There’s a knock on the wall to her left, and she goes silent. She waits a few seconds before trying again, softly this time. But the next knock is more insistent. With a sigh, Greta sets the guitar on the bed beside her, grabs her mother’s fleece from the hook on the back of the door, and steps out into the hallway, suddenly desperate for air.
Outside, the night is still suspended in twilight, everything misty and gray. Greta walks along the promenade deck until she finds a quiet spot. She leans out, her eyes watering from the wind. Far below, the ship kicks up a white froth, and the waves ripple out until they get lost in the fog. Tomorrow, they’ll spend the whole day on this boat, stuck at sea until they reach Juneau the following morning. It feels like a long time to wait.
“All I keep thinking about is the Titanic,” someone says, and she glances down the railing to see the typewriter guy again. He’s wearing a waterproof jacket, trim and green with a hood, and his brown hair is mussed from the wind.
“The ship or the movie?”
“Does it matter?” he asks with a smile. “Neither ended particularly well.”
They’re both quiet, peering out at the deepening sky. Greta is about to push off the rail and head inside when he looks her way again.
“This is kind of weird, isn’t it?”
“What?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. Being out here like this. On a ship. At night. Just bobbing around in the middle of the water. There’s something lonely about it.”
“Is there?” she asks, and for some reason, this makes her think about the time she got a bad flu in her twenties and her mom flew out to take care of her. For three days, Helen made soup on the janky stove in Greta’s tiny apartment, and they sat on the couch in pajamas and watched movies as the radiator hissed and the snow pinged against the window. One afternoon, when she thought Greta was sleeping, Helen called Conrad to check in, and in that foggy, thick-headed place between sleep and awake, Greta heard her lower her voice. “I know,” she murmured. “It’s times like this when I wish she had someone too.”
Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to Greta to feel lonely.
She’d just returned after seven months of touring, opening for a band she’d admired since she was sixteen—the whole experience quite literally a dream come true—and in all those days of travel and nights onstage, all the quotidian acts of her life had been shed: regular phone calls to her parents, texts to friends, even the fling she’d been having at the time with Jason Foster. When she’d returned, her brain was still sparking and firing, overcharged by those months filled with fans and frenzy, and she’d spent the next few weeks in the same gray hoodie and leggings, moving from her notebook to her computer to her guitar in a burst of creative productivity. She’d never been happier.
But suddenly she could see things through her mom’s eyes: how she’d come home to an empty apartment and had no one to take care of her when she got sick. It didn’t matter that Greta hadn’t actually asked Helen to come; she would’ve been fine ordering soup from the diner downstairs and resting up until she was better. And it didn’t matter that she could afford a bigger apartment now if she wanted one; it was that this place she’d lived in for so many years felt like home. Her life wasn’t this way by default; it was this way because she liked it this way.
She turns back to the guy with a shiver. His eyes are still on the water.
“I’ve been reading a lot about Herman Melville lately…” He pauses, glancing over at Greta uncertainly. “Melville was—”
“？‘Bartleby, the Scrivener,’？” she says, and his eyes light up.
“Wow,” he says. “Most people go right for Moby-Dick.”
She nods at the water. “Too obvious.”
“Anyway,” he says, looking pleased, “I was reading about when Melville first went to sea. He was only nineteen, which seems so young now, and he wound up on this merchant ship that sailed from New York to…actually, you know what?” He laughs. “This is the part where my six-year-old would tell me I need to recalculate.”
“Recalculate?”
“Like on a GPS,” he says sheepishly. “When you go down the wrong road, and it starts recalculating your route. I have a tendency to take the long way.”
“That’s not always a bad thing,” she says, and he scratches at his beard, which is trim and flecked with gray at the edges. He’s handsome in a deeply wholesome way, clean-cut and earnest, and though he can’t be more than a few years older than her, he seems like an adult with a capital A, like someone who has his shit together, like the guys she sees in holiday photos from college friends she’s mostly lost touch with because their lives are too different.