Pescador's Wake (23 page)

‘Oh, Sascha. Is that why you haven't been to visit? Were you scared of what we'd say?'

‘Yes. And the longer I left it, the harder it got.'

Margie waits a moment before asking her next question. ‘And your boyfriend, does he know the truth?'

Sascha wipes her nose with the back of her hand. ‘We broke up long before I had Scotty when I told him I still loved Sam, but by then it was all too late.' Sascha plucks a fresh tissue out of the box on the coffee table and sobs into it.

‘Then why did you break up with Sam in the first place?'

‘I don't know. I think I was afraid of how serious we were getting. He was my first real boyfriend. Mum and Dad were telling me I should meet other boys too. Sam said he wanted us to get married, and I was so confused.'

Scotty searches his mother's face and she holds him tight.

‘Do your parents know who Scotty's
real
father is?' Margie asks.

‘Yes, of course…'

‘Why on earth didn't you tell us?'

‘I thought it'd just make things harder for you. I thought it'd be the last thing you needed to hear and I wasn't sure you'd accept me or Scotty into your lives after everything you'd been through. And after everything I put Sam through in his last few weeks. Mum said to just leave it be.'

‘Well she was wrong! How could we not want to know that Sam had a little boy? That we have a grandson?' Margie's sadness fuses with anger.

‘I'm so sorry…'

Margie shakes her head. ‘The main thing is that you've told us now…' For a second time, she buries her nose into Scotty's curls and their comforting scent. ‘My grandson,' she says quietly, ‘I can't believe it. Neither will Dave. We've also been grieving for the grandchildren we thought we'd never have…'

‘Do you think he'll be okay about it?'

‘It'll take a while to sink in, but he'll be thrilled.' Margie thinks of Dave and wonders if what she has just said is true. If he'll be ready yet to open his heart again. Whether she herself is ready. With love comes the risk of loss. She knows it only too well. But closing her heart is no way to live. Given the choice to love again or not, she will always choose to love.

Most seabirds have salt glands, allowing them to drink seawater if necessary. How marvellous is nature, how clever to devise such a system. As for me, I think I will be eternally thirsty, never sated.

I have it all with Virginia and my beautiful daughters, but it is still not enough. Not enough when I know how perfect love can be. I have had to choose, and in choosing I have closed down a part of my heart. Even here, at sea, I have had to decide between right and wrong, and I fear I have made the wrong choice.

Carlos Sánchez is roused from sleep by the brutish young South African, one of the three armed South Africans assigned to the
Pescador
for the two-week journey back to Fremantle.

‘There's an email from your wife, with a picture of your baby. Doesn't look too flash,' the South African says provocatively, looking for a reaction from the inert fishing master who has barely spoken since the
Pescador
was apprehended.

Carlos feels his heart race. He spoke to Julia just yesterday and their baby was okay. A week old, she said. ‘You opened my email?'

‘Of course. What did you expect?'

‘
¡Pendejo!
' Carlos curses, throwing back his sleeping bag and filling the small cabin with the smell of stale sweat and unwashed skin.

‘There's not much to see anyway. It'd fit in my boot.' The South African holds up his foot.

‘
¡Vete al infierno!
' Carlos rises stiffly from his bunk, and makes his way to the computer at the corner of the mess. Before the boarding, all the crew had been able to send and receive emails from a communal address, but an unspoken rule dictated that no one would stoop so low as to read the personal messages of their crewmates.

Carlos opens the email, the South African still at his side like a vulture clawing at its injured prey. He reads the short message from Julia and opens the attachment, his index finger shaking as it hovers over the mouse. The picture emerges line by line from the top of the screen. There is a faint spray of very short dark hair, not the mop that María was born with, but then she was born full term. He makes out a rounded forehead, eyes squeezed shut against the world, and a nose largely covered with sticky plaster, which appears to be holding in place a small plastic tube. Scrolling down he sees his son's delicate mouth, the tiny red lips parted as if yawning or gasping for air. He hopes it's the former.

When the whole picture has downloaded, Carlos sits back in the plastic seat and stares at the screen. The baby's head is partly turned to the left, revealing a crumpled right ear that is folded over, as if glued down, at its outer rim. Carlos feels an immense rush of love and a need to protect this tiny creature. A pen has been placed beside the baby for scale. It is half his son's length, he realises with a start. The baby
would
fit in a man's boot. What chance does his son have?

He re-reads the first part of Julia's message: ‘Little Eduardo still weighs less than one kilogram, and is just thirty
centimetres long.' It hadn't meant much until he had seen the comparison of his baby with the pen.

‘Looks like a skinned rabbit, doesn't it?' the young South African taunts, just as his superior arrives at the door.

‘Give the man some peace!' the older man orders.

‘I was just making sure—'

‘Making sure of what? That this man isn't allowed an ounce of human dignity? That he knows, without a doubt, that you're a pathetic excuse for a man? What's he going to do, dispose of his illegal catch via email? In any case, he's innocent until proven guilty.'

‘Shall I go then?'

‘Your powers of perception astonish me. Yes, go. As far away from me as this boat will allow.'

The young South African leaves the room like a scolded child.

‘I apologise,' the senior naval officer says, seeing the picture on the screen. ‘Some of these lads still have a fair bit of growing up to do.' He shakes his head. ‘Your son will pull through. They work miracles these days, the doctors.'

‘I hope so,' Carlos says in stilted English.

‘There's nothing you can do from here. There'd be nothing you could do even if you were there.'

‘I could touch him. I could hold my wife.'

‘Yes. Of course. Well, let's hope this illegal-fishing matter can be resolved swiftly in the Australian courts.'

‘
Gracias
.' Carlos prints out a copy of the picture and tries to imagine the tiny form, his son, growing into a sturdy man who will accompany him on fishing trips. It seems impossible.

No longer permitted to remain in the wheelhouse, and with no desire to be there anyway, Carlos returns in silence to the crew's quarters.

He closes his eyes, but doesn't sleep. Obsessive, anxious thoughts engulf him. How can Julia deal with all of this on her own? How can she have anything left emotionally for María?
‘¡Me jodí!
' Carlos swears out loud at himself, taking the blame for the entire mess—the disastrous expedition, Eduardo's death and his baby's premature birth, brought on, he fears, by the stress this chase has caused his wife. If he was at home now, he would hold his wife and daughter and only let go to take María outside to play in the back garden, where he could pretend, for just a moment, that life was still good. He wonders if it will ever feel good again. He imagines Julia smoothing his brow, kissing his eyelids closed. He imagines stroking her long hair and consoling her in return. At least his mother-in-law is there now, he thinks. Julia will be able to drop her guard from time to time. Keeping a lid on this level of emotion would poison his wife.

Carlos imagines their baby in the humidicrib, struggling for oxygen. He pictures his miniature face, with its squinted eyes, and slightly misshapen ear, no doubt bent from lying too long on one side. The ear's crêpe-like skin appeared so
thin in the picture that it was transparent. He could almost see the tiny veins transporting their cargo of bright red blood – his own blood.

Carlos finds himself talking with God, uttering a prayer for the first time since he was a boy. At the end, he asks what he has done wrong to deserve this ultimate of punishments – the potential death of his child. Is he a bad person? Why is Julia also being forced to suffer? But there is no answer.

He feels betrayed. Betrayed by God and angry at life for what it is asking of him. If his son dies, he doesn't know if he has what it takes to survive. What does it take? Would he even want to go on living? For the sake of María and Julia, the answer must be yes, but he suspects such sadness would turn him into a different man.

He looks out through a porthole and prays to the sea instead. He asks it to lull him to sleep, to numb his mind and ease his pain. He contemplates the photograph—taped now to the hull wall beside the porthole—of Julia at Eduardo's father's boatshed. He takes it from the wall, again studying the handwriting on the back. It's odd, he thinks, that she didn't mention going to the boatshed, but then what was there to tell? He wishes he had alcohol with him to deaden the answerless ache in his soul.

He dreams he is again visited by Eduardo. This time the first mate's face is gnarled and worn away by the ocean. His once-handsome friend teases him with his newfound
ghoulishness. Eduardo opens his mouth and a small fish swims out in a trail of black filth that stains the water like squid ink. Eduardo reaches out his hand, but it's not for him. It is for his tiny child.

‘No!' Carlos wakes with a start, shocked by the loudness of his own voice. He doesn't understand the dream. He doesn't understand reality. The space between the two seems infinitesimally small.

Manuel brings him food, but he rejects it, taking only a sip of warm, over-sweetened tea. The effect is nauseating. He has dealt with much in his life at sea: enormous waves, extreme weather, ice and injury. He pleads to be dealt another challenge like that. Something he can recognise and fight. Instead fate is toying with the most vulnerable member of his family, and tying his own hands at the same time.

Hope, Julia wrote in her email to him, is a powerful force. At the moment, Carlos realises, it is all he has. He dares to dream again that one day he will take his son fishing. He would give his right arm to have the chance to teach the boy how to read the clouds, the sea, and the birds that speak of fish. How to tie ropes and fix salt-encrusted engines; to work with men on the most levelling platform on Earth. He rolls onto his side, re-attaches the photograph of Julia to the hull wall that separates him narrowly from the ocean, and, with his fingers gently touching the image of his wife's face, lets the tears come.

In another world we are together. I can touch your hair and enfold myself in its scent. There are no boundaries keeping us apart. It is as it was supposed to be.

Julia is waiting outside the Hospital Maciel in the old part of the city for a bus to the open-air markets at Plaza Cagancha. It's a warm day in the Ciudad Vieja and the sunlight touches her bare arms with the familiarity and grace of an old forgotten friend.

Two weeks and two days have passed since her baby was born and the doctors have told her they would stake their reputations on him coming home within a couple of months. The good news has seen her begin to emerge, little by little, from her cocoon—her self-spun protection. After so many days crouched beside the humidicrib—wet with anxious perspiration and tears under the cold, artificial lights of the hospital—she is finally testing her wings again in the outside world, wondering if they will hold her. She stands tall and surveys her surrounds from her new, higher vantage point, as if she is, indeed, a newly emerged winged insect—a moth or perhaps even a butterfly. The resilient antique beauty of the old Spanish buildings, which have endured so much, resonates with her. She notices, too, old men and women, who would have lived through Uruguay's political uprisings, walking hand in hand with small children, perhaps their
grandchildren, leading them forward towards brighter futures.

With her baby doing better, Julia's thoughts are now on his namesake. Until today, she hadn't had the energy for both. She could only deal with one trauma at a time. When Carlos told her, over a week ago, that Eduardo had died at sea, she had felt unusually calm, but completely empty. Part of her had died too, she realises now. Carlos had cried when he passed on the soul-shattering news, something she had known him to do only twice before in their marriage: once, five years ago, when his father died, and then when he phoned from sea earlier this month, after hearing that their son had been born prematurely. Her tears—the proper ones—she knew would come later.

She reads her watch. It's still early. Maybe today is the day.

She walks a few paces to a phone box and dials her home number. Her mother answers. ‘Julia, is there a problem? Is our little boy all right?'

‘
Mamá,
stop asking me that. Everything is fine. Our little boy is going to make it.'

Julia hears her mother whisper a small prayer.

‘I'm taking a bus to La Paloma. I need to get away for the day.'

‘Why there?' her mother asks.

‘Because I have to.' Part of Julia longs to tell her mother more. To admit to her that she needs to confront her grief
over Eduardo's death head on. To admit having loved him. To let her know that she can't go forward without meeting his ghost and saying goodbye. ‘I'll be home later tonight. Don't wait up. And if there's no bus tonight, I'll see you tomorrow.' Julia ends the phone call before her mother can say anything else, and peruses the bus timetable posted on the wall of the phone box. There's a bus heading north along the Atlantic coast in ten minutes. Her shopping trip can wait.

The beaches bleach white as the bus propels her back through time. The water becomes clearer and cleaner, and there is the dusty smell of coastal vegetation through the open bus window. Julia doesn't even feel herself fall asleep.

His hand slides up the inside of her arm, and she can taste salt on his lips. Her fingers are in his hair, drawing him closer as he bites at her neck. He takes her hands in his, pinning them above her head as he lifts and consumes her. Her ring finger is in his mouth, her wedding band touching Eduardo's lips.

When she opens her eyes, it is the woman on the bus seat beside her who is touching her hand, rousing her from sleep.

‘La Paloma,' the woman says. ‘Didn't I hear you tell the driver you were getting off here?'

Julia checks her watch. ‘
Gracias
,' she whispers as the familiar headland comes into view. There's a rush of blood
through her veins, but it is from dread this time, not excitement. Those teenage flutters have finally been extinguished. Even the more recent memory of an afternoon spent here with Eduardo is now infused with sorrow, and the dream, just moments ago, is already a relic from another time – a parallel universe. She steps out heavily onto the uneven pavement and makes the short walk across town to the northern beach. The surf is breaking unforgivingly against the sand, paring back layers, stripping back the years.

Eduardo is calling her.

She can see his father's boatshed, nestled in the bushes. The dinghy is now on a trailer outside, the varnish beginning to peel from the gunnels. The last time she was here, Eduardo had just finished restoring it. How quickly it has begun to deteriorate. The window at the back of the shed is shut, probably forever. She inhales the salty air released by exploding waves, and closes her eyes as the wind pushes her along the sand, its soft warmth filtering through her leather sandals like someone's loving caress.

Finally she begins to let go of her emotions. Her head spins and she steadies herself against the boatshed's front door. The salt-white wood is chalky against her hand and reminds her of blackboards from her teaching days, a lifetime ago. For all of Eduardo's father's best efforts, the building is crumbling into the sand. Salt has wedged itself firmly into the grains of wood, creating time capsules of winds and storms past. Even
now, as she braces herself to enter, sharp crystals tear at the wood, cutting and splitting it as the timber expands and contracts with the warmth of sunlight and the chill of shade.

Julia pushes against the unlocked door, and the boatshed welcomes her home with the smell of nets and bait boxes, a smell she wouldn't have been able to describe had she been asked before now. In an instant she remembers it all. She sees herself walking this same path in March, her hair hanging loose, her legs and arms bare except for a hint of sandalwood perfume and the caress of her red-flowered dress. She longs for Eduardo, her first love; she longs to be safe again in his arms. She leans back against the heavy door, closing it behind her, and begins to weep deeply, loudly. ‘Eduardo!' she cries out, airing her grief.

‘Who's there?' a female voice ventures from the back of the shed. ‘Who is it?' The woman is standing now, and, with a start, Julia recognises Eduardo's widow, Virginia.

‘
Hola
.' Julia fails to hide the surprise in her voice. She feels naked, caught out. ‘It's Julia, Virginia. I'm so sorry. I thought I was alone. Carlos told me about Eduardo. I'm sorry I haven't been up to see you yet. I was on my way.
Lo siento
,' she apologises again.

Eduardo's widow flicks on a light and Julia observes that she too has been crying. Virginia is pale and tired, and obviously confused. Julia rushes to embrace her, but it's an awkward, one-sided gesture. The two women have managed
a measure of friendship over the years, but, for reasons neither of them has ever articulated, it has always felt strained. No more so than now.

‘But why are you here?' Virginia's voice shakes. She looks Julia up and down, as though seeing her for the first time.

‘I needed to gather myself first,' Julia lies. ‘I didn't want your girls seeing me like this and I didn't know where else to go.'

Virginia frowns, unconvinced. ‘When is the
Pescador
due back?'

Julia wipes her dripping nose on the back of her hand. ‘They're on their way to Australia.'

‘
Si,
Carlos told me. And you still don't know how long they'll be kept there?'

Julia shakes her head. ‘We'll all miss Eduardo terribly.' Caught in the frame of Virginia's suspicious stare, it is all she can do to stand still and not flee. ‘Carlos didn't tell me how it happened. How he died. Do you know?'

‘Conditions were bad. He was clearing ice off the rails,' Virginia says, her face wincing as if she is feeling the bite of a Southern Ocean gale herself. ‘The boat pitched and he slipped and went over. His harness failed somehow, or…Carlos said he might have released himself, believing that the boat would come back to rescue him.' Virginia uses a white linen handkerchief to absorb the tears from her eyes. ‘The seas were big and he was being beaten against the hull.' She covers her
face with her hand. ‘I came here to have a few moments to myself. Away from the girls. We've all been crying together, of course, but I've been trying to stay strong for them. It's terrible. I haven't slept.' She looks at Julia and her expression softens marginally. ‘I heard about your son being born early. I'm also sorry
I
haven't been in touch. Carlos had just told me about Eduardo and I was still in such a state of shock. Is he doing okay, your little boy?'

‘
Si.
He'll be in hospital for a while yet, but he's doing much better.
Gracias
.'

‘Strange that he was born the same day that Eduardo died.'

It feels to Julia that time has stopped. ‘My God,' she whispers shakily. She falls silent, taking it all in. ‘I didn't know.' She searches for something else to say. ‘We were going to ask Eduardo to be his godfather. We've named our son after him.'

‘You've called your baby Eduardo?'

‘
Si
,' Julia answers, fishing for acceptance. It occurs to her that perhaps this fact alone might be enough justification for why she was here, calling out the name of Virginia's husband. She takes a step closer and rests her hand on Virginia's forearm. ‘And I know what you're saying about staying strong. About keeping your emotions bottled up. I've been the same way in front of María.' Julia's eyes drop to the place on the floor where she made love with Eduardo earlier this year. She steps away again, sickened by her own dishonesty. ‘I'm sorry to have intruded.
Lo siento
.' It occurs to her for the first time
that this place was probably also sacred to Virginia. How could she have assumed she was the only person to have been here with Eduardo? His wife probably made love with him among the nets countless times. ‘I'll leave you now. This is your place. And Eduardo's father's.'

‘
Si,
he was here earlier today. I saw his car.'

‘Of course. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help,' Julia says as she walks, backwards, to the door.

‘You don't want to come up to the house? It's a long way to come just for the afternoon?'

‘No, I've seen you now, so I should get back.
Mamá
is minding María.
Hasta luego
.' Julia sees Virginia sitting back down, her normally trusting face torn apart by doubt as well as grief. She wants to sprint but forces herself to walk back along the beach—this time the wind is in her face—until she is out of sight of the boatshed. As she leaves the beach, the sand drains from her sandals and she knows that she will not return here. She looks at her watch and breaks into a run. If she goes straight to the bus station now, she should be home again by nightfall.