Last night’s steak and fries sit lodged in his gullet, and he has to wait
patient to ease them out. He is sick of himself. Tired of Daniel’s hard
looks across the dinner table, tired of telling himself never again
afterwards. In the moment, though, like a kid shouting fuck you to
the world, he does not stop. Up above, the stars shine silence, and
he strides with cigarette past deckhands who congregate by a steel
pipe. He wishes someone who loved him were here. Daniel’s in the
cabin, everyone else on land. Wind hits his head, and he remembers
the olive jacket they left, in the frenzied trip to the airport, by the
door to the house.

And then it starts. That tug through him like low whale song that
gains momentum and peaks and settles into calm. He grabs the
railing with a hand. Afterwards, the deck sits stable again, as if the
phantom had not made its presence known. But he, like a wound,
open to sea and sky. Some chuck a shift like that—they take the
before and the after and patch them into one neat line. But he cannot.
He cannot. In darkness, in tears, he comforts himself by thinking
that only the best remember. Only the best hold it in their breasts
as they navigate the trips and gardens and clinking glasses
and the kids’ voices from the other yard.