Like a good grandfather, he explains his actions to Judy as they go along, the theory and the practice, and both of them become infected by confidence, by the ease with which this toy supporting them can be made to trace an angled path back and forth, teasing the wind and the water by stealing a fraction of their glinting great magnitudes.
Judy announces, "I want to steer."
"You don't steer it, sweetie, like you steer a bicycle. You can't just point it where you want to go. You have to keep the wind in mind, what direction it's coming from. But yeah, O.K., scrootch your, like, backside back toward me and take hold of the tiller. Keep the boat pointed at that little island with the pink house out there. That's right. That's good. Now you're slipping off a little. Pull it a bit toward you to make it come left. That's called port. Left is port, starboard is right. Now I'm letting out the sail a little, and when I say `Ready about,' you push the tiller toward me as hard as you can and hold it. Don't panic, it takes a second to react. Ready? Ready, Judy? O.K. Ready about, hard alee."
He helps her push through the last part of the arc, her little arm doesn't quite reach. The sail slackens and flaps. The boom swings nervously back and forth. The aluminum mast squeaks in its Fiberglas socket. A far freighter sits on the horizon like a nickel on a high tabletop. A bent-winged tern hangs motionless against the wind and cocks its head to eye them as if to ask what they are doing so far out of their element. And then the sail fills; Harry tugs it in; his hand on top of Judy's little one sets the angle of the tiller for this tack. Their two weights toward the stern lift the bow and make the Sunfish slightly wallow. The patter of waves on the hull has settled into his ears as a kind of deafness. She tacks a few more times and, seeing that's all there is to it, grows bored. Her girlish yawn is a flower of flawless teeth (the chemicals they put in toothpaste now, these kids will never know the agony he did in dental chairs) and plush arched tongue. Some man some day will use that tongue.
"You kind of lose track of time out here," Harry tells her. "But from the way the sun is it must be near noon. We should head back in. That's going to take some time, since the wind's coming out against us. We don't want your mother to get worried."
"That man said he'd send a launch out."
Harry laughs, to release the tension of the tenderness he feels toward this perfect female child, all coppery and bright and as yet unmarred. "That was just for an emergency. The only emergency we have is our noses are getting sunburned. We can sail in, it's called beating against the wind. You work as close to the wind as you can. Here, I'll pull in the sail and you try to keep us pointed toward that hotel. Not the hotel at the very far right. The one next to it, the one like a pyramid."
The merged bodies on the beach have lost to the distance their flecks of color, the tints of their bathing suits, and seem a long gray string vibrating along the Bay for miles. The water out here is an uglier color, a pale green on top of a sunken bile green, than it seems from the shore.
"Grandpa, are you cold?"
"Getting there," he admits, "now that you ask. It's chilly, this far out."
"I'll say."
"Isn't your life jacket keeping you warm?"
"It's slimy and awful. I want to take it off."
"Don't."
Time slips by, the waves idly slap, the curious tern keeps watch, but the shore doesn't seem to be drawing closer, and the spot where Roy and Pru wait seems far behind them. "Let's come about," he says, and this time, what with the child's growing boredom and his own desire to get in and conclude this adventure, he tries to trim the wind too closely. A puff comes from an unexpected direction, from the low pirate islands instead of directly offshore, and instead of the Sunfish settling at a fixed heel in a straight line at a narrow angle to the direction they have been moving in, it heels and won't stop heeling, it loses its grip on the water, on the blue air. The mast passes a certain point up under the sun and as unstoppably as if pushed by a giant malevolent hand topples sideways into the Gulf. Rabbit feels his big body together with Judy's little lithe one pitch downward feet-first into the abyss of water, his fist still gripping the line in a panic and his shin scraped again, by an edge of Fiberglas. A murderous dense cold element encloses his head in an unbreathable dark green that clamps shut his mouth and eyes and then pales and releases him to air, to sun, and to the eerie silence of halted motion.
His brain catches up to what has happened. He remembers how Cindy that time stood on the centerboard and the Sunfish came upright again, its mast hurling arcs of droplets against the sky. So there is no great problem. But something feels odd, heartsuckingly wrong. Judy. Where is she? "Judy?" he calls, his voice not his out here between horizons, nothing solid under him and waves slapping his face with a teasing malice and the hull of the Sunfish resting towering on its edge casting a narrow shade and the striped sail spread flat on the water like a many-colored scum. `Judy!" Now his voice belongs entirely to the hollow air, to the heights of terror; he shouts so loud he swallows water, his immersed body offering no platform for him to shout from; a bitter molten lead pours instead of breath into his throat and his heart's pumping merges with the tugs and swellings of the sea. He coughs and coughs and his eyes take on tears. She is not here. There are only the dirty-green waves, kicking water, jade where the sun shines through, layered over bile. And clouds thin and slanting in the west, forecasting a change in the weather. And the hollow mute hull of the Sunfish hulking beside him. His bladder begs him to pee and perhaps he does.
The other side. She must be there. He and the boat and sail exist in a few square yards yet enormous distances feel ranged against him. He must dive under the hull, quickly. Every second is sinking everything. The life jacket buoys him but impedes. Currents in the water push against him. He has never been a natural swimmer. Air, light, water, silence all clash inside his head in a thunderous demonstration of mercilessness. Even in this instant of perfectly dense illumination there is space for his lifelong animal distaste for putting his head underwater, and for the thought that another second of doing nothing might miraculously bring it all right; the child's smiling face will surface with saltwater sparkling in her eyelashes. But the noon sun says now or never and something holy in him screams that all can be retrieved and he opens his mouth and sucks down panicked breath through a sieve of pain in his chest and tries to burrow through a resistant opacity where he cannot see or breathe. His head is pressed upward against something hard while his hands sluggishly grope for a snagged body and find not even a protuberance where a body could snag. He tries to surface. Fiberglas presses on his back like sharkskin and then the tiller's hinged wood, dangling down dripping, scrapes his face.
"Judy!" This third time he calls her name he is burbling; gobbets of water make rainbow circles in his vision as he faces straight up into the sun; in these seconds the boat is slowly twirling and its relation to the sun, the shadow it casts on the water, is changing.