Jack sees his true love for the first time when he is a baby, nursing on his mother's breast. The woman stands in the water, on the water, barefoot and brown-skinned. She smiles at him with teeth scarred and pitted as a dishonest man's soul. Jack gurgles and coos.
Five years later Jack is still in love. The sea pulls at him, sucking on his toes as he dangles his feet from the dock, sitting too close to the edge with a child's boldness. He stares out over the swirling depths; the yawning maw clenches like a man's fist, laps at his feet like a kitten's tongue.
He slips into the water slowly, waist deep first, dangling from the dock like a fish on a hook. It is a simple thing to let go and fall into the bosom of the ocean, the caress of water as sweet and warm as a mother's touch. He closes his eyes and fancies he can hear singing, a hoarse, rich, slow crooning.
A hand comes out of the sky, warped and stretched by the water. It pulls Jack up, jerking and struggling to the air, where he gasps for breath he forgot he needed. "Jackie," growls the owner of the hand, a faceless man who seems as tall as cliffs behind him. "Jackie, beware. The sea is a fickle lover."
The next time Teague makes berth, Jack stands tall on chubby legs and asks his father if he can go a-pirating with him.
"No, Jackie," Teague says, "You'd just be getting in my way, boy, and we can't have that. I've no need for a useless whelp who knows naught the piratical arts. Learn the code, boy, and then we'll see."
He says this the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.
Jack is ten when he breaks his arm. Teague is at sea, and there is no one in Shipwreck Cove to scold Jack, warn him against playing too close to the rocks and climbing the masts of moored ships. Jack is scrambling up the side of a decrepit schooner when the rotted wood gives way beneath his summer-bare foot.
He falls backward, and the wind rushes in his ears like a scream, a song, the sea. He hits the deck of the sloop below with a thud and a crack as the big bone in his forearm snaps in two. Jack does not feel the pain at first, and stares, fascinated at the bloody ends of skin and bone-fragments.
A port prostitute binds him up later, one the ubiquitous whores who flock where sailors convene, because sailors are always good business, desperate after weeks or months at sea. She eases Jack's skinny arm into the bowl of casting mixture, forms the binding around his elbow with professional precision.
"How the mighty have fallen, Jack!" She tsks, and looks sad and angry and amused all at the same time. "You've made quite the mistake."
She bends over his arm and her hair tickles his wrist. One of her breasts has fallen out of her low-cut bodice. The skin is moon-white, crisscrossed with bluish veins like little rivers, but her nipple is as rosy red as the inside of a man's mouth.
She kissed Jack on the forehead. "You'll be quite the charmer one day, Jackie, If you live long enough," she whispers into his ear like a blessing, "Think what might've happened!"
But Jack does not think about it, because hypotheticals do not matter. There is only what did happen, and anything else is the worry of philosophers and madmen.
The whore tells Jack he will not be able to use his right arm for a while, but the loss of his leading hand does not bother him. He learns to swordfight and pickpocket with his left hand, and when the other boys swim he studies the Code and reads, kicking his feet in the water while his cast stays dry. Jack learns words like accord, acquiesce, disinclined. They roll off his tongue like waves on the sand.
He meets the woman again when he is twelve. She has been calling him more and more strongly over the years. She comes to Jack in his dreams, her hair like a knotted coil of snakes, skirts ragged and torn like a boy's skinned knee. Jack stands on the dock, a summer's grime on his bare feet, his hair knotting and fraying in the wind like rope. Teague's ship pulls in and the captain steps down from the gang plank with a hunter's grace, a lion's grace. Deadly.
Jack watches his father with kohl-lined eyes, lidded against the strong sunlight. He admires the scars scattered across Teague's face, each one proof of another breathtaking adventure, each one the testimony of another narrow escape.
"Aren't you going to ask me if you can come with me, Jackie?" Teauge drawls, words dropping smoothly from his lips like marbles, like loose teeth after a bar fight.
"No," Jack wets his lips, starts again, "No, I'm afraid not."
When Teague finds Jack stowed away in the rope locker a week later, he laughs and laughs while Jack rattles off the plea for Parlay.
"The sea's a dangerous lover, Jack" Teague warns.
Days later, Jack stretches out his toes as he dangles his feet from the crow's nest. Gulls gulp and wheel overhead and men hurry across the deck below, like ants. The sea breeze kisses his cheek, and a woman laughs in his ear like a blessing, like a curse.
