For the fifth time in the last thirty minutes, I picked up the binoculars and swept them over the Sir Francis Drake Channel, which shimmered in the severe light of the Caribbean sun. An afternoon wind had sparked up, creating whitecaps on the waves which rolled north toward Tortola. A dozen sailboats, mostly catamarans with a few monohulls thrown in for good measure, bobbed in the growing swell, but there was no sign of the water taxi bringing my brother to the ferry terminal at West End. A flotilla of magnificent frigatebirds wheeled in the breeze, lending the afternoon a tranquility I didn’t feel in my gut, which was taut with strain.
I was worried, although I couldn’t understand why. Sure, the water taxi was late, but ‘late’ was a relative word in the islands, where tomorrow was the best day to get something done and today seemed like a good time to have a Schaefer and enjoy the shade of a tamarind tree. Perhaps it was because my brother’s arrival was coming a week earlier than he had said, or at least I thought it was a week earlier, after having run into one of my neighbors the previous night at the Coal Pot, the local restaurant a few miles from my house. With Jade and Anastasia, my soon to be wife and my daughter, out of the country, and Juan and Imelda, the housekeepers who had literally come with the previous house I had bought in Mexico and just kind of stayed with me, off vacationing with their children, of course I had gone to the Coal Pot every night for dinner. What else was I going to do?
Anyway, my neighbor had mentioned in passing that Mitchell, my older brother who had been living and doing research in Antarctica for ten years, had moved up his arrival a week and was due this afternoon in Saint Thomas on the Jet Blue flight from Boston, then had acted surprised when he realized I wasn’t aware of the change.
‘That’s just like him,’ I had lied, because it was completely unlike him, ‘to forget to tell me he had changed his plans.’
‘Maybe I got it wrong,’ he had said with a look on his face that indicated he hadn’t gotten it wrong. ‘I can check again in the morning when I get to work.’
He worked for British Virgin Islands Water Charters, which was why he knew about the change in itinerary. There was a ferry service between most of the islands, but tourists tended to use water taxis, which were a lot more convenient, albeit a lot more expensive. As a rule, Mitch had always been fairly conservative with his spending, but perhaps he was awarded a big grant I didn’t know about or had won the lottery. In truth, there were many things I didn’t know about my big brother, including everything that had happened to him in the last ten years. Other than receiving a few letters over the last decade, I hadn’t heard from him at all. Nor, for that matter, had I reached out to him after my last few emails had gone unanswered.
‘No worries,’ I had replied, waving dismissively, ‘I’ll just head down tomorrow afternoon and see.’
And so here I was, sitting in my 2004 Sea Ray Sundancer 320 I had named The Minnow after my favorite television program as a kid, bobbing up and down in the swell as I waited for the taxi to appear as it made its way north and east from Saint Thomas. I was about to pull up my anchor and make the short trip back to my cottage on Frenchman’s Cay when I saw the front of a boat appear, motoring west in the channel the ferries used to come into the terminal in West End, the aptly named town on the west end of Tortola.
