The Captain

twenty-four

The sun was warm on my face as I tried to shake his words from my head. I wasn't being avoidant, I was just strategically removing myself from a conversation I didn't want to have. 

Avoidance. 

The little voice in the back of my head sang smugly. 

I rolled my eyes. However complicated my feelings for the infuriating captain below were growing, they were not my biggest concern at the moment. 

I smiled wanly at Ernie as I went to switch shifts with Tim, hauling myself up into the crow's nest.

Eyes flicking around at the infinite blue around me, for the first time in a few days, I allowed myself to breathe. 

The fight. 

The ghosts. 

The dress. 

The deep seed of foreboding I'd been suppressing since that ghost whispered to me finally resurfaced. 

Who wasn't gone?

The image of the dress, my mother's dress, flashed behind my eyes. 

It couldn't be a coincidence, right? The more I thought about all the little clues, the more I couldn't shake the feeling that all of this was somehow tied to my mother. 

But that was ridiculous. She was an ex-seamstress from France, not a pirate. 

I wracked my brain for memories of her, fuzzy as they were. 

All the times she'd stared out at the water with that strange wistful look in her eyes that I'd attributed to missing home. 

I thought about her face, trying in vain to remember more than just her soft laughter and sharp smile. 

I closed my eyes, letting the sun rest on my face, listening to the heartbeat in my ears and the breath in my chest. 

Think, Florence. 

An ornate box in the attic that I'd been forbidden from opening, one that she'd taken with her on her last doomed trip. 

That strange woman with the tattoos and missing tooth that had visited us on that rare occasion we'd gone to the beach without my father. I'd been afraid, but my mom had greeted her like an old friend. 

The odd scar on her back that I'd only seen twice, one that she swore was from a childhood accident.

My eyes flew open, blood rushing to my head. It was too late to close the gate and memories came flooding back, slamming into me like a wave. 

Jewelry that my father hadn't bought her. 

Her seeming indifference, even disdain for the navy. 

Skills that I can't imagine she'd picked up in finishing school, like fishing and fencing. 

Old french documents that my father couldn't read. She'd laughed and said it was poetry.

The way her eyes would cloud over when she talked about her past. 

Scarred hands, from sewing, she told me. 

Her laughing insistence that I didn't need to know her maiden name, what mattered was our family one. 

Memory after memory came crashing back and I stumbled into the side of the crows, tasting blood in my mouth. 

Impossible. There was no way I was actually entertaining the idea that my mother could have been a pirate, let alone one of the most infamous captains to ever sail the Caribbean.