Seize the Storm Read online

  Susannah groaned aloud. She wasn’t given to silent exasperation. When she was unhappy, people knew it.

  She shouldn’t have mentioned the subject. She should have kept her mouth shut. Who cared about extramarital affairs these days? She called her parents by their first names. They were a modern family.

  “You knew about it?”

  “He told me,” Claudette replied.

  Claudette had a way of standing that looked as though she had an attitude of prideful dismissiveness toward everything around her, one foot forward, the other at an angle, one hand on her hip.

  The truth was that she had injured her right knee falling from a horse as a teenager. The knee was chronically weak, and she stood and walked in a manner calculated to disguise this flaw.

  So why the long sulk? wondered Susannah.

  “Claudette,” she said, “ I have trouble believing that Dad told you everything.”

  “He told me he saw her, and he told me it was innocent.” Claudette tossed the cigarette away, and it flew wide, over the side of the yacht into the sea. This bothered Susannah, her mother using the Pacific as an ashtray.

  “It didn’t look innocent,” said Susannah.

  Her mother was proud—arrogant, even, with good reason. She was smart and good-looking. Susannah figured her mother deserved better than a cheating husband.

  “Where were they?” came the question again. They had been through all this.

  “In Oakland, at Jack London Square,” Susannah said, “near the ferry station.”

  “When?” This time more sharply. Her mother might have hidden deficiencies, Susannah knew, but she had hidden powers, too. She got what she wanted.

  “A month ago,” said Susannah. “Maybe five weeks.”

  “Just like he told me,” said her mother, perhaps betraying just a small amount of relief.

  Susannah gave a shrug.

  “He told me Michelle was going to work for the FBI. It was a farewell lunch.”

  Susannah waved her hand OK. She wanted to drop the subject. Maybe it was a relief to figure out now that her dad had not been cheating.

  Claudette thought for a while. “Are you sure it was Michelle?”

  What an odd question, thought Susannah. If she already knew, why was she asking? Another hidden weakness. But she felt a little compassion for Claudette. After all, they were talking about marital dynamite. “No one looks like her, with that mustard-yellow hair, or wears those—”

  She made a gesture across her upper thigh.

  No one else sports those unstylish but never completely out-of-date short skirts, she meant. Except her father’s old legal secretary, his former and now maybe not-so-former girlfriend. Susannah had told Martin about the sighting, and he had suggested not mentioning it, at least not until the voyage was over and they were safely berthed in Honolulu.

  But her mother had been sharing the predawn watch with her daughter, and the warm air was so sweet that her mother had started bragging about what great luck she had enjoyed all her life. This had to be a lie, or at least an exaggeration. The last year had been one slump after another, with the family stockbroker finally quitting and leaving for the Bahamas. And for some reason Susannah had felt like pricking that air of self-congratulation, cutting her mother down.

  Claudette lit a fresh cigarette. Someone else was awake now. He was moving around below, the wooden deck communicating the movement of a human body over the vibration of the engines. Someone big, Martin probably, tiptoeing forward to the galley, where Leonard, her father, was probably already up, too, preparing the ingredients for his mysteriously delicious hot cocoa.

  “This is a bad time,” said Claudette, “to even think about divorcing your father.”

  Susannah put her hands over her eyes. No, no, no, she wanted to protest. This was not what she was suggesting.

  Claudette could survive a divorce emotionally intact. She was good-looking in an athletic, silver-tipped way—tall, size sixteen, and with the posture and shape to go with it, aside from her old injury. Dad, however, would be wrecked by a breakup. He was an affable man who couldn’t sleep without pills, a man who loved life but suffered emotional downturns in broad sweeps of feeling.

  When his own father died he had sat in a darkened room for a week and lost ten pounds. When Claudette’s mom died, Claudette wore a black scarf and bought an iPhone. Both of Susannah’s parents were genuine and loving, but her dad was an animated bear, and her mom was an ocelot.

  “Our stock portfolio is dust,” said Mom now, “and our money market is down to pennies.” She spoke as though to herself, closing one eye against the smoke, keeping the cigarette in her mouth, looking tough and ready for anything. The cigarette bobbed up and down when she added, “Divorce would be a financial H-bomb for both of us.”

  “What are we going to do about Axel?” asked Susannah, wanting to seek some common cause with her mother.

  “Anything you like,” said Claudette.

  Axel had been coming on to Susannah, not overtly, but with a quiet, possessive air that bothered her. It was hard to avoid someone on a yacht in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

  Axel was the only paid crew member, an eighteen-year-old with a lot of sea experience and a high opinion of his powers. Susannah was a year younger than Axel, with a lot less know-how, and she had to admit that Axel had sex appeal. He didn’t talk much to her, and she did not mind. Axel liked talking to men, showing off. He just looked at her and smiled, sticking his chin out.

  “I’ll tell him to leave you alone, if you want,” said Claudette.

  “I’d feel embarrassed.”

  Claudette conceded this possibility with a contemplative smile.

  Susannah liked this about her mother. She had a way of sighing that made everyone around her feel like failures, but she got the point of things quickly. Claudette had been a manager for Macy’s, before the business collapse cost her the job, and she had always been hurrying to a meeting with the Talbots agent or the Cole Haan rep. Claudette knew how to deal with people.

  “We’ve all gone salmon fishing with Axel a few times,” Claudette said. She got the gold Dunhill lighter out of her pants pocket, flicked it, and lit yet another cigarette, the burst of Marlboro menthol smoke vanishing into the air. But Susannah caught the scent of it, raw perfume, toxic but almost desirable, even to someone who had never smoked.

  Claudette drew on her cigarette and gave a sideways toss of her head, an unspoken Never mind Axel.

  “Have you been watching that airplane?” Claudette was asking now.

  “Heading east, and then heading north,” said Susannah. “For the last ten, fifteen minutes.”

  Claudette had the big Pentax binoculars up to her eyes, focusing. She kept one hand on the helm and manipulated the binoculars easily with the other.

  She said, “Now I can’t see it—like it vanished.”

  MARTIN CLIMBED OUT ON DECK. Susannah wondered why guys like Martin always looked great in the morning, fresh out of bed.

  He said her name, and she said his in return, casual and cheerful like it was no big deal, but for her, seeing him after an absence was always a forceful moment. Martin had a way of changing things, shifting the mood, making it better. If you could fall in love with your first cousin, that’s what she was doing.

  Martin had thick auburn hair and a hale, easygoing manner that could be welcoming or thoughtful, depending on his mood. This morning he wore army-green shorts and a Scripps Oceanography T-shirt, his feet thrust into a pair of Top-Siders. He had studied tide pools and sea currents at Scripps last summer, had taken scuba lessons, too, and had come back talking about plankton and carbon dioxide levels.

  He was in love with everything about the ocean, and Susannah envied him his joy. Getting Martin’s mind off a recent tragic incident he had witnessed was one of the main reasons for the voyage, aside from giving Leonard one more chance to skipper the yacht he and his wife could no longer afford.

  It wasn’t easy to clim
b up from belowdecks carrying hot drinks, the deck canting and shifting every moment—even under engine power she was a frisky vessel. It was like Martin to show up with something people wanted, at just the right moment. Now he carried two blue mugs of Leonard’s cocoa. There was the smell of frying fish in the air from the galley.

  “Thank you, Martin,” Claudette said, and you could hear in her voice how glad she was to be talking to someone who was not a problem, and not a messenger of trouble. Just a pleasant, agreeable person, someone Mom was glad to have in the family.

  “Martin, I collected a specimen for you,” Susannah said.

  She said this as though she was offhand, but the truth was she was excited.

  “Another bird picture?” he inquired eagerly.

  She had gotten pretty good at snapping pictures of the albatross that had winged along in their wake until this morning.

  “You were telling me you’d never seen one before.”

  “One what?” asked Martin, enjoying this, wanting to make a game of it.

  “Does the word exocoetidae mean anything to you?” she asked.

  “Really!” he exclaimed.

  She liked to spring scientific words on Martin, to confound him, even if she had to more or less make them up. She referred to Leonard’s chronic back trouble mock seriously as “vertebral vertebratis,” and when a movie made her teary she called it “cinematic lachrymosis.”

  “Take a look in the collecting bucket.”

  She had hoped to see him pleased, and she was not disappointed.

  Even though they were both seventeen and shared a quality of family good looks and intelligence, she felt very much more likely to succeed than Martin. Succeed—but not find happiness. She saw herself running a veterinary clinic in Mill Valley or Orinda in a few years, the sort of vet who cured feline leukemia before lunch and then drove out to a horse ranch to see how that new thoroughbred foal was coming along.

  She expected Martin to be caught up in some sort of marine discipline, studying the life cycle of the sea cucumber. But he would be loved and admired by his colleagues and have many friends. Susannah knew she was the sort of reasonably good-looking person who would have trouble getting dates, except with guys like Axel.

  She wanted to change all that.

  “There was a school of them,” said Susannah. “Escaping a hungry tuna, I suppose. This one hopped up on deck.”

  “A black-winged flying fish,” said Martin.

  “A lot of people,” said Susannah, “are disappointed how small they are.”

  “He’s enormous,” said Martin.

  He gave her his smile and she felt it all the way through.

  She made up songs. Nobody knew this about her. She talked without hesitation and was free with her tartest opinions. But her songwriting was strictly private, music in her own head. This was what she would like to put into a song right then: the sunlight on the water, the way Martin gave his silent laugh.

  The fish was aware of Martin’s shadow and splashed, not frightened so much as showing off, discouraging a prospective predator from assuming he would make an easy breakfast.

  He gave the fish an appreciative moment, admiring the animal as it scouted around and around in the interior of the plastic bucket. Then Martin picked up the container and tossed the fish into the ocean.

  He was rewarded by the sight of the fish leaping and skittering across the waves, looking like a dragonfly granted superpowers, thought Susannah, or a sparrow that had adapted to a watery existence.

  She sipped her cocoa and thought that instant into a song, too, privately, the tune in her head. I’m free again, but I’m yours.

  I’m yours forever.

  You could use forever in a song, she knew, a word too sentimental to break into everyday speech.

  The cocoa was delicious, served up in the appealing, heavy-duty mugs. The mugs were part of the set that Leonard had ordered especially designed by a studio in Copenhagen, back when he had money to burn. They were light blue in color, and on the side of each mug was a picture of the yacht that they were sailing on, Athena’s Secret, with her sails set, the artwork cobalt blue, with dark blue waves parting around the prow.

  “I’m afraid a storm’s coming, Martin,” Susannah said.

  Martin looked upward at the blue sky. Then he gave her a glance of friendly skepticism.

  “Believe me,” said Susannah.

  Martin headed back below again. He returned at once, with his Sony notebook computer, and found a place under the flat canvas awning that shaded the helm and where the flip-up screen didn’t have to compete with the glare off the sea. In addition to the classic spoked wheel, the helm was equipped with padded benches, running forward and aft, and side tables for beverages and snacks.

  The yacht had shipboard Wi-Fi through a small gray dish on the foremast, and they got communication by digital telephone through the same technology. If the dish got knocked down or the generator blew, they’d have trouble, but for now the entire world was just a power button away.

  Leonard joined them right then, smelling of aftershave and beaming at life in general, a forceful, genial man. He was dressed in his customary fair-weather outfit—a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, seersucker pants, and a pair of well-worn Dubarry deck shoes. His short hair was dark, just flecked with gray, and he had profound dark eyebrows. His face and arms gleamed with sunblock lotion. His dermatologist had burned off a basal cell carcinoma from his forearm the winter before.

  In years gone by, Leonard Burgess had been on the Coastal Commission appointed by the governor, honored for his business success and campaign contributions. Susannah knew that those days were over.

  “Kippers!” he exclaimed. “I’ve fried us all a batch of delicious smoked herring.”

  Her father was a generous man, and he liked people to be happy. But sometimes his choice of menus left something to be desired. Martin and Susannah gave each other a glance of mock horror. Kippers, Martin echoed in silent dismay.

  “Susannah’s right,” said Martin.

  “About what?” asked Leonard.

  Martin turned his computer so they could all look at the lurid squiggles of the isobars across a map of the Pacific, the scarlet outline of tempest.

  “That,” said Leonard, “looks like fun.”

  MARTIN WAS HAPPY.

  He loved stepping out on deck and seeing how much bigger the sky always was—every time—than you could imagine it in your mind.

  He liked talking with Susannah, and he liked the way she sipped her cocoa, daintily, finding it too hot and then not too hot—just right.

  But despite the cocoa and the breathtaking disclosure of the flying fish, things were not as they should be.

  Claudette went below shortly, taking her mug of hot cocoa. You could hear her cabin door, feel it shut hard under your feet. She was both tough and stylish, and wore sunny pastels, oversize shirts with sleeves she rolled up, summery pants that fit her perfectly. When Claudette showed up, people acted and thought a little bit smarter, and when she left everyone slouched.

  Maybe the smell of frying kippers that wafted out from belowdecks was not the best scent in the world just then.

  Leonard gave his daughter a questioning glance.

  “She OK?”

  Susannah offered up a shrug of incomprehension that satisfied Dad. Martin, though, could see that Susannah was going out of her way to avoid admitting that Claudette was not OK.

  Susannah was thin and pretty, with hair that looked sable in morning light, butterscotch in the afternoon. She kept her hair in low-maintenance tails—pigtails, ponytails, multiple extensions that stuck out where they would. His cousin was fond of clothes with single bold stripes up and down the sleeve and along the pant leg. Now she was wearing a blouse that made her look like a crossing guard, a yellow stripe across her body.

  “We’ll all feel better,” Uncle Leonard was saying, “when we get nutrified.”

  When they ate, he meant.

  Leon
ard coined words like this, his version of being funny. Taking the helm was making sure that the yacht was fully helm-itized, and polishing the brass fittings throughout the vessel he called brass-imization.

  Martin had to concede that some mature person might find Leonard just a little tedious, but to a young nephew he was a joy. Leonard liked himself, and because he thought most people resembled him in some way, he liked most people, too.

  “Hey, it’s our first mate,” said Leonard as Axel made his appearance on deck.

  Axel Owen used a towel to rub the top of his close-cropped head. Axel wasn’t the sort of guy who bothered with good morning or even hi, but he gave a nod to Martin.

  Axel was wearing a pair of Diesel denims and a blue Tommy Bahamas half-zip sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and left artfully ragged. He radiated a quality of masculine self-assurance so keen that even Uncle Leonard wanted to impress him.

  Axel said, “Morning, Skipper.”

  Martin knew a lot of men like Axel, and you could read them like the ingredients on the back of a bottle. But Axel knew boats, and he was physically tough. Martin liked Axel well enough, but if he had to fight Axel, he would find something to hit him with.

  Leonard was the owner and the captain, but he wasn’t really a hands-on guy. That fell to Axel and to Martin, because Leonard, for all his enthusiasm and experience, had a bad back, injured moving a pot of sago palms around his patio ten years earlier—although he liked to say he hurt it playing free safety for Cal football. Leonard had actually played practice-squad football for Cal—Martin had looked him up on the University of California Golden Bear Web site.

  “It was a quiet night,” said Susannah, but she made no move to go below, drinking her cocoa and watching Axel take the helm and up the throttle to fifteen knots. Susannah hated to so much as glance in Axel’s direction, but sometimes she couldn’t help it.

  “Any luck?” asked Leonard.

  By any luck he meant: had they found anything valuable?

  “There was an airplane,” added Susannah. “I think it was looking for something.”

  “Did you check the emergency channel?” asked Axel.