The first mate of our ferry, a man not half my age, threw the deadbolt on the wheelhouse door with the boat sliding sideways toward the rocks and told me through the glass, “Sit down, Grandma, or a deputy walks you off this boat in cuffs.” He had no idea whose hands he’d just locked out. Neither did my grandson.
Dawson was eleven, and it was the first weekend his mother had ever let me take him anywhere without her.
We were on the 4:10 boat back from Put-in-Bay, the last crossing of the season, two hundred and twelve people and thirty-eight cars.
He had the window seat and a box of maple fudge he’d promised not to open until the parking lot.
About halfway across, the captain came on the speaker.
“Folks, we’ve got a little steering hiccup up here. Nothing to worry about. Stay in your seats for me.”
Everybody heard nothing to worry about.
I heard the water.
The swell had been coming at our bow all afternoon. Now it was slapping our side, and the boat was rolling with it in that long, loose way a boat only rolls when nobody’s steering.
Thirty-one years on the lakes. That doesn’t leave you.
I set my coffee on the floor and stood up.
Dawson grabbed my sleeve. “Grandma. He said stay sitting.”
A deckhand with a ponytail and a radio clipped to her belt got to me before I reached the stairs. Her name tag said MADELINE.
“Ma’am, I need you back in your seat, please.”
“Your rudder’s jammed hard over,” I said. “Somebody up there is fighting it with the engines, and he’s losing.”
She gave me the smile people save for a woman who’s wandered into the wrong room at the nursing home.
“The crew has it handled, ma’am.”
“They don’t. Go get your mate.”
She didn’t need to.
The wheelhouse door at the top of the stairs banged open and a young man came halfway down. Pale. Sweat through his collar. A phone in one hand he kept checking like it might tell him something.
Maybe twenty-nine. Pressed white shirt, gold stripes on his shoulders.
He looked at me and saw what everybody sees. Short white hair. A purple windbreaker. Shoes from the pharmacy catalog.
“Ma’am, we’re fine. Go sit with your grandson.”
“You’ve lost your steering and you’re splitting the engines to hold a heading,” I said. “And you’re not holding it.”
He stopped on the stair.
I was right, and his face said he knew it.
What I didn’t know yet was that the captain was on the wheelhouse floor. Reynaldo Barajas, sixty-three, twenty-six years on that run, and his heart had picked the middle of the lake to quit.
That left Tremaine Calhoun. And a boat full of people drifting toward the rocks off the east breakwall.
He wasn’t about to say that to an old lady on the stairs.
“With respect, ma’am, who told you anything about boats?” he said. He pointed at my right hand. “What’s that, your dead husband’s class ring? Go pawn it. And SIT DOWN.”
I put my thumb on the ring. The crest was worn almost smooth.
For one second I was twenty-six, on the bridge of a seven-hundred-foot ore carrier in a November blow, the radar out, the captain sick in his cabin, a mate who’d never seen water like that, and me bringing her in by ear, listening for one bell buoy.
Then the ferry rolled hard.
A car alarm went off on the deck below. Somebody’s cooler slid the length of the cabin. A woman screamed. Dawson’s fudge went all over the floor.
I went up two stairs.
Tremaine went up the rest faster. The door slammed, and I heard the deadbolt.
Through the little window he pointed at me and keyed the radio on his shoulder.
“County, island ferry. I’ve got a confused elderly passenger trying to force her way into my wheelhouse. I want a deputy waiting at the dock to take her off in cuffs.”
Dawson was standing at the bottom of the stairs.
He heard every word.
I knocked on the glass with the ring.
“You can have me arrested at the dock, son,” I said. “But somebody has to get us TO the dock first. Open this door. NOW.”
He shook his head.
Madeline looked out the window at the gray line of the breakwall coming out of the fog. Then at me.
Then she pulled the key ring off her belt.
“Tremaine, she KNOWS WHAT SHE’S DOING,” she said. “Look out the window. LET HER IN.”
She turned the key herself.
The wheelhouse smelled like burnt coffee and diesel. Reynaldo was on his side by the chart table, gray, holding his left arm, and nobody had stayed with him.
“Aspirin, and keep him talking,” I said to Madeline.
I didn’t take the chair. I never could steer sitting down.
Port engine ahead. Starboard astern. Let her come. Wait for the swell to lift the stern, then a little more.
My hands knew it before my head did.
Four minutes to get her bow back into the sea. Tremaine stood against the back wall the whole time and didn’t say a word.
“Call a mayday,” I said. “No rudder, captain down, two hundred and twelve souls. Your voice, not mine.”
He did.
Eighteen minutes later two Coast Guard boats came out of the fog, one off each side, blue lights turning.
The radio cracked.
“Island ferry, Coast Guard. We copied your call to County. Who has the helm over there right now?”
Tremaine looked at me.
I took the mic.
“Yvonne Petrov. Unlimited master, retired. I piloted ore boats on these lakes for thirty-one years. The old crews called me Gale.”
Nothing came back.
The boat off our starboard side held pace in the swell, and a man in a helmet on its deck turned around and looked up at our windows.
When the radio came back, it was a different voice.
“Ma’am, this is Chief Sung Lawson. Did you say GALE? My father decked on your boat in 1984. He’s been telling that bell buoy story my whole life.”
“Tell him I’m still sorry about the coffee,” I said.
Tremaine sat down on the step by the door.
The chief wasn’t finished.
“Island ferry, one more question,” he said. “Who’s the confused elderly passenger you asked County to put in handcuffs?”
Tremaine looked at the radio. Then at my hands on the wheel.
Then at the little window, where my grandson had his face pressed to the glass.
Channel 16
Tremaine got up off the step and held out his hand for the mic. I gave it to him. I needed both hands anyway.
He keyed it twice before any words came out.
“Coast Guard, island ferry. Disregard my call to County. There’s no confused passenger. The lady I called about is the one at the helm.”
The radio hissed for a while.
“Copy, island ferry,” the chief said. “I’ll want to hear about that call at the dock. Keep her on this heading. We’re staying with you.”
Madeline got up from beside Reynaldo and unbolted the door. Dawson came in fast, before anybody could change their mind. He had a square of fudge stuck to the knee of his jeans.
“Stand by that window and don’t touch anything,” I said. “Tell me if the breakwall gets closer.”
“It’s getting farther.”
“Good. Keep telling me.”
Port ahead. Starboard ahead, a little less. The bow wanted to fall off every time a swell came under her, and every time I gave her more starboard engine she came back, slow, like an old dog called off the road.
On the console by my left hand, Tremaine’s phone lit up.
He reached across me and turned it face down.
The class ring
The ring was mine. It always had been.
Maritime school, class of ’68. I bought it with my first season’s pay off an ore boat, and the jeweler in Sandusky asked me twice if it was a gift for my boyfriend.
My husband never wore a ring of any kind. He sold crop insurance and got seasick on the car ferry to Kelleys Island, and we were married forty-one years. He’s been gone since 2012.
So the mate was wrong about whose ring it was. He wasn’t wrong about everything else he saw. I’m seventy-nine. My knees click on stairs.
And last February I put a pot of split pea soup on the stove and went to bed.
The smoke alarm got me up. Then the fire department, then my son, then Janelle. She stood in my kitchen in her good wool coat at two in the morning, looking at the black pot in the sink, and she didn’t say a word.
That was worse than anything she could have said.
After that, Dawson only came to my place when Janelle was there too. She’d sit on my couch with her phone and pretend she wasn’t watching me make his grilled cheese.
This weekend was the test. I asked in August. She said yes in October, with rules.
She would meet the boat herself, at the mainland dock, at 5:30. I would not drive him anywhere after dark. And Dawson would text her at every stop, and call her if anything happened at all.
He’d been good about it. He texted her from the hotel, the bike rental, the fudge shop and the top of the monument.
Now he stood at the wheelhouse window with his phone in both hands.
“I told Mom,” he said.
“Told her what, honey?”
“What he said on the radio. About the cuffs.”
Reynaldo’s logbook
Madeline had Reynaldo sitting up against the chart table with her jacket behind his head. He’d chewed the aspirin. His color was coming back in patches.
“Who’s got her?” he said.
“A passenger,” Madeline said.
He turned his head and looked at me at the wheel for a long time.
“Huh,” he said.
I needed to know what I was working with. “How long has the steering been bad?”
“Just now,” Tremaine said.
“It stuck this morning,” Madeline said. “On the ten-forty. Captain worked it loose at the dock.”
“Madeline.”
She didn’t look at him.
There was a black logbook open on the chart table under a coffee cup. I could see Reynaldo’s handwriting from where I stood, small and slanted, but not what it said. My reading glasses were in my purse, and my purse was under my seat downstairs, next to my coffee.
That’s what seventy-nine looks like. Not the knees. The glasses.
“Dawson. Read me the last thing written in that book. The open one.”
He went over and moved the cup with two fingers, the way you’d move something in a museum.
“Ten fifty,” he read. He went slow. “Steering slow to answer to port. Hyd… hydraulic pressure low. Office notified.” He stopped. “Then it says, ‘Advised to run schedule.’ And his initials.”
Nobody said anything.
The office had known. Six hours before the steering quit for good, somebody on the mainland had read that and said run it anyway, the last boat of the season, full.
Reynaldo shut his eyes.
Tremaine came off the back wall in two steps. He took the book out of Dawson’s hands, shut it and held it under his arm.
Twenty past five
Dawson’s phone rang at twenty past five.
He held it up to show me. MOM.
“Put her on the speaker,” I said. “I can’t let go of this.”
“Yvonne?” Janelle’s voice filled the wheelhouse. “There’s a sheriff’s car at the dock. Dawson says somebody’s calling the police on you. What is going on? Do you know where you are right now?”
Do you know where you are.
“I’m steering the boat, Janelle.”
There was a long pause on her end.
“Put somebody from the crew on.”
Tremaine leaned toward the phone. “Ma’am, this is the first mate. Everyone’s safe. Your mother-in-law has been a help. We’ll be in about six.”
“Is she steering the boat or isn’t she?”
He didn’t answer that.
“Dawson,” Janelle said, “you stay right next to the man in the uniform. Do you hear me? Do what the crew tells you.”
Dawson looked at Tremaine. Then he stayed where he was, at my window.
I tried to fix it the only way I had. The chief’s boat was still off our starboard side, so I asked Madeline for the mic and she held it to my mouth.
“Coast Guard, island ferry. For your record, chief. This steering failed on the ten-forty this morning, it’s written in the captain’s log, and the office told them to keep running.”
Tremaine reached over and took the mic out of Madeline’s hand.
“Coast Guard, disregard. The passenger hasn’t seen any vessel records.”
A pause.
“Island ferry, keep this channel for traffic,” the chief said. “You can all sort it out at the dock.”
So that was that. On the record, I was an old woman making claims about a book she couldn’t read without her glasses.
The phone on the console buzzed against the metal. It buzzed again. It kept on buzzing until Tremaine flipped it over to kill it, and when he did, the screen was lit, right there by my hand.
I couldn’t read it. Dawson could.
“Grandma,” he said. “It says Wilson Office. It says, ‘Who called CG? I said NO mayday. Tug was 40 out.'”
Tremaine grabbed the phone and put it in his pocket.
There had been a tug coming. Forty minutes out. And the rocks had been about six minutes out.
Wilson
The Coast Guard put two of their people aboard off the stern as we came into the channel, a medic and a young woman with a bag. They brought a folding stretcher up the stairs and got Reynaldo onto it.
I had the mainland lights on the bow by then. I talked to her under my breath the way I used to, and nobody said a word about it.
Tremaine’s pocket rang.
He let it ring.
Reynaldo, strapped down, with a cuff on his arm and the medic reading numbers, turned his head on the stretcher.
“Answer it, Tre,” he said. “On the speaker. Let me hear him.”
Tremaine had done what the people above him told him to all day. He did it one more time. He took out the phone and put it on the console.
“Tre.” A man’s voice, out of breath, like he was walking somewhere fast. “Where are you. Talk to me. Did County copy it the way I gave it to you? Confused, elderly, she forced the door, that’s why you lost the heading? Good. That’s what it is. That’s the whole story. Nobody argues with confused. You hear me?”
Tremaine didn’t say anything.
“And Rey’s book stays on the boat. That ten-fifty entry, I don’t want to see it, I don’t want anybody to see it. You tear it out if you have to. I’m on my way to the dock now.”
Reynaldo lifted his head off the stretcher. The medic put a hand on his chest and he moved it.
“Wilson,” he said. “It’s Rey. The page is still in the book.”
Nothing on the line.
Then, quieter: “Tre. Take me off the speaker.”
I didn’t let go of the wheel.
“Give me the book,” I said to Tremaine.
He looked at his captain. Reynaldo looked back at him and didn’t help.
Tremaine held it out.
Slip two
They had cleared the whole dock. An ambulance with its back doors open. A county car with the lights going. A deputy, a woman about fifty with her hat under her arm and a notebook. Chief Lawson came up the ramp from his boat at a jog.
And a man in a company fleece, standing at the front of the slip with his hand out before the ramp even touched.
Janelle was by her car with her arms crossed. She didn’t come forward.
The medics took Reynaldo off first. Then the cars. I came down the ramp last, with Dawson, and Madeline, and the logbook against my chest like a hymnal.
“Mrs. Petrov.” The man in the fleece got in front of me. “Wilson, operations. First of all, thank you, I mean that, from the whole company. That was a scary afternoon.”
He put his hand on the logbook. I didn’t let go.
“That’s vessel property, I’ll need it back. Deputy, this is the passenger my mate called about. And look, we’re not looking to make anything of this tonight. She’s seventy-nine, she was frightened, she went somewhere she shouldn’t have, my mate made a call in the moment. Nobody wants this bigger than it is.”
“Mrs. Petrov, you don’t hold a current license, do you? You took the helm of a passenger vessel with two hundred people aboard and no license. I’d think hard about that before I gave anybody a statement. I’d go home with your family.”
Janelle was close enough to hear that.
I stepped around him and gave the book to the chief. “Ten-fifty this morning,” I said.
The chief opened it right there under the dock lights.
“Mrs. Petrov, that’s company records, that’s theft. Deputy…”
The deputy didn’t move.
Wilson turned to her. “Okay. Whatever my mate put on the radio, that’s his. I was on the phone with him for two minutes. He panicked. He’s twenty-nine years old and his captain went down. I’m not responsible for every word a scared kid says to County.”
Tremaine was standing behind Madeline on the ramp.
He came down, took his phone out, unlocked it and handed it to the deputy.
“Read it from the bottom up,” he said. “Every word I said to County, he sent me first.”
“Tre,” Wilson said. “Tre, come on. Don’t do this here.”
The deputy read. Then she read it again. She handed the phone to the chief, and the chief read it with the logbook still open in his other hand.
“Mr. Wilson,” the deputy said, “let’s go stand by my car.”
The chief turned to me. “Ma’am. I need a full statement tonight. It’s going to take a couple hours. And I’ll have to write down that you took the helm without a current license.”
“Write it down,” I said.
Janelle came across the lot then. She took Dawson by the shoulder.
“Car,” she said.
“Grandma’s not done.”
“Grandma’s going to be here a while.” She looked at me. Then at the deputy’s car, where Wilson was talking with both hands. “I’ll take him home. Call me when they let you go.”
That was the ride home. That was the parking lot, and the fudge, and the last hour of the first weekend I’d had with him in eight months.
Dawson held the box out to me. There were three pieces left, and some lint.
“I’ll come back for you,” Janelle said. “Don’t drive yourself.”
The 10:15 boat
The statement took three hours and ten minutes. The hearing in January took two days.
Wilson’s lawyer said “lapsed license” four times in his opening. Janelle sat in the second row through all of it in her good wool coat, and she drove me home both days.
Tremaine lost his ticket for a year. Wilson doesn’t work for the ferry line anymore. Reynaldo had a stent put in, two of them.
In April, Janelle dropped us at the island dock for the first boat of the season and drove off without waiting to see it leave.
Dawson had a new box of maple fudge. He hadn’t opened it.
Halfway across, the wheelhouse door at the top of the stairs opened, and Madeline leaned out and looked down at the cabin until she found us.
“Gale,” she said. “Captain says come on up. He says bring the kid.”
Reynaldo was at the wheel, thinner. The door stayed open behind her, propped with a fire extinguisher.
Dawson went up the stairs ahead of me, two at a time.
If someone you love has hands that still remember a job the world forgot they had, send this one their way.
Family betrayals have a way of surfacing when you least expect them – like in the story of a father who called his daughter a trap or the brother who claimed his mother’s building was empty.
