All the sails are down, the boat is hurled forward, backward. I curl up on the floor of the cockpit—the urine has long since been washed away. I can see the helm above me, also being thrown back and forth, back and forth. I curl into a ball, but can’t just lie here like this, I can’t give up.

A drogue, a drogue, that would slow the boat down, stabilize it. I sit up, open the cockpit’s starboard stowage space, digging, rummaging through coils of rope, fenders, pails of old ship-bottom paint. It’s such a mess. Good God, why haven’t I organized things better? Although the boat is shipshape, here nothing is as it should be, when you get right down to it. But there it is, finally, I pull it out and find at the same time a long, thick rope, stiff with salt. I fasten it to the drogue, then I crawl astern, tie the rope to the railing, and throw the anchor overboard into the ocean. It makes no sound when it hits the surface—it’s made of fabric, a huge bag of fabric—and it will take time for it to fill up with water, but then I notice the rope tightening and the boat is finally stabilized. My Blue, my home, Mommy’s present for my eighteenth birthday. She gave it to me to stabilize something, I think, she put this boat on my internal scales. She perhaps intended it to be beautiful, this attempt to meet me halfway, but actually it was just ugly, an attempt to buy redemption for all the times she’d disappointed me in my childhood.

“An Arietta 31. Brand-new,” I remember she said, a little proud when she gave me the keys. “Built in Sweden. Olle Enderlein designed it. He’s the best there is these days.”

Only the best was good enough for me.

My boat, the boat Blue, Mommy’s present, Mommy’s olive branch, the gift I couldn’t bring myself to refuse, the only gift she ever gave me that I actually wanted. Unlike her, it has never let me down.