By Janice Lynch Schuster

Your father-in-law is eighty-five and owns a beautiful racing sailboat that is one of your favorite places. When you and Steven started dating and you could arrange care for the children, you’d spend a weekend on the boat, sailing from St. Michaels via the Miles River, sometimes out to the Bay or across it. Once in a while, you’d bring the kids, but sailing bored them, and with them aboard you were a wreck of counting heads.

Steven taught you to manage the tiller, to pull or let out lines, to duck when the boom came around. But he was such an accomplished sailor that you really didn’t need to know anything. He’d grown up on the Bay and The Swagman, and to him there was nothing magical anymore about being on the water. To him, it had always been work on weekends with his father, polishing the bright wood, tinkering with the engine, and completing the hundred chores a wooden boat entailed.

But to you, the boat, moving on the currents or at anchor, offered a freedom and a luxury you had never known. You’d do little more than to make sandwiches and pour wine. At night Steven would drop the anchor in a cove and heat soup on the boat’s stove. You’d eat cheese and crackers and marvel at the multitude of stars. You always slept in the fore cabin, tucked into the boat as if in a womb. When you were dating you could make love with abandon, and the rocking of Steven’s body and the boat filled you with such pleasure that you slept past dawn.

By day Steven scrambled from bow to stern while you sat idle and listened for his commands. But he was a solitary man, happy to do things on his own, with help from no one. He didn’t need you, but he didn’t mind you. You kept applying sunblock to both of you, but otherwise there was just the quiet of the boat moving along. Every so often you’d hand him a beer, and he’d smile. In those early days you thought he looked like a movie star, with the cleft in his chin and his chiseled features. He exerted a gravitational pull on you, and you were content to be where he was.

Even on the standstill of midsummer days when you pleaded with Steven to take you out and he’d warn you there’d be no wind, you were glad to be on the water. The blinding glare of the sun on the flat Bay reflected what Steven had said: no wind. Powerboats surged past, engines roaring and laughter in their wake. You’d strip down to your bathing suit and, if the jellyfish hadn’t come up yet, jump into the water to cool off. Steven would throw you a life ring and you’d float around. “My fish, my little fish,” he’d call to you. “You’re burning.” He’d toss a ladder over the side of the boat, and you’d climb back in.

On those motionless days you could lure him to the motion of your body—your breasts, your mouth, the way your two bodies worked so well as one. The world was at a standstill, but you were not. And there was the relief of not having to lock the bedroom door, to listen for the children, to bite your lip to stay silent. There was the relief of simply being yourselves and, for a few hours at least, not being parents of a small horde of children.

But the years floated on, and you’d reached a point where you could seldom go to The Swagman for a weekend. The children were older and needed rides to their sporting events and friends’ houses, and then you’d had the surprise baby at forty, and you could hardly devote time to anything but a newborn.

On rare occasions the whole family would visit your in-laws, and your father-in-law, Opa, would take the big kids on his speed boat, a little runabout that he let them drive up and down the Miles River. You’d swim in the pool and try to make conversation with your mother-in-law, a high-strung woman who was Steven’s stepmother, and whose expectations for children were wildly out of line with what children were. You and Steven had begun to argue, mostly about the children, and could often not tolerate being in each other’s presence for more than the time it took to eat dinner. Thoughts of going out on the Bay were long gone.

Then one afternoon Steven mentions that Opa is offering the boat for the weekend, do you want to go? By now the baby is five, the big kids can all drive, and you arrange for a long weekend on the water. You pack lightly but make sure to take a bathing suit. The forecast is for temperatures in the nineties, and with the humidity, you know it will be a sauna. There will, of course, be little wind.

When you and Steven motor into a cove in the early evening, you wrestle yourself into your bathing suit and jump into the Rhode River. The water feels cool and, as a swimmer, you feel at home. In the years since the baby’s birth, you’ve gained a lot of weight and lost a fair amount of muscle mass, but you can still manage a lazy freestyle around and around the boat. Eventually, you tire, and swim to the stern, shouting for Steven that the ladder is gone.

“What?” he says. “Give me a minute. Opa must have pulled it up. Are you okay?”

“I’m all right for now,” you say, and you do a few more laps around the boat.

“The ladders aren’t here,” Steven says as he comes out of the cabin and looks down to you. The Swagman is thirty-six feet long, and the deck is a good six feet above the waterline.

“I’ll just pull myself up by those ropes” you say, pointing to the lifelines around the deck.

“You can give it a try,” Steven says. “I found this little rope ladder.”

He tosses it over, but every time you grab it, it flips under and slams your toes into the side of The Swagman. Your arms do not have the strength to pull your body out of the water. The sun is setting, and the water glows pink and orange. You are not panicking, but you are getting cold and beginning to wonder how, exactly, you are going to get back on the boat.

Steven leans down and holds out his hands, but you cannot gain purchase on the side, and he cannot lift you four feet straight out of the water. You try a few times, your body banging hard against the boat.

“There must be something,” you say. “Otherwise, you’ll have to put me in the dinghy, and I’ll row to someone else’s boat.” You are only half kidding.

Steven glances at you. “I thought of that, the dinghy’s gone. Opa must have been in a race and stripped down the boat. You hold onto that life ring and put this life jacket on. Let me think.”

You wonder if you could swim to shore—but it’s woody and there is no beach. There would be snakes, and how would you signal for help? You suppose Steven could put out a mayday but that seems excessive. Still, you can feel your heart racing. The thought of snakes puts you on edge. You kick your legs harder, though you are tired and growing frightened.

“I’ve got it,” Steven says. “I can get you back in but you’re going to have to give me a few more minutes.”

He disappears below decks. Fifty yards away another boat has come to anchor. You wonder if you could swim to it. But you believe that there is nothing Steven cannot fix, and if he’s going to get you out of the water, then that is that. You have seen him fix children’s toys, broken appliances, his motorcycle, car engines, and so much more. Getting you out of this fix does not seem so complicated, despite the lack of a ladder.

Steven emerges from the cabin with two ropes wrapped around his shoulder. He attaches one to a line that runs to the sails. You can’t figure out what he’s doing, but you can see he is concentrating and from experience you know not to interrupt.

“Look, I’ve made these lassos for you to sit on like a swing,” he says. “I’m going to winch you up the line. When I throw them out you sit in them like you’re sitting on a swing, and then hold tight and I’ll pull you in.”

He throws the first rope to you, and it splashes into the water near your hands. Just then a snake emerges beside you. You scream and grab the rope with both hands.

“Snake, snake, snake,” you shout as if you were on fire. “Get me out of here!”

The other rope splashes near you and the snake glides an easy circle around you. You feel its smooth body entangling your legs.

“Jesus, Steven, get me the fuck out of here. Snake!”

Steven begins to winch the line and you feel your body lifting from the water, the snake dropping away to the waterline. You swing like a trapeze artist in the air, your legs dangling above the boat. Below you the snake slicks away. As Steven lifts you over the boat, you hit it with your legs, jumping out of the swing and crying.

“The snake touched me, I need a shower,” you say. You have always harbored an irrational fear of snakes and touching one was the apex of that fear.

“It didn’t bite you, right?” Steven says, pulling you into his arms. “You’re okay, you’re okay. It just saw something strange at the waterline and came to explore. I’ve got you.”

You pull yourself out of the swimsuit while Steven opens a can of chicken noodle soup. You pour yourself a glass of wine, then another. Steven dries you with his camp towel and wraps you in his sleeping bag. You can no longer see the waterline, for the sun has set completely and the moon is but a sliver. The stars gather everywhere and from shore you can hear the peepers and the crickets and the splashes and noises of other boaters. In the morning you will motor back to Opa’s and tell him this story, and he will apologize for the missing ladders—he’d been in the Bay 100, and indeed had lightened the load.

“It’s a good story, you know,” he’ll say. “Every good story should end with a snake.”

As Steven backs the car out of the driveway for the ride home, you wrap your arms around his. “Snake my ass,” you say. “I’ve never been so scared.”

“I had my eye on you the whole time,” he says. “You weren’t going under.”

You remember how it felt to float above the boat. You remember all the years you had fallen into Steven’s arms as if they were home and you were lost. You wonder if you might find a path back to each other and if the story had begun, not ended, with a snake.

~~~~~

Janice Lynch Schuster is a poet, writer, and visual artist. Her work has appeared in Persimmon
Tree Review, Months to Years, The Sun Magazine, The Washington Post, Poet Lore, and
elsewhere. A proposal writer, she lives and works in Annapolis, Maryland.