Nova Scotia. I was so glad to get out of the car I didn’t even look at Tara. They dropped me off at my parents’ house and I said farewell, breathing a sigh of relief. The relief choked up when I was in the sun at the beach two days later and Tara waddled over. I told her I was leaving for Vancouver in a few days, so I had to relax. It was a long drive. I was doing the drive alone. That was fine with old Tara. She said she’d just sit there and read.

It was the book I’d been reading in the car on the drive up to Canada. I lay there in the sun and wished I was already heading west. And I wanted to scream, go home go home go home and let all my air out, but I didn’t. Then she said she wouldn’t mind getting a lift to Vancouver with me, taking a road trip. She didn’t want to go back to Toronto. She didn’t want to go back to university. She started crying. Then she wiped her nose on her arm. The snot stuck to her arm hair. I recognize lonesome when it oozes out. Then Tara said I should wear a one-piece, not a bikini. It was more flattering for someone with a body like mine. I sucked in more and wondered again if I would implode. The only place I was safe was inside my own fat body.

But right now I’m in my body stuck on this boat. Pete’s still out there. The waves lap against the side of the boat and I hear the shoes click away. I peer out a porthole on the dock side and see Pete, tall and thin like Anthony Perkins in Psycho. He walks up the gangway and over the main wharf.

I’m alone. The clock says eleven. Ten hours until Bob’s return. It’s ten hours that won’t end. I grab a book I need to reread for my dissertation. The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, a reconstruction of a journey, a journey of many kinds. It is based on the logbooks of Crowhurst, a competitor in the first single-­handed, non-stop round-the-world sailboat race in history, the Sunday Times Golden Globe race of 1968.

Donald Crowhurst was desperate to prove himself, and very proud. He was an inexperienced sailor (as far as being prepared for zooming around the world alone), out at sea in a poorly prepared boat, the Teignmouth Electron. His boat was an early trimaran and should have been covered in fibreglass, but because of time pressures and delays, the plywood deck was covered with a coat of paint instead. And so at sea Crowhurst had problems with a boat that cracked and rotted and leaked. Unlike the traditional sailboat, trimarans and catamarans sit on the water rather than in it. There isn’t a lot of digging in, and in storms one runs the constant risk of pitch-poling: running down a big wave, smashing the bow of the boat into the water and then flipping over — just like pole-vaulting, only you go upside down. And you die — a major fear of Crowhurst’s. But a bigger fear of his was telling the truth. To himself. That’s something I understand.