MY GRANDFATHER, LIKE his father and grandfather before him, began his life on the sea as a cabin boy and became a ship captain. After marrying my grandmother, he took her with him on his travels, transporting ice from Maine to the Philippines, Australia, Panama, the Virgin Islands, and filling the ship for the return trip with brandy, sugar, spices, and rum. Her stories of their exotic travels have become family legend. She traveled with him for decades, even bringing along their children, three boys and a girl, until, at the height of the Civil War, he insisted they stay home. Confederate privateers were prowling up and down the East Coast like marauding pirates, and no ship was immune.
But my grandfather’s caution could not keep his family safe: all three of his boys died young. One succumbed to scarlet fever; his four-year-old namesake, Sammy, drowned one October when Captain Sam was at sea. My grandmother could not bring herself to break the news until March. “Our beloved little boy is no more on earth,” she wrote. “While I write, I’m almost blind with tears. No one saw him fall but the little boy who ran to tell his mother. The vital spark has fled. Dear husband, you can better imagine my grief than I can describe to you.” Fourteen years later, their teenaged son, Alvaro, working as a seaman on a schooner off the coast of Cape Cod, was swept overboard in a storm. News of his death came by telegram, blunt and impersonal. His body was never found. Alvaro’s sea chest arrived on Hathorn Point weeks later, its top intricately carved by his hand. My grandmother, disconsolate, spent hours tracing the outlines with her fingertips, damsels in hoopskirts with revealing décolletage.
MY BEDROOM IS still and bright. Light filters through the lace curtains Mamey crocheted, making intricate shapes on the floor. Dust mites float in slow motion. Stretching out in the bed, I lift my arms from under the sheet. No pain. I’m afraid to move my legs. Afraid to hope that I’m better.
My brother Alvaro swings into the room, hanging on to the doorknob. He stares at me blankly, then shouts, to no one in particular, “Christie’s awake!” He gives me a long steady look as he closes the door. I hear him clomping deliberately down the stairs, and then my mother’s voice and my grandmother’s, the clash of pots far away in the kitchen, and I drift back to sleep. Next thing I know, Al is shaking my shoulder with his spider-monkey hand, saying, “Wake up, lazy,” and Mother, trundling through the door with her big pregnant belly, is setting a tray on the round oak table beside the bed. Oatmeal mush and toast and milk. My father a shadow behind her. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I feel a pang that must be hunger.
Mother smiles a real smile as she props two pillows behind my head and helps me sit up. Spoons oatmeal into my mouth, waits for me to swallow between slurps. Al says, “Why’re you feeding her, she’s not a baby,” and Mother tells him to hush, but she is laughing and crying at the same time, tears rolling down her cheeks, and has to stop for a moment to wipe her face with her apron.
“Why you crying, Mama?” Al asks.
“Because your sister is going to get well.”
I remember her saying this, but it will be years before I understand what it means. It means my mother was afraid I might not get well. They were all afraid—all except Alvaro and me and the unborn baby, each of us busy growing, unaware of how bad things could get. But they knew. My grandmother, with her three dead children. My mother, the only one who survived, her childhood threaded with melancholy, who named her firstborn son after her brother who drowned in the sea.
A DAY PASSES, another, a week. I am going to live, but something isn’t right. Lying in the bed, I feel like a rag wrung out and draped to dry. I can’t sit up, can barely turn my head. I can’t move my legs. My grandmother settles into a chair beside me with her crocheting, looking at me now and then over the top of her rimless spectacles. “There, child. Rest is good. Baby steps.”
“Christie’s not a baby,” Al says. He’s lying on the floor pushing his green train engine. “She’s bigger than me.”
“Yes, she’s a big girl. But she needs rest so she can get better.”
“Rest is stupid,” Al says. He wants me back to normal so we can run to the barn, play hide-and-seek among the hay bales, poke at the gopher holes with a long stick.
I agree. Rest is stupid. I am tired of this narrow bed, the slice of window above it. I want to be outside, running through the grass, climbing up and down the stairs. When I fall asleep, I am careering down the hill, my arms outstretched and my strong legs pumping, grasses whipping against my calves, steady on toward the sea, closing my eyes and tilting my chin toward the sun, moving with ease, without pain, without falling. I wake in my bed to find the sheet damp with sweat.
“What’s wrong with me?” I ask my mother as she tucks a fresh sheet around me.
“You are as God made you.”
“Why would he make me like this?”
Her eyelids flicker—not quite a flutter, but a startled blink and long shut eye that I’ve come to recognize: It’s the expression she makes when she doesn’t know what to say. “We have to trust in his plan.”
My grandmother, crocheting in her chair, doesn’t say anything. But when Mother goes downstairs with the dirty sheets, she says, “Life is one trial after another. You’re just learning that earlier than most.”
“But why am I the only one?”
She laughs. “Oh, child, you’re not the only one.” She tells me about a sailor in their crew with one leg who thumped around deck on a wooden dowel, another with a hunchback that made him scuttle like a crab, one born with six fingers on each hand. (How quickly that boy could tie knots!) One with a foot like a cabbage, one with scaly skin like a reptile, conjoined twins she once saw on the street . . . People have maladies of all kinds, she says, and if they have any sense, they don’t waste time whining about them. “We all have our burdens to bear,” she says. “You know what yours is, now. That’s good. You’ll never be surprised by it.”
Mamey tells me a story about when she and Captain Sam were shipwrecked in a storm, cast adrift on a precarious raft in the middle of the ocean, shivering and alone, with scant provisions. The sun set and rose, set and rose; their food and water dwindled. They despaired that they would never be rescued. She tore strips of clothing, tied them to an oar, and managed to prop this wretched flag upright. For weeks, they saw no one. They licked their salt-cracked lips and closed their sunburned lids, resigning themselves to their all-but-certain fates, blessed unconsciousness and death. And then, one evening near sundown, a speck on the horizon materialized into a ship heading directly toward them, drawn by the fluttering rags.
“The most important qualities a human can possess are an iron will and a persevering spirit,” Mamey says. She says I inherited those qualities from her, and that in the same way she survived the shipwreck, when all hope was lost, and the deaths of her three boys, when she thought her heart might pulverize like a shell into sand, I will find a way to keep going, no matter what happens. Most people aren’t as lucky as I am, she says, to come from such hardy stock.