“Are we going to be okay?” Lacey asks as we hit another wave. She grips the handles by the stairs and I lean against the boat, distributing my weight for balance.
“We should be fine,” Tai says. “This is the tail end of the front. Wind isn’t too bad, there’s no rain. The waves should ease a bit but even so, if anyone is up here, I think we should start clipping on to the boat. Just in case. There’s another system moving in tomorrow and I have no idea how that’s going to go. It’s going to push us to the east, which is a shame. Might need an extra day to tack upwind and get to Suva.”
We all nod silently. It’s not the best news, but at least this is going to die down soon.
Only problem is that fucking hatch.
The entire couch is soaked.
AKA my bed.
I don’t want to bug Tai about it, not now, so I motion for Lacey to head back down the stairs and then the two of us go about trying to close it. It’s tough, and standing on the couch is like standing on a waterbed that sprung a leak, but together we manage to close the hatch.
“Some honeymoon, huh?’ Lacey says, going over to the loveseat and sitting beside my luggage, leaning against it tiredly. There’s a silly face on it now that someone drew with a marker. I wiped half of it off and then left it, figuring it’s probably Tai’s handiwork. Serves me right for packing so damn much, especially since I’ve pretty much been wearing the same clothes day in and day out.
“Well, you did want an adventure,” I tell her, leaning against the galley.
Oh shit, the soup!
I turn around and start stirring it, though half seems to have burned at the bottom.
“Ugh,” I moan. I’m not sure I can salvage this. I might have to start again.
“We never did learn the home domesticity skills, did we?” Lacey comments.
“Nope,” I admit, dumping the soup in the garbage. “Though you have to admit that I do some mean scrambled eggs. And you do some pretty fine loaves of bread.”
“I suppose that’s the extent of what mom taught us,” she says. “Though I learned how to make bread when I lived with my old roommate in Portland.”
“And I learned my scrambled eggs from YouTube.”
The secret is a dash of curry spice.
“I wonder what mom really wanted for us,” Lacey muses, bracing herself as the boat slams down another wave. It’s rare to see her this reflective and I like that fact that she’s talking to me, so I don’t want to screw it up like I usually do.
“I’m sure she just wanted us to be happy,” I say carefully. “I mean, off the bat, both mom and dad knew we had no interest in the family business.”
“None at all. You were all whales and I was all plants. Actually, at the time, it was roses.”
“I remember your rose garden behind the house,” I tell her. It was small but you could walk through it and Lacey had meticulously pruned all her roses to showroom status. I think she was maybe sixteen at the time.
Lacey is silent for a moment, apparently lost in the memory, as I get a new can of soup. Then she adjusts her glasses and looks at me.
“Are you?”
I glance at her. “Am I what?”
“Happy.”
The soup slides out of the can and into the pan with a plop.
Perfect punctuation.
“Happy?” I repeat, not sure what to do with that question. “Of course I am.”
Of course I am.
“That’s what I thought,” she says after a moment. “How could you not be?”
I want to bring up, you know, what I’ve been talking about since I got here which is my bad luck streak, but there’s no point in bringing it up. I can tell that Lacey wants to argue, wants to prove some point, and I’m just going to let her at this point. I don’t have it in me to fight.
So I just smile at her and start humming a song that’s been in my head as I stir the soup, and she eventually sighs and goes to her cabin.
“Dinner will be ready soon,” I call over my shoulder, but I don’t think she cares.
Turns out, no one was hungry anyway, including myself. All the waves and rocking makes you feel extremely nauseous when you’re down below, so I stay up top with my life jacket on, keeping out of the way. Tai and Richard are constantly running around and adjusting things, but other than that, the waves are getting smaller and things are starting to calm down.
Then night falls.
Lacey and Richard take their shift, both of them wearing lifejackets, clipped in for safety. Richard insisted on Lacey staying down below, but Lacey insisted otherwise and she’s definitely the domineering one in that relationship.