Stranger is the Sail Ch. 01

Laura looks devastated. What a goddamn mess this is.

I saw a doctor on TV once...psychiatrist, or 'chologist, or whatever they are...talking about men and women. She was a sight. Here's this jagged, fiery-looking lady, telling an audience of women that men are scared of female anger and are jealous of female strength. And those fat women all just bobbled their heads like it was windy or something. Tellin' 'em what they wanted to hear. A woman talking to women about how men think and feel. What a joke. At least when men talk to each other about women, it's just to acknowledge that we can't figure 'em out.

There's wisdom in admitting to what you don't understand.

Women, though, got to think they know it all. Anyways, I wasn't ever scared of no angry woman, nor of a crying woman either. It makes you tired, yeah, all that noise and tears. But it don't scare you.

Two crying women is extra extra, though. Shit. It's just unpleasant. I'd honestly rather be in church.

Both of them seem to want to shoulder the blame for all this. Well, they can both have it as far as I'm concerned. I'm really about done with patience and sympathy for anyone here who isn't named Adrian. All this weeping and trying to measure their guilt isn't going to help that boy one iota. In fact it'll hurt. If he does ever wake up, God willing, the last thing he's going to need are a couple of women so wrapped up in their own feelings that they spend more time talking about themselves than caring for him.

"Bill," Amanda says at last through tears and snot, "can you get us some Kleenex?"

I raise my brows. Run an errand while you go on and on? Well, that's about that, isn't it?

"No," I say.

She gives me that look that women like to give men. "William! Please! We're a mess here."

"Well, fuck, then I guess you'd better stop crying."

"Daddy?" Laura at least has the wherewithal to look timid. Maybe it's just a technique. They've each chosen their weapons based on a lifetime of experience getting their way with me. But there's nothing new to their assaults, and I'm ready.

"Bill," Amanda says my name like it's a warning.

"Look, I know you have all sorts of stuff to deal with. Laura, I'm sure you feel more than awful. I guess you ought to. And really, I do, too...though I'm not sure why. But if you two don't set aside the past, quit all this sob storying and tear farming, and start planning for tomorrow instead, then it won't matter whether Adrian ever wakes up or not."

Amanda frowns. "How can you say that?"

"Because it's true. He's gonna need a strong support system when he comes around, if he comes around, and that isn't gonna be what he gets if all you can do is go on and on about your damn selves. Make no mistake, that's what's going on here. You two are standing in the trauma ward, thinking about yourselves. So, okay, I'll get you your Kleenex if that's what you want, but if you don't stop this ridiculous shit right now then I think you both ought to leave."

Now, I don't do this kind of thing very often, because I'm usually okay with leaving it to the women to solve the people stuff. I trust my wife's judgment in that department most of the time. It's just that right now she happens to be one of the people down in it. Maybe it's because I don't like to do this, but when I do speak up, she tends to listen.

"OK, Bill." She nods, and wipes at the tears. "OK." And then she goes to get the Kleenex herself. She's a strong woman. Not many of them can stand to listen to a man talk tough, especially when they're all wound up about something. Amanda has the rare gift of logical thinking.

My little girl, on the other hand....she was always a firecracker, and packed with one hundred percent pure female reasoning. Everything had to be emotion. Everything. Love, anger, stubbornness, compassion...Laura owned them all, before she was even out of diapers. She was capable of having terrifying conflicts with other girls that I couldn't even see happening. Strange feminine smoke-and-mirrors stuff. Amanda would tell me about them after the fact.

Don't get me wrong, I love her fiercely. But Laura took me some getting used to. They should offer new fathers some kind of training on raising little girls. Even up into her teens, I was having to count on her mama to play go-between. I just couldn't make any sense of the girl's thinking. Her emotional state was so exhausting, it's like it ruled her. I don't think my wife ever thought that way. My ma neither. She was even quieter than Dad was. Stoic, really.

So Laura, my little long-haired firecracker, is watching me now with a sort of defiant hurt, like I'm being unreasonable. But I can see that it's something else that's driving her. It's like the time in high school when she had a party while Amanda and I were down in the city. That damn Casey kid was screwing around and he broke the railing on the deck. Laura played outrage when we called her on it, but in the end it was just her defense against her own guilt and shame. When she cracked, she cracked hard.

"Daddy," she says quietly, "how can you talk like that? How can you ask me to...to be there for him? How am I even going to be able to look him in the eye? And why do you think he'll even want me around?"

"Come here, honey," I let her wrap her arms around me. It will make it easier to get her to listen. Hugs are useful for that sort of thing. "I think you need to consider that maybe Adrian won't remember. Some level of memory loss is extremely likely. And maybe he shouldn't remember. It ain't gonna help him any, to know the truth. And I don't know what's going to happen when he wakes up, but I know that his head was hurt pretty bad. He's not going to be capable of a lot of things. He...he'll need a lot of help just getting by. For the rest of his life, honey."

"This isn't helping," she's starting to cry harder again. "I feel so awful."

"See, this is what I've been talking about. I know you feel terrible. But these are things that happened to Adrian. Not to you. Not to me. He's family, and he's going to need us in ways we can't even imagine, yet." I grab her shoulders and step back, looking her in the eye. "Were you aiming for a divorce, Laura? Did you intend to...leave him, when the time came?"

"What?" She stares. "No! No, I love Adrian!"

I can't help shaking my head in disgust. Pointing out the contradiction of her words and actions isn't going to help anything. "Well, if you go telling him all the truth about what you've done, he's probably going to want to be rid of you. And who could blame him for that? I certainly wouldn't. But he'll also hurt, and hurtin' is something he doesn't need piled on top of him."

"I hurt, too, Dad. This is tearing me apart, and-"

"And who gives a shit?" She gasps at my language. I understand. I never cuss in front of her like this, and I'm really piling them up tonight. "Yeah, you hurt. But you made that hurt. You lit the fire on all of this mess, and don't go playing like you didn't. But you're missing the real problem in all of this. Tell me, Laura...if you go unloading your shame on that man, telling him near everything, and he throws you out of his house...who is going to take care of him then?"

"Daddy."

"It's the rest of his life, Laura. The rest of his life."

She's sobbing heavy, now, but that's okay. Maybe this'll be the end of it. "How can I live with that? How can I live with it every day?" she asks.

"Goddamn it, how can you not?"

Amanda comes back in, but she's smart enough to hang back. Looks like she washed her face. She opens her mouth to speak, but I wave her off.

"What if he knows?" Laura asks. "What if he remembers?"

"Baby, bad as his head got hurt, he'll be lucky if he remembers his name. And so will we."

She just shakes her head.

"Daddy," she says. "I think he was coming to get your help. I think he knew."

"Just remember what I said, hon. We have to do what's right for him, now. If he doesn't remember, then we leave it that way."

AMANDA DOLE

Bill keeps trying to get through to Laura, to make her jettison her guilt in the name of protecting Adrian, but he's just wasting his time.

Oh, my love, you want so badly to find a way through this mess. I know you do. But you're just a man, and men are born for work. Functional, helpful, maybe even essential, they keep this world alive. But they don't understand it. And they don't understand women. They just can't.

Right now, the things you don't understand are working against you.

You don't understand what it means to not know what you want. Not really. Men love goals and accomplishment, so even when they're uncertain they still look for the signs of success. You don't know what it means to want two completely different things with equal and unignorable pull. How a woman feels when she is happy with a man like Adrian Burke yet drawn to another the way Laura is drawn to that jackass Victor Casey.

I doubt if you really understand how a woman sees a man, either. So you don't see any of the reasons that you are not getting through to your daughter. She is horrified and filled with guilt right now, yes. And she just had the shock of almost losing the man she's built a life with...a man she loves. But that doesn't mean she no longer feels the pull. It just means that she's that much more confused and lost. And, somewhere inside of her, the idea that spending the rest of her life being punished for a momentary lapse of character is too much is going to start festering. It'll grow, digging into her emotional core like fingers into sand. It will point out to her that her growing unhappiness is connected to Adrian and not to Victor. It will tell her things she wants to believe. It will tell her that Adrian is better off without her. It will tell her that the accident didn't really have all that much to do with her affair. That it wasn't her fault. And it will tell her that, someday, her parents will understand why she had to leave her invalid husband behind.

And it won't wait long. A woman in emotional turmoil is a weapon against herself. It will move faster than you can possibly imagine.

In fact, it will start to lean in and tell her these things

right

about...

now.