Girl at Sea

by Maureen Johnson

  “They must be back,” he said. “I didn’t hear them. Did you?”

  “No.”

  There were footsteps above. Clearly, everyone had come back. The boat angled itself, then switched to rapid forward movement.

  “We dropped them off,” he said. “How did they get back without the launch?”

  The sudden cutoff of the moment, combined with the movement, left Clio thrumming. She felt a little woozy.

  “I don’t know,” she mumbled. “My dad—”

  “This isn’t right,” Aidan said. “I don’t like this.”

  Clio was just recalling that he had said the same thing earlier, up in the wheelhouse, when the door opened. A man in a Nirvana T-shirt stepped inside. A stranger. He was a fairly small guy, with slightly tufty brown hair. He looked lost. He stared at Clio and Aidan. He looked around at the maps and laptops. He spoke to them in Italian. They looked at each other.

  “Who the hell are you?” Aidan asked.

  The stranger cocked his head, then in reply pulled a gun from his pocket and pointed it right at Clio.

  Prisoners

  Clio was having an epiphany. It was exploding across her mind, as epiphanies do.

  Movies won’t help you now, it said in its all-consuming echo. See how wrong they are about this? That’s a gun, and it’s pointing at you, and does this seem at all like something from a movie? No.

  Her brain flipped the gun into a few other objects. He was holding a stapler. He was threatening them with a hand blender. That was a wrench. A garden hose.

  “Hey,” Aidan said quickly. “It’s okay. You don’t…You don’t need to do that.”

  His words only seemed to confuse the man. The intruder noticed the com on the table and grabbed it. Then he glanced around and behind him, peering out into the hall but keeping the gun trained on them at all times. Then he stepped out and shut the door.

  Clio couldn’t even move.

  “What,” Aidan said, “the hell was that?”

  She managed to back toward Aidan a little, and they stood together in the corner, looking at the door.

  “Okay,” he said. “Apparently the boat is being stolen. What are you supposed to do? What’s the rule?”

  “Do you think he’s coming back?” Clio asked, her eyes darting around the room.

  “No idea. Probably?”

  There were voices in the hall. The door opened again, and the man stepped back in. Another man glanced around the door. The two men conferred. Then they waved Clio and Aidan out of the room and up the stairs. They sat them down on the living room floor against the sofa.

  Both men seemed nervous. One kept grimacing and laughing, walking around the room and picking things up. He was deeply tan, wore an Italy World Cup Champions T-shirt, and played with his lighter a lot. The other, the one who’d found them, was the smaller of the two. He sat at the table and watched them, tapping his fingers relentlessly. He held his gun loosely with his other hand, almost with the casualness that you might hold a cigarette. Neither, it was clear, spoke any English. Clio got the impression that whoever these men were, they hadn’t been expecting to find anyone on board.

  Of the many strange places she had been in her life, Clio had never been in the path of a gun. And the truth was, it was so completely scary that it almost ceased to be scary at all. Her mind seemed to have short-circuited on fear, leaving her unable to do anything but stare at the leather armchair and take in its every detail. It was kind of like they had invited very weird, awkward guests onto the boat. Guests who brought guns instead of snacks.

  For at least an hour, Aidan never moved his eyes from the glass doors. Then Clio heard him speaking in a very low voice when neither of the men was looking.

  “Look upset,” he whispered.

  She mouthed the word, “What?”

  “Look like you’re upset.”

  Clio tried her best to arrange her face in something that resembled extreme unhappiness. This should have been easier than it was. Her face didn’t really want to move. Aidan slipped his arms around her and pulled her comfortingly close.

  The guy at the table looked back, but this seemed to make some sense to him. They were still harmlessly on the floor, and he had the gun.

  Aidan’s face was right up next to her head now.

  “No matter what I say,” he said. “Just keep looking upset, okay?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t think these guys know what they’re doing,” he mumbled into her hair in a sort of cooing voice. “I think we’ve been heading due west. Maybe slightly southwest. And we’re going pretty fast. I have the feeling they’re heading for Corsica or Sardinia. There’s nowhere else to go unless they’re taking us to the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.”

  Looking upset got a little easier.

  “If you were a boat thief,” Aidan said, singsonging away and rocking her a little, “and you had just stolen a million-dollar yacht loaded down with expensive toys, what would you do with two people you found hiding belowdeck?”

  “I don’t know,” she mumbled, keeping on her sad face.

  “People will shoot you for your wallet on a dark street. I think they might be prepared to do that for an eighty-foot yacht. They look nervous. Nervous is not good for us. So I suggest we make a decision before it comes to that.”

  “What decision?” Clio said, managing a few tears.

  “The kind of decision I’ve never anticipated making,” he said. “We need to get off this boat. And I think that means jumping off.”

  “This sounds like a really bad plan,” she said.

  “It’s horrible, but it’s the best I can do. We don’t have a lot of time to debate this. Are you in?”

  Clio pressed her head into his chest even harder.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Actually, I think I’ve heard worse.”

  Tears were nothing now. He rocked her some more. The second guy returned to the room and looked at them, then started to laugh.

  “If we can distract them,” Aidan said, “we can get through the doors to the deck. Do you know if there are any flotation devices out there?”

  Clio went back in her mind to the day that Martin showed her around.

  “A raft,” she mumbled.

  “The raft is good,” he said. “But we’ll need to seriously get them looking away for a few minutes. Cry harder and think how we could do that.”

  She buried her face in his chest and let her mind race. She walked it all around the main floor. The most logical place to go was the galley. That would be a logical spot. When people were attacked, they grabbed knives, right?

  She wasn’t going to get into a knife fight. No. There had to be something better than that. But nothing was coming to her. She ran her mind over all the useless and stupid things in there. The orange press, the fancy toaster, the stupid crème brûlée torch.

  The stupid crème brûlée torch.

  A fire. There was a fire alarm in the galley. That would definitely attract attention.

  Now that she had something to focus on, a plan started to assemble itself in her head. She mentally found the torch. It was in the cabinet with the mugs. It had a safety on it, and the only way it worked was by depressing the catch. If she could wrap something around it to hold it down…

  Like a ponytail holder.

  “Pull the band out of my ponytail,” she managed to gasp in what were supposed to be sobs. “Play with my hair. Give me the band.”

  Aidan reached up and slipped off the band. It pulled and snagged a bit on the way, but he managed it. He shook her hair loose and rubbed her head. Then he nudged her forward and pushed the band into her palm.

  “I’ll be back,” she said. “When the alarm goes, we go.”

  She stood, her legs shaky.

  What’s the international symbol for “vomit”? she thought frantically.

  She clasped her stomach and pointed in the direction of the bathroom, holding a hand over her mouth. The laughing guy watched her, and the
gun guy stiffened. But she must have looked harmless enough. The laughing guy followed her but allowed her to go.

  As she passed the galley, she stopped and motioned for a glass of water. She stumbled in before she even got a look of permission. She went right for the sink, turning it on and putting her mouth under the spigot. This made the guy chuckle a little.

  Laugh away, you bastard, she thought.

  She dropped against the edge of the sink, then weakly pointed at the cabinet, as if asking for a mug in total defeat. He nodded but watched her carefully. He came around behind her a bit, but there was very little up there except cups and spice jars. And one stupid crème brûlée torch.

  She managed to get her fingers around it as she pulled out the mug. Now it needed to go down the sweatshirt. That was fairly easy. She pressed her arm into her stomach to keep it from coming out of the bottom.

  Now she had a mug and a stupid crème brûlée torch down her shirt. Wonderful. She filled the mug and stood there, drinking. She needed a moment to get the thing on.

  But the guy had had enough. He grabbed her arm and forced her out of the galley. It looked like he wanted her back in the living room, but she lurched forward, throwing herself into the bathroom and shutting the door.

  Panic set in. Her head started to spin. She backed herself up against the door, whacking her head into the towel hook. That felt good. It was solid, reassuring. She banged it again.

  She was trying to fend off two men, at least one of whom had a gun—with a crème brûlée torch.

  She flicked it on. A tiny blue tongue of flame flickered out. It was hot, but pathetic and small. She released the catch and closed her eyes.

  They were going to be expecting barfing noises or something. She attempted some hacking and retching sounds and looked around. How did you set fire to a bathroom? It wasn’t exactly the most fire-friendly place. There were two thick hand towels. Toilet paper. That was about it. She felt the towels up and down. They were perfectly dry.

  From her limited experience making fires, she knew that they usually needed something that would burn fast and high, which would set the slower-burning things alight. The toilet paper would go up very quickly, but it probably wouldn’t burn enough to take out the towels. So that wasn’t really enough.

  She made a few more barfing noises while she looked around the tiny compartment in despair. What else would burn? Not the floors or walls—they were tile. There was nothing else.

  Her sweatshirt. That would burn. She ripped it off.

  Now she just had to assemble this. She took the toilet paper off the spindle on the wall and set it down. Then she bundled the two towels and the sweatshirt loosely around it.

  There was a knock at the door.

  This was it. Now or never.

  She pulled out the band that had held up her ponytail and wrapped it around the catch of the torch tightly, keeping the tiny flame lit. She slid this carefully along the floor into the center of the pile, tucking the edge of towel around it.

  Then she flushed the toilet, splashed some water on her face, and opened the door. The guy looked at her, glanced inside, but didn’t see the towels. The bundle hadn’t gone up…yet.

  He brought her back into the living room and pushed her in the direction of the sofa, where Aidan put his arms back around her. This time, the embrace felt very real. She hugged him back. He was shaking a little.

  “Well?” he whispered.

  “It’s done,” she said.

  Well, something was done, anyway. It was either going to work or it wasn’t.

  Five minutes passed. There was no smell of smoke. No noise.

  Then the laughing guy decided it was his turn to use the bathroom. This was it. Considering there had been no alarm so far, this would undo them. He would find the fire, and they would be shot, and the whole summer would be punctuated by a bullet. A period. The end. Worse than she had imagined at the beginning, but—she almost laughed—not that much worse.

  Bullets seemed quick. They would pop you like a balloon. She tried to get herself used to the thought in the time that she had left.

  The man was at the door. In a moment, he would notice. He would yell.

  The door opened. No cloud of smoke.

  Clio could smell it. He stood there, looking down. He said something in Italian, which stirred the other guy, who stood up and turned toward him. He walked a few steps toward the bathroom.

  Then the alarm went off. It was in the hall. All of a sudden, Aidan was shoving her forward.

  “Now!” he said.

  In the space of two heavy heartbeats, they were at the glass doors. The whole thing was dream-like. They were passing through them before the two guys had even quite figured out why they would want to go out on deck or if they cared whether they did.

  Aidan yanked the doors closed. He already had the key in his hand to lock them from the outside. The men rushed for the doors now, but Aidan was halfway through locking.

  The man pounded on the glass. As Aidan moved away, he shot blindly at the glass, puncturing but not shattering one of the thick panes.

  There was no time to think about it. Clio pulled the orange box from under the back wall, her hands shaking as she released the four metal clasps that held it there. It dropped at her feet. She picked it up and threw it over.

  The door to the wheelhouse opened and a third man looked out. The man inside took another shot at the glass doors, breaking a large hole in them. Aidan pushed Clio toward the steps. She stopped. She could hear the boat’s motor now loud in her ears. Without thinking twice, she lunged toward the tub and lifted the stone, wrapping it in her shirt.

  “Clio!” Aidan shouted over the rushing water and the motor beneath them.

  She stood, her shirt soaking wet, the stone wrapped tight in her arms. It was heavy, like a small child.

  And then she tipped herself off the side of the boat, the stone dragging her down.

  The Great Beyond

  Here was another occasion today when life seriously deviated from the movies.

  There was nothing graceful about jumping off a moving boat. Clio tried to control her fall but lost it when she dropped directly into the boat’s wake, which tossed her onto her back and down underwater. She slammed hard as she hit and opened her mouth and took in water. The force of the blow bounced her several times along the water’s surface like a skipping stone. Long before she could even tell which way was up or down, she was sinking under the surface, her nose and throat burning with salt water.

  Underwater is a strange place to be. The world suddenly goes quiet—a frightening loss. The water, which seemed so bright and clear at the top, rapidly darkened. She had nothing now. No tanks. No mask. Nothing to block her nose.

  The stone, which was on top of her now, pulled her down. She managed to get out from under it and spread out her legs to slow her descent. It took a lot of effort, but she was able to kick herself up, her nose burning as she gagged on the water.

  If she just dropped the stone, she would get there. Just dropping it would fix everything.

  But she held on, forcing her legs to pump like they had never pumped before. When she finally broke the surface, her lungs ached, and Aidan was nowhere in sight. The Sea Butterfly was a white speck in the distance.

  She screamed for Aidan. After a moment, she saw him flapping in the distance. He swam toward her with choppy, uncoordinated strokes. He was badly out of breath and coughing.

  “Let’s…not…do that again,” he gasped when he had regained control.

  “Do you have any idea where we are?” she shouted.

  He came a bit closer, his legs bumping into Clio’s as he treaded water viciously.

  “I would say…somewhere off Italy? That’s only…” He paused for breath. “…about twenty-one hundred miles of coastline to cover.”

  Clio rotated around in the water to give herself a full view. Unfortunately, all she saw was ever more water. Except in the distance, there was a tiny lump with
what appeared to be a light on it.

  “I see something over there,” she said. “Maybe a light. Look at it. What do you think?”

  “It could be land,” he said, gasping. “It could also be a freighter a hundred miles out to sea. And that means we swim into rougher, deeper waters. And then we die.”

  “We won’t die. Someone will find us. Besides, if we can find that orange box, we’ll have the raft.”

  They looked around, but there was no orange box.

  “It must have drifted,” she said. “We’ll have to swim for it.”

  “Swim which way?”

  She squinted. The Sea Butterfly was still just in sight; she turned in the other direction.

  “This way,” she said. “Can you handle the swimming?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said.

  “I can do it,” she said. “Can you tread water with this?”

  “I can try.”

  “If you feel weak, drop it,” she said. “Drop it before you lose all your energy, all right?”

  “I’m not dropping it,” he said, accepting the stone. It pulled him under a little, but he fought it.

  “I’ll be back,” Clio said. “And maybe slow down a little. Only tread as hard as you have to to stay up, okay?”

  He slowed a tiny bit but not much.

  “I’ll be here,” he gasped. “Try not to run into any jellyfish.”

  Aidan didn’t drop the stone in the half hour it took Clio to retrieve the box. They took turns just leaning against it for a while until they had regained some energy.

  By dusk, their kiddie-pool-shaped orange raft was bouncing somewhere off the twenty-one hundred miles of Italian coastline. It had a metal frame that needed to be snapped together, a tiny pump to supply the air. None of this was easy to accomplish while treading water.

  The contraption was actually fairly sturdy when it was up. It kept them at least a foot and a half out of the water, and it had a tented roof and many built-in pockets that they had already emptied of their contents—three flares, two very small paddles (some assembly required), six seasickness pills, a whistle, a signaling mirror, two pints of water, and a miniature first aid kit. They’d sent up two of the flares, to no avail. The third was in Aidan’s hands. There was a tiny self-powered light on the inside of the raft that came on as soon as the roof was popped open. It gave the space a weak but intensely orange glow.