A
Thousand
Shades
of
Blue
Text copyright © 2008 Robin Stevenson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Stevenson, Robin H. (Robin Hjørdis), 1968-
A thousand shades of blue / written by Robin Stevenson.
ISBN 978-1-55143-921-1
I. Title.
PS8637.T487T48 2008 jC813’.6 C2008-903050-8
First published in the United States, 2008
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008928575
Summary: A yearlong sailing trip to the Bahamas reveals deep wounds in Rachel’s family and brings out the worst in Rachel.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Design by Teresa Bubela
Cover artwork by Janice Kun
Author photo by David Lowes
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
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Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on 100% PCW recycled paper.
11 10 09 08 • 4 3 2 1
To Cheryl May, for all the memories of a magical year
aboard the sailboat Tara.
Many thanks to Ilse and Giles Stevenson for their support and encouragement; to Pat Schmatz for her careful reading and insightful suggestions; to the fiction critique group of the Victoria Writer’s Society for providing helpful feedback on the early chapters; and to Sarah Harvey for her thoughtful and astute advice.
Sailing in the Bahamas is a dream come true, right? Clear blue water, suntanning every day, cocktails on the deck with ice cubes clinking, tropical fish, brightly colored coral reefs.
Here’s the reality: That clear blue water never stops moving. The boat doesn’t always rock you gently. Sometimes it throws you around so violently you’d sell your soul to get to shore. More often it just drives you crazy with its constant motion and keeps you slightly off balance. The sun burns your skin. The refrigeration breaks down, and there are no ice cubes. Everything tastes salty: your hair, your lips, the tips of your fingers. The coral reefs are fragile and damaged, and the fish that swim over them can carry ciguatera, a toxin which damages your nervous system so that heat feels like ice and cold burns like fire.
Nothing is what it seems. Nothing.
I’m sitting on the foredeck of our sailboat. This is what passes for privacy now. My parents and my younger brother, Tim, are twenty feet behind me. They can see me if they stand up, but at least I can’t hear them over the sound of the waves breaking against the hull and the wind luffing the badly trimmed jib. Sailing only looks quiet and peaceful when you’re watching from the shore. I lie down, close my eyes against the sun and try not to think about what happened back in Georgetown. After all, we’ve left. We’ve sailed away. Georgetown, the small Bahamian community and cruising hub, is behind us now.
“Rachel,” Dad yells. “We could use a little help back here.”
You’d think between the three of them, they could manage. I stand up and make my way back to the cockpit, holding on to the rigging as the boat rises and falls beneath me. The wind has picked up, and it’s getting a little rough out here.
I sit down on the bench beside my brother. “What’s up?”
Mom is at the helm, standing with her hands gripping the big wheel. Dad is frowning at the chart.
“Change of plans,” he says. “Calabash Bay isn’t going to be safe with the winds shifting to the west. We’re going to go in here instead.”
I scan the low barren shoreline of Long Island. “In where?” All I can see is rocks.
Dad stabs at the chart with his finger. “Joe Sound.”
Tim reads aloud from the guidebook. “A very protected anchorage with a narrow entrance channel.”
“No shit,” I say, staring at the rocks. “So narrow we can’t see it. Are you sure we’re in the right spot?”
Dad nods. “Absolutely.”
“Right there,” Mom says suddenly, pointing. “God, it’s really narrow. Mitch, are you sure this is the best plan?”
“Unless anyone else has a better idea, or feels like sailing all night,” Dad says. “It’ll be dark in a couple of hours.”
Tim and I drop the sails and tie them down quickly. As we get closer to shore, the channel looks even narrower. The waves behind us push us forward, and the water changes from blue to green: It’s getting shallower.
“I don’t like the look of this at all,” Mom says.
“Let’s not have negative attitudes.” Dad glances down at the chart again. “It should be perfectly straightforward.”
“Perhaps you’d like to take the helm then.” Her voice is tight and brittle.
He takes the wheel from her without saying anything.
Tim picks up the guidebook again. “The channel is six feet deep at its center. Follow the imaginary line into the calm waters of Joe Sound.” He snorts. “Follow the imaginary line?”
“Get up on the foredeck, you two. Guide us in.” Dad’s voice is tense.
Tim and I go and stand at the bow, gripping the forestay tightly. I try to find the bluest, deepest water and signal to Dad. It’s not as easy as it sounds. There are a thousand shades of blue. Anyone can tell the difference between water that’s two feet deep and water that’s ten feet deep, but trying to tell the difference between the subtle shades of turquoise that differentiate four feet and six feet is a bit more difficult.
And yet essential. Our boat needs five feet of water to stay afloat.
“A little more to starboard,” I yell, pointing.
Tim is shaking his head. “This is crazy. There isn’t enough water.”
Once we’re in the channel, there’ll be no way to turn around. The rocks on either side of the channel are jagged and sharp, and I can’t help agreeing with Tim: This is crazy.
Dad is coming to the same conclusion. “It’s too narrow,” he shouts. “I’m turning back.” The bow of the boat starts to swing back to port.
I look down through the water and see the yellowish sheet of rock on the bottom. “It’s too late to turn,” I yell. “It’s too shallow.”
There’s an awful crunch, and the boat stops dead. My forehead smashes into the bow rail, and Tim grabs me to keep me from falling overboard. Then there’s another awful crunch, and another. The waves are lifting us up and flinging us back down onto the rocks. The whole boat shudders horribly with each impact.
Dad throws the engine into reverse. It roars, and we lift and crash and then somehow, just as suddenly, we’re free and floating again. I point wildly to starboard. Dad puts Shared Dreams into forward, the boat swings back into the channel, and we slip through into the still blue water beyond. It looks like a wide shallow lake: acres of pale blue water surrounded by beach and scrub and low hills.
We set the anchor. I rub my forehead; a tender bump is starting to form where I whacked it on the rail. I figure everyone must be shaken by what happened, but no one says anything about it. Dad’s pretty quiet. I bet he’s furious with himself. Mom and Tim stow the genoa and tie the cover on the main sail, and Dad jumps in the water to make sure the bottom of the boat is okay.
As for me, I’m starving. It’s my turn to cook—we have a schedule for absolutely everything. I’m stirring noodles into boiling water when Dad climbs back on board and stands dripping in the cockpit.
“Bad news, folks,” he says. “The rudder’s pretty badly cracked. No way we can fix that without getting the boat hauled out of the water. And there’s no marina here. We’ll have to sail it back to Georgetown.” He shrugs, like it’s not such a big deal. Like it’s not the end of the fucking world.
A dull pain thuds in my chest. Tim and I stare at each other. The water in my pot starts to boil over, and I pull it off the burner, slopping scalding hot water and noodles down the side of my hand. I swear under my breath. It hurts, but at least it’s a distraction.
Tim chews on the edge of his finger. “Isn’t there some way we can fix it here?”
“No, it’s a big job.” Dad rubs his chin. “I’ll slap some underwater epoxy on tonight to help it hold together for the sail back. We’ll head to Georgetown in the morning.”
I want to scream at him. I want to tell him that Georgetown is absolutely the last place we should go. He has no idea that this stupid crack in the rudder could destroy our already messed-up family. And I can’t tell him without destroying it myself.
The reason we were in the Bahamas in the first place was, according to my parents, to spend quality time together as a family. Don’t laugh. Although, why not? Four people who could barely stand each other on a good day moving onto a small boat together? I would have laughed if it wasn’t my life that was getting turned upside down.
When Dad first made the big announcement about dragging us off on this sailing trip, it all seemed totally unreal to me. That was four months ago, but if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the past matters. Tim’s the history buff, not me, but even I know that you can’t make sense of the present without understanding the past. So here’s how it all went down.
We were all sitting around the dinner table, back in our four-bedroom house in Hamilton. After my sister Emma moved out, Mom and Dad decided that Dinner Time Was Family Time. So there we were like some TV sitcom family, eating meatloaf, asking each other polite questions about our days and pretending we cared.
I was kind of nervous that night because I’d dyed my hair a bit. I’d added a blue streak, which wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds. My hair is dyed black anyway, and at that time it was a spiky mess of half-dreads that didn’t quite work out. So the blue wasn’t actually as noticeable as I’d hoped. Still, I was waiting for Dad to freak out.
He didn’t even notice.
I poured ketchup on my meatloaf and mushed it up. Roadkill. I pushed it around my plate.
“So,” Dad said, “your mother and I have been talking, and we’ve got some news to share.”
I couldn’t help glancing at Tim. He was gripping the edge of the table, his skinny face white as the walls. I knew exactly what he was thinking.
D-I-V-O-R-C-E.
A part of me actually felt relieved. Like maybe we could all just get it over with. Then I looked at Dad. He had a big grin on his face.
“We’ve decided we’re going to take a family trip,” he said.
It took a minute for the words to sink in. Okay. Not a divorce then. “I hate to break it to you, Dad,” I said, “but we’re a little old for Disneyland.”
He ignored my sarcasm. “This is a lot better than Disneyland, Rach. We’re going to sail our boat down to the Bahamas.”
This was something Dad had always talked about doing someday—like, after Tim and I are gone, and he retires. We hadn’t done all that much sailing as a family. I’d never been interested. Sailing back and forth in Hamilton harbor, with the steel factories belching out smoke in the background, is not all that exciting. Our biggest trip ever had been an eight-hour sail to Toronto: slogging through the rain with the engine on all day, fish and chips at the marina restaurant for dinner, sleeping with the boat tied to a wobbly finger slip with the mosquitoes biting and the gas dock-lights beaming in through our windows all night long. I looked at Mom. “He’s kidding, right?”
She’d been out running, and her hair was still all wet from the rain. She tucked it behind her ears and shook her head. “We thought it’d be good for us all. For our family.”
Tim was smiling uncertainly, his eyes flicking back and forth between Mom, Dad and me as if he was trying to figure out what was going on, or waiting for clues so he’d know how to react.
Dad leaned toward me. “What do you think, Rachel? Sounds like fun, don’t you think?”
I lifted my chin and looked right at him. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do less than spend god knows how long trapped on a thirty-six-foot sailboat with my family. “Oh yeah, Dad.”
He looked at me uncertainly. I almost laughed. He wasn’t sure whether I was being serious or sarcastic. Well, Dad, that’s what you get for spending all your time at the office fixing other people’s messed-up kids.
“Sounds like a riot,” I said. “I look forward to hearing all about it when you get back.”
He leaned back and pushed his chair away from the table. “You’re coming with us.”
“I’ll stay with Jen. Her parents won’t mind.”
“The point of this trip is for us to spend time together,” he said firmly. “As a family.”
I snorted.
Dad looked bewildered. “What?”
No one said anything. Tim looked at me anxiously and shook his head ever so slightly.
I ignored him. “Spending time with us isn’t usually high on your list of priorities, Dad.”
He hesitated, rubbed his chin and looked at Mom for help.
She just shrugged. “Rach, you’ve hardly touched your meatloaf.”
I stared at the mess on my plate. “I’m not hungry.”
Dad cleared his throat. “This family is very important to me,” he said. “You are all very important to me.”
He looked kind of sad, but none of us said anything. Dad’s big on teenagers expressing their feelings, but only in his office. In our house, the rules are a little different: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
Most of the time, no one says anything at all.
“How would we get to the Bahamas from here?” Tim asked.
He was always trying to smooth things over, but it was still a good question. We kept our boat on Lake Ontario, and even I knew that the lake was nowhere near the ocean.
“There’s a series of canals,” Dad said. He was starting to smile again. “Wait, I’ll get the chart and show you.” He stood up. “Be right back.”
I waited until he’d left the room. “Male bonding? You and Dad are going to be the navigators, are you?”
“I just wanted to know how we’d get there,” Tim said.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re such a loser, Tim. Always kissing up to Dad.”
Mom stood up and smoothed her track pants over her thighs. “That’s enough, Rachel.”
“May I be excused?” I asked.
“Just wait. Your dad really wants to show you the charts. He’s so excited about this.”
“What about you? Are you excited? Or is it all about Dad, as usual?”
“Rachel...” Mom made a funny little gesture with her hands, lifting them up and dropping them again like it was all too much. Too heavy. She’s skinny like me but almost a foot taller. Seriously. I’m five foot nothing. Usually she looks really healthy in an athletic, outdoorsy way, but that night she looked really tired.
Tim gave me a dirty look. He hates it when anyone fights. He’d rather pretend that we really are that happy sit-com family.
I stood up to leave, but Dad came back in before I could make my escape.
“Sit down,” he said. “I want to show you this.”
Tim looked at me pleadingly. I felt like a shit for calling him a loser, so I sat back down.
“Here,” Dad said, pushing plates aside to make room on the table for the big chart book. “We sail to Oswego; then we take the mast down and enter the Erie Canals.” His index finger skipped across the chart, tracing a thin, blue, snaking line. “Here, there’s a whole series of locks we go through, right to the Hudson River. We put the mast back up here, at Castleton-on-Hudson, and...right down the river to New York Harbor.”
I’d never left Ontario, except for a couple of vacations in Florida and one trip to the Calgary Stampede when I was seven.
“And then—into the Atlantic?” Tim asked.
“You got it.” Dad glanced at Mom. “Well, actually there is an inland waterway. The icw—Intra-Coastal Waterway, it’s called.”
Mom leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “It’s a bunch of connected rivers and canals and lakes that goes all the way down to Florida. So we don’t actually have to do much sailing on the open ocean at all.”
“We want to cross over to the Bahamas by early December.” Dad had a big grin on his face. He didn’t seem to have noticed that neither Tim nor I was jumping up and down with excitement.
Tim started to pick at his fingernails. “How long would we be gone for?” he asked.
Dad cleared his throat. “About a year.”
I just sat and stared at him. Then I turned to Mom. “What about school? I can’t miss a whole year.” I couldn’t get my head around this at all. A year away from Jen and all my friends? A year stuck on a boat with my family?
“You and Tim can do your courses by correspondence,” Mom said. “We’ll arrange everything before we go.”
“My family spent a year in New Zealand when I was sixteen,” Dad says. “I didn’t want to go, but you know what? It was one of the best things my parents ever did for me.”
I stared at them both. “You can’t be serious. There is no way I’m doing this.”
Mom ignored me. “It’ll be nice for us all to have more time together,” she said.
That’s my mom—denial in action. I swear, sometimes I think she’s living on a different planet.
The thing that upset me most about the whole trip idea was the pretense that somehow they were doing this for us. For our family. As if a family is something other than the people who make it up. As if it could be good for the family to do something that half the people in the family didn’t want to do. Okay, Mom hadn’t admitted that she didn’t want to, but she’d never liked sailing much. She always got seasick. And Tim was so desperate to believe that we were a happy family that he’d have gone along with anything. But I definitely didn’t want to go.
As for Emma? Well, of course no one had even bothered to ask her what she thought. When I brought up the subject with my parents, they didn’t say anything. They just looked at each other, all uneasy and dishonest.
“What?” I asked, suddenly feeling anxious. Tim was watching me, his green eyes half-hidden by his glasses and his floppy hair.
Mom put down her coffee mug. “Honey, Emma’s not coming with us.”
I stared at them both. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“It’d be hard for her,” Mom said. “Unsettling.”
I pictured Emma’s wide blue eyes, her goofy pink- gummed smile and slightly crooked teeth. She’d been doing great lately. But I had a head full of jagged memories: Emma banging her head against the bedroom wall, Emma biting her fingers until they bled, Emma ripping up my best sketches because I wouldn’t let her use my new charcoal pencils. I pushed the memories aside.
“Did you even ask her? Did anyone even bother to ask her if she’d like to come?”
The answer was obvious in the way they exchanged glances.
“This whole thing about doing a trip for the family is a load of crap if part of the family isn’t even included.” I stood up. The sunlight was streaming in, and Mom, Dad and Tim were dark silhouettes against the kitchen window. “Count. Me. Out.”
I didn’t want to go anyway. A few weeks, maybe. A whole freaking year? Missing all of grade eleven, leaving my friends, being stuck with my parents and Tim the Nerd? No thank you. And leaving Emma for that long?
I couldn’t even believe they were considering it.
It had been less than a year since Emma moved out. I always visited her after school on Tuesdays. Tuesday was our special day.
The Tuesday after Mom and Dad told us about the sailing trip, I told Mom I didn’t want to go to the group home. I knew about the trip and Emma didn’t, and I couldn’t stand the thought of lying to her.
Mom was making coffee, still in her housecoat. She was quiet for a moment; then she put on her reasonable voice. You know when parents get that reasonable voice going that they are about to say something that isn’t really reasonable at all.
“Rach, there’s no point in telling her yet. She’ll just get upset.”
“Maybe if it’s so upsetting for her, we shouldn’t be doing it. Did you think about that, Mom? That maybe if you feel you have to lie about it, you might be doing something wrong?”
She looked away from me and brushed at some coffee grounds on the counter. “If we tell her about the trip now, she’ll be upset right up until we leave.”
“Yeah, then you’d have to deal with it.” I leaned my elbows on the table. “Much better to spring it on her at the last minute and let the staff deal with her being totally freaked out when no one visits for a year.”
“It won’t be a whole year,” Mom protested. “I’ll fly home to see her at least twice.”
“I’m sure that’ll take care of everything,” I said. “Two visits in a year. She’ll just be getting used to being abandoned, and then you’ll come back for a few days and do it all over again.”
She didn’t say anything for a minute. Her mouth was a hard thin line. Finally she put both hands flat on the counter and without even looking at me, she said, “We’re doing this for you, you know. You and Tim, but mostly you.”
I pushed my chair away from the table, its legs screeching against the gray linoleum. “Don’t give me that.”
“I’m serious, Rachel.” She hesitated. “We’re worried about you.”
“We? We? You and who else?”
“Your father and I.”
“Right.” I snorted. “Well, if you’re so concerned about me, you can do me a favor and forget the whole idea.”
She went quiet again. Her hair was all sticking up on one side, dirty blond bed head, the same color mine would be if I didn’t dye it. She kept trying to smooth it down, patting it like it was an animal curled up on her head. Finally she gave a long sigh. “You seem so angry all the time. Since Emma left...I don’t know. I can’t talk to you anymore. I thought, maybe, if we had more time together...”
I swallowed hard. Mom had no idea why I’d had such a crappy year, and I sure as shit wasn’t going to tell her. I stood up. “So hold me hostage on the boat for a year. That should help.” As I walked out the door, I turned and fired one last shot. “And don’t try to make it my fault that you’re abandoning Emma. You’ve probably wanted to do that for years.”
As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wanted to snatch them back. Mom looked like I’d slapped her. Besides, Mom would have taken care of Emma forever. Dad was the one who had pushed for her to move out.
“It’s developmentally appropriate for children to move out when they reach young adulthood,” he used to argue.
Never mind that Emma hadn’t done anything developmentally appropriate since the accident.
Mom would shake her head. “I don’t think she’s ready. I don’t want her to feel like she’s a failure if it doesn’t work out.”
“Failure is a stepping-stone to success,” Dad would say.
That’s Dad—the King of Clichés. I agreed with him though, for once. Not so much for Emma’s sake as for the rest of us. Emma couldn’t be left alone in the house, not even for five minutes. She does stuff without thinking, on impulse, and has no judgement about what’s a good idea or what’s safe. She has seizures too, even with all the meds she’s on. And when she doesn’t get her way, she gets pretty out of control. Disinhibition, the doctors call it. We just call it Emma’s temper.
One time, when I was maybe twelve or so, I was screaming at her because she’d had this mammoth fit of rage and broken something of mine—I don’t even remember what now. She broke a lot of stuff. Anyway, Dad pulled me aside and told me to get a grip. A few days later, he took me to see a social worker at the hospital. She tried to explain some stuff about head injuries to me and even showed me the ct scans of Emma’s brain. You could see this black area where bleeding had basically destroyed part of her frontal lobe.
So I got that it wasn’t her fault. But understanding that didn’t make her any easier to deal with, and as we got older, I had to look after her more and more often. When Mom and Dad made the decision about her moving out, I was sad, sort of, but I was relieved too. I know how selfish that sounds, but that’s how I felt.
I just wanted a more normal life.
Mom tried to act like she was in agreement with Dad’s plan: My parents have always been big on presenting a united front in between the fights. But when Em left, Mom kind of fell apart. She sort of stopped talking, and Dad started spending even more time at his office.
So much for my dream of a normal life.
I ended up going to see Emma that night anyway. She had a big calendar in her room, to help her keep track of what was happening every day. On every Tuesday it said RAE-RAE in big green letters. She always bragged to the staff, telling them every week that her little sister was coming to see her. It wasn’t easy to let someone like that down.
Though Mom and Dad didn’t seem to be having any trouble with it.
Emma was waiting near the front door. “Rae-Rae!” She threw her arms around me and squished her face into my shoulder.
“Hey, Em.” I grinned at her. She’d had a haircut— someone had given her bangs and cut her long hair to just above the shoulders. Mom would flip. She hated it when the staff made any decisions without consulting her. “Nice hairdo,” I told her.
She touched her hair self-consciously. “Kelly did it.”
“Looks good. So, what have you been doing? Were you working today?” Emma goes to a sheltered workshop where they make weird-looking teddy bears that get sold to raise money for the hospital.
“No, I’m sick,” she said.
She didn’t look sick. Sometimes she just doesn’t want to go, and the staff don’t push it too much.
“Come see what I made,” Emma said. She tugged on my arm, pulled me down the hall into her room and pointed at a painting pinned to her wall.
“It’s beautiful. Really great.” I looked past the orange and blue swirls to the photo collage I’d made her when she moved out: old pictures of the three of us as little kids, of Dad looking young with a mustache and blue jeans, of Mom in short skirts and sunglasses. Those pictures reminded me of what I’d figured out about Emma’s accident. It was the main reason I’d had such a crap year, but I hadn’t told anyone.
I didn’t even want to think about it.
The group home’s glossy white paint was all scuffed up from the bumps of wheelchairs through narrow door frames. Schedules and medication charts were taped to the kitchen walls, and there were child safety locks on cupboards. It looked okay from outside—just like a regular brick house—and it had only six residents, all brain-injured adults. Emma was the youngest and the only one who didn’t use a wheelchair. She could walk okay, though her muscles are tight and she kind of walks on her toes. Her left side drags a bit, but she manages.
Mom said this residence was really good and that we were lucky to get Emma placed here. Even after a year, though, Emma was always asking when she could come back home. To be honest, this place didn’t feel like a home to me either. It made me antsy.
“Let’s go to the coffee shop, hey?” I tilted my head and smiled at Em’s skinny face.
“I want French fries.”
“Sure.”
“And ketchup.”
“You bet.” We had French fries and ketchup every Tuesday.
Em clutched my arm, and we walked out together. Guilt was eating a hole in my stomach. I couldn’t imagine telling her we were all going to go off sailing without her. She had no idea how long a year was. Fifty-two Tuesdays on her calendar with no visits. Fifty-two Sundays that she wouldn’t be coming home for dinner.
I couldn’t believe we were going to do this to her.
A few days before we left, I poked my head into Tim’s room. “Done packing?”
He shook his head, looking even more worried than usual. Huge piles of books were spread out all over his floor.
“What are you doing?”
“Sorting.”