A Thousand Shades of Blue Read online

  Robin Stevenson

  A

  Thousand

  Shades

  Blueof

  Sailing in the Bahamas is a dream come true, right?

  Clear blue water, suntanning every day, cocktails on S

  the dec

  t

  k with ice cubes clinking, tropical fish, brightly ev

  colored coral reefs.

  e

  nso

  R

  n A

  achel’s friends back home in Ontario envy her the opportu-Th

  nity to work on her tan, do her schoolwork by correspondence ou

  and meet cute guys on the beach. But the reality is something quite sa

  diff erent. Trapped on a small sailboat with her nerdy brother and nd

  her warring parents, Rachel discovers something which turns her S

  world upside down and threatens to destroy the fragile ties that hold ha

  her family together.

  des of Blue

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  www.orcabook.com

  Orca Book Publishers

  A

  Thousand

  Shades

  Blueof

  A

  Thousand

  Shades

  Blueof

  Robin Stevenson

  Orca Book Publishers

  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

  PO Box 5626, Stn. B

  PO Box 468

  Victoria, BC Canada

  Custer, WA USA

  V8R 6S4

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  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.

  Acknowledgments

  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.

  One

  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 1

  Robin Stevenson

  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 al , we’ve left. We’ve sailed away. Georgetown, the smal 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 fal s 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?”

  2

  A Thousand Shades of Blue

  Dad nods. “Absolutely.”

  “Right there,” Mom says suddenly, pointing. “God, it’s real y 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 al ,” 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. Fol ow 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 fore-stay 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.

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  And yet essential. Our boat needs five feet of water to stay afloat.


  “A little more to starboard,” I yel , 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 yel owish sheet of rock on the bottom. “It’s too late to turn,” I yel .

  “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.

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  A Thousand Shades of Blue

  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 pul 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.

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  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.

  6

  Two

  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.

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  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 actual y as noticeable as I’d hoped. Stil , I was waiting for Dad to freak out.

  He didn’t even notice.

  I poured ketchup on my meatloaf and mushed it up.

  Roadkil . 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 wal s. I knew exactly what he was thinking.

  D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

  A part of me actual y 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.

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  A Thousand Shades of Blue

  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 mosqui-toes 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 al . 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. Wel , 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.”

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  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 ver
y 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 al .

  Most of the time, no one says anything at al .

  “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.

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  A Thousand Shades of Blue

  “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 al 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. Usual y she looks real y healthy in an athletic, outdoorsy way, but that night she looked real y 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.

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  “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.”