Once, however, Reuben yelled to waken Levi, who was sleeping in the main cabin. A black line of cloud squatted on the horizon directly in front of the boat, barely visible at first as nothing more than a pencil line where sky and water met. The cloud raced toward the boat, flashes of lightning visible within its mass, illuminating it from within.
“Quick, get the sails down.”
Reuben rolled the jib, the big sail in the front of the boat, and tied it down. Levi dropped the other two sails and wrapped ropes around them.
“That’s the best we can do for now,” Levi said. “Now we go inside and wait it out. We are going to bounce around a lot.”
The black clouds brought what sailors called a line squall—fierce winds that went from almost calm to near hurricane force in seconds, churning the water into short, steep waves that washed over the boat from all sides at once. Levi and Reuben were snug in the cabin, holding onto whatever handholds were available. It was terrifying at first, but after fifteen minutes of feeling as if they were inside a washing machine on spin cycle, it became obvious they were not going to die and they both sat in silence, side by side on the bench seat, holding on and waiting for the storm to pass, Levi’s arm around Reuben’s shoulder, offering what protection he could.
Something on deck rattled ominously after a wave crashed on top of the cabin. Another wave and the rattling became a deep thump sounding as if it were trying to crash through the roof under which Levi and Reuben huddled. Another wave. The thump was louder still. Reuben watched the blood drain from Levi’s face.
“I’ve got to go out and see what that is,” Levi said, putting on foul weather gear, waterproof bibbed overalls, and a jacket with seals at the neck and wrists. He opened the cabin door and stuck his head into the cockpit, only to be drenched by a wave breaking entirely over the boat. He pushed through it, thumped to a seat in the cockpit, glanced forward at the top of the cabin, then poked his head down into the cabin.
“Not too bad,” he told Reuben, who was curled on the cabin floor, wondering now whether she really would survive this voyage. “The life raft is loose. Waves must have broken the bracket holding it to the deck. I’ll cut it free and carry it inside. Hand me that big knife, will you, and the vise-grip pliers from the tool box.”
Minutes later the cabin door flung open, letting in a spray of water. Levi entered carrying a white fiberglass canister, three feet by two feet, obviously quite heavy.
“Here is the raft,” he said. “I hope we won’t need it. I’ll find a place to store it where it will be out of the way.”
Levi carried the heavy canister into the boat’s forward cabin, where there was a V-shaped berth Reuben usually slept in. He pushed the canister as far forward on the berth as it would fit, right up into the pointy front end of the sailboat.
“You’ll have to sleep with your legs bent,” he said, smiling, then added, “or you could sleep with me in the main cabin.”
The storm blew itself out as quickly as it arrived, and within the next hour the sails were back up and the boat continued its northerly course. Levi and Reuben resumed their debate about where in America they should make their landfall.
“Right into New York Harbor,” Reuben said. “Then we tie up or dock or anchor or whatever it is that boats do when they get to the land. I climb off this stinking thing and never get on another boat for as long as I live. I can’t say I know what I’ll do when I get to shore, but whatever, it will be better than this. I’ve had it with this fucking boat. Goodbye ocean.”
She was reaching her limit. What had looked luxurious tied to the dock in Spain was taking on the feel of a damp pup tent. Worst of all was the constant movement. Reuben expected the rocking to continue for days after she reached shore. The storm had terrified her more than she wanted Levi to know.
“No, not New York. Not a city,” Levi responded. “Someplace small. Someplace where nobody is looking out for anything. Someplace where the government is not on watch for terrorists sailing in with a bomb on their boat.”
Levi’s knowledge of American geography was a bizarre mix of what he’d figured out from hearing stories about the hometowns of American tourists in Israel, what he’d seen in American movies, and what he’d studied in the few books left on board the sailboat, including The Cruising Guide to the New England Coast. That book, the classic bible for Yankee sailors entering new ports, described useful details of every cove, marina, harbor and island from New York to the Canadian border.
“I want a place with no Coast Guard station, no military base, with no police department, if there is such a place in America,” he said. “I want us to sail in as if we’re stopping by for lunch, a loving, sailing couple on vacation on their beautiful sailboat. I want someplace with lots of other sailboats, lots of other couples on sailboats, where we are just like everybody else, nothing special about us. Who goes to New York City in a sailboat?” Levi asked. “You grew up there. Does anybody sail into New York City harbor?”
“Well, nobody I knew actually sailed into the city. That was what the Long Island Rail Road and the Long Island Expressway were for. People kept their sailboats at yacht clubs, on the sound, Long Island Sound,” Reuben answered. “But cruise ships go there, and ferry boats. Maybe no sailboats, though.”
She paused, thinking.
“Okay,” she continued. “I see your point. We’ll sail this boat where other sailboats go, and I agree it should be somewhere quiet and out of the way. We don’t want anybody snooping around this boat.”
The Cruising Guide was open in Levi’s lap. “Not New York. We are sailing to Brooklin,” he announced.
Levi was shocked at Reuben’s reaction. She cracked up, literally falling out of her seat in the boat’s cockpit and rolling on the cockpit floor, laughing so hard she gasped for breath.
“Brooklyn?” she shouted at last. “Brooklyn? You don’t want to go to New York, so you go to Brooklyn instead? I’ve got to get off this boat before I get as crazy as you are.
“For your information, Captain or Lieutenant or whatever you claim to be, Brooklyn is part of New York, one of the five boroughs of New York. Brooklyn is where my bubba, my grandmother, lives right now. Great plan, oh fearless Sabra. A couple of Jews try to sneak oh so quietly into the United States, which has ringed its coast with the Navy, with the Air Force, with the Coast Guard and probably with Boy Scouts in kayaks. All looking out for bad guys trying to sneak in and do bad things in America. And where does the great Jewish warrior decide we should go? To Brooklyn, New York, the same place in America where a million other Jews went from Poland and Russia and who knows where.”
Levi stared at her. She couldn’t stop mocking him.
“They have the best bagels there, you know. And knishes. We’ll step off the boat and ask the first cop we see where the best potato knishes are sold. Maybe I’ll ask him in Yiddish, so we’ll blend better. That’s what you want us to do, isn’t it, to blend? Right, we’ll blend in Brooklyn.”
“Are you finished,” Levi said. He turned the book in his lap toward Reuben. “Not Brooklyn, New York. Brooklin, Maine. Population eight hundred and forty-one. And, I’ll bet, not a single Jew among them.”
The week after the storm provided pleasant, straightforward sailing under clear skies. Levi glanced at the glowing GPS screen showing a map of the Maine coast with a blinking dot next to an elongated island. Monhegan Island, their destination, was dead ahead. He looked over the boat’s bow at the lighthouse on the island’s southern shore.