Chapter Text
By Jotaro’s estimate, the drive from Port St Lucie to Fort Lauderdale should take an hour and a half – but that is an hour and a half behind the wheel, with his foot on the gas and clear roads ahead. And perhaps if it were just him – or as just him as he’s capable of being nowadays – an hour and a half is all he’d need. But this kind of trip, he’s realized by now, can’t be measured in physical distances and average speeds. A mysterious thing happens to travel times when one or more passengers are introduced into the equation: trips that ought to take an hour take two or three. On trips like these distances are no longer measured in miles, but in picnic stops and roadside attractions and by the minimum bladder capacity of all vehicle occupants. Travelling with another person – especially when that other person is five and demanding in a way only a five year old can be – has a way of dilating an hour and a half beyond what even Jotaro’s time-stopping abilities can accomplish.
So as in all things, he plans accordingly, budgeting time with all the manic attention to detail of a mission control operator on launch day.
The genius of his planning fails to make an impression on his ex-wife.
After the obligatory greeting, she stands rubbing the corner of her eye with the inside of her wrist. She’s in her pajamas still, her honey-brown hair trussed up in a messy bun.
“You know it’s only eight o’clock, right?” she asks, in a tone that suggests she’s looking for an explanation, not an answer.
“I want to be in Fort Lauderdale before noon.”
To her side, her arms drop. In the exact same tone as before, all short strained syllables and downturned lips, she says: “It’s only an hour and a half drive.”
He readies to launch into an explanation – pit stops, the observed ability of five year olds to alter Einstein’s principles of general relativity – but even a marriage as short as theirs was just long enough for her to recognize the signs of an oncoming argument.
Throwing up her hands – so very much like his grandma Suzie that he wonders if the stereotype surrounding Italians and the use of hand gestures has some kernel of true to it – she mutters, “Alright, I’ll wake Jojo up. You want a coffee – anything?”
“Already had one.”
There’s an uncomfortable minute where she lingers with her hand on the door. He can tell she’s debating whether common courtesy requires she invite him in, so he makes the decision easy for her: he turns and heads back to the car.
As he waits, he unfolds an interstate map to review the route for the umpteenth time. On a whim of its own, his left index finger begins tapping out a staccato rhythm against the steering wheel. It takes two full minutes for Jotaro to realize that the restlessness he’s feeling is not his own.
Peering over the corner of the map, he notices for the first time that his Stand has manifested in the passenger’s seat. Star Platinum is leaning forward, elbows resting on its knees with its eyes fixed on the house. Not for the first time, he notes how ridiculous Star Platinum looks when it’s trying to make itself fit inside the tiny sedan – a feat his stand almost but not quite manages. It’s body’s all there, sure, but its hair is promptly cut off by the presence of the car roof. All at once he’s stuck imagining what the scene must look like from outside: a nondescript silver sedan with a friendly tuft of ghostly hair waving from the roof at passersby. He hides his snort by ruffling the glossy folds of the map.
“She’ll be out soon,” he offers.
He doesn’t look up from the map again until he hears the passenger door open. There’s something like an electrical current just then passing over his skin that happens to coincide with Jolyne’s delighted squeal as Star Platinum pulls her into the car and into a tight hug.
“I missed you too, buddy!” she exclaims, reaching up to ruffle Star’s hair. And then, in the manner of an afterthought: “Hi, dad.”
Don’t take it personally, Jotaro reminds himself. You aren’t cool and purple and practically magic.
“Back seat,” he greets her in turn.
“Why?”
“Because getting hit by an airbag inflating at 320 kilometers an hour at your height and weight would feel a lot like getting punched in the face by Star Plat.”
“But I wanna sit with you!”
“Back seat – now.”
She lets out a sound between a growl and a whine and swings one leg over the center console – ignoring Jotaro’s protests (“There’s a door, you know”) – before pulling the rest of her body through. She flops down onto the back seat; between her and her knapsack, she somehow manages to take up the whole bench. He can’t help but feel somewhat betrayed when Star Platinum drifts after her.
By the time they pull out of the driveway, it’s already twenty minutes to nine, and the causal relativity of passenger travel is well underway.
***
“Where are we going?” Jolyne asks, before they’ve even left the block.
“It’s a secret.”
“Mom said we’re going to Fort Lauderdale.”
“Did she?”
He tries to keep his eyes focused on the road ahead, but they’re coming up onto the Turnpike, and from here out the scenery turns into one long ribbon of asphalt. The sky that morning is overcast; with no hills nearby and the treeline huddled low all around them, the cloud cover feels low and oppressive, sagging heavy over the road as if there’s nothing holding it up.
Jolyne’s foot smacks against the back of his seat.
“Why do you wanna go to Fort Lauderdale for?”
“The beaches are nice.”
“We got beaches back home.”
He tries again: “There’s some decent wildlife parks along the way.” And then: “Just try to enjoy the drive.”
As if going for a drive is fun for anyone under the age of twenty; as if he doesn’t remember, with pressing clarity, how even at seventeen in a faraway country, he couldn’t wait for the hours spent having his bones jolted in the backseat of a jeep while elbowed in between strangers to come to an end.
“Those aren’t real parks,” Jolyne retorts. “They don’t even have rides or anything. Why can’t we go to Disney World instead?”
“We’re not going to Disney World.”
He expects her to counter with that ever-niggling, single-syllable question that he swears up and down makes up for the bulk of her conversation these days. Instead, a brief, blessed moment of silence follows. He makes the mistake of thinking Jolyne is sulking, when he hears his daughter pipe up:
“Mom says you better not be planning on looking at boats again.”
“I’m not,” his knuckles flush around the steering wheel, “going to look at boats.”
The internal struggles of a grown man hold no interest for his daughter; her thin shoulders bob in a shrug before she turns her attention to her knapsack, pulling out the Game Boy he’d gotten her last Christmas.
“How about you put that up,” he says, just as she flicks the ‘on’ switch.
“And do what?”
“Just talk for a while” – is what he doesn’t say. Because as much as he’d like to do just that, he has no idea how to initiate a conversation. Pathetic, he thinks – that someone like him, someone who’s gone toe-to-toe with death countless times, is somehow afraid of making small talk with a child.
Instead, he settles on a lame, “Never mind.”
As though nothing happened, Jolyne goes right back to her game. Jotaro doesn’t need to look in the rear-view mirror to know that right about now Star Platinum is hovering over his daughter’s shoulder, watching the graphics race across the screen – he can feel its enthusiasm, warming him over like a sunbeam and making the long stretch of spackled skies and spackled highway ahead seem a little warmer, a little softer.
Glance into the rear-view mirror he does regardless. It’s cute, almost, the way the two are huddled together. But right now – right now, he can’t help but feel jealous of the apparent ease with which he Stand takes to Jolyne. As if the parts of him that are supposed to be good at, well, at this are the same parts of himself that that he has no access to, behind the one-way mirror at the back of his mind that marks the boundary between himself and Star.
***
He was telling the truth when he said he hadn’t brought them to Fort Lauderdale to look at boats. So when they happen to pass by a marina on the way out of the port town late in the afternoon after spending a few hours at the beach, Jotaro’s the one who’s surprised when an impulse causes his hand to drift, tugging the steering wheel with it.
At first, he writes off the detour as the product of pent-up resentment over being made to sell the Tanzer the year before, as him testing the boundaries of his renewed bachelor status, as his Stand’s insinuating influence – because hasn’t Star Platinum always known, often before he does, exactly what he desires most?
On feeling the car make a sudden turn, Jolyne looks up from her game and groans. “Daaaaaad.”
“I’ll only be a few minutes,” he tells her, as he eases the car into a free spot. His tires lose traction over the gravel, whirring in protest as they spin without catching. “Look, there’s an ice cream stand – you can get yourself something if you want.”
He expects Jolyne to take off right away. Instead, she hops out and waits for him, stretching her arms above her head and squinting at the sunlight with a look of contempt. He pauses, glancing back at her, his fingers curling and uncurling as he tries to work out what’s going through her head.
“…Did you want to come with me?” he asks. Something like eagerness takes root in the cavity of his chest.
She grinds the toe of her shoe into the ground, mumbling something he doesn’t catch the first time. It’s only when she shoves her fists into her pockets that everything clicks and Jotaro remembers that kindergarteners do not usually carry around money or credit cards.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, taking out his wallet.
The only thing he finds in the bill compartment are a few crumbled, unpaid parking tickets and a single twenty dollar bill. Still – a twenty’s better than giving his daughter his bank card, he supposes.
“Here. Bring back the change.”
Jolyne looks at the bill that’s handed to her the same way an adult might look at a winning lotto ticket. “You’re not afraid of someone kidnapping me or something?” she asks.
“No.” He stoops then, cupping her cheek in his hand. “If someone gives you trouble, just punch them.”
He gives her cheek a pinch. With an indignant noise she swats his hand away, before turning and skipping off in the direction of the ice cream shack painted the color of lime sherbet at the far end of the lot.
In his head, Jotaro counts the seconds. On ten, Star Platinum manifests at his side, and already he can feel an empathetic clench of anxiety in his gut.
“Hey,” he says, drawing Star’s attention away from Jolyne’s retreating figure. “Go with her, alright?”
Without so much as an acknowledgement, Star blinks out of existence, reappearing moments later and a hundred feet ahead at Jolyne’s side.
With that out of the way, he’s free to wander. A kid at the candy store, as the cliché goes.
Out of a misplaced sense of familiarity, he’s immediately drawn to the sailboats. After all, his first and only boat (or mistress, as his ex-wife was in a habit of calling it), had been a Tanzer 16 – a small vessel that handled with pep, the kind that made you feel as though you were part of the waves instead of riding atop them, the way the vessel would cross the water in whiplash bounds. The way the spray and foam flew back in your face, whenever the wind got up.
But Jotaro’s matured since then. His needs are different, and the kinetic handling of a daysailer is not optimal for sensitive scientific equipment. The last thing he needs is a thousands of dollars in grant money accidentally going overboard. Gradually, he directs his steps toward parts unknown: the impressive rows of workhorse ships, trawlers and tugboats and freighters that tower like monuments over the rest of the shipyard.
Just when he’s starting to suspect that he’s set himself up with unrealistic expectations, he catches sight of a sign, black with red majuscule letters proclaiming ‘FOR SALE’ – but it’s the piece of paper taped on beneath with hard numbers hen-scratched in sharpie that makes him stop to take a closer look.
The vessel is smaller than the ones immediately surrounding it – a forty-eight footer, if Jotaro’s any judge of these things (and he is). A trawler by the looks of it. Fiberglass hull, though he can only tell upon closer inspection for how dull the oxidization process has rendered the finish: when he places one hand on the surface, it feels almost chalky beneath his palm.
“Can I help you?”
Danger in excess quantities has by now sharpened his senses to a kind of fineness. His head jerks up automatically, and right away he locates the source of the voice: a man in his fifties hanging over the bulwark above. There’s grease on his hands and on the rag tucked into the pocket of his jeans; Jotaro figures he must be the boat’s owner.
“Just looking.” His hand stays put on the hull. “Forty thou’, hunh?”
“Yeah, well… she’s in need of a lift. Mostly cosmetic stuff, you know – but the fuel lines need replacing. Sold the fishing gear years ago, ran her as a tour boat – it’d be a good project for someone.”
The way the man says it, his cheeks puffing out and his arms swinging slow and heavy at his sides, a weight and weariness dragging behind every word – Jotaro realizes he’d underestimated the man’s age. He’s got to be in his seventies, at least.
“But the hull – it’s sound?”
“Not a dent in her.”
Just for show, the man leans over the bulwark to rap his fist against the side of the boat. A satisfying, solid whump rings out. Jotaro closes his eyes.
“Engine runs real smooth too,” the man continues. “Just had her refinished a few seasons back.”
Forty grand. That’s half his goddamn mortgage.
“I’m from away. You got a number?”
The man pulls the rag out from his jeans pocket, wiping his hands on it. From the looks of the rag, it’s a symbolic gesture more than anything – good old fashioned southern manners of a kind. “Let me get you a card from the old tour business – it’s a home number, so it’ll still be in service.”
It’s when the man turns disappears into the wheelhouse that Jotaro feels a presence at his back.
“What’cha doing?” asks Jolyne, from a height far greater than Jolyne’s voice has any business being.
Jotaro clenches his fists, mentally counts to three, and spins around. There’s his daughter, holding a trip-quadruple scoop ice cream cone the size of her head – a sickening cotton-candy-bubble-gum-birthday-cake-rainbow-sprinkle concoction that practically gives him a stomach ulcer from just looking at it. Already the treat is in the early stages of melting. Ice cream trickles down the cone and over the tiny pink fist wrapped around it, dripping down in fat droplets onto the dark, wild mass of hair that Jolyne’s free hand is currently buried in.
“Get down from there,” he says, and he doesn’t wait for the protests to come before grabbing hold of Jolyne and pulling her from Star Platinum’s shoulders, because in this case, actions are easier than words, at least when using his words means explaining to his daughter that from an outsider’s perspective, she currently appears to be floating seven feet in the air.
Sharing what equates to an imaginary friend with his daughter can be a challenge at times.
Thankfully, the microcosmic drama unfolds without witness. The boat’s owner returns. Jotaro is given a business card, and without any further incident, they are on their way back to the parking lot.
“You’re not gonna buy that boat, are you?” Jolyne asks.
“No.” After a moment’s hesitation, he adds: “Don’t tell your mother.”
“Only if you buy me an ice cream.”
“I already bought you one,” he says, noting that she seems to be in no rush to give him back his change.
He takes a second glance at the size of the ice cream in Jolyne’s hand and shoots Star Platinum a stern look, as if he expects his Stand to know what is considered a reasonable sugar intake for a developing child.
“Fine – then I want a piggy back.”
“Forget it.”
“Not from Star, from you,” Jolyne clarifies.
His feet stop moving beneath him. Out of the corner of his eye, he looks down at the girl beside him, at her bunched up fists and the expression of pure determination that makes her look so much older than her five years. For a moment, he mulls over his options, but only for a moment – he’s carried far greater burdens on his shoulders than this, after all.
Removing his hat, he sets it down on top of Jolyne’s head before scooping the girl up and setting her up on his shoulders. She squeals and kicks her feet, digging the heels of her sneakers into his shoulders, before settling down and gripping his hair between her sticky, candy-colored fingers.
As he walks back to the car, Star Platinum directs his attention to several boats it has decided it likes (his Stand’s expectations are even more unrealistic and far-fetched than his own), while his daughter hums the melody to the theme song of some Saturday morning cartoon he remembers watching with her once.
All in all, it’s a pretty decent way to spend a Saturday.
***
On the pretense of doing research at the city’s aquarium, Jotaro takes a trip up to New York the following weekend.
The last time he’d seen Joseph had been before the divorce, so it’s a shock to see the changes that have come over the man since then. His grandfather’s eyelids flag throughout dinner. More than once Jotaro has to repeat himself, and whenever Suzie asks Joseph a question a brief delay follows, as if he’s stuck on a different internal clock from the rest of them, just a moment out of sync. Jotaro makes note of how Joseph’s whole person seems to be under the effect of gravity, the way he sits pitched forward on his elbows – the way his spine arches and his head seems too heavy for his thin, corded neck.
In other respects, however, his grandfather is still very much the same person he was ten, twenty, sixty years ago. He tells jokes over dinner, and though his delivery’s gotten slower and he has to pause often to remember the next line, his wit’s as sharp and inappropriate as ever. He bickers with his wife, fusses like a child when Roses doesn’t put enough sugar in his tea, and all in all, acts far too petty and upbeat for a man who’s lived the kind of life he has. But then, perhaps he’s just good at compartmentalizing. Jotaro wonders, at times like this, if it’s really only just him who’s never been able to move on.
“What brings you to New York?” Joseph asks, after the table’s been cleared off and they’ve rejoined in the sitting room.
“I’m here on a research trip.”
“Besides that, I mean.”
There are things Jotaro wants, and things Jotaro needs, but he’s never been one to voice them in such a way – never been one to let on that he’s in want of anything. So what he says instead is:
“I was looking at taking out a loan.”
“What for? Not planning on buying a new house, are you?”
Without another word, he pulls out the crumpled-up print out from his pocket and hands it to Joseph. A long delay follows. Joseph spends three minutes rooting around for his glasses, and another minute cleaning the lenses on the corner of his sleeve. By the time he finally turns his attention to the print-out, Jotaro’s palms are sweating.
“The Wild Rose, eh?”
“I wasn’t planning on keeping the name.”
“It’s bad luck to change a boat’s name, you know.”
Jotaro doesn’t answer.
After reading over the page one last time, Joseph folds it in half before handing it back. “Forty grand’s a lot of money.”
It is – but Jotaro’s already run the numbers through his head a few times, enough to know that it’s doable. “I have ten grand set aside for a rainy day that I can pay up front. The university wants to hire me on as a tutor, so there’s some extra money there.”
Into a grin, Joseph’s lips quirk. “Better off scratching the itch while you’re still young, eh?”
And once again, his grandfather seems to be fighting against gravity, the corners of his mouth falling back into place no sooner than he closes his mouth.
***
Between his fifteen grand and a twenty-five grand loan from his grandparents, Jotaro finds himself the owner of a boat.
He learns a thing or two about the boat – the Wild Rose, it’s been called for the past thirty years – after the paperwork’s gone through and he’s handed over the vessel licence and registration, along with a complete maintenance history. For one, what he’s been calling a trawler is actually a longliner, custom-built in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia with the original purpose of hooking cod on the Bering Sea. As the previous owner had told him, however, all the fishing gear had long been sold off and freighted to God knows where.
The tow truck shows up at his house on a Wednesday due to a scheduling mishap. He turns his back on temptation and lets the boat sit in the yard until the weekend, but it’s taxing being able to look but not to touch, especially when the damn thing is sitting right in front of him every time he opens the blinds in the morning. To make matters worse, the anticipation he feels roiling in his gut is doubled on account of the two-way feedback he shares with his Stand. After all: he isn’t the only one looking forward to getting down to work.
When he stumbles into the kitchen that Saturday, there’s half a hardware store laid out on the breakfast table. Sandpaper, buffers, paint brushes, and cans upon cans of resin epoxy – everything needed to repair a fiberglass hull, and he remembers buying approximately none of it.
He takes a swig of coffee, swishing it around in his mouth as he reaches out to pick up one of the cans of epoxy.
“Are you sure this is the right stuff?” he asks, as he glances over the label.
He feels a flare of – annoyance, maybe? Impatience? It’s hard to place – when Star Platinum manifests at his side. Around his wrist its hand closes, and suddenly he’s being pulled toward the front door.
In the boatyard, surround by commercial fishing and freighting vessels, there’d been no real way of gauging the scale of the boat. Forty-eight feet seems like a small number on paper. But with the thing parked in his driveway, side-by-side his modest one-story house in the suburbs, there is no denying that the boat is big. Taller than the house, and just as long.
Star Platinum’s grip loosens, but its hand remains looped around his wrist, where his skin tingles at the contact. When he turns to look at his Stand’s face, its eyes are raised up and at the boat, the light of its body pulsing faintly. Like a heartbeat. In perfect tandem a tremor hums over Jotaro’s skin, all electric nerves and energy.
Truth be told, Jotaro’s not certain whether the boat is the product of his desire, or Star’s. His interests had always been focused on what lay below the water, on the ocean bed where life teemed and bloomed. Only after being around Star Platinum for so long did he cease to see the ocean as a means to an end, and traveling on its surface as an act of necessity. A younger him might have been alarmed by the idea of his Stand slowly altering his personality, but it’s an idea that Jotaro’s learned to embrace over the years, just as he’s learned to embrace the small gifts that keep appearing on his desk and the physiological empathy he and his Stand share.
“Excited, are we?” Jotaro asks.
He can’t help but smile at the intrusive feeling of gratitude that warms him from his core – and maybe, just maybe, he’s a little pleased with himself, because how often does he get to impress his Stand? Not content with their empathic connection alone, Star rubs its cheek against the top of his head, knocking off his hat in the process.
“Alright, enough already,” Jotaro mutters as he gently shoves Star away. “We’ve got work to do.”
***
Saturdays and Sundays come and go. Fair weather days grow fewer and far between as the rainy season closes in on the Atlantic coast. With each passing day the mercury falls a little lower – and still, Jotaro Kujo spends every spare moment transforming his third-hand dinghy into something so much more. And each day he spends out in the driveway with his shirt sleeves rolled up and a sweat breaking out over his back, Star Platinum spends with him. He knows by now what his stand is capable of; knows, too, how easy it would be to approach the task at hand the same way he’s approached all his previous trials, relying on Star’s strength and speed to get things done in a hurry.
But this isn’t a life or death scenario, and the project isn’t one he wants finished off like so many battles he’s fought before. If he’s going to do this, he’s going to do it the right way, and above all, he’s going to savour it. In the end, he’s used up enough blood and sweat to rival the cans of resin epoxy they’ve gone through, and he’s made enemies of his neighbours for how loud the work can be at times and how late into the night it can often carry on, but in the end, it’s all worth it – and not just for the results.
He enjoys the process, start middle and finish. There’s the work and that’s part of it, but it’s Star too and having the chance to do something meaningful together. On some level, everything they do is a joint effort. They are a symbiotic organism, after all – they need one another to survive. Day to day life, however, is made for routine, and it’s hard to bond when they’re just going through the paces. They’ve always communicated best through doing, Jotaro because he’s no good with his words and Star Platinum because it has no other choice, but since Egypt there hasn’t been much in the way of doing.
It’s unnerving, how he almost misses the constant adrenaline and anxiety.
Right now, there’s sweat dampening the collar of his shirt and dirt on his elbows, but for the first time in ages it’s not because he’s emerged from a scuffle. He’s exhausted and his heart is pounding and he hasn’t even left the driveway.
Just for today, the weather is unseasonably hot and muggy for November. A south wind rolled up in town earlier that week, dragging with it a heatwave and a monsoon. The latter feels like a relief in the wake of the former.
Jotaro drops down the last few rungs of the later, feet landing with a slap on the wet asphalt. Two hours doing minor engine repairs had him shimmying up and down in a crawl space only just tall and wide enough to accommodate his bulky shoulders. After the sweltering heat of the confined space, the rain on his bare skin feels like an answered prayer. Mist rolls off the pavement, warm and thick against his calves as he sprawls out on the boat’s cradle and fishes a beer out of the cooler.
Star Platinum drifts to his side, a tarp in hand. It holds up the item in front of him, its lips pursing in a silent question.
He shakes his head. “I’m fine, thanks.”
Scooting over, he pats the space beside him.
They sit together listening to the rain while Jotaro finishes off his beer. Star’s always been on the side of antsy; it shows just now in the way his Stand continually flexes its fingers. Part of its design, Jotaro thinks. If stands were biological creatures, he might speculate that they’d evolved through the selection of traits that optimized the species for short, sudden bursts of energy in order to survive in battle. Short, sudden bursts of existence, in practical terms. Stands were not, he thinks, ever meant to spend much time on idle.
He and Star are a lot alike, in that way.
Two birds, one stone: he soothes both their restlessness by rubbing his Stand’s back. The action gives his hands something to do, and something for Star Platinum to focus on. His stand rumbles appreciatively, allowing its head to drop to Jotaro’s shoulder where it huffs and noses softly at his collarbone.
At long last, he crushes the empty can against the ground and rises to his feet. “Almost done,” he says, more to himself than to his Stand.
Star follows as he wheels the ladder around to the back of the boat. Already knowing exactly what’s on his mind, it hands him the paint scraper before he makes is way up the rungs.
Changing a boat’s name was bad luck, Joseph had warned him. Jotaro wasn’t one for believing in luck, or chance or fate or whatever name people liked to dress it up as. Without a second thought, he scrapes off the peeling mauve letters that spelt out the name, Wild Rose. By the time he’s through, it’s as though there’d never been anything written on the boat’s transom. All that’s left is a clean, blank slate.
He doesn’t believe in luck or chance or fate, but he believes in new beginnings, and if he’s going to own a boat, then he’s going to make it his own.
***
“I don’t want to go.”
“Why not?”
“Cause I don’t like it when the boat feels like it’s gonna tip.”
“I never tipped the boat before, did I?”
“But it felt like you were gonna.”
They’re on the docks at the same marina in Fort Lauderdale they’d visited nearly three months ago. The late warm spell didn’t hold; Jolyne’s in her winter coat, shivering in the wind that cuts across the open water. He kneels before her, coat tails bunching on the ground.
“It’s not like the other boat,” he explains. “It’s big, like being in a house. You barely notice you’re on the water.”
Jolyne turns her head away. Her cheeks are rosy and mottled, rubbed raw by the high winds.
“You have your own cabin. Don’t you want to see it?” he asks.
This time, he gets a reaction – but it’s not the one he expected. Her eyes glass over and when she opens her mouth, her lower lip trembles. “Daddy, I’m scared.”
He’s no good at this sort of thing, never has been. For a moment, he feels like he’s a teenager all over again, back when he relied on using his Stand to express all his pent-up rage. It’s only the emotions themselves that have changed.
Just like back then, Star Platinum can express what he cannot; it’s better at giving hugs, just as it’s better at throwing a punch.
In his Stand’s arms, Jolyne’s sobs die down immediately.
At arm’s length, Jotaro finds himself able to say: “Look… we don’t even have to leave the dock. If you want, we can stay moored the whole time. You won’t even have to go up on deck.”
“Promise?” Jolyne asks, reaching for him with fingers outsplayed.
He hesitates – before taking her hand. Star shuffles closer, transferring Jolyne from its arms to his. When he opens his mouth to speak again, his windpipe feels like it’s closing in on itself.
“Yeah, promise.”
Because there’s no one around, he lets Star carry Jolyne onboard, more for his sake than hers. It’s ridiculous to admit, but he’s goddamn terrified that he’ll screw up somehow – that he’ll drop his daughter, or slip while climbing up the ladder and put them both in the harbour.
Suffice to say, they all make it aboard in one piece. Jolyne takes a moment to acclimatize to the feeling of the boat rocking beneath her, settling into a wide stance to compensate for her wobbling legs. When a particularly large wave smacks against the hull, she lets out a screech and grabs his pant leg.
On the back of her head, he lays a hand.
“Come on,” he coaxes.
Down below in the cabins, out of the wind and with the battery-powered space heater running at full blast, it’s actually cozy. There’s a small built-in dinette just behind the galley, with cushioned benches and a table with fold-out leafs. He parks himself there, just below the porthole window where he can watch the ocean spray fly up against the vessel’s side.
He’d expected Jolyne to go off somewhere – curl up on one of the berths with her gaming system, maybe – but she sticks close, sliding wordlessly into the booth across from him. Nerves, perhaps.
That said, Jolyne settles down in no time at all. When she’s warmed up and her teeth have stopped chattering, she even pulls out a colouring book and a box of crayons and sets to work on a picture of a field with wild horses while Jotaro grades undergraduate biology papers.
He should be concentrating on his work, but he can’t help but glance up every now and then to observe the process unfolding before him. And ‘process’ is the only way he can really describe it. In place of picking out colours on her own, Jolyne has Star Platinum hand her crayons, one at a time. The results are… fascinating, if not somewhat eye-gouging, given that ‘colours Star Platinum thinks are neat’ and ‘reasonable colours for grass’ do not at any point categorically intersect.
Jolyne’s in the middle of colouring one of the ponies orange and aqua blue when Jotaro clears his throat.
“Boat needs a name, you know,” he supplies.
At him Jolyne glances, crayon hovering just above the page. “You’re asking me?”
In place of an answer, he shrugs.
“What kind of names do people usually give boats?” she wonders out loud.
“Could be anything. People usually pick a name that means something to them.”
Jolyne takes a moment to chew at the inside of her cheek as her brain sorts through the (extremely short) list of important and meaningful things it has managed to accrue over five brief years of existence. This she undertakes with so much severity that Jotaro finds himself at the edge of his seat with curiosity, when finally –
“I like butterflies, I guess,” Jolyne says with an air of finality.
“What kind? Swallowtail, Monarch?”
The face Jolyne makes just then is one he suspects is similar to the one he wears while grading undergraduate papers. Or at least, it manages to perfectly capture the feeling he gets while doing so.
“You know,” she repeats. “Butterflies.”
“…Right.” His eyes drift back to the papers, to the red pen in his hand. There’s red ink smudged against the pads of his fingers, and on the heel of his palm where it dragged over still-wet pages. “Just ‘Butterfly’, then.”
Nonetheless, because Jolyne came up with it and because it’s Jolyne, he can’t help but think the name is perfect.
***
For months on end, his weekends with Jolyne and weekends with clear weather orbit around him, and nary the two intersect. It’s the time of year, he figures. But then in March a Saturday rolls around, clear blue skies and an optimistic outlook for the days to come, and for once, Jolyne is there to meet the meteorologists halfway.
When Jotaro shows up unannounced at his ex-wife’s house an hour early, there’s already a knapsack and packed lunch sitting by the door. Jolyne practically trips down the driveway, trying to pull her sneakers over her heels while walking at the same time. He can’t recall ever seeing her in such a rush.
This time, he’s the one who gets the first hug.
***
The marina is swarming with activity by the time they get there. What with today being the first nice day since November, half of Eastern Florida seems eager to get an early jump on the boating season. There are cranes and tow trucks ferrying up and down the shipyard, moving vessels off blocks and down to the docks, and the vessels’ owners are all standing around talking shop. Jotaro’s never been good with crowds, perhaps even less so now – he pulls Jolyne close and sets off in a stiff, brisk walk, eyes focused straight ahead.
Only when they’re aboard the longliner does he allow himself to relax. In the wheelhouse he drops into the captain’s chair, letting out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding as he allows his palms to come down to rest on the console. Star Platinum manifests at his side, slipping into a languid stretch like it’s been cooped up too long – before the navigation equipment catches its eye mid-stretch. Over to the console his Stand drifts, peering curiously at the various dials and radar screens. Jotaro wonders if it’s the devices themselves that interest Star, or if it’s trying to make sense of the data.
“Dad?”
Jolyne’s poised at the entrance to the wheelhouse. There’s unmasked displeasure in her voice, which he figures likely has something to do with the sunshine-yellow life jacket she’s currently stuff in.
“How’s the fit?” he asks.
“This is stupid. Do I have to wear it?”
“Yup.”
“Even inside?”
“You heard me.”
At the collar of the life jacket Jolyne tugs with exaggerated desperation, affecting the mannerisms of victim of strangulation. Jotaro just rolls his eyes and turns back to the console.
“Don’t undo the buckles either.”
“It’s not fair,” Jolyne whines. “You’re not wearing one.”
“Don’t need one.”
He turns the ignition. There’s a rumble below as the engines come alive, and any further protest from Jolyne is drowned amidst the noise.
After giving the engines a minute to warm up, he eases on the throttle, and The Butterfly inches backwards until it slips completely from its mooring. With a feeling of satisfaction, he listens to the gurgle of the engines kick up into a roar as they gather speed heading out of the harbour.
Jolyne watches his hands on the wheel with wide-eyed wonder; it’s only a matter of time before she asks:
“Can I drive?”
“No.”
“Come oooooon. Can I at least blow the whistle?”
He shoots her what he hopes is a withering look. “You,” he says, “can sit in the co-captain’s chair.”
Of course Jolyne grumbles, but whether out of persistence or because giving it a title makes it seem more important than it really is, she slumps into the adjacent seat and kicks her feet up on the console.
***
They head south, skirting along the coastline. By the time Jotaro decides to drop anchor, the afternoon sun is already beginning to cool, but that’s fine – he’d planned for an overnighter, and the weather seems fit to hold.
Jolyne watches as he hauls out his nets and diving equipment.
“What’cha doing?”
By then, he’s midway through putting on his buoyancy compensator vest.
“I have to collect specimens as part of my doctorate.”
“You’re gonna dive all the way to the bottom?”
“Yup.”
Over the bulwark, Jolyne leans. This time of year, the ocean is an opaque dark blue – from the surface, it’s like looking down at an alien world, as far removed and unreachable as the stars at night.
“Do you think there’s any sharks down there?”
“Sure.” He pauses from calibrating his dive computer, struck by a sudden recollection. “I punched a shark once, you know.”
Either Jolyne doesn’t believe him or she’s harder to impress than he thought, because she shrugs aside the remark and pushes right to her next question:
“Can I come too?”
“You don’t have the right equipment.”
Jolyne’s eyes narrow – portents of the storm that’s bound to head his way if he doesn’t do something soon. Because she is after all his daughter, and the sum of everything she’s inherited from him includes more than just physiognomy. There’s a rage in her he knows too well, but with her it’s a slow-burning sort, a distant rumbling thunder that occasionally uncoils in a lightning strike. And, unlike him, her anger flows more often through her lips than through her fists. She has a clear-headed articulacy he’s never possessed, and that just means he’s at a loss for how to deal with her, when she gets up her temper like this.
“You never let me do anything,” she complains, voice warbling like a violin string. “I want to go home.”
He’s not sure how one goes about making the logical leap from ‘not being allowed to drive a $40,000 commercial vessel’ and ‘not being allowed to dive in dangerous seas without equipment or training’ to ‘not being allowed to do anything’, but something about the tone of her voice makes him waver. Before he realizes what he’s doing, the words are already past his lips.
“You ever dissected anything before?”
***
“Don’t tell your mother,” Jotaro repeats for neither the first nor last time in his life.
“I wasn’t gonna.”
As she pokes around in the bucket – its contents courtesy of Jotaro’s dive – dimples form between her eyebrows. “I thought marine biologists studies whales and sharks and stuff.”
“I wouldn’t be able to fit a whale on this boat. Besides – my research is focused on Echinoderms.”
“Those are like starfish, right?”
Crouching, he sticks his hands into the bucket. “Invertebrates with radial symmetry – but yes, it includes sea stars. Here.”
Jolyne holds out her hands, palms cupped, only to immediately jerk away with a squeak when he pulls out a sea star.
“I’m not touching that!”
“It’s not slimy – it just tickles a bit.”
Jolyne tenses, but she keeps her hands out at least. When he places the sea star in her open palms she winces at looks away – though only for a moment. Then she’s opening her eyes to look at the wriggling, living thing in her hands, and no sooner do her eyes settle on the fat body and stumpy limbs of the sea star that Jotaro realizes, with a pang of remorse, that she’s in love. And sure enough –
“I don’t think I want to dissect this one,” Jolyne remarks. “He’s kinda cute.”
“That’s an Oreaster reticulates – a Cushion Sea Star.”
Across Jolyne’s fingers the sea star extends a limb, feeling around with its tube feet. She gasps, letting out a giggle. “I think he likes me.”
She looks up at him with an expression he’s all too familiar with by now – it’s the same she wears whenever she’s been caught doing something wrong.
“Can we put him back? Please?” she asks.
You need at least a dozen more specimens to complete your preliminary findings, Jotaro reminds himself. This is the whole reason you’re out here in the first place.
Yet here he is, watching as Jolyne whispers a word of parting to the sea star before tilting her hands over the bulwark. Starfish, they both learn, are not particularly aerodynamic. This one hits the water with a wince-inducing slap. For a moment, it floats at the surface – before slowly drifting downward, rocking with the motion of the waves.
The thing’s probably dead now anyway, but…
Beside him Jolyne is beaming. He’ll just have to make due, somehow.
***
After the excitement dies down, he selects another specimen from the bucket to work on – an Astopecten articulates. Royal blue with orange marginal plates, it almost looks like a cartoon drawing of a star. This time, he doesn’t make the mistake of letting Jolyne hold the thing first.
“How’s it eat, anyway?” Jolyne asks as he slips on a pair of rubber gloves
“It’s got pretty much all the same parts you do. It even has a primitive form of eyes.”
Jolyne balks. “It can see?”
“Sort of. Not quite.”
With the forceps, he grips one of the sea star’s legs, lifting it so that Jolyne can take a closer look.
“See at the tip there? – That’s an eyespot. It has one for each leg. They’re sensitive to light, so it can make out shadows.”
Flipping the sea star over, he motions to its gelatinous underside. “…And this is the oral side. That’s its mouth, at the center. It pushes its stomach out through there and wraps it around its prey.”
“That’s gross.”
“Want to try taking its stomach out?” he asks, offering her the forceps.
When Jolyne hesitates, he adds, “Don’t worry, it’s already dead. You’re not hurting it.”
Though she makes faces the entire time, Jolyne successfully extracts the stomach. Not only that, but she moves on to do the stomach glands and gonads too, with Jotaro explaining at each step what all the various organs do.
“You like this kind of thing?” he asks, when they’re cleaning up afterwards. He’d let Jolyne wear a pair of latex gloves – she’s in the process of peeling them off now, rolling up her sleeves to wash her hands like she’s been doing this for half a decade like he has.
“It’s kinda cool,” she says. “But I think I’d rather see them at the bottom, when they’re alive and stuff.”
Without thinking, he says, “Tell you what – how about I pick you up some equipment and sign you up for diving lessons? If you decide you like it, I’ll take you on an expedition some time.”
Jolyne breaks out in a grin. It’s big and ugly and uneven, with an assortment of adult and baby teeth all vying for space along her gums, but he can’t think of a single smile he enjoys seeing more. “When?” she asks, with an absolute pronounced certainly that leaves no room for whys or hows.
Though she’s getting taller by the day, growing out of her clothes as fast as she can wear them in, she’s not yet old enough to understand that a promised made by an adult is still a promise that’s liable to be broken.
Jotaro knows better, but he’s too caught up by her enthusiasm, and by the novelty of the idea, to think too long on the consequences. “Soon,” he says. “When the weather warms up a bit.”
The weather does indeed warm up. Southeast Florida gets one of the mildest springs it’s had in decades – but not before Jotaro Kujo receives a phone call from New York, and not long after that, a single airline ticket to Morioh, Japan, with no scheduled return trip.
Bit by bit, in the busyness of living, he gradually forgets all about his impromptu promise.