“God, remember the light on that Sanibel trip?” Andy’s father pushed back in his chair and rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “Wasn’t it glorious? Those red and orange sunsets? Fire and embers? Atomic, almost? Pure flame just ripping and pouring out of the sky? And remember that fat, smacking moon with the blue mist around it, off Hatteras—is it Maxfield Parrish I’m thinking of, Samantha?”
“Sorry?”
“Maxfield Parrish? That artist I like? Does those very grand skies, you know—” he threw his arms out—“with the towering clouds? Excuse me there, Theo, didn’t mean to knock you in the snoot.”
“Constable does clouds.”
“No, no, that’s not who I mean, this painter is much more satisfying. Anyway—my word, what skies we had out on the water that night. Magical. Arcadian.”
“Which night was that?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember! It was absolutely the highlight of the trip.”
Platt—slouched back in his chair—said maliciously: “The highlight of Andy’s trip was when we stopped for lunch that time at the snack bar.”
Andy said, in a thin voice: “Mother doesn’t care for sailing either.”
“Not madly, no,” said Mrs. Barbour, reaching for another strawberry. “Theo, I really do wish you would eat at least a small bite of your breakfast. You can’t go on starving yourself like this. You’re starting to look very peaked.”
Despite Mr. Barbour’s impromptu lessons from the flag chart in his study, I had not found much to engage me in the topic of sailing, either. “Because the greatest gift my own father ever gave to me?” Mr. Barbour was saying very earnestly. “Was the sea. The love for it—the feel. Daddy gave me the ocean. And it’s a tragic loss for you, Andy—Andy, look at me, I’m talking to you—it’s a terrible loss if you’ve made up your mind to turn your back on the very thing that gave me my freedom, my—”
“I have tried to like it. I have a natural hatred of it.”
“Hatred?” Astonishment; dumbfoundment. “Hatred of what? Of the stars and the wind? Of the sky and the sun? Of liberty?”
“Insofar as any of those things have to do with boating, yes.”
“Well—” looking around the table, including me in the appeal—“now he’s just being pigheaded. The sea—” to Andy—“deny it all you may but it’s your birthright, it’s in your blood, back to the Phoenicians, the ancient Greeks—”
But as Mr. Barbour went on about Magellan, and celestial navigation, and Billy Budd (“I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank/And his cheek it was the budding pink”), I found my own thoughts drifting back to Hobart and Blackwell: wondering who Hobart and Blackwell were, and what exactly they did. The names sounded like a pair of musty old lawyers, or even stage magicians, business partners shuffling about in candle-lit darkness.
It seemed a hopeful sign that the telephone number was still in service. My own home phone had been disconnected. As soon as I could decently slip away from breakfast and my untouched plate, I went back to the telephone in the family room, with Irenka flustering around and running the vacuum and dusting the bric-a-brac all around me, and Kitsey across the room on the computer, determined not to even look at me.
“Who are you calling?” said Andy—who, in the manner of all his family, had come up behind me so quietly that I didn’t hear him.
I might not have told him anything, except I knew that I could trust him to keep his mouth shut. Andy never talked to anybody, certainly not his parents.
“These people,” I said quietly—stepping back a little bit, so I was out of the sight line of the doorway. “I know it sounds weird. But you know that ring I have?”
I explained about the old man, and I was trying to think how to explain about the girl, too, the connection I’d felt with her and how much I wanted to see her again. But Andy—predictably—had already leapt ahead, away from personal aspects to the logistics of the situation. He eyed the White Pages, open on the telephone table. “Are they in the city?”
“West Tenth.”
Andy sneezed, and blew his nose; spring allergies had hit him very hard. “If you can’t get them on the phone,” he said, folding up his handkerchief and putting it in his pocket, “why don’t you just go down there?”
“Really?” I said. It seemed creepy not to call first, just show up. “You think so?”
“That’s what I would do.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they don’t remember me.”