wind. Clouds were moving in, turning the sky to dark wool. The temperature had dropped. Rain, Fiona thought, maybe even snow, was coming.
Nathan held up his hand. “Wait. You can’t get on. Remember? You have to ask permission to come aboard. Like that: ‘Permission to come aboard?’ I mean it.”
Fiona rolled her eyes. Nathan and his ridiculous protocols.
Obediently, Doug asked. “Pe…pe….pe…permission to c…come aboard?” His eyes slid to her and away. His cheeks went red, more from embarrassment she realized, than the cold. She’d never met a stutterer before. Why had Nathan asked him to say it?
Nathan grinned at Doug and then raised his eyebrows at Fiona. “Permission granted. To both of you.” He held out his hands for the bags and Fiona noticed his long and dirty fingernails. Not like a doctor’s hands at all. Where was Luc?
She and Doug handed the bags over. Doug gestured for Fiona to hop into the boat first. She hesitated. The distance between moving dock and moving boat was wide. She could see herself falling in between, ending up wet, freezing, most likely crushed against the splintery wood pylons. She had struggled yesterday and today Luc wasn’t here to help. She grimaced and leapt. Too far—she banged her knee against the wheel. It hurt enough for tears.
“Want me to look at it?” Nathan’s face was all concern.
“It’s okay.” She rubbed her knee and forced a smile. She turned to Doug and saw him standing on the dock making the same calculations she had. She held out her hand to him and was surprised he took it—the second time he had surprised her.
“Thanks,” he said.
She smiled. “Too cold this morning for a swim.”
Nathan put his hand on Doug’s shoulder. “Doug was my patient,” he said.
“Ca…cancer.”
“Quite a large tumor. It damaged his left inferior and middle frontal gyrus, plus the head of the candate nucleus. That’s why he stutters. Won’t last. Probably. Not sure. It’ll be interesting to see.”
Fiona watched Nathan’s hand on Doug’s shoulder, the way his fingers prodded and squeezed. There was something in his eyes too when he looked at Doug, like he was looking at a specimen. Nathan yanked off Doug’s cap.
“Hey,” Doug complained.
A red mountainous scar ran up and over Doug’s shaved head from ear to ear, like the strap on a pair of headphones.
“It’s quite remarkable, isn’t it?” Nathan’s eyes shone. “A truly extraordinary job. One for the journals.” He clapped an arm around Doug’s back. “And here he is, crewing on a sailboat.”
Doug grimaced, tried to grin, his moon face even wider, rounder. “Fu…fu…funny thing is, I never st…st…stutter with my Latin.” He nodded toward a flock of seagulls in the sky. “Family Laridae, sub-order Lari.” He pointed to a smaller gull with black tipped wings on a dock post. “Rissa tridactyla.”
“Sounds like a dinosaur,” Fiona said.
“Doug’s an ornithologist,” Nathan said. “Bird expert. Came along to see some special duck that breeds in Bermuda.”
Doug nodded. “In the mangroves. The West Indian Wh… Wh…Whistling Duck. I can’t believe it. D…d…ducks are my specialty, and it’s the la…la…last one on my Life List.” He stood taller and looked at Fiona as he almost shouted, “Dendrocygna aborea.”
She wanted to clap for him. “Cool,” she said. “A Life List.”
Doug stepped closer to her. He reached a gloved hand for her hair, then stopped before touching her. “Your hair is b…b…beautiful. Ducks don’t come that color.”
Nathan looked from Doug to Fiona. “He’s from Arizona. Completely landlocked.”
“I…did C…Cornell for grad school.” Doug looked out toward the horizon. “New York for my surgery. Bu…but I’ve never seen the s…s…ocean before.”
Fiona smiled. She had a comrade, someone else new to boats and ocean life. “Can you swim?” she asked.
“Before the op…operation, like a fish.”
“I’m sure he still can,” Nathan said. “His brain stem was not involved.”
Doug stretched his arms out wide, his hands in the huge knit gloves. The empty fingertips fluttered in the breeze. “It’s so v…vast.”
“Oh God, thy sea is so great and my boat so small.” Nathan threw his cigarette into the water. “Breton Fisherman’s Prayer. My wife is from Brittany.”
Fiona didn’t know where that was, or if it was slang for Great Britain. She would ask Luc about it. Where was he?
“The na…name of the boat,” Doug said. “Is that Breton t…t…also?”
“Yes, it’s her name for me.” Nathan thumped his chest proudly. “Bleiz A Mor, Sea Wolf. Isn’t that perfect? I am the Sea Wolf.”
He looked more bear-like to Fiona, round and lumbering. She was glad Doug had asked about the boat’s name. She had seen it in fancy script across the back—stern—but not wanted to ask in case everybody else knew what it meant.
“Dendrocygna arborea,” Doug said again. “I’m going t… to write about them…for Au…Audubon.” He took off one glove and ran his finger back and forth across his awful scar. Back and forth. Back and forth. Then he saw her watching and put his hand in his pocket. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s a… ha… habit.”
“I get it. I used to wiggle a loose tooth incessantly. Drove my mom crazy. You can’t help it.”
He smiled at her then and leaned gently toward her. She saw something in that smile and that lean. But he hadn’t met Luc yet.
The seagulls squawked. “So you’re a bird expert, right?” she asked him. “Why are seagulls so noisy?”
“D…d…demanding. Always hungry. I’ve seen them… pluck a chicken bone right out of a… man’s hand.”
“Isn’t that cannibalism?”
Nathan piped up. “They’re disgusting. Scavengers. Eat anything.”
“Let’s try it,” Fiona said to Doug. “Think they’d take a pretzel out of your hand?” She reached into one of the grocery sacks for a bag of pretzel rods. She ripped it open, handed Doug one, and watched as he broke it into pieces.
“First, let them…kno…know there’s food.”
His stutter was kind of endearing. It proved how badly he had suffered. He threw a piece of pretzel out toward the birds. It fell into the water and one flew down and scooped it up. Instantly, the entire flock was clustering and cawing overhead. He threw another piece up and two gulls vied for it, one of them snatching it out of the beak of the other.
“It’s
