It was three days before Christmas, high summer and le mauvais temps in the Societies. He faced a day of simmering heat and squalls. Naked and tall in the rigging, eyeballs wind-dried and stinging, he had clung to the shrouds as the sun rose. His hands and feet were already raw from the teak ratline rungs, for the roll continually pressed him against the rough wood and then flung him abeam. His skin smelled sourly of terror. Already he was oozing sweat.

He had hung on past sunrise as Irwin, their stainless-steel wind-vane, steered him back over the track they had come. A few minutes after dawn the breeze fell off so sharply that the boat began to wander, groping for the wind. So he had swung down, lurched aft to the cockpit, and released the steering-vane. He took the wheel.

Now he was too low to see well. For a while, he slatted along at two knots, not covering nearly enough ocean, trapped at deck-level. He had no choice: if he lashed the helm and started the engine and climbed the shrouds again he’d drift from the path they had sailed.

To fend off despair, he considered once more a hope that had helped him through the hours aloft. If she had been wearing her jacket, there was a plastic police-whistle tied to the zipper, just for this, very loud and shrill. The jacket itself, being floatable, might keep her up all day.

He moved toward the hatch, intending finally to duck below to check the foul-weather locker for the coat. Hand on the hatch-top, he stopped. He was afraid to face her bright orange jacket hanging in the locker. It was better to assume that she was in it, floating somewhere ahead.

He glanced back at the rising sun, shafting through a squall line. She could be watching it too.

“Now look,” he muttered to no one, “I haven’t asked a fucking thing until now...”

He found his eyes filling with tears, so that he could not search. Astonished, he massaged them with his fingers until he could see. When his vision cleared, he grabbed a mizzen shroud near the wheel. To raise his eye-level, he balanced with one bare foot on the cockpit coaming. He steered with the other, as he did when they entered an unknown pass and she perched in the crosstrees to help. He craned ahead, sweeping the horizon. Standing this way, until fatigue overtook him, he would be able to see almost as well as if he were on the bottom rung of the ratlines.

He glanced at a squall line to windward. He saw one of her cloud-people, a perfect matador wearing a scarlet-fringed hat, taunting him with a swirling cape of rain. He almost called her topside, realized she was gone, pulled back just in time from the edge of self-pity and panic and tears that would blind him. He regarded instead the threat of a squall.