A Star to Steer Her By

by Beth Anne Miller

  His eyes blazed, and he stalked forward, so he was right in my face.

  “He’s not okay, though, is he? They just dug a rifle slug out of his arm. They’ve given him two blood transfusions so far, and they’re waiting to see if he needs another one. They’re worried about infection, too, in which case they might have to fly him to Miami for treatment. And, he hasn’t woken up yet. So I’d say that my son is bloody well not okay!”

  He took a step back. “Go back to the ship, Ms. Goodman. We’ll discuss your violation of the rules another time.”

  Something inside me snapped. “Is that what you’re concerned with, your rules?” I shouted. “I just swam through a swarm of frenzied tiger sharks—the same kind that tore my leg open—wondering if your son, who was bleeding from a bullet wound, was going to be their next target.

  “I stabbed one of them with a dive knife to keep it from biting your son, and then watched the other sharks tear it to pieces five feet away from me. And then I had to get your son, who was unconscious, back to the boat a hundred feet away, while trying to keep pressure on his bleeding arm, hoping the goddamn sharks didn’t follow us.”

  I dashed away the tears that spilled from my eyes. “And now, I’ve just spent hours alone in the waiting room, wondering what the hell was going on back here. So you’ll excuse me for saying this, Captain, but I don’t give a shit about your rules right now. There are things in life that are more important than rules and grades.” So much for the nice, respectful girl I used to be.

  The captain’s face went white and he staggered back against the wall. Oh shit. I dropped my backpack to the floor and took his arm, guiding him to a chair. “Are you okay?” Please tell me I didn’t just give him a heart attack or something.

  “I—” He swallowed hard. “I didn’t know about the sharks.” His eyes flicked down, and I saw that the bottom half of my scar was visible beneath the leg of my shorts.

  “Please, Captain. If you want to flunk me for getting involved with Tristan, then so be it. But I need to see him.”

  He nodded once, and I scooped up my bag and slipped inside the room. Tristan was asleep, his left arm held in place with a sling, the white of the bandages stark against his skin. An IV line ran from his right hand up to a bag suspended from a pole, and there was a machine monitoring his blood pressure and heart rate.

  I dropped my bag and went over to the bed. He looked so pale, so vulnerable, laying there, the sheet pulled halfway up his bare chest. Wasn’t he cold? I laid my left hand over his, and was relieved to find that he was warm. As usual, his hair was in his eyes, and I reached up with my right hand to brush it back, trailing my fingers gently over his cheek.

  His fingers tightened on mine. “Red? That you?” His voice was a little slurred.

  “I’m here,” I whispered.

  His eyes slowly opened, and his lips curved in a small smile. “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “I…don’t know, actually. Just seems like the right thing to do in a hospital room. How do you feel?”

  “Not too bad. Just very…sleepy.” His eyes closed, then opened again—he was clearly fighting to stay awake.

  “Sleep, Tristan. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Ari?”

  “Yeah?”

  He squeezed my hand. “Thank you. For saving me. So brave…” As his eyes drifted shut, he muttered something else in Gaelic that I hadn’t heard before. There was a quick intake of breath behind me and I turned to see Captain MacDougall standing in the doorway, his eyes wide with surprise.

  I pressed my lips to Tristan’s forehead, then shouldered my bag and left the room. A moment later, the captain joined me in the hallway. He leaned against the wall and studied me for a moment, his arms folded across his chest.

  “What is it?” I asked. His intense stare, so like Tristan’s, was intimidating, but I was done with trying to be respectful.

  “Do you know what he said just now, at the end?”

  “Something…aka morsht? I didn’t catch it all, and I’m not sure of the pronunciation. Why?”

  “It was tha gaol agam ort.”

  “Ha gay-ul akam orsht,” I repeated, stumbling over the strange words. “Do you know what it means?” His pensive expression had me curious.

  “It means ‘I love you,’” he said, continuing to watch me closely.

  I stared at him, suddenly unable to move.

  He took my arm. “Come, Ari, let’s get you back to the ship. You look like you’re about to keel over. We’ll come back tomorrow.” I let him lead me down the hallway, dimly realizing it was the first time he’d called me by my first name. But I had other things to think about.

  It means ‘I love you’…

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  We took a taxi back to the ship. Neither of us spoke in the car, and the silence was really awkward—for me, at least. I’d just screamed at my captain, the man who ruled the ship and could send me home immediately, with a failing grade for company on the flight. The same man who just calmly told me that his son loved me.

  How could my heart be filled with dread and joy at the same time?

  We arrived at the marina. Captain MacDougall paid the driver and got out of the car, striding off down the dock. I followed slowly, not ready to face anyone yet. Hopefully they were all still off enjoying their free day in Nassau.

  No one was in sight when I reached the Meg. I headed for the foredeck and opened my backpack. I took out my wetsuit so I could lay it out to dry in the late afternoon sun. A metallic smell wafted up from the wet neoprene.

  I knew that smell. It was one of my clearest memories following my shark bite: the coppery smell of my blood, spilling onto the deck of the boat from my maimed leg.

  I looked down at my hands. Blood. From my wetsuit.

  Tristan’s blood.

  The wetsuit slipped from my hands and dropped to the deck in a wet heap. There was a sudden sharp pain in my knees—from what?

  “Ms. Goodman…Ari…are you all right?” I blinked up at the captain. Why is he looking at me like that…Wait, why am I on my knees on the deck? “Ari?”

  I looked at the pile of wet neoprene in front of me. That smell—I had to get away from the smell of Tristan’s blood. “Get it away from me!” I cried, lurching to my feet.

  I heard him shouting from somewhere far away. I couldn’t breathe. All I could see was Tristan’s limp form in the water, blood pouring from his arm, the sharks drawing closer…

  “Take a deep breath and let it out. And another. Good. Just breathe, Ari. You’re okay. You’re on the Meg, and you’re safe. Just breathe.”

  The soothing voice sounded just like Tristan’s when I panicked on the first dive and he’d had to talk me down, and I slowly returned to myself. I was sitting on the deck and the captain knelt before me, cleaning the blood off my hands with a washcloth as if I were a small child. I wondered whether I’d fallen into another dimension, but everything around me looked the same.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, my voice hoarse.

  “He’s going to be okay, Ari.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Why don’t you go lie down?”

  “Okay.” He helped me to my feet. “Wait. My wetsuit…” I couldn’t leave it like that, but I couldn’t bear the thought of washing Tristan’s blood out of it, either.

  “I’ll take care of it, don’t worry.”

  “Thank you.”

  We reached the hatch, and I turned back to him. “Captain, do you have a phone?”

  “Aye, I do. But we need to let Tristan rest now. You can see him tomorrow.”

  I shook my head. “I want to call my parents.” I needed to hear my mom’s voice, even though I’d scare the hell out of her with this call.

  The captain escorted me to a bench on the dock and handed me a mobile phone. “I’d like to speak to them first.”

  My heart sank, not for the first time today. He was going to tell them that he was sending me home, tha
t I’d be failing for the semester. I entered in the number and handed the phone back to him, tucking my cold hands under my thighs to try to warm them.

  He pressed send and held the phone up to his ear, pacing back and forth in front of the railing.

  While he waited for the call to go through, I turned to look at the Meg. She sat quietly at the dock, the American flag at the top of the mast rippling proudly in the breeze. We were maybe thirty minutes from sunset, likely my last sunset as a member of the student crew of the Meg.

  I wasn’t ready to say good-bye to her.

  “Mr. Goodman? This is Captain Brian MacDougall from the Megaptera Novaengliae. Yes, Ari’s fine. She’s sitting right here, and I’ll put her on in a moment. But I wanted to speak with you first. Yes, I’ll wait for you to get Mrs. Goodman on the line as well.”

  Here it comes. I felt like I was sitting in the principal’s office, waiting to be suspended from school. Not that I’d ever experienced that, but this is probably what it would feel like—cold, sweaty palms, roiling stomach, the knowledge that you’ve disappointed everyone.

  “Yes, Mrs. Goodman, this is Captain MacDougall. She’s fine, I promise. Are you both on the line? Okay, good. I wanted to inform you both about an incident that occurred today involving your daughter. I assure you that she’s fine, but as a parent myself, I’d want to know if it was my child.” He cleared his throat. “In fact, it was.”

  Wait, this isn’t about Tristan and me?

  “My son, Tristan, is a deckhand aboard the ship, and he and Ari were diving together when he was…injured, rather severely. Your daughter, at great risk to herself, got Tristan out of the water and back to shore.” He sank down on the bench beside me and took a deep, shuddering breath. “She saved my son’s life.”

  He turned and looked me right in the eye as he spoke. “I owe her a debt that I can never repay.” The meaning behind that look was clear. I won’t be sending you home, or telling Marine Classroom about you and Tristan. He inclined his head, and I nodded in return. Message sent, message received. “You should be very proud of her. I’ll put her on now.” He handed me the phone and walked over to the rail.

  I stared at the phone for a moment. Well, here goes. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”

  “Ari? What happened? The captain said his son was ‘severely injured’? What does that mean?” My mom’s voice was high-pitched with panic. I knew how she felt.

  I thought about lying, maybe telling them Tristan had cut himself on—I don’t know, something. But I was the worst liar ever, even over the phone. And the captain was standing three feet away. There was no way I could pull that off.

  “Ari? Are you there?”

  “I’m here.” I looked up at the captain. He nodded encouragingly. I took a deep breath and launched into the story.

  Five minutes later, I was crying, my mom was crying, and my dad—well, he was actually pretty quiet. I took a deep breath and tried to get myself under control.

  “Are you coming home?” asked my dad.

  “No, Dad. I’m finishing the semester.” If the captain wasn’t kicking me off the ship, there was no way in hell I was leaving.

  “Ari, you were shot at! You might have been hit, or those sharks might have—”

  “That’s right, Dad! Might have. A lot of things might have happened. But they didn’t. I’m staying on the ship.”

  “Ari—”

  “Dad, listen to me. Almost eight months ago, I was wounded so badly by that shark that I didn’t even know if I would walk again—at least not in those first few days. Then I was terrified to get back in the water, and I thought I’d never be able to dive again. The thing I loved doing more than anything—gone. Do you know what that felt like? Every time I looked at the water, I felt those teeth clamping down on my leg. I had nightmares every night.

  “When the letter came from Marine Classroom, it was the worst possible irony. I’d been accepted into my dream program, and I was terrified—terrified of going in the water, of even looking at the water, of having people see my scar and having to tell them what happened. Did you know that I composed a letter declining my acceptance?”

  “No, we had no idea.”

  “Well, I did, Mom. And every day, I opened it, thinking ‘This will be the day I turn down the semester at sea. This will be the day I become a quitter.’ But I couldn’t do it. And so I came out here, scared to death. In those first days on the ship, every time I looked at the water, I imagined sharks lurking below the surface. On the first dive we did, I thought I saw a shark and had a panic attack. Tristan had to get me back to the boat after I nearly drowned us both.” I heard a sharp gasp. “I didn’t tell you, Mom, because I didn’t want you to worry.

  “But since then, I’ve been back in the water a bunch of times, and each time, it gets easier. Even when I saw the sharks passing by on the dive this morning, I was afraid at first, but then I was okay. I was able to finally call Josh, and maybe make things right with him. I’ve gotten back the two things I thought I’d lost forever.”

  I took a deep breath. “And I’m not going to come home. Not yet. I’m going to sail with the Meg into New York City. Not only that, I’m going to be at the helm when we sail into New York City.”

  Okay, that was a bold statement to make. But if I had to beg the captain, I would. He did say he owed me—dare I push my luck beyond him letting me stay on the ship? “And I’m going to look out at the crowd of family and friends waiting on the dock, and see you and Josh standing there, and it’s going to be the proudest moment of my life.”

  The silence on the other end of the line was deafening. I watched a pelican dive into the water and surface with a beak full of fish.

  “We’ll see you in New York,” my mother finally said. I could hear the tears in her voice, and I got all choked up again, too.

  “Thank you,” I whispered. I knew they couldn’t force me to come home, but I also knew how much they worried, and it meant everything to have their blessing.

  “We’re very proud of you, Ariana,” said my dad. “And we love you very much.”

  “And we hope your Tristan has a quick recovery,” added my mother.

  My Tristan.

  I finally ended the call and joined the captain at the rail. The look on his face was a combination of surprise and admiration, and I knew he’d heard everything I said. “Your parents are lucky to have such an amazing daughter. Thank you, Ari. For saving my son. He’s all I have now…”

  His voice trailed off, and I turned away, wanting to give him some privacy. Besides, the sun was beginning to set.

  “I wonder if Tristan can see the sunset from his window. He watches it every night, you know.”

  “He does?”

  “Yes. He stops whatever he’s doing.” I looked over at him. “It reminds him of his mother.”

  The captain’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t know that. How did I not know that?” he whispered, and I knew he wasn’t talking to me.

  We watched together as the sun tumbled into the sea and the first of the stars began to twinkle in the sky.

  Chapter Thirty

  After the sun set, the captain and I returned to the ship. I was completely drained, both physically and emotionally. I took a hot shower at the marina and crawled into my bunk. I didn’t want to have to face anyone, even if it meant sleeping down below. As exhausted as I was, every time I closed my eyes, I saw Tristan, lying in his hospital bed, his normally tan and powerful body looking pale and weak. It took forever to fall asleep.

  We glided over the reef amidst schools of colorful fish. It was quiet and serene—the only sound was the gentle hiss of our regulators. He held my hand in his, and every few minutes he would turn to look at me. I could see the love shining from his eyes.

  Suddenly, his eyes grew wide with shock and pain, and the water filled with blood. I reached out, trying to stop the bleeding, but no matter how hard I tried, it kept pouring out around my hands. Helpless to do anything, I watched the light fade
from his eyes. His hand slipped from mine, and he sank into the abyss…

  I jolted awake with my chest heaving, tears running down my face. I grabbed my blanket and went on deck, carefully stepping around my shipmates.

  I sat down on the salon roof and scooted back against the lifeboat, pulling my legs up and wrapping the blanket around me. It was 0300—we had hours left until sunrise, but there would be no more sleep for me tonight. I had too many thoughts running through my head: the terror of facing the sharks and getting Tristan to the boat, relief that he was going to be okay and that the captain wasn’t sending me home.

  I focused on the last one. Tristan was an amazing guy, and I would have risked anything to be with him. But it could have—should have—gotten me kicked off the Meg and sent home with a failing grade. If Tristan had been just another deckhand, not the captain’s son, and had the captain not been grateful to me for saving him, I would have been done. And while I was so relieved the captain was letting me stay, I couldn’t help but feel guilty that I was getting preferential treatment.

  I stared up at the stars, fainter than usual with the lights of Nassau around us, and wished Tristan was with me.

  I kept my silent vigil until darkness faded into dawn. As the sun’s first rays crept up over the eastern horizon, Jenny appeared next to me. “Mind if I sit?”

  “Of course not,” I said, moving over to make room. “Have some blanket,” I added, holding out the edge.

  She scooted closer and wrapped herself up. “Thanks. It is a little chilly out here. How are you holding up?”

  “I’ve been better. I didn’t sleep much.”

  “I didn’t think you would. Um, what happened with the captain?” she asked hesitantly. “Is he… He’s not going to make you leave, is he?”

  I shook my head. “No. I’m not sure if he would have, but after the stuff with Tristan getting hurt, he’s not going to.” I played with the edges of the blanket. “I feel a little weird about it, though. I mean, if it wasn’t his son that was involved, would he have sent me home?”