The Blue Line Read Free Page B

she would have a nervous fit in the middle of their preparations to leave.
    They set off toward the pier in a little procession at dusk. The captain was waiting for them. Julia instantly recognized the boat. The dread she had felt during her vision returned, and she began screaming in terror. The captain, all black beetle brows and bulging eyes, thought the child was throwing atantrum and lost his patience. He even threatened to punish her, having decided that her parents lacked authority.
    Julia became hysterical. Clutching her string of bottles and cans, she took refuge between her father’s legs, but nothing could calm her. Despairing, he took her in his arms, climbed into the boat, and instructed the elder children to join him in the stern. Meanwhile, the captain was loading the boat and balancing the cargo in the hold under their mother’s watchful eye.
    There was a full moon, and the night sky was clear and starless. Large black clouds were building up in the distance, but the crossing wouldn’t take long—two hours at most. However, the wind began to pick up as soon as they sailed out of the port, and the rising swells slowed the boat’s progress.
    Just as in her trance, it all happened very quickly. The twins began to feel seasick, and the captain sent them to the prow. Anna wanted to help them and began to make her way to the front, gripping the rail. The boat pitched dangerously, and the captain left the tiller to secure the front hold. Their father took his place.
    It was at that precise moment that a giant wave surged up and crashed with the sound of thunder across the deck. The captain had just enough time to snap on his safety harness, grab hold of the twins, and pull them to him. Anna went overboard. The roar of the wave drowned out Julia’s screams. She was still gripping her string of bottles and cans. Left alone at the controls, her father yelled with fear, unable to steer theboat and thrown into a further panic by his wife’s hysterical shrieks as Anna disappeared into the hollow of the wave. The boat had filled with water and the captain was frantically attempting to bail it out in order to escape disaster, all the while bellowing instructions to Julia’s father, who seemed incapable of understanding him.
    The twins hesitated for no more than a second. They exchanged a meaningful glance, launched themselves at Julia, grabbed her string of bottles, and jumped overboard. The last thing Julia saw before she passed out was Anna’s head bobbing like a cork in the trough between two waves.

3.
    MAMA FINA

    Austral Summer
    1962
    J ulia remembers every moment of her life from her first “journey” onward. She knows she hadn’t yet turned six, because they celebrated her sixth birthday at her grandmother’s house sometime after. Looking back, she thinks it was probably then that she became an adult.
    Her grandmother had a lot to do with it. Hers was the first face Julia saw when she came to after the boat incident. She had never met this grandmother from Buenos Aires her father talked about so often. She remembers immediately feeling safe with her.
    â€œAnna and the twins are alive,” her grandmother told her. Julia stared at the unfamiliar face and then instantly fell asleep again, but this time into a child’s deep sleep. She spent her convalescence in a bright room that opened onto an innercourtyard with an endlessly cooing stone fountain at its center. She could hear her mother’s voice and the shouts of the twins from outside, like an echo. But it was her grandmother who was always there, all the time, right beside her.
    Mama Fina had clear gray eyes so gentle you could lose yourself in them. Her voice, in contrast, was deep, rasping, even, almost masculine. She sat patiently by Julia’s bedside for hours on end. From time to time she would lean forward to stroke her face and Julia would feel the touch of her hands, the skin as rough as a