing this since he could walk.” And, Bud didn’t have to say, because Hank was just like his grandfather. The boy knew everything about these boats because he loved them. And anyone could see that the boy loved his grandfather at least that much.

His grandmother Ellen ran the front office and Hank usually spent a few hours a day up there with her, usually just helping out – and learning what the girls up there did, too – because Bud said they were the real brains of the outfit. The glue that held everyone and everything together. Hank knew all the girls up there, too. By name. And by the time he was ten he knew their husbands’ names, and their kids, too. Pretty soon he began to think of the women up there as his sisters, and it wasn’t long before he realized he cared for these people, all of the people working at the yard. He had no idea how unusual that relationship was, only that his grandfather felt that way, too.

The worst part of the year came when summer days started growing short, when sunsets came earlier and earlier in the day, but as was usually the case, his grandfather had taught him all about the movement of the sun across the sky, even the concepts of latitude and longitude and the plane of the ecliptic and how you used that knowledge in navigation. It seemed there wasn’t a thing his grandfather taught Hank that somehow didn’t relate to the way the world worked, and to his life.

On his last weekend at the yard that summer, the summer of his tenth year, they went out on Pegasus, and they went way out past Block Island towards Montauk and the Atlantic. Bud introduced him to celestial navigation out there, including how to use a sextant and how to reduce the sight they took using tables and formulas. He had Hank read chapters in a book Bud simply called Bowditch, and Bud sent his grandson home that labor day with his own practice sextant and a new copy of The American Practical Navigator, by Nathanial Bowditch. It turned out that this book was nothing short of an encyclopedia containing everything anyone might need to know concerning navigation and seamanship. Soon he found himself staying up at night reading his new book, then dreaming about all the places he might go one day with his very own sextant – on his very own Langston 42, of course.

+++++

His little brother, Ben, came alive when the leaves started turning, usually in the second week of October, and as soon as school let out for the day he’d go to Main Street and over to the Co-op, to start checking out all the new skis and ski boots. And then the daydreaming really took hold. Ben would get the latest Buyer’s Guide from Skiing Magazine and soon he had everything memorized. His mother, of course, lamented that the boy had no memory when it came to reading and writing, and she was sure Ben was a moron. Literally. Yet Ben could read and write all day long if he got to read about snow, or sliding around on snow – on five hundred dollar boards. In the end, Ben was easy to understand.

Of course, Hannah and Jennifer were playing lacrosse as the leaves turned, which left Hank blissfully free to go straight home after school and grab Daisy. They’d run out the house like they were breaking out of prison, then head up the hill in search of whatever or wherever their imagination took them. He loved their runs through the woods when the leaves turned almost as much as Daisy did, all the more so because this time of year wildlife was suddenly easier to spot. There were ponds up there, too, and they too were crowded this time of year. With deer and moose, usually, but elk too. And black bears. Some of the old-timers in town, the crotchety old men who wiled away their afternoons sitting in old rocking chairs at Dan & Whit’s, said they’d seen gray wolves recently, but few people took anything these old guys said seriously. Yet Hank did. He’d seen the tracks up there, where the mud was soft around the muddy edges of the less frequented watering holes, and he knew they’d been made by wolves because he had a book that described such things. They looked like a dogs footprint, only bigger. Much bigger. Daisy might not have been big enough to ward off a pack of wolves, but she could certainly hear well enough to give them fair warning. Anyway, he usually didn’t get too far away from the house because this far north it started getting dark early in the afternoon, at least until daylight savings time ended. After that it was dark by the time he got home from school and stayed that way all winter.

His sisters usually came in from practice sporting scabby knees and grass stains in the unlikeliest places, but they were jocks and he couldn’t relate to their nonsense. His mom would usually get in about the same time his sisters did, and she always started cooking as soon as she put her purse and coat away. Always. Like clockwork. He didn’t know it yet, but Hank’s mom was the glue holding the family together, and she seemed to take the job seriously. His dad was too forgetful, she told him once, too much the absent-minded professor to tend to things as inconsequential as children or running a household. Ben, on the other hand, would come in from school with piles of brochures about the latest skis and ski boots in hand, then he’d head up to their room only to re-emerge when their mom called everyone to dinner.

His dad was, usually, home for dinner, too, unless he was at his other job.

Funny thing about that, though…

No one, not even Hank’s mom, knew what that other job was.

Hank went with them one time to the little airport in Lebanon, New Hampshire, to a little parking lot across the airport from the tiny passenger terminal building. There were a bunch of little propellor airplanes out there, but pretty soon a small jet painted just like Air Force One landed and pulled up next to the fence; after the little jet’s door opened two men in blue and white Navy uniforms came out to help his dad get his bags onboard, then the jet left. Just like that. Sometimes his dad was gone a week or two, other times he didn’t come home for months, and that time he was gone for months.

He asked his grandfather about it once, but Bud just shook his head and shrugged. “Best not talk about all that stuff, Hank.”

“But do you know what he does, GrandPa?”

“I think it goes all the way back to Annapolis, when your father was first in the Navy. I’m not sure, but he made some kind of discovery when he was a student there, and I think it has something to do with submarines and all those missiles. But you listen to me, Hank, this is all top secret stuff, so don’t you ever go around talking about any of this.”

And so, that was that. Whatever it was his father did, that was a forbidden topic. Period. 

And one afternoon just before Thanksgiving, just as he came in from school, he heard his parents in their room – and they were fighting. Again. And it had to do with another one of those top secret trips.

“How long will you be gone this time?” his mother shouted.

“I have no idea, Liz, but why are you pretending you care?”

“And just what do you mean by that?”

“Look, I know all about you and Carter. Everything. So don’t you dare try to deny it.”

Silence. And then…

Sounds of his father putting a few more things in a suitcase. Drawers opening and slamming shut. Walking to the bathroom, things being removed from the medicine cabinet. Those kinds of sounds, and none of it was pleasant.

Hank slipped past the door to his parent’s room and walked gingerly up the stairs, and he found Hannah, Jen, and Ben huddled on his bed with Daisy Jane, and they’d apparently been listening to the fight since they’d gotten home. He walked in and Daisy’s tail started thumping so he tip-toed over and sat on the floor right next to her, then he looked at Hannah. She looked at him, too, but then she shook her head. Which meant this was a bad one.

Their parents fought like this all the time, and the funny thing was they all knew it was their mother’s fault. She seemed to enjoy picking a fight with their father, too, but what was all this stuff about Carter Ash? Who was he, and what was going on?

And then…

“I’ve already contacted Tom,” his father was saying just now, his voice now noticeably more calm, “so I’d suggest you get yourself a lawyer. When I get back I’ll take a room at the Inn, but I’d think about moving on soon. I do seem to recall that your name is not on the title to this house, and I sincerely hope you do not try to contest this.”

And with that their father walked out of the house. A car was waiting for him in the driveway, a car with two men in Navy uniforms inside. When he walked out the front door the men sprang into action and grabbed his bags, and a moment later their father was gone.

Hannah waited a few minutes, she said to let the dust settle, then she walked quietly downstairs and into their parent’s bedroom. She did not come back up to them for quite some time.

+++++

It was the first time their father had been away for Thanksgiving, but to make matters even more interesting this Carter Ash was coming over. With his kids.

Turned out Carter was a science teacher at the high school in Woodstock, Vermont, and he’d been divorced for a while. He had three kids, and he got them for Thanksgiving one year, then Christmas the next, so this year was his kids’ Thanksgiving with Dad. They arrived in an old Saab hatchback and even though there was a little snow on the ground they were all, every last one of them, wearing Birkenstock sandals. With brightly colored rag-wool socks, too. And Carter’s nine year old son had the longest hair of the bunch; hair so long it hung almost to his waist. His father’s hair was not quite that long, but by that point Hank really didn’t care. He’d sized them up as they got out of that old Saab, and as he watched from the comfort of his room he didn’t like one thing he saw about them.

Except it turned out that Carter Ash was pretty cool. Laid back. He was from California, of course, and had ended up in Woodstock when he followed his girlfriend across the country to Hanover when she took a job working at the medical school. She’d soon fallen in love with another psychiatrist and that was that. Carter became the latest casualty in the gender wars, his kids just another scarred mess of collateral damage, yet nothing penetrated that cool, laid back California vibe he had going.

The boy with the long hair was called Huck, even though that wasn’t really his name. He was actually named Carter Stockton Ash, Jr., but he hadn’t taken to that name early on and now preferred Huck. As in Huckleberry, or Huck Finn, which fit him like a glove. Huck liked skiing so he was alright in Ben’s book, but when he found out that Hank was into sailing he went over and sat by him, then struck up a conversation.

“My dad says you spend summers down on the water, sailing with your grandfather.”

Hank wanted to ignore the long haired kid but there was something earnest about him, and about his question, so he chose to look Huck right in the eye and answer his questions as best he could. “Not quite. My grandfather builds boats in Rhode Island, and I go down there to help out.”

“Langston? Your grandfather owns Langston Boats?”

“That’s a fact.”

“That 28 footer…man, that’s the real unshelled nuts…the perfect boat. It’s my dream boat, I guess.”

“Really? You’re into sailing?”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that, but I haven’t been out sailing in years. Still, there’s just something about it, ya know…?”

Hank nodded. “I know. Why the 28?”

“It’s perfect, man. Not too big, not too small, nice galley, decent head, and the woodwork in the cabin is insane!”

“Insane?”

“It’s the best ever!”

Hank nodded. “I’ve been out on a few, but only on acceptance trials…”

“What’s that?”

“When a buyer comes down to check out the boat before he actually buys it. One or two of us always take them out for the day, help them learn where everything is.”

“You help with that?”

“Oh, sure. A couple of times a week, more in August.”

“And you’ve been out on a 28?”

“Tons of times. Maybe three last summer.” He could see the wanderlust in Huck’s eyes now, too. The same look all the buyers had when they first laid eyes on their new Langston. It was like an explosion of dreams, and it happened right in front of him, too. Bud showed him once and now it was obvious. Sailboats did something to people. They untamed the far horizon and let the imagination fly, made it seem like you could reach out and grab hold of a star and fly away forever. “I’ve got a brochure on the 28 up in my room. You wanna take a look?” 

Huck was on his feet and heading towards the stairs before Hank could react, but he smiled inside when he saw the happiness in Huck’s eyes. The same happiness he’d seen in the eyes of the new buyers he’d been out with. The same happiness he’d seen in his grandfather’s eyes when he saw how infectious that kind of happiness really was. Making someone’s dreams come true wasn’t just an opportunity to make a few bucks, Bud had told him more than once, it was a grand privilege. 

Hank had brochures for all the Langstons in a binder on his bookshelf, the 28, the 38, and the 42, and when Huck started flipping through the photo album behind the brochures the boy’s wanderlust kicked into overdrive.

“Did you take these pictures?” Huck asked.

Hank nodded. “Yeah, I take a couple on every sea trial. Bud takes a bunch, too.”

“Is Bud your grandfather?”

“Yup.”

“He sounds like a pretty righteous dude.”

That language took Hank by surprise, and he was suddenly annoyed enough to fall away from the moment. “He’s not a dude. Okay?”

“Sure. Yeah. I got it. Sorry.”

Hank relaxed – a little – then he looked at the kid and nodded. “We better get back downstairs. I think Mom’s carving the turkey.”

“Better her than my dad.”

Hank saw that the kid was grinning when he said that, and right then and there he decided that Huck was alright after all.

The week after Thanksgiving was always kind of a letdown, but this week seemed worse. 

On top of the usual miseries at school, the kids in the family were dealing with the absence of their father, an acute pain heightened by feelings of uncertainty that just wouldn’t go away. And on top of it all, there was their mother’s less than forthright telling of her relationship with Carter Ash. If everything about their life as a family now felt precarious, Hank realized that right now it also felt unclean, steeped in lies, and he’d never felt that way about his life before. He intuitively knew big changes were coming, yet for now he was doing his best to sweep all that under the rug.

Hannah, however, seemed to be taking this separation harder than anyone else – so far, for while she had always been regarded as ‘the mature one,’ that role had taken on new urgency when she was least prepared to take it on. She couldn’t simply be mature now, because she was too scared, but first she needed to be honest with herself. That meant telling her sister and brothers the truth, whatever that truth may be, and wherever that truth took them. She was eighteen going on eighty, and the strain was telling because she couldn’t do it on her own.

Daisy Jane seemed the least effected among them but even Hank could see that she knew something wasn’t right. Elizabeth was coming home from work and no longer setting out to fix dinner; now she was carrying in boxes of pizza from EBAs, the pizza place behind the Co-op just off Main. She came in and dropped the boxes on the kitchen table then went straight to her room, then closed the door behind her. No signs needed.

But Hannah’s retreat didn’t make sense to Hank, because her reaction was so unexpected. Really, nothing made sense right now.

If his mother had been so unhappy in her marriage that she needed to find companionship elsewhere, now that she had someone why was she still so depressed? This little undigested bit of cognitive dissonance was of course just one piece of the shattered puzzle Hank was sorting through, but that was the one piece on the floor that Hank saw and understood. Nothing about his mother had made a whole lot of sense that Thanksgiving, but Carter Ash was more than just a huge question mark. He was quite obviously a very different man than his own father, but on an even more fundamental level Carter’s distinct California vibe was seriously at odds with her own strait-laced New England upbringing. She was also used to the conveniences of wealth and privilege, of being around families with a real New England pedigree, so once again Carter Ash was the antithesis of that.

‘Is that what she’s attracted to?’ he wondered as he and Daisy Jane made their way up the hill behind their house. A man who represented a clean break with everything about her past? 

But, if so…why? What was so bad about her life?

And then there was school to deal with. The usual post-prandial gluttony of Thanksgiving had given way to the academic doldrums that arrived between Thanksgiving and Christmas, a span of three weeks between vacations that somehow felt as pointless as it did cruel. Anything taught in this span would soon be forgotten, and even his teachers looked distracted as they tried to plow aimlessly through their lesson plans. Everyone’s thoughts were quite naturally focused on Christmas this time of year, and to pretend otherwise was pointless. About the only thing on the calendar that made any sense at all was a dance for fifth and sixth graders, and Hank was pretty sure he wanted nothing to do with anything that involved being around girls.

The trail up here on the hillside was clear of undergrowth now and Daisy ran ahead every now and then, usually chasing grouse, but soon they came to one of the larger ponds up there and he was surprised to see several geese paddling around out there on the water, their heads bobbing under the surface in search of the delicate morsels they craved, usually hiding under logs in those dark, scummy waters. He stepped out into the clearing on the east side of the pond and saw Daisy on point, her head down, her right hand pulled up close to her chest, her tail ram-rod straight and parallel to the earth beneath her low-slung belly, and Hank’s eyes naturally enough followed her point.

To a small gosling on solid ground by the edge of the pond, watching his family out there on the water.

And this little goose was as blue as the waters out past Block Island, out there in the deep waters of the Atlantic, and Hank had never seen anything like this little thing. It was the color of a blue jay, kind of cobalt blue on top and gray closer to the ground, and even it’s beak was bright, shiny blue. It’s eyes were following one group of geese out there on the water and Hank could see that the little thing was anxiously attending their every move.

Yet he soon realized that the little blue gosling was being ostracized, so did that mean it had been abandoned? He watched Daisy watching the gosling, but when he watched the gosling’s family swim away the little thing extended one wing and stepped tentatively towards the water, and just then Hank could see that it’s left wing was broken. And now Daisy had lowered her body very close to the earth and she was advancing slowly towards the gosling.

She was going to stalk the little goose, and that meant she planned on attacking it.

So Hank broke cover and advanced towards them. “Daisy! Come!”

Daisy turned and looked at him, her feelings of betrayal clear in the surprised expression on her face, but the imperative in his voice was not something she ever betrayed so she stood and trotted over to his side. He watched her as she came, then knelt to greet her. “Daisy is my good girl,” he repeated softly until she was tucked close to his side. He reached inside his coat and found a treat and gave it to her, then he turned his attention to the little blue goose again.

It was staring at him. Head held high, body low to the earth, obviously aware of this new threat to its existence.

Hank looked at the other geese out there on the water and they were all now swimming away from the little blue gosling as fast as their little flippers could carry them, and now the situation was abundantly clear. The gosling wouldn’t survive the night up here by itself. If the cold didn’t kill it, then coyotes or a fox would surely do it in.

So Hank followed the language of his heart, the only language he knew.

He advanced slowly towards the gosling, with Daisy still by his side, and the poor creature slowly lowered it’s head to the grass and the leaves, trying to make itself small and inconspicuous, and Hank could only imagine what it must have felt.

Yet the gosling did not try to flee. It’s head moved only fractionally as Hank approached, it’s tiny black eyes following both the boy and his dog as they came close. Then Hank knelt down close to the gosling, and he reached out to stroke it’s head.

The gosling watched, clearly terrified.

But it did not recoil too much from his hand, nor did it try to defend itself, perhaps because nature had equipped this little creature with just enough understanding to read hope into the moment. The hope of an outstretched hand, crossing the primal barriers of instinct and survival.

Hank stroked the top of her head as he spoke the quiet, reassuring words the moment required.“It’s okay, little fella. Are you all alone?”

The gosling’s eyes followed his hand; at first it’s head flinched from the unfamiliar touch but soon it seemed to relax as Hank kept speaking soft words of reassurance.

He bent closer, saw the broken bones and bloody feathers along the leading edge of the gosling’s left wing and nodded as he sighed, before he turned and looked at Daisy Jane. “Daisy, we’re going to have to take her down to River Road,” he said, speaking the only two words that incited rebellious fright in Daisy’s heart. River Road was where the vet’s clinic was, and no good ever came from a visit to the old lady lurking about in that smelly place.

Hank stood and took off his jacket, glad he had worn a sweater today, then he knelt beside the gosling and scooped her up inside his jacket. Still it did not struggle. Was it in shock? Was it too terrified to even put up a fight?

“Come on, Daisy. We need to get a move on,” he said as he took off down the hill at a steady jog. It took almost an hour to get to the clinic and the doctor was getting ready to close down her office for the day when he came huffing and puffing up to the front door. It didn’t take more than a moment for the old lady to size up the situation, but what interested her most was the gosling’s cobalt coloration.

She was a kind-hearted person, had grown up in town and only left to go to college and veterinary school at Cornell, in New York, and yet she had returned and taken over a marginally profitable clinic as soon as she graduated. She was also not in it for the money, so had no qualms at all as she took the gosling from the boy’s coat and set about examining the creature’s injuries.

“I’ll have to keep her overnight,” she finally said, “but what are you going to do with her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, single geese don’t normally do very well in captivity without professional care. They need their families as much as you and I do, and that could be a problem. There aren’t many people taking care of geese these days…”

“I can learn, can’t I?”

She hesitated to answer that one. “You could,” she began, but then something stopped her. “Do your parents know about this?”

He shook his head. “We just found her, up on the hill above the Porter’s place.”

“Maybe you’d better talk to your parents about all this before committing to taking care of her. You’ll be taking on a lot of new responsibilities, and some new expenses, too.”

“How much?”

“Well, there’s specialized food and she’ll need a safe place to recuperate…to get well while her wing is on the mend. Do you have anyplace like that?”

His mind raced, but then there was the crawl-space under the dormer right beside the bunkbeds in his room, so he told her.

“That might work…if you can keep it warm in there. And you’ll need to make sure there’s a little light, too. But dim light, not bright. I tell you what…when you come to pick her up tomorrow you bring your mom and dad and we’ll talk about it.”

He looked down, then turned away.

“Hank? What’s wrong?”

So he told her about his parents, and about Carter Ash, and about all the other uncertainties swirling through their lives right now. And she listened, thinking all the while. She knew his parents and she knew Daisy, and she’d always thought this family solid and stable. But not now. Now this was a family in crisis, flying through unexpected turbulence. Yet something like this little goose could really help Hank get through this, too…

“Okay, Hank. But you’re going to have to talk to your mother tonight.” She paused, then nodded as another thought came to her. “Tellya what. I’ll drive you home right now, and maybe we can talk to your mom together. And you know what? If anyone can, I bet you and I can talk her into it…”

But when they got back to the Langston house, Elizabeth was locked away in her room and wouldn’t come out. There was nothing cooking in the kitchen, and no boxes of pizza on the table. Hannah looked confused, Jennifer distraught. Ben was up on his bunk, staring out the window.

This wasn’t a family in crisis, Dr Emily Stone told herself. This family was melting down – in real time.

“Where’s your father?” Emily asked Hannah.

“No one knows,” Hannah responded listlessly. 

“It’s some kind of top secret thing,” Hank added. “With the Navy.”

“Is there anyone we can call? Some other family member who could come and give us a hand?”

Hank nodded and went to the phone, and once he looked up the area code for Rhode Island he called his grandfather.

+++++

They both came, of course. Both Bud and Ellen. This was family, after all, and his son’s family at that. Hank had explained everything, too. From the fights to Thanksgiving with Carter Ash to the blue gosling up at the pond, which helped explain that surprisingly incongruous update from the family’s veterinarian, too. Bud had advised Ben Rhodes, his shop foreman, what was going on and where he’d be while Ellen packed their suitcases, then they’d set out across Connecticut to Hartford, and there turned north on Interstate 91, bound for the Hanover, New Hampshire exit, and they arrived a little before ten that night.

Emily Stone had by then taken the kids across to Hanover for something to eat, so she stayed with them until Bud and Ellen Langston arrived. 

But Elizabeth still refused to open the door to her bedroom.

And Bud wasn’t having any of that. 

“Do you happen to know a psychiatrist around here?” he asked Emily.

“Well, not to put too fine a point on things, but my wife is.”

Bud nodded. “Think you could give her a call?”

“I already have. She’s on her way over.”

“Thank you.”

Emily and Bud turned to Hannah. “How are you doing?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m fine.”

One look told him all he needed to know about her. She was far from fine. In fact, this evening was too much for her and she was coming undone at the seams; one sidelong glance from Ellen was all the confirmation of that assessment he needed. “Well then, why don’t you take Jennifer upstairs. I think the two of you should try and get some sleep. Tomorrow might be a busy day.”

And once the girls were gone he turned to Hank. “Think you can stay up a few more hours, son?”

“Yessir.”

“Okay. Ellen? Think you could rustle us up some coffee?”

When Dr Stone’s wife Judy arrived, and after introductions were made, they once again tried to get Elizabeth to open the door. But now there was no response at all from inside the room.

And at that point Judy Stone threw herself against the bedroom door, and after it fell away she ran in the room. Hank’s mother was in the bathtub, and her wrists had been slashed. Blood was no longer flowing into the water, and Elizabeth’s eyes was cold and still. Judy palpated Elizabeth’s neck, feeling for a pulse, then she turned to Emily. “Call 911,” she said calmly. “Mr Langston, help me get her out of the water. I want to start CPR now, so Ellen, would you take Hank away for a while?”

“I want to stay,” Hank replied.

Judy looked at the boy and nodded. 

They laid her on the cool tile floor while Emily called the paramedics, and Hank looked up, terrified, while this stranger started chest compressions and rescue breathing, then satisfied he’d seen enough he went out to sit with his grandmother. When the ambulance arrived he helped guide them to his mother’s room, then went back to the kitchen to nurse his coffee-milk by the cast iron wood-burning stove in the corner by the mudroom. 

His grandfather rode in the ambulance to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, leaving the kids with their grandmother and Emily Stone. Hank sat by the fire, every now and then putting a fresh log in the firebox, waiting. Always waiting. 

“Hank, let’s you and me go check on your brother,” Emily said, and he led her upstairs to their room. Ben was still sitting up in bed, looking out the dormer window at the moon coming up over the river, and at the college’s bell tower, a near duplicate of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Ben did that when he zoned out, often staring away into nothingness for hours and hours, and when Dr Stone asked how he was doing Ben just shrugged away the question.

“How should I feel?” he finally asked.

And without hesitating Dr Stone answered: “Scare, lonely, confused.”

“That’s about right,” Ben sighed, just before he turned and buried his face in his pillow. When Emily saw the boy was crying she climbed up on his bunk and laid down next to him, stroking his hair while she cooed the music of gentle reassurance in his ears.

Hank closed the door and went to check on Hannah, but she was either asleep or playing possum so he went to Jennifer’s room instead. She was sitting at her desk with Ben’s headphones on, listening to music while reading another one of those books by C.S.Lewis she seemed to be infatuated with these days.

“What are you reading now?” he asked as he came in and sat on the edge of her bed.

“‘Out of The Silent Planet. You’d love it, too. A professor is kidnapped and taken to Mars.”

“By Martians?”

“Yes, Henry.”

“Why do you call me that?”

“Because it annoys you.”

He nodded and got up to leave.

“Don’t go, Hank. Not yet, okay?”

“Okay, but could I ask you a question?”

“Sure?”

“Do you believe it’s your mission in life to tear me down when you think no one is looking?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then…would you please stop trying?”

She put her book down and looked over at him. “Is that what you think?”

He nodded. “Yeah. And you know what? Carter’s son asked me pretty much the same thing, so it isn’t just me.”

Jennifer turned away and shook her head for a moment. “I guess I never thought about it much, Hank, but I’m sorry you…no, I’m sorry if I’ve been doing that.”

“Okay. Apology accepted.”

“Okay.”

“Now, how’re you feeling?”

“Me? I’m mad, Hank. Mad and angry. Mad at Dad for not being here, mad at Mom for not taking better care of herself, and I’m even mad at that Carter Ash…”

“Why him?”

“Oh, I’ve been trying to understand that, but I think maybe he’s been taking advantage of her.”

Hank nodded. “Yeah, maybe, but what if it’s the other way around?”

“Then I’ll be really, really mad at Mom. Is she still asleep?”

And then he realized she probably had no idea what had happened. Sitting up here inside her own little cocoon, plugged into her music and the ambient comfort of another book, how could she…?

“No, she’s not here right now, Jenn.”

“What? Where is she?”

“She went to the hospital with Grandpa Bud.”

He now had her full attention. “What?”

“Jenn, she tried to kill herself.”

“What?” she cried. Tears started flowing and she turned pale as a ghost.

He nodded. “She hurt herself bad, Jenn. Real bad, with a knife.”

Jennifer nodded. “She’s trying to hurt Dad again. She’s always trying to hurt him.”

That thought had never occurred to him before, and the idea hit like an epiphany. “Why? Why do you think that?”

“Because she’s never been able to control him any other way.”

And that hit like thunder right above the house.

She saw his confusion, too. “Hank, I think she learned all that when she was a kid, and I think maybe that’s why she married Dad, too. He was always way too smart for her, too smart to control, so in a way she set herself up to fail. The only problem with that is that her failures always rub off on us.”

“Because of Dad?”

“Yup. Because I think he got tired of her games a long time ago.”

“I know she’s not your mother and all, but you really don’t like her, do you?”

“Me? Well, no, Hank, I despise her. I think she’s evil, and she probably always has been.”

“Evil?”

“I’m sorry, but yes, that’s how I feel.”

“You know, one of my first good memories is watching those Narnia movies with you. You’ve always reminded me of Lucy. The wise and courageous sister.”

Jenn stood and came to him, then she sat beside him on her bed and put her arm around him. “I’m really sorry if I’ve hurt you. I’ll try to do better, Hank. Okay?”

“Yeah, okay. I’d like that.”

She nodded. “Me too.”

+++++

His mother was checked in to the ‘mental facilities’ at DHMC, and Judy Stone became her therapist – which in the end was probably the best thing that could have happened to Elizabeth Langston, given current circumstances. And when Hank thought about it, which he often did, it all came back to that afternoon walk on the hill above Norwich, and so, in the end, to Gertrude.

Which was what he had named his little blue goose. Gertrude, after the goose in the old Journey to the Center of the Earth movie, the good one with James Mason and Arlene Dahl. Gertrude came home from Dr Stone’s clinic in dire straits; barely able to take care of herself and in a lot of pain. But that didn’t matter, not to her, and pretty soon not to any of the kids in the Langston house. Just like they needed their mom to get better, they wanted to help this little gosling. 

But the deeper problem was simple enough to understand.

There wasn’t much the kids to do to help their mother as she was still in the hospital, yet there was no end to the things they could do for Gertrude. Hank and Grandpa Bud built her a nesting box and they put it near one of the baseboard heaters. Grandma Ellen got all the food and other things that Doc Stone recommended, and together everyone simply pitched in and helped take care of Gertrude. She had a plastic graft holding her wing together as it healed, and yet within a week Gertrude was up and around, following Hank all around the house when he got in from school.

Bud commuted to and from the boatyard for those three weeks, until school let out for Christmas, when Bud came up in his old Chevy Blazer with Ben Rhodes, his foreman. Rhodes came up in a the company Suburban, and together they hauled the family down to the boatyard for the holidays. And, of course, as Gertrude was now a part of the family so she came, too. When Hank walked around the boatyard Gertrude ambled along right behind him, waddling along gracefully while trying not to hurt her damaged wing. Daisy had become her protector, too. Now they were inseparable.

Five days before Christmas Bud and Ellen put on their annual Christmas party in the main building, and as usual he personally handed out Christmas bonus checks to each employee. What was new this year was the presence of Bud’s grandkids from Vermont, and as word about their circumstances spread everyone went out of their way to make the kids feel at home. Of course, Hank was already at home – because he’d felt that way about the boatyard for years – yet in his way he was beginning to feel a sense of pride about not just the products turned out here, but about the team that made all this magic possible. None of this would have been possible without his grandfather’s dedication, too. Not simply to his boats, but to his employees, as well.

One of the things Hank loved most about the boatyard had little to do with the boats being built in all the various sheds and buildings. No, the thing he loved most was his grandparent’s house, an early 19^th century red brick colonial that had been built by Eldritch Henry Langston, Sr. when he first arrived from England. The house was, even for it’s time, quite large, with a half dozen bedrooms on the second floor and a huge library off the living room that even had its own fireplace. And that library was Hank’s favorite place in the whole world. Bud’s, too.

And it was because one day Grandpa Bud had taken him to an almost hidden little alcove off the main library, where all the logbooks kept by the various Langstons over the last two hundred years were kept. Sea captains all, as ship’s masters each had not simply maintained their vessels’ logbooks, they held onto them, passed them on, for they contained priceless knowledge. And, as Hank soon discovered, once you understood the language of the sea, each entry read like the best mystery novel ever written.

Yet Bud had slowly been leading Hank to this discovery, one step at a time. Molding and shaping the boy’s outlook and expectations of his place in their world, so much so that the secret alcove in the library was nothing so much as it was the gateway to the one enduring mystery that bound all the Langstons together. That mystery was, of course, hidden within the many moods of the sea, and those many moods were detailed in all these logbooks.

Two summers before, Bud had taken Hank to the alcove in the old library for the first time, and that day he had shown his grandson the way to delve into these mysteries, if he indeed wanted to do so. “You never know what you’ll discover hidden away in here,” Bud said, his eyes twinkling with pure mischief. “Tales of your great-great grandfather sailing from Newcastle or Hull across the English Channel to France one year, but then to West Africa and on to India the next. The adventures are endless, but Hank, they’re not make believe. Everything you read in those pages really happened.” 

Bud pulled one logbook from a shelf and handed it to Hank, then left him alone after dinner one August night, left him to read about a series of impossible voyages from Boston to Polynesia and then on to the Japans. When he found his grandson still reading at five the next morning, he knew the circle had been closed. He knew the family’s sacred journey was now in good hands, and that he was but one link in a chain of events stretching back in time as far as memory dared reach. Because of Hank, that chain would continue to grow into the future, and now that he knew his time would soon be at an end, there was nothing more important than this boy – and his dreams.

+++++

One of the things that the Langston kids most enjoyed about their grandparent’s house at the boatyard was the sheer number of bedrooms on the second floor – with six there was one for each of them, with more to spare. And because there were two more bedrooms on the first floor, crowding was never an issue. And having a bathroom all his own was nothing short of bliss to Hank. Having grown up sharing one bathroom with Ben and his two sisters meant that mornings in there soon turned into chaos, with his sisters just manipulative enough to monopolize the tiny room all morning.

Which Hank circumvented by waking up an hour before the girls. Ben had proven to never be an issue because he was a sackrat who had to be dragged forcibly from bed simply to make sure he got to school on time. The downside, of course, was that being first in the shower meant he had to deal with cooler water temperatures, but that hardly mattered. Sharing that time with either of his sisters, on the other hand, meant sharing their dreadful early morning odors while he was trapped inside the steaming shower stall, which left him feeling less clean than he had before he got in the shower. So having his own bathroom was Hank’s idea of heaven.

And unlike Ben, he was fastidious, and so more like his own father – a real creature of habit. He unpacked his things and put everything away neatly in drawers, while Ben left his things crumbled up in a duffel bag stuffed under his bed. Hank brushed his teeth twice a day; Ben forget his toothbrush. Hank changed his socks and underwear daily, and he refused to talk about how infrequently his little brother changed those things. At home, he tried to keep their shared bedroom picked up and habitable, but that was often simply not possible. Ben was a slob, and like all slobs he was a procrastinator. Any homework assignment, like all Ben’s daily chores, could be put off ’til tomorrow, and no matter how many times Hank told him to get his act together his little brother just shrugged and walked away. Being a lazy slob was apparently Ben’s destiny, and Hank was fast learning that there were some things you could change, and some you couldn’t. Destiny was, apparently, one of those things you couldn’t.

But now that Gertrude was a part of his life, combatting Ben’s sloth had taken on a new sense of urgency. She couldn’t waddle over the usual piles of dirty clothes discarded on their floor, and yet because of these piles they were soon both discovering the joy of stepping in goose shit – with their bare feet – at three in the morning. But here at his grandparent’s house, Gertrude was enjoying the simple art of cleanliness, and she soon was getting in the habit of doing her business in a cat’s litter box, too. She could not yet navigate the stairs on her own and relied on Hank for that, but beyond that minor inconvenience the little blue goose followed her savior anywhere and everywhere.

Though Hank had just turned eleven years old he was sprouting up almost uncontrollably, and that Christmas he broke into the six feet tall range. He was, in fact, almost a foot taller than Ben and already four inches taller than either his father or grandfather, yet Ben weighed almost as much as he did – and Ben was far from being overweight. Hank was skinny, the awkward kind of skinny with a prominent Adam’s apple and floppy, almost gangly legs, and if his sisters and Ben were jocks, Hank was their polar opposite. He cared not at all for football or soccer or lacrosse and though he tolerated the family’s trips to the local slopes at the Dartmouth Skiway, he usually just managed to get down the hill without face-planting, whereas Ben streaked down like a heat-seeking missile.

And this year, as Ben was in the Ford Sayre junior racing program, he had decided to go out for the ski jumping team. One look at those daunting ramps was all it took to send Hank into shock, and the thought of his kid brother flying off one of those things left him feeling unsure of his footing. Ben, meanwhile, could hardly wait for on the hill training to begin.

One of Hank’s biggest concerns right now was the weird looking hair sprouting on his upper lip; this was secondary, of course, to his biggest concern, the painfully large red zits smoldering on his upper back and forehead. He had one on his back just after school started that was the size of supertanker, and when Hannah popped it he had screamed so loudly that Daisy ran from the room. And Hannah, apparently, loved to pop zits so much that he refused to take his shirt off around her.

He had snuck into his parent’s bathroom before they loaded up to come to the boatyard for Christmas, and he had taken one of those disposable razors his father used to shave in the shower. Now, in the splendid privacy of his own bathroom, he pulled the thing out and looked at his reflection in the mirror over the ancient pedestal sink as he tried to figure out how to use it. There were no instructions on the plastic packaging so all he had to go on were the glitzy ads he’d seen on TV – which were, he soon realized, next to useless. He put some soap on his face and lathered it up a little, then took the little plastic protector off – and then, for the first time, his eyes behold the blades. Two slivers of shiny steel that seemed purpose-made to slit a throat, or a mother’s wrists, and he stared at those two blades for the longest time – before he carefully put the cap back in place and rinsed the soap off his face. After a half hour of internal deliberations got him nowhere, he decided his next best course of action was clear. He needed to ask his grandfather.

And while Bud made their early morning coffee, Hank asked him about shaving and Bud came over and examined the peach fuzz on his grandson’s upper lip and nodded. “Yessir, I reckon it’s time,” he managed to say while doing his best not to smile, then he whipped up some pancakes and sausage links before they went upstairs to tackle the razor issue. With that chore out of the way, it was time for everyone to run to the Christmas tree lot and pick out the family’s tree, which Bud and Ellen usually did on Christmas Eve, and almost always late that afternoon, setting the tree up right before dinner. Of course Ellen had already been to the lot and had already picked out a tree – just in case – yet when the grandkids were there the final decision was always made by the group.

Once the tree was loaded on the white fiberglass top of Bud’s ancient Chevy Blazer, they all went back to the house and unloaded the tree, then began the hours long tradition of grooming the tree with endless strings of lights and dozens of old glass ornaments, until every branch was drooping under the tremulous weight of all those expectations. Christmas morning, of course, could not come soon enough…

Which in no way had stopped Grandma Ellen from preparing a feast to end all feasts, the gathering held before anyone dared head off to bed. Though she had in years past roasted a goose, under the circumstances she held off that year and made do with a huge slab of beef, which she roasted with Yorkshire pudding, creamed spinach and cranberry relish, as well as a dish of cheesy potatoes. This rounded out their Christmas eve, and after dinner Ben and the girls went upstairs. Bud and Hank took Daisy and Gertrude out for a long walk, the boy trying to orient himself to the night sky overhead while his grandfather pointed out the different navigation stars found in winter’s sky. “Follow the arc to Arcturus,” he admonished, followed by: “And remember? You drive the spike to Spica.”

“Yessir.”

“Are you going to the library tonight?”

“May I?”

“Of course, that’s what it’s there for, son.”

And so after Daisy and Gertrude had done their business, Hank disappeared within the secret alcove beyond that hidden corner of the library. He found the logbook he had started reading last August and noted that his place mark was still where he’d left it, then he went to the big overstuffed easy chair by the window and sat down. Instead of turning on lamp on the table beside the chair, he turned and watched the moon rising over the eastern horizon, marveling once again at the illusion of size the orb displayed as it rose through the trees, once again breaking free of the earth and dashing into the clear sky above. Once upon a time he might have kept an eye peeled for Santa and his reindeer, but not tonight. No, tonight he wanted to continue the journey had had started last summer, on his great-grandfather’s second trip across the Pacific.

But as he opened the logbook he almost immediately felt something different about the night. Not about the book, but something about the room and the lingering blue light flooding through the huge window and into library. Was it the moon – as the silent orb vaulted into the night sky? No, not really, because he felt it everywhere he looked, yet when he thought about it he had no name for what he thought it was he was feeling. In a way, it felt most like halloween, like spirits were lurking about, maybe the spirits of his ancestors…but no, he was getting carried away with himself, wasn’t he…?

He tried to shake off the feeling so decided the best way to do that was to turn on the reading lamp, and he looked around the library once again…just to make sure he really was alone…

This was Eldritch Henry Langston, Jr’s. third trip on Pegasus, but it was his first around Cape Horn as the ship’s master, and as Hank read through the entries the flow of the voyage began to take shape in his mind. Leaving Boston in April, heading east towards Bermuda but turning south well before they ran into the British warships usually on patrol around the island. They put in for water and provisions somewhere along the coast of modern day Brazil, then again as they grew near to the Cape. They passed a small flotilla of whalers once, the four ships heading back to New England without escort, and he wished them well after they passed along their own observations of rounding the Horn. They had lost two ships just a few miles off the rocks, with all hands lost. Including several women and children, Captain Langston recorded near the end of his first logbook of this voyage.

The second volume picked up where the first ended, approaching the Cape. 

The weather encountered by Pegasus over the next three weeks was, according to Henry, ferocious, and Hank could see the anxiety in his great-grandfather’s handwritten entries. There was evidence of dread in the tremulous script, and Hank recognized this anxiety as evidence of something new that Henry either had encountered, or was about to. Raging gales, mountainous seas, the constant moaning sounds the wind made as it passed through the rigging, all these things weren’t simply facts to be recorded on the page, they were the “something new” that Henry was dealing with as a new captain. Then Pegasus experienced not one incident of St Elmo’s fire, but three, and in just as Pegasus rounded the Cape. A few of the older hands onboard took this a good omen, signs that the weather would soon improve, while the usual malcontents grew wide-eyed with fright. These poor souls noted that these appearances of Witch’s fire, as they called them, foretold that they were all doomed to sickness and death, and soon.

Yet in one entry the weather cleared, the sun came out, and a lookout spotted survivors from one of the whalers adrift on slabs of wood and sailcloth. Once they had been taken onboard Henry wrote of all the various superstitions once again, but as always he was a scientist so hardly seemed able to countenance supernatural explanations.

Yet Henry took note of the effect these superstitious had on morale, and he did his best to record them in these pages. He also recorded in some detail the conditions when ‘the fire’ appeared, including the temperature and barometric readings around the time of each event, but he had little else to say about the matter beyond a few choice, oblique references to the bad omen chatter. Nearing the latitude of Valparaiso he began to worry about the ship’s water supply so put-in to load barrels of fresh water, and to once again replenish the ship’s stores before setting out towards Polynesia and the Line Islands. The survivors opted to disembark and settle in the town.

The last entry in this volume had described Pegasus’s landfall in the Gilbert Islands, on an atoll the locals called Te Rawa, and there was an American ship at anchor in the lagoon when Pegasus arrived and dropped anchor. When Henry met with Captain Phillip Anders, the captain of the Bunker Hill, he learned that Thomas Gilbert of the East India Company had named the islets around the lagoon Tarawa, and that the U.S. Exploring Expedition had officially recognized that name not quite twenty years before, back in 1841. The two captains went over the available charts they had of the region, and Henry sketched out a reasonably detailed rendering of the Tarawa atoll, as well as the enclosed lagoon. Pegasus was anchored in Charlotte Harbor, as a matter of record that Henry duly noted in his last entry…

And there Hank closed the logbook. He looked over the vast expanse of the night beyond the windows and could almost hear the wind in the rigging, and feel Henry’s anxiety when two barrels of water had turned up black. A man of the Enlightenment, he had no tolerance for the superstitious among his crew, and his intolerance of willful ignorance was often brutal, but in these pages everything was explained in muted detail, leaving Hank to read between the lines every now and then. Yet the boy felt lost as he paged through the entries, often feeling like he was lost in time. Like he was there beside his grandfather on Pegasus, pacing the deck behind the helmsman or sounding the hull with the ship’s carpenter after taking a series of brutal waves after Pegasus rounded the Horn. 

He drifted along for a few minutes then placed the book back on the shelf where it belonged. It was now four in the morning and he was exhausted. Daisy was asleep on the floor, Gertrude was sitting attentively by Daisy’s side, as usual watching every move Hank made, but when Hank stood so did Daisy, and the little blue goose seemed to sigh as she stood too, waiting for Hank to pick her up. They made their way up the stairs and soon all were fast asleep, perhaps not to dream of sugarplum fairies that night, but to linger on the sea for just a little longer, perhaps until dawn and the changing of the watch.

It wasn’t long before he heard Ben up and about, running down the stairs to check out his haul under the Christmas tree. Several woo-hoos followed, then Hannah was out her door and galloping down the stairs. Jennifer, dear jaded Jennifer, met him in the hallway outside her bedroom and shook her head when they heard Hannah’s squealing delight.

“Well,” she sighed, “we might as well get this over with…”

Ellen had been acutely aware that without either of their parents on hand, this was to be a Christmas filled with uncertainty, even fear. And, possibly, even a little acting out. Yet Ellen knew of no better way to push aside such feelings than two bury them under waves of wretched excess, and this she was well prepared to do. She had flooded the floor around the regal pine with dozens of boxes of gifts, some more consequential than others, but no one would go without this year.

With one exception.

Ben found two new pairs of skis under the tree, one for downhill racing and the second for ski jumping, both purchased on the advice of his coaches in the Ford Sayre program. Hannah and Jennifer each received new laptop computers, the latest Apple MacBooks, yet oddly enough there were no presents under the tree for Hank. Not even one.

And yet Bud saw no trace of disappointment in his grandson. He saw nothing less than the simple joy of the moment, his brother and sisters receiving their presents, each running over to Ellen or Bud and then enjoying a big Christmas hug. That was the way of a generous soul, he knew, and it was this one simple truth that had evaded his own son. Yet here it was again, a minor – if unexpected – miracle. So he sat back and watched Hank as he handed out presents to all his family, until even Hannah and Ben realized that, so far, anyway, there had not been a single present for their brother.

“What about Hank?” Ben asked.

And of course Hannah’s lower lip jutted malignantly, now that she was aware of the injustice.

Yet Jennifer? Oh, she had noticed immediately and even now the sense of anticipation was spreading across her face like a wildfire.

Yet Bud was in no hurry. 

In fact, as soon as all their presents had been passed around and admired, Hank found one last gift and gave it to Grandma Ellen. It was a picture Hank had taken of the family in happier times, last winter in fact, when his family had spent a long weekend at the von Trapp Family Lodge, over in Stowe, Vermont. And yet not one of his siblings knew Hank had taken the picture, let alone had it enlarged and framed, so of course everyone gathered around and looked. Even Jennifer.

And within that interplay of light and shadow captured on a single piece of paper, the absence of the children’s parents finally hit home, and while the children tried to reconcile their feelings within the moment, Ellen and Bud reeled under the weight of their own son’s various abdications. Duty was one thing, Ellen thought, but his children needed him – now more than ever, while Elizabeth’s dalliances with this Carter Ash were beyond the pale. Her bringing this stranger and his family into their home at Thanksgiving had been unforgivable, and Ellen was still furious about it. Yet where was their father – her son – during all this? Off on another submarine somewhere? Testing another missile, perhaps? Who knew what he was doing, but that had soon become her greatest concern. He should have been here, now, holding his family together. Instead of…going out yachting with the navy…

Hank saw the mood in the room darken and he instinctively looked to Jennifer for clarity, if not affirmation. She alone understood what was happening to them, and yet she remained aloof, detached, as if things such as emotional pain could not reach her. Yes, he saw, she understood what he had meant by the gift. He had wanted to serve up a of slice of happier times, that’s all.

But then Bud looked at him and nodded. He understood, too. Ellen squeezed his hand, then smiled her approval; after that everyone took their presents and retreated to a corner to take inventory of all the new memories just waiting to be had. Then Hank pulled a new chew toy from his coat pocket and gave it to Daisy. And still Gertrude sat, her eyes, as always, focused on Hank.

The boy was, after all, her savior.

Bud stood and walked over to Hank and quietly handed him a small manilla envelope, a little brown thing no larger than a credit card. He smiled at his grandson, an obscure, enigmatic slip of a smile, then he walked off to the kitchen to put Ellen’s homemade cinnamon rolls in the oven.

+++++

Hank took Daisy and the goose out for a walk after the family’s mid-morning breakfast, and from his study off the kitchen Bud watched the boy carefully. Still no sign of disappointment, still nothing but curiosity. Hank had helped Hannah get her MacBook up and running, and then helped Jenn get a software update downloaded and installed. He even helped Ellen with the dishes, then he had even helped get the smoker lit and burning, and the turkey on the grate. Just now Hank was throwing a stick, clapping approval as Daisy ran after it. Bud grinned as he watched them, watched as the blue goose seemed get interested in this new game, too. The gosling stood tall and extended it’s neck high above her outstretched wings before it began running around in excited circles, and for a split second Bud thought it quite possible that Gertrude might just turn into a decent retriever.

And when he decided he’d had enough, he went outside and walked over to Hank and his little brood and stood behind them until the boy realized he was there.

“Hi, Pops.”

“She looks ready to chase that thing into the water. Too bad it’s so cold out there.”

“Oh, she gets whatever I throw in the water, no problem.”

“You’re not going to hunt with her, are you?”

Hank looked down, not sure how to answer that one. “Never been hunting, and anyway, I’m sure I don’t want to kill anything…”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“I don’t know, Pops. Killing something wild and free when they have a hard enough time just surviving in the wild? That just feels wrong to me, I guess.”

“That turkey we just put on the smoker? How do you reckon he felt?”

“I know, I know. If I could just eat veggies I probably would…”

“That’s not how we evolved, son. And whether you like it or not, hunting is a skill, and it’s a skill you should understand. That doesn’t mean you have to go out and start killing things, but think about that turkey we just put on the cook, would you? You and I didn’t look him in the eye while we killed him but he’s just as dead, and I bet you’re going to enjoy eating him this afternoon, too.”

Hank nodded. “I can’t resist anything covered with Grandma’s lemon-butter sauce.”

“Same here, only that cranberry relish gets me every year. Don’t tell her I told you, but that stuff is full of Grand Marnier…”

“What’s that?”

“Booze, son. Pure-bred French booze, and none better.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding, and she doesn’t cook it down so it’s pretty potent. Don’t eat too much or you’ll get sleepy. And she’s cooking Brussels sprouts, too…”

“Oh, God, not again…”

Bud laughed at that. “When I was your age I hated ‘em too.”

“I’d rather eat roadkill. Bleck-k-k…”

“Did you open that little envelope?”

“Yessir. Is it the key to a padlock?”

Bud nodded. “Well, what say you and I go find out.”

Hank took the stick from Daisy and put it on the picnic table by the patio, then they fell in beside Bud as he started walking to the finishing shed, where new boats were painted and varnished. “You remember the 42 we delivered to Ralph Seaton last July?”

“Sure. The one with the navy blue hull, right?”

“That’s a fact. He bought a 28 from us about fifteen years ago. Took real good care of it, too. I think he had mixed feelings about buying a new boat, but he really couldn’t justify keeping two around. In the end, he asked if I’d take his 28 in trade, and he brought it down in October,” he said as he used his key to unlock the door to the shed. Bud stepped inside and turned on the lights, and there along the far wall was a Langston 28, her freshly buffed navy blue hull gleaming under the sparkling light, the white cove and boot stripes accenting the red bottom paint perfectly.

“Holy smokes,” Hank sighed as he looked at the glowing hull. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful in my life.”

“Ben Rhodes has been working on her in his spare time, getting her ready to go.”

“I bet you didn’t have any trouble finding someone to buy her…”

“Oh, I’m not going to sell her, Hank. As a matter of fact, she’s your Christmas present.”

Hank stopped dead in his tracks, then he slowly turned to look at his grandfather. “What?”

“She’s yours, son.” Hank knelt down and grabbed hold of Daisy, and Gertrude came over and stood tall again, this time draping her neck over Daisy’s, and Bud saw the boy’s hands were shaking just a little. 

“The key opens the padlock up on the companionway sliders, if you want to go below and check her out.”

There was a step-ladder leaning against the outer wall; Bud helped him get it over to the side of the hull and steadied it as Hank climbed up the rungs, then watched from below as his grandson enjoyed the moment. He’d brought along a few treats for Daisy and the goose, and they listened as Hank made his way below and rummaged around in the darkness. He finally found the breaker panel and got the interior lights on, and Bud couldn’t help but smile.

When Hank came down maybe ten minutes later, tears were running down his cheeks.

“I don’t know what to say, Grandpa. I really don’t. Thanks hardly seems enough.”

“I understand, son. And just so we don’t get the girls too jealous, the boat is registered to the company for now.” He paused, watched his reaction. “Mainly because you’re not legally old enough to own a boat yet, but she’ll be yours from now on. When you turn eighteen you’ll own her officially. And I didn’t know what to name her, but I had a new name plank carved. Take a look.”

Hank walked around to the back of the boat and up there on the stern was a curved mahogany name board, and there carved in gold-leaf was the boat’s name: The Blue Goose.

Hank turned to his grandfather and grinned. “How’d you know?” he asked.

“Because if I was in your place, Hank, that’s what I would’ve named her.”

Hank went over and hugged his grandfather; Daisy and Gertrude watched, neither really understanding what was happening, though Daisy was pretty sure she wanted to go back up to the patio and find that stick. That grassy lawn was calling her name, and there was still lots of daylight.

+++++

Hank helped with the dishes again, then he helped Bud bring in wood for the fireplace. Once the fire was going everyone gathered around and Ellen made sure everyone had hot cocoa and a thick wedge of her pumpkin cheesecake. In the afterglow of their contented gluttony, everyone stared at the Christmas tree and just sort of zoned out for a while, drifting along down memory lane and for a few blissful moments not thinking about their mother too much. Grandpa put on his favorite Christmas movie, White Christmas, the one with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, and pretty soon everyone was singing along to ‘Snow-snow-snow…’ or taking long sips of Ellen’s cocoa. It was Christmas night, after all.

About halfway through the movie Bud got up and went to one the large windows overlooking the bay, and he just stood there, lost in thought. Hank joined him, then Daisy and Gertrude did too.

“Is that snow?” Hank asked. “It felt too warm just a while ago…”

“Look at the thermometer,” Bud said, pointing to the instrument just outside the patio door. It now read 27 degrees, almost ten degrees lower than an hour ago. “Weather service is saying we could get ten or so inches overnight, more up in Vermont.”

Ben heard that and came right over to the window. “Really? We’re gonna get a big dump tonight?”

Bud nodded, smiled at the boy’s obvious excitement. “I reckon we better get you over to the ski shop in the morning, maybe get you some new ski boots. They ought to have the roads plowed by noon, so maybe we could head up to Norwich in the afternoon, get you guys up on the mountain the day after tomorrow.”

“Oh, Gramps, that’d be awesome!” Ben said, a wide grin splitting his face in two. He had his eyes on some new Head ski boots and was already stoked about his new boards, so…

Hank turned and looked at Jennifer, and he already knew what she was thinking. It was time to go to the hospital in Hanover. It was time to go and visit their mother.

He was already afraid of what they were going to find there.

+++++

Bing and Rosemary, Danny and Vera finished crooning White Christmas one more time. Hannah was fighting back tears, Jennifer was lost in thought, and Hank was still thinking about his mother. Ben was, of course, thinking about new ski boots and bombing down the GS course at the Skiway. Daisy was asleep, her head draped over Hank’s lap, while Gertrude was perched on the back of the sofa, her head resting on her feathered back.

Bud felt a familiar stir in the air and smiled.

Hank helped gather plates and cups, then helped Grandma with the few remaining dishes while the others yawned and thanked Grandpa-Bud once again for their day, then they headed up the stairs to get ready for bed. Hank got the dishwasher loaded then hugged Grandma one more time before he went to stand with Bud by the window again.

“Already have about three inches,” Bud sighed when he saw Hank’s reflection join his own in the glass. “We’ll be lucky to get out of here tomorrow if this keeps up.”

Hank saw the temperature was already down to 20 degrees and nodded. He turned and looked at the barometer on the bookcase and saw it was strongly in the ‘rain’ part of the dial. “Where’s the wind coming from?” he asked.

“Looks like we’re in for a real nor’easter tonight, son. You might sleep with your socks on, just in case.”

“Yessir. Can I help you with anything before I head up?”

Bud shook his head. “No, we’re good.”

“Merry Christmas, Gramps. And thanks for the best Christmas ever.”

Bud nodded, then held out his arm and pulled the boy close. “And thanks for all you did today. You’re growing up fast, too fast, I know, and I understand all the things you’re going through right now are hard on you all, but I think you’re handling things as well as anyone could. We’re both so proud of you.”

Hank hugged his grandfather again then led his entourage up the stairs to his bedroom. He’d only managed a few hours sleep the night before and was already very tired, but he decided to shower before he brushed his teeth and put on his pajamas. He stood in the shower lost in thought, letting the hot spray pound down on his neck for the longest time, and when he got out of the shower the little bathroom was full of steam, the walls literally running wet with lingering moisture. He put some toothpaste on his toothbrush and began brushing his teeth, stopping once to wipe away the water running down the mirror over the little sink…

…and as he looked inside the mirror, expecting to see his own mottled reflection in the silvered glass, he saw a shape taking form somewhere within all that swirling moisture…

…and a pattern emerged…

…something like the letter ‘o’ – only tall and skinny, and pushed a little to the left so that the top off the ‘o’ was leaning to the left, and the bottom was flattened out a little…

…yet the shape was so familiar…

…but – why?

“Where have I seen this?” he whispered, his voice hollow, full of curiosity. He wiped away a rivulet streaming down the glass, then he began tracing the outline of the letter with his index finger, his hand moving around and around. 

“I saw this last night. Henry, on Pegasus, he had just copied that chart of Charlotte Harbor. That atoll…what was its name?”

“Tarawa.”

“What?” Hank barked. “Who said that?”

The water running down the glass gave way now, gave way to the image of a middle-aged man standing in a low-ceiling sea cabin. The face was lean, the eyes deep brown, and Hank saw echoes of himself in those eyes.

“Who are you?” Hank cried.

The man smiled. A knowing smile, yet kind. 

“You must be Hank,” the man said. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for some time. How was your Christmas, by the way?”

© 2025 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | and this is a work of fiction, plain and simple. 

And just to help you keep things straight…

Dramatis personae 

The Langston Family

–   Hank aka Eldritch Henry Langston V

• Hannah, Hank’s oldest sister, from his father’s first marriage
• Jennifer, next oldest sister, also from his father’s first marriage
• Ben Langston, Hank’s younger brother, from their father’s second marriage
• Elizabeth Langston, Henry’s current wife and mother of Hank and Ben
• Eldritch Henry Langston IV, Hank’s father
• Eldritch Henry Langston III, Hank’s grandfather
• Ellen Langston, Hank’s grandmother
• Eldritch Henry Langston, Jr., Hank’s great-grandfather 
• Eldritch Henry Langston, Sr., Hank’s great-great-grandfather

At the Langston Boat Company, in Melville, Rhode Island

• Ben Rhodes, foreman
• Travers Stuart, draftsman

In Hanover, New Hampshire and Woodstock, Vermont

• Carter Ash, Elizabeth’s suitor
• Huck, or Carter Ash Jr., Carter’s son, a year younger than Hank

In Norwich, Vermont

• Dr Emily Stone, the family veterinarian (and her wife Judy, a psychiatrist)