The Summer I Dared: A Novel

by Barbara Delinsky

  “How long will the charge last on its own?”

  “An hour, give or take. The radar drains more, the horn less. We’ll sound the horn. If anyone’s near, they’ll come.”

  “What if they don’t?” Ian asked.

  “Then they’ll come looking for us once we’re missed.”

  “What if the weather gets bad, and they can’t?”

  “We’ll ride out the storm. Then they’ll come looking.”

  “Can we ride it out in one piece?”

  Noah knew Ian was frightened. He was none too happy, himself. He couldn’t have known his fuel would be fouled, but he should have made sure the radio worked. No good fisherman left port without a radio. And without a cell phone? No modern fisherman did that.

  Stupid, Noah decided in disgust. And with his son aboard? Stupid and irresponsible.

  He had been on the Leila Sue in a storm. She could hold her own in waves up to eight or nine feet. Much higher, and there’d be trouble.

  Last time, at least, he’d had power and had been able to steer into the waves. He had no power now, no way to control his position. Pitching and rolling were one thing, yawing something else. If the Leila Sue yawed so much that she ended up broadside to the waves, she could roll right over under a high one. Once underwater, she might not recover.

  “Tell you what,” he told Ian as he tried to control his own fear. “Let’s take a lesson from Lucas here. See how calm he is?” Lucas was sitting in a corner of the wheelhouse, watching Noah with his tongue hanging out, a smile on his face, and adoration in his eyes.

  “He doesn’t know any better,” Ian said.

  “Well, neither do we. The sea’s not bad right now. It may not get bad at all. Let’s give it an hour before we panic.”

  It didn’t take an hour for the weather to worsen. After shooting one more seemingly futile flare and twenty minutes of bobbing at a tight anchor, the Leila Sue began to roll in a rising surf. A third flare and another twenty minutes later, the pull on the boat grew fierce, and still Noah resisted. He liked knowing where he was. The thought of being blown loose around the North Atlantic didn’t appeal to him at all.

  When yet another twenty minutes had passed, though, he had no choice. The waves were too large and the wind too strong for the boat to be yanked around on a cord. Fearing structural damage that could actually sink the Leila Sue, he raised the anchor, and for the next few minutes, grasping the gunnel for balance against the roll and pitch of the boat, he held his breath. With the fog unremittingly thick, he couldn’t see if they were about to hit rock or not. When enough time had passed, he gave the depth finder a quick look. Only when he saw that they were in deeper water did he relax.

  It was a mixed blessing, of course. Rocks could destroy the Leila Sue. But rocks were something to cling to if the Leila Sue sank.

  Negotiating the roll of the deck, Noah went forward and pulled life jackets from a bin in the bow. He tossed one to Ian, who quickly put it on and asked, “What about Lucas?”

  “He’s a good swimmer.”

  “So am I,” Ian said just as the boat crested a wave and pitched down. He nearly lost his footing and had to grab at the edge of the wheelhouse.

  Lucas stayed in his corner, alternately putting his head down to try to sleep and raising it to send Noah questioning looks.

  Seeming to speak for the dog, Ian said, “It can’t get much worse than this, can it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Much worse?”

  Noah gave a half shrug as he fastened his life jacket. He loaded the flare gun again.

  “Do you think it will?” the boy asked, sounding either impatient or imperious.

  Neither sat well with Noah, who was wallowing in “shouldas”— shoulda checked the VHF, shoulda taken the cell phone, shoulda stayed in port, to hell with a few traps.

  “Do I look like a weatherman?” he shot back and fired the flare gun, but even as he did, he wondered if it was futile. They were ten miles out. In this kind of fog, the glow cast by the flare wouldn’t carry more than a mile or two, or last more than a minute. Even if someone was in the area, he’d be working hard to control his boat, not looking up into the sky for a flare.

  Ian was staring at him hard, jaw tight and square. “Can’t you talk to me? I haven’t done this before. You have. Tell me what we’re going into. I don’t even care if you don’t know, but it would be nice to hear that. I can’t read your mind. When you don’t say anything, I think the worst. Like, you hate my clothes, hate my school, hate the way I talk and the way I look.”

  Noah was startled. “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t talk. I don’t know what you’re thinking. You don’t give compliments. I don’t remember your ever saying I did something right. Do you even like me?”

  Noah was bewildered. As precarious as his footing was on a rolling deck, this was worse. “You do lots of things right.”

  “Like what? Name one thing.”

  “This isn’t the time, Ian.”

  “See? I called it wrong. Why isn’t it the time? What else are we supposed to be doing?”

  “Checking the bilge, for one thing. The pump’s not going to work on its own. Water starts collecting there, and we’ll sink. While I do that, you keep dry,” Noah said. Grabbing the oilskin at Ian’s elbow, he pulled him inside the wheelhouse. “And hold on to something. The swells are getting higher. I don’t want you going over the side.”

  “What about Lucas?”

  “Inside the cuddy,” Noah instructed and grabbed Lucas’s collar. The dog didn’t want to go, and Noah was torn. If Lucas was in the cuddy and the boat went down, he was doomed. If he stayed where he was, though, with the boat pitching forward and back, he would slide out of his corner and be swept off. The dog might be a good swimmer, but he wasn’t any match for a mountain of water driven by an angry wind.

  One hour passed, then a second. A light rain was falling, and the waves didn’t let up. Broad daylight was a dense, steely gray, broken by absolutely nothing at all. The Leila Sue continued to seesaw, but what water she took on ran out the scuppers, and the bilge remained dry. Noah checked the radar from time to time, looking for other boats in the area, but the few blips he saw were easily a handful of miles away. He used the fifth flare, then the sixth. They started sounding the horn, but it seemed lost in the echo of water on water as the waves crashed in on themselves.

  Soon, the rain began in earnest. They wore full oilskin jackets, now with hoods raised, and even under the wheelhouse roof their faces were wet. Ian’s was pale. Seeming frightened enough to have moved past his snit, he asked, “Do you think we’ve hit the worst of it yet?”

  “Can’t tell,” Noah replied, but he was still annoyed. Ian’s accusations hit home—and were all the worse because he thought he had made inroads with the boy. And then there was guilt. He had dragged Ian to Maine. His own carelessness had put them in a mess. And now he was back to the same old silence.

  He owed the boy more than that. He owed himself more than that. Hell, he owed the people who had died on the Amelia Celeste more than that. If he had been spared death for the purpose of making more of his life, he was botching it good.

  So, holding the wheelhouse roof for balance against the pitch and roll of the boat, he spoke loud enough to be heard over the commotion of the storm. “Let me explain something, Ian. I grew up working with my father on a boat just like this. He didn’t chatter, so I didn’t chatter. We’d hear friends on the radio, and sometimes we talked to them, but we were busy hauling, and we liked hearing the sounds of the work. We were caught in lots of storms. Weather forecasting wasn’t as good then. Storms could come on you out of the blue. We didn’t talk about it, because we knew what we faced, and what we faced was not knowing. The sea has a mind of its own. I don’t care what pictures satellites beam down, it can be different under those clouds. My guess is we’re in for another eight hours of this. Could be more, could be less.”

  “What do we do until
then?”

  “If we start taking on water, we bail. If we broach, we pray.”

  “Broach?”

  “Turn sideways. That’s risky.”

  “Do you think help’ll come?”

  “Hard to say. It’ll be at least another hour before anyone starts thinking we might be in trouble. If conditions are bad enough, my friends won’t dare it. Same with a helicopter. It wouldn’t get close in this fog. A Coast Guard cutter might. That’s our best chance.”

  “Best chance of survival?”

  “Best chance of rescue within the next few hours. We’ll live, Ian,” Noah vowed. “I didn’t survive the loss of my father three weeks ago just to go down with him now.”

  Chapter 20

  Julia slept late in her childhood bedroom. The decor had changed; Janet had turned it into a sitting room. She had tried to get Julia to sleep in her brothers’ room, now the guest bedroom, but Julia chose the pull-out sofa here.

  This room held memories. The furniture might be different, but the sun streaming in through the blinds was the same, as were house sounds, like the washing machine running in the laundry room and the whoosh of cool air through the vents. With the rest of her life in flux, she needed the familiarity of these things. In a sense, she had come full circle and was about to set out on her own once again.

  She wondered if it was sunny in Maine, wondered if Noah had to move his traps after all. She wondered if he was thinking of her, wondered if he was wondering why she had left and when she would be back. She was starting to wonder that herself.

  When she went downstairs, she found Janet on the patio, looking far better than she had the day before. This time, the paper had been read. She smiled and nodded toward the mug Julia held.

  “You helped yourself. Good. I still make it awfully strong.”

  Julia sipped the brew. Yes, it was strong—stronger than her usual— but it was good. “Why does coffee always taste better when someone else makes it?”

  “It does, doesn’t it,” Janet mused, then asked, “Can I get you some breakfast?”

  “Not yet,” Julia said, though she was tempted. Like drinking coffee made by someone else, breakfast made by someone else was a treat, all the more so with her mother doing the making. At that moment, Janet did seem like a mother, which was what Julia needed far more than food. Satisfied with her coffee for now, she slipped into a seat.

  “Would you like the paper?” Janet asked, solicitous.

  “No. I’ll just sit.”

  “So, what should we do today?”

  Julia heard enthusiasm, the eagerness of a woman who seemed delighted to have a companion, which raised the issue of George. They would have to discuss him. But later. Julia didn’t want to argue with her mother, not when they were on such comfortable footing. Part of the fence had been mended; she wanted to bask in the pleasure of that before she tackled the rest.

  “I could just sit awhile,” she said.

  “Not bake cookies? Or cut flowers? Or paint something?” Janet countered. “You were always doing something homey, making me feel totally inadequate.”

  “No. Did I?”

  “You did.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” Janet asked with a curious half smile. “I was inadequate— here, at least. Remember when you painted the mudroom? We each got to pick a wall color. You got the ceiling.”

  Julia hadn’t dreamed that Janet felt inadequate about anything, and it wasn’t that she liked the idea of it, so much as Janet’s ability to say it. Their relationship was taking a more honest direction, which was behind much of what Julia had said the evening before. That realized, she let it go and thought of the mudroom.

  “I picked blue,” she recalled. It was a clear, fair-weather blue, the likes of which they hadn’t seen in Big Sawyer in days. Something told her that they weren’t seeing it now either. Feeling oddly uneasy, she pushed it out of her mind. “I’ll just sit. It’s truly lovely here. Not everyone has what we do, y’know?”

  Noah wasn’t happy. Rain pelted the Leila Sue, blowing horizontally at times, and the occasional wave rose up and broke on her deck. It drained easily enough. But they had already lost several traps, and the storm continued to worsen. He rationed use of the battery, only briefly turning on the depth finder to verify that he wasn’t about to run into rocks, or the radar to look for other boats. He kept Ian at the horn. The fog remained opaque.

  With a wind out of the southeast, the waves were carrying them in a northwesterly direction, and the Leila Sue kept turning. That was the most frightening part. Without the ability to steer, he couldn’t control their position. At least they hadn’t been broadsided yet.

  At the rate they were being swept along, he guessed they would pass north of Hull in five or six hours. Hull was the northernmost of Big Sawyer’s three closest neighbors, and the waters above her were littered with rocks. That didn’t bode well for the Leila Sue. Nor did the fact that he saw no boats near them now. Small-craft warnings might be ignored by lobstermen bent on moving traps, but gale warnings were not. Noah estimated that the wind was blowing close to thirty-five knots, definitely gale force. Even the last foolhardy stragglers must have turned around and gone in.

  “What time is it?” Ian called.

  They were standing side by side, trying to brace themselves against the instrument panel, facing the stern, on the premise that it was less disconcerting to look at the boat than at the nothingness of fog. Even with this shelter, the noise of the rain, the wind, and the waves would have drowned out a quiet remark. Lucas had begun to howl in the cabin, but this, too, was muted.

  “Almost twelve,” Noah called back. “They’ll be missing us soon.” He wished he could see something. Between the rise and fall of the boat and the hemming-in of the fog, he felt vaguely queasy, though that was more from their predicament than from seasickness. Mercifully, Ian looked pale but not green. “Are you feeling okay?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Not what you expected when you agreed to come up, huh?” Noah asked, trying to lighten the mood. The words were barely out when curiosity got the better of him. “Tell me what you thought you’d do.”

  “Catch lobsters.”

  Noah nodded, then said, “You do that well.” He had certainly thought it often enough, but, no, he hadn’t said it aloud before.

  Ian shot him a surprised look. In the next breath, though, he repositioned his hands and bent his knees to take the pitch of the boat. He came out of the motion looking more nervous than before. “Can this boat sink?”

  “Any boat can sink.”

  “What’ll we do if it does?”

  “There’s an inflatable life raft.”

  Ian gave him an incredulous look: Like, we’d survive in an inflatable life raft and not in the boat?

  Noah was grateful he hadn’t asked the question aloud, because he didn’t know the answer. The ensuing silence was filled with water, wind, and fear.

  Julia ate on the patio, more of a brunch than a breakfast, given the lateness of the morning. Then she fell asleep. Right there in her mother’s lounger. Fell asleep. Again.

  She awoke to find that the sun had shifted past the midday point. She had barely taken that in when Janet said, “You were exhausted. Confronting Monte must have drained you.”

  It wasn’t only that, Julia knew. She had barely slept the night before leaving Big Sawyer. Thinking of that night now, she felt a tingling inside, and suddenly she wanted to talk with Noah. She wanted to know he was safe, wanted him to know she was thinking of him.

  “I’ll be right back,” she told Janet and went into the kitchen, where she had left her cell phone. She dialed his numbers, first cell, then home, and got no answer at either. She was thinking that that was odd, and that she hoped the weather had improved—when her cell phone rang right in her hand.

  “Mom, it’s me,” said Molly. “Where are you?”

  “Gram’s.”

  “In Baltimore? Oh, God.”

&nb
sp; “What’s wrong?”

  “It is storming so bad here, and Noah and Ian aren’t back. No one’s seen or heard from them since they left at dawn.”

  Julia’s stomach dipped. She had sensed something amiss even before trying to call—had felt that odd uneasiness. Heart thudding, she asked, “Has anyone gone out to look?”

  “They can’t. I mean, it’s really bad, and it’s not supposed to clear until tonight. The Coast Guard’s going to try it. John Mather will go with them. He knows where Noah sets his traps, but there’s a lot of traps and a lot of ocean.”

  A lot of traps and a lot of ocean. Once upon a time, Julia might have pictured the scene in a horizontal way. Now she pictured it vertically, as well. The ocean depths were real to her. Likewise, death at sea.

  Feeling a terrible dread, she was holding the phone to her heart when her mother walked in. One look at Julia, and the older woman paled. Her first thought, again, clearly was of George.

  So Julia said quickly, “That was Molly. Dad’s fine, but the weather’s bad up there. Two really good friends are lost on the water.”

  “Lost, as in dead?” Janet asked.

  Julia’s eyes teared up. “Lost, as in no one knows where they are. The Coast Guard’s going out. I have to leave, Mom. Those friends? They’re Noah and his son. Noah is special. I need to be there.”

  Janet opened her mouth, seemingly to interrogate. Special? How? Who is he? What does he mean to you? Then she closed her mouth for an instant, shifted gears, and said sensibly, “Do you want to fly and leave the car here?”

  It made sense, of course—until Julia called the airline and realized that with bad weather in Maine causing air traffic delays, flying might actually take longer. She couldn’t see herself sitting, stuck, in an airport. Better to take her chances on the road.

  “It’s a long drive,” her mother warned when Julia made her decision.