Sail Away

On my television, a yacht cuts out of marina waters. A group of women in bright bikinis yells “ADVENTURE” off the top deck, across the awaiting Mediterranean Sea. The woman in the biggest sunglasses wiggles her champagne flute toward the camera before raising it to her lips. She misses her mouth, and the bubbles dribble down her chin.

In my dark living room, the steps creak behind me. The way Ava comes down the steps makes her sound like an adult man, not a four-year-old girl.

“Go back to bed,” I say. I don’t look behind me as the scene switches on the television. The yacht is anchored all alone. A woman swan-dives off the side of the boat. Someone raises a fancy snack in her honor. I do not hear Ava move. “Don’t make me count to three.”

When Ava says nothing at my second threat, I turn around. Her face is bright white, the light from the screen erasing her fine eyebrows—our father’s pale coloring. Her hands clutch the railing. A tiny ghost on the stairs.

“You aren’t in bed,” she says.

“Mom’s going to be mad if you aren’t asleep when she gets home from work.”

She would be mad at me, mostly.

“What’s this show about?” Ava points to the television. She likes to divert. She’s the smartest toddler I’ve ever met, but I haven’t met many.

“Rich people on a big boat on the Mediterranean,” I say, hoping that will be enough, that she will go back to bed, that I will go back to my show.

Ava rolls the word “Mediterranean” in her mouth and trips over the syllables. She settles with being unable to say it.

“Is that the ocean?”

“It’s a sea,” I say. “It connects to the ocean eventually.”

“Like the canal?”

She points out the window to the backyard like she can see the dry rut that runs through our property—remnants of the Chenango Canal. It is too dark though.

“Like the canal used to,” I say. The Chenango Canal fed into the Erie Canal fed into the Hudson River fed into the Atlantic Ocean.

There’s a wide-panning shot of the yacht on the television. The show cuts to a commercial for migraine medication. Ava loses interest.

“Mom’s going to yell at you if you don’t listen to me.”

This is enough. Her feet plod up the stairs and above my head until I hear the twin bed that was once mine whine under her weight. Just before Mom gets home, I’ll enter the same room and lie on the air mattress on the floor.

~

My parents told me that my mom was pregnant with Ava on the night of my high school graduation. We sat at the only restaurant with white tablecloths within ten miles of little Jefferson, New York. Our table was on the restaurant's deck above the big lake. Mom drank sparkling water, and Dad downed a beer.

“Okay” is not what a person should say when their mother announces their pregnancy. Across from me, Mom started to cry, and Dad put his arm around her. My foundation sweated off my face even though there was a breeze off the water. We said nothing else as the waitress put down a basket of bread and shuffled away without making eye contact with any of us. The chicken piccata sat heavy in my stomach on the car ride home.

“You’ve upset your mother,” Dad said when she hurried into the house.

I didn’t say anything. I just took my diploma and went straight under my covers. When I heard my parents go to bed, I slunk down the steps to the couch, where I scrolled through the channels on the television all night.

~

What was once my desk is now Ava’s craft table; it’s covered in crusty paint, dried playdough, half-ripped stickers. My new workspace is the kitchen table. I open my laptop. My email inbox is empty. LinkedIn and Indeed are open, and my fourth tab has the details of a job that I aim to apply for by the end of the day.

Mom appears from behind me with a blue bowl of Goldfish for Ava in her hands.

“Any luck?”

She has asked me this every day for five months since I graduated from college a semester early in December and moved back to Jefferson from D.C. She obsesses over my unemployment and my mounting pile of unreturned applications and scattered rejections.

Mom swings her head over my shoulder. “No new emails, huh?”

“So it appears.”

Sometimes, I wonder if she realizes I’m worried, too—worried that my stellar GPA and my graduating in three-and-a-half years are all for nothing. She must realize that I need to go.

Mom walks away with the snack.

“What are you watching, Ava?”

I lean back in my chair and crane my neck to look into the living room. The yachting show from last night still plays on the television. Must be a marathon. The chef stands before the same guests and explains the meal using words I’ve never heard. I look back at my laptop.

“Natalie, when you watch these shows, you need to change the channel afterward. You can’t leave it on where Ava can find it.”

“It’s just some rich idiots on a boat,” I say. “It’s fine.”

“It is not fine for Ava to watch trashy people getting drunk in the middle of the afternoon,” she says, crossing back into the kitchen to scold me to my face. “If you’re going to be here, you need to watch out for her.”

I mumble something to appease her. In the living room, Ava eats her Goldfish one by one, considering each cracker before throwing it down her gullet like a pelican. Mom gets her keys and leaves for her shift at the convenience store. I am a free childcare provider once more. I do mind. She’s never asked.

When the front door shuts, Ava looks up at me and smiles. Her teeth are cheddar orange. “I’m going outside.”

“Be my guest.”

It’s cold outside this morning, so I don’t move to follow. She knows how to put on her coat and boots and unlock the backdoor in the kitchen, and she’ll probably just pick clovers or do cartwheels for two minutes. I watch her through the door’s window, and when I see her get closer to the canal rut, I finally get up. I run out the door, socked feet soaking in the water from this morning’s rain. I only slow when she stops at the edge.

“People used to sail here,” Ava says. This isn’t directed to me though—perhaps more to herself as if she’s finally grasped the ex-canal in our backyard after four years of life.

“Boats on canals didn’t really sail.” I don’t know much about canal boats, but I am almost certain that they did not have big, puffy sails. The wind in this valley isn’t consistent enough for it.

“All boats sail. What else do they do?”

She is precocious, and I hate it.

Ava starts scaling down the rut. What remains of the canal is only three feet deep in our yard, but that’s a lot for a toddler. I tell her to be careful, and she says she will be. She falls into the bottom of the rut, clumps of grass in her hand from where she tried to latch onto the side. Still, she doesn’t cry. She stands. The grass is as tall as her waist, and she has mud all over her pants.

I think this is her first time in the canal.

“How do you expect to get out of there?”

She puts her hand to her forehead to shade her eyes in the morning light. She looks off into some distance, spins around, looks where the rut crosses into our neighbor’s yard, and turns to me. She extends her arms.

~

When Ava was born, I told my parents that I couldn’t leave college for her birth because of an exam. While I did have an exam, I just chose not to ask my academic dean for what would’ve been an excused absence. My parents didn’t press me about it, which was both hurtful and a relief, and I met Ava for the first time at Thanksgiving.

Turned out that Dad wasn’t thrilled when Ava was born either. The long nights and expenses and Mom’s turbulent postpartum recovery sent him packing a week before Thanksgiving. He left for Utica to live with one of his friends, and soon after, he signed over his parental rights. We haven’t seen him in years even though he is under an hour away if he’s still in Utica at all.

When I came home from D.C. for that first Thanksgiving, Ava’s crib stood where my twin bed once was—in the corner of my bedroom. That first night home was the beginning of my air mattress nights. It wasn’t easy to share a room with a newborn, so I didn’t come home for Christmas.

~

I’m swallowing a bite of pizza when Ava bangs a fist on the table. It’s so forceful that our plates shake against the wood. Ava declares that dinner is now a “family meeting.”

“I want a boat.”

Ava says this like it makes sense. I huff and sit back in my chair. Mom, exhausted from her long shifts managing the convenience store last night and today, puts her pizza down and presses her palm into her forehead.

“Is this about that show?” Mom asks. When she opens her eyes, they land on me. I will not tell Mom that Ava and I spent the majority of the day watching more of the yacht show. If she asks, I’ll say that I applied to two jobs and put some Disney movie (anything but The Little Mermaid with its ocean and ships) on for Ava.

“It’s for the canal,” Ava says.

“Ava, there’s no water in the canal,” I say. I shrug at Mom, who still looks suspicious. “She wanted to see it today, so we went out back.”

“But I want a boat,” Ava says. She looks at me with sparkling hope from the chair that used to be Dad’s. “You can build me a boat.”

I can’t toss her dream aside because Mom speaks first.

“Natalie can’t build a boat.”

She says it with such certainty as if the possibility is ridiculous. But what Mom says is factual. I have no skills that would lend to boat building. I’ve never built a thing in my life or touched a toolbox, but I watched Dad in the garage before. I’d sit on the concrete steps and stare at him hammer and wrench and saw away at Adirondack chairs and the clock that sits on the mantle. I figure it has to be biologically within me, and perhaps she resents it.

“What makes you think I can’t build a boat?”

Mom looks at me like I’m Ava’s age. “You majored in English, Natalie.”

“She can build a boat.” Ava sounds more certain than Mom or me. Her little fists tremor the table once more.

~

That night, I sit on the couch alone. Mom and Ava have gone up to bed.

On the television screen, the guests head into some little town and don’t even look at price tags in the shops. The crew shuttles their bags back to the yacht.

On my laptop screen, I open my email for the first time today. There’s an invitation to an interview, but before I can get too excited, I see the follow-up that says the first email was sent by mistake.

While I reread the emails, a new one pops up in the corner of my screen from Mom. The subject line is familiar, and I can see the first line of her email:

NEW JOB??? Saw this listing and thought of you. You should . . .

I hit the “X” in the corner of the message. She means well but wouldn’t know the job prospects of an English major if the ghost of Ernest Hemingway showed up at our door. In fact, I get so fed up that I hit the “X” out of my job-searching window. My progress from the past day erases.

I open up a fresh window, type “building a boat easy” into the search engine, and hit enter.

The first website stresses the importance of plywood. The site seems reputable enough, so I put plywood and nails on a list on my phone. The tools sound familiar (a saw, a hammer, a screwdriver), and some of them sit in the garage, untouched for four years. Dad took almost nothing when he left; his clothes hung in the closet for two years until Mom finally gained the courage to donate them to some church.

By the time the guests make it back to the yacht, I have finished my list and turned my attention back to their fun.

~

Mom takes the car for her early morning shift at the convenience store because she says it’s going to storm later. Normally, she walks because Jefferson is so small.

When she leaves, I turn off the educational show Mom put on for Ava.

“Put your rain stuff on,” I say. “We’re going to the hardware store.”

“It’s cold.”

“For boat materials.”

Ava hurries to the door. She is ready before I am.

On the walk to the hardware store, Ava slows behind me. She keeps looking at a wet leaf that stuck itself to her boot.

As we walk into the parking lot, a bald man of about my age walks out of the doors. His plastic bag is so full that the bottom of it threatens to split and spill onto the pavement. When he gets closer, I recognize him, and by the way he looks at me, I know he recognizes me as well.

“Hi!” Ava is smart, precocious, and also horrifyingly outgoing.

The man and I smile terribly. I sigh. “Hi, Charlie.”

“Hey, Natalie.”

Charlie Witt graduated a year ahead of me, but we were in a few elective classes together at Jefferson Central School. He had been something of an anomaly—a local celebrity, thanks to his incredible amateur wrestling skills. He dominated the scene and was the most popular person in all of Jefferson until he choked when he got to the top wrestling college in the country. People thought he’d go to the Olympics and bring back the bronze at least. Now, he’s the bald barber who came crawling home when he couldn’t hack it.

“How have you been?” His shopping bag swings at his knees.

“Good,” I say.

“Good.”

The silence is dead. Ava seems amused at my feet.

“You went to school down south, right?”

“D.C.,” I say. “I graduated a semester early in December.” Charlie nods along, but I fear he isn’t impressed because why would he be. “Actually, I have a big interview next Monday. They’re flying me back down to D.C. for it. It’s a big deal and practically a sure thing at this point. The interview’s more of a formality, honestly.”

“Nice,” he says. I can tell he doesn’t care though.

Above us, the clouds roll over Jefferson. A spring storm is coming.

“So how’s the barbershop stuff going?”

“Good,” he says. Charlie nods his head and bobs it in the direction of what I assume is his car. “I’ve actually got a client coming in a few minutes, so I’ll have to go. I’ll see you around, Natalie.”

“Bye, Charlie.”

He walks across the lot and swings his bag into the backseat. Only after I watch his car pull out of the parking lot and disappear in the direction of the town center do I feel Ava’s hand in my own.

“Are you going back to D.C.?”

“No,” I say. “Don’t tell Mom that I said that.”

“So you lied to him?”

“Do you want me to build you a boat or not?”

~

Dad dropped me off at college by himself because Mom was too pregnant by the time August rolled around. The last thing he told me was to get it done, that he believed in me, and that everything would work out in the end.

~

The hardware store is large but too tight inside. The cashier stares at me from behind the register. He looks like he could either be thirty or sixty—nowhere in between. In front of me, all the plywood looks the same, and I’m not sure how to pick a piece of it.

“Are you mad?” Ava asks. She plays with the hem of her coat next to me.

“I’m not mad,” I say. “Why would I be mad?”

“I don’t know. You lied. You don’t have a job.”

“You sound like Mom.”

I start to move the top sheet of plywood. It’s heavy, so when it comes down, the thud slaps through the store. It’s four feet wide, eight feet long, twenty dollars, and what I need.

“That’s the base of your boat.”

I pull down two more. Forty, sixty. My bank account is dwindling for sure, but I have nothing else to spend it on.

“Those are your sides.”

I grab one more. Eighty.

“I’ll cut that one in half for the front and back.”

“What are you going to cut it with?”

“Dad left a saw.”

Ava doesn’t respond. She stays silent as I pay and convince the cashier to let me borrow the platform truck to drag the plywood home. Together, the cashier and I stack the plywood sheets on top of each other. Ava crawls on top of the top sheet and crisscrosses her legs. She pouts, puts her hands on her cheeks, and turns away from me. I use both hands to drag the cart behind me and out of the store, across the parking lot, and onto the sidewalk. When it starts to drizzle, we put our hoods up.

“Are you going to leave us for D.C. again?” Ava asks when we’re a block away from home.

“I don’t know.”

She huffs.

“Can I go to D.C.?”

“You can go to D.C. if you want when you’re older,” I say. “You can go anywhere you want eventually.”

“Eventually.” She chews on this word. “It’s too cold here.”

When we get home, we park the platform truck in the garage and go inside. I turn on the television. I swap the children’s channel to the one that plays the reality television show we’ve both come to enjoy. One of the women is drunkenly sobbing about something that I can’t understand. I tell Ava to sit while I get to building.

I start down the concrete steps and take my spot on Dad’s workbench.

~

Two hours later, I’m sitting in a chair in an urgent care center, thirty minutes outside of Jefferson with what is probably a broken foot. It’s storming outside, and Mom sits next to me with Ava on her lap. We aren’t saying anything. Despite being the only person in the urgent care center in rural New York, I have received little assistance so far. My purple foot is elevated on a chair across from me. Mom taped three plastic sandwich bags filled with crushed ice to it in our kitchen after I had Ava call her home from work.

“This shouldn’t have happened,” Mom says finally.

Plywood is heavy when it falls over and lands on your foot and you scream and your little sister cries and your mom comes home from work to you crying like a dumb kid so she takes you to an urgent care center without saying anything and you feel her disappointment bubbling while she signs the forms and hands over the insurance cards and you wait and wait until finally it boils over into “This shouldn’t have happened.”

A lot of things shouldn’t have happened. Mom and Dad shouldn’t have had another child. Dad shouldn’t have left. The jobs I applied to shouldn’t be ignoring me. I shouldn’t be in Jefferson, and I certainly shouldn’t be in an urgent care with a broken foot.

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“You should’ve known not to walk around in your father’s garage in just your running shoes.”

“Well, Dad took his work boots with him, so . . .”

Mom’s eyes widen and then squint like I’m a blur.

~

I spent my second night home that first Thanksgiving break out with a friend. When I got home that night, I tried to shut the door quietly. My consideration didn’t matter. I could hear Ava screaming from the welcome mat. The digital clock where my parents’ wedding picture had stood before I left for college blinked 1:37.

Mom sat on my air mattress sobbing as Ava wailed on her shoulder. I stood in the doorway for a minute, and neither of them noticed.

“Give her to me.”

Mom stood and transferred Ava into my arms, and I told her to go to bed. Alone with my new sister, I paced by what was once my window and felt like crying, too.

~

The doctor tells me that I’ll be laid up for a while and velcros a boot onto my foot. I crutch my way into the passenger seat of the car. Mom straps Ava into her car seat, and we begin the ride back to Jefferson through sheets of diagonal rain.

“At least now, you’ll have more time to apply to things,” Mom says when we’re ten minutes into the ride.

I snort. “Because I’ve been so booked since I graduated in December.”

We don’t speak for the rest of the ride. At home, Mom opens the front door for me and tells me to follow her. She leads me up the steps and into her bedroom.

I’m not sure of the last time I’ve been in my parents’ bedroom. Instead of two pairs of pillows, there was one pair in the center of the bed. On top of her dresser, I see a photo that’s been downturned next to her old television.

I lean against the edge of her bed, and Mom opens the closet. She grabs a set of pillows and puts them near the foot of the bed. She shoves the pillows to one side.

“Sit,” she says. She pats the comforter.

I lift myself onto the bed, and she takes the crutches.

When my foot is elevated and my back is up against the other stack of pillows, she turns on the television and sits beside me. She puts on the yacht television show and pulls Ava onto the bed.

She says that for now, we can watch together.

Ava sits at my feet. She asks me if I’ll get the type of cast that she can draw on. I say I don’t know, but she can if it happens.

On the TV, there is a new group of guests. They repeat everything the last set of guests did. They yell something off the top deck. They drink. Ava seems the most interested, but I’m bored and ask to be left alone.

Mom says it’s time for me to rest and turns off the light.

~

I wake up from my nap to a crash. I lean up and out of the pillows to look out the open window. Outside, it is sunny but still spitting on our backyard, and Ava has dragged and pushed the empty platform truck into the canal rut, which has collected an inch of rainwater.

The platform truck is upside down, and Ava scales onto it.

Ava catches her balance and stands tall, face-to-face with the setting sun. She points directly at it.

“To the east! Land ho!”

The boat does not budge on its grass sea.