Page 83 of The Hitchhiker in Panama
After a few hours of that, bone-weary but unable to ignore the stimulation around me, I got up and trudged into the common area. I turned my phone on and connected to the free Wi-Fi.
A chorus of chirps demanded my attention as a series of messages from my mother arrived.
Did you leave the boat okay?
Was your flight today?
Are you in Tahiti?
Lila?
Lila, I just emailed with Jonas. He said you got to the hostel okay. Where are you?
And one from Marcella.
Hi. We miss you already. Have a good flight.
I tapped over to my mum’s messages and her increasing panic. I sighed and tapped the phone icon.
She answered on the first ring. “Please tell me you are off that godforsaken boat.”
I burst into tears.
My mum, God bless her, cooed into the phone while I scrambled to collect myself again.
“Your father’s here. I’m putting you on speakerphone.” The phone emitted some muffled noises while Mum figured out the app. She said to my father, “Lila’s upset.”
Dad’s voice came on the line. “I told that young man I’d cut his balls off.”
I laughed despite myself.
“You sound very upset, sweet pea. What’s going on?”
I told my parents everything in a huge flood of words. I told them, as best I could, the struggles and hardships of what twenty-six days at sea had been like. Now that I was off the boat, it seemed different. Flattened. Like I’d had huge emotional swings that rocketed aroundEikwith no way to get out. Now, without the ground swaying beneath me or the wind in my face, all of my feelings rushed out.
It was cathartic.
“I thought the sail was boring?” Mum said.
“It was. Kind of. There’s an old saying Jonas told me, that sailing is boredom with flashes of sheer terror.” I winced, expecting Mum to zero in on the terror like a hawk. Instead she said something that surprised me.
“Tell me about the good parts.”
So I sat back in the chair and told my parents about the endless blue of the ocean, stargazing with Eivind, eating freshly caught fish. I talked about helping to hoist the sails, the feel of the winch handle in my palm and the burn of my muscles as I cranked the sail in.
My parents listened quietly. When I finished, Dad spoke up.
“What about Eivind?”
I told them about our fight, my cheeks burning with embarrassment when I admitted to my parents that their daughter had not, in fact, become a sailor.
“Well, I didn’t expect you to be! It was only a month at sea, really,” Mum said.
“Mum!”
“What? It’s true.”
“Well, it still hurts my feelings.”
