The next morning began blue and clear, and we sailed into the harbor with a day to spare before the auction. Slate watched the approaching shore with a look on his face like he had never known disappointment, nor ever would. He kept grinning at me, giving me credit for his joy—better, at least, than taking responsibility for his sorrow.
My own mood had improved as well. Part of it was the season; when Slate had told Bruce it was my birthday, it was only partially a lie. I was sixteen or so, that much was true, although no one knew exactly. Not Bee nor Rotgut, who had been on the Temptation longer than I had, and certainly not Kashmir, who’d only come to the ship a couple of years ago. You’d think the captain would know—when he bothered to think about anything but himself—but it was a mystery to him as well. After all, he was away at sea when I was born, and my mother was gone when he returned, although to a very different place.
I’d spent the first months of my life in the opium den where my parents had met, cared for by the proprietor, a woman named Auntie Joss. After he had mourned the only way he knew how, Slate had barged in, wrapped me in a quilt, and taken me away. He hadn’t bothered asking Joss for details, so my birth date was hard to pinpoint. Instead, the crew generally celebrated my theft day sometime in early summer, whenever we spent a few days in a place where it was early summer. Though there were no signs pointing to an actual party, my father’s mention of one had lifted my spirits. He didn’t always remember.
The bigger part of it was that the captain had waved me over to the helm for the last leg up the Hudson, through the Narrows. He stood over my shoulder, and my route was bounded on all sides by banks and buoys, but my heart beat faster as the ship surged forward under my watchful eyes, the brass wheel warming to my steady hands. For a moment, I could pretend I was captain of my own fate.
The city unfurled to port and starboard: busy, crowded, full of strange people and stranger sights. Nowhere else in modern-day America was so much variety crammed into so little space. People from all over the world lived side by side—and stacked atop—each other, like the maps in our collection. Libraries and museums displayed the debris and plunder of kingdoms long gone and times far past. Being in New York was like being able to Navigate on dry land.
The Temptation joined the parade of oddities and curiosities. Some passengers on the Staten Island Ferry pointed as we sailed toward the dock in Red Hook, but they didn’t stare for long. Tall ships were a rare sight in this era, but New Yorkers had seen it all before.
Even so, New York was no longer the city of my father’s youth; the only signs left of the urban decay he’d tried to escape were on his person. Tall, tattooed, and painfully thin, the captain would have fit right in sleeping on a bench in a bygone Tompkins Square. The hard edge was authentic. But when he had to, Slate could fake it.
As soon as we were moored at Red Hook, he put on a pair of pressed slacks and covered his ink with a fine suit jacket in preparation to meet his dealers—his antique dealers. Dressed that way, he looked almost like any other New Yorker. It was only the nervous shifting of his eyes that hinted at discomfort, but not with the city, nor with being on land. With his own skin. No matter where we went, he never felt at home.
I recognized that feeling. I’d inherited it.
He took the pocket watch and left us at the dock with a list of chores to finish before we left port, including repairing the spar that had snapped in the storm and filling the bullet hole with epoxy. It was a rapid reversal for me—from captain to boatswain—but Kashmir only teased me a little, and we worked hard, side by side, cutting, shaping, sanding, staining, until we had a new spar and the bullet hole was gone. For a few hours, I focused on the wood of the mast, trying not to think of the auction, memorizing the grain as though it was a map to a distant shore.
The captain returned that evening with a heavy briefcase and a buoyant air, while Kash and I were still only between the first and second coat of varnish. Slate dropped the briefcase on the deck and ran up to us, palms up, grinning.
“What do you want?”
“High fives,” he said, as though it was obvious. Kashmir started laughing. I glanced down at my fingers, stained black and sticky, and then back up at Slate’s clean hands. Then he winked at me, and I couldn’t help but return his smile. Slate clapped Kashmir on the back and put his other hand on my shoulder, warm and firm. “Good work on the pocket watch! You couldn’t have planned it better.”
I made a face. “I didn’t plan it at all.”
“Well, you know what they say! Chance favors the prepared mind, and there’s no mind more prepared than yours.” He leaned in to kiss the top of my head.
“Dad!”
“And fortune favors the bold,” he added as he sauntered backward, pointing at Kashmir. “They say that too.” He raised his hands again, tilting his head to gaze at the heavens. “The stars are aligning for us!”
I followed his eyes upward and laughed. “There are no stars.”
“Yeah? Then what’s that?”