IT IS A STORY EMBEDDED IN THE very fibers of my heart, and it has changed the direction of my life, but it is not my story. Oh, I’ve managed to insert myself into some of its chapters, but I am a long way from being one of the principal characters. They have been silenced by an enormous tragedy and its aftermath, and have selected me to give voice to a story that needs telling. I choose to begin the account on November 24, 1995, but really, that is when the story ends. On November 23, 1995, all over the United States people were enjoying Thanksgiving with their families, in their homes. The Sleavin family celebrated in the cockpit of their sailboat, the Melinda Lee, sailing toward New Zealand. They were about seventy-five miles from its coast, and they expected to be there by the next morning. This might not have been a conventional Thanksgiving celebration, but they were not a conventional family. The Sleavins had been away from home for almost three years, and they planned to settle down somewhere in New Zealand for a while.
