One by one the screens lit up. But that’s all they did.
“We’ve lost our instruments, Boss. I can’t tell where we’re going or how far we’ve gotten.” Stephen reached in his breast pocket and pulled out a compass. He smiled at it sadly. “My father gave it to me. It still works. Heading south as fast as I dare.”
Then I heard something no one ever wants to hear on a boat in the midst of a killer storm. “Mayday, mayday! 39 degrees, 43 minutes, 47 seconds north, 31 degrees, 6 minutes, 54 seconds west. Last known location. Have lost instruments. Repeat have lost instruments. Mayday. Mayday!” Stephen was calm and clear but his face had lost all color. He turned to me and said in a dead voice: “Radio’s gone, too.”
El Loco pitched violently with each wave. The electronics that controlled her sophisticated system of stabilizers had been fried. We were at the storm’s mercy, directionless and vulnerable somewhere close to a perilous and rocky coast.
Stephen tested the intercom. “Engine room. Do you read?”
“Read you, Captain.”
“Thank God. All hands. Life jackets.”
I hurried toward the door. Rene was below with Lady D. and she’d have heard Stephen’s instructions. I had to get to her and get her secured. She’d be panicked. Hell, I was panicked and I knew how ironclad my boat was supposed to be. Stephen didn’t even notice I was leaving. He was fighting for our lives against each wave that pummeled El Loco’s sides. The chaotic storm wouldn’t let up and wouldn’t give him a clue as to what it was going to throw at us next.
Chapter 13—Rene
I didn’t know what to do. Was I supposed to go somewhere, do something? I vaguely remembered being shown where the lifejackets were in the galley, but I wasn’t in the galley. I was in a monkey’s room with a little beast who, in spite of her tiny size, was threatening to strangle me with her wiry arms around my neck.
Dylan burst through the door as the lights flickered for the second time.
“C’mon.” He motioned for me to follow him and I ran behind him down the hall toward the salon. Adrenaline and fear had made his leg whole again. I could hardly keep up. He yanked a life jacket from a cupboard and helped me into it. The boat tipped fiercely to one side and I went flying into one of the sofas. Lady D. hung on to me for dear life. I felt a hot stream of pee slide down my chest as she screamed in terror.
“It’ll be okay. Just find something to hold onto. We’re close to the island. As soon as Stephen can see it, we’ll send up flares. Try not to worry. She’s not going to capsize.” Dylan sounded confident, but his eyes spoke a larger truth. He was scared, too. Lady D. and I both sensed it. She continued to screech and whimper into my neck.
I’ll never forget the noise when we hit. It felt like an earthquake and sounded like bombs going off.
“Sweet mother of God, have mercy,” Dylan said as both a prayer and a curse. “We’ve run aground. She’s on a rock.” He grabbed my arm and headed for the deck. The boat shifted again and we heard another huge ripping sound as the ‘fail safe’ hull of the mega yacht was torn apart. I held onto the hand rail as the boat settled into a sickening slope and stopped moving.
Irrationally, I was grateful we were finally still. It felt safer to be wrecked on a rock than to be thrown back and forth by the boiling sea.
The first engine exploded mere minutes after we crashed. I grabbed Dylan’s arm in terror.
“They’re flooding and overheating. All the systems are failing.”
Stephen and his mates appeared on deck along with several other crew members. They wordlessly started the process of launching the life boat on the low side of the boat. “Rocks on the other side, Dylan. Let’s get moving.”
The men hoisted the craft on a metal davit that brought the small craft level with the deck. The waves were crashing all over the place, but since we had stopped moving, I wasn’t quite as scared of the water as I had been.
Dylan helped me down the slippery deck and I jumped into the lifeboat with Lady D. still attached. The first mate followed and started preparing the engine for launch. One by one all the crew members got in with Dylan and Stephen the last to board.
Stephen closed the hatch and we were in a completely enclosed capsule. It was a futuristic egg shaped design that under other circumstances would have struck me as quite beautiful. I hadn’t paid much attention to the two dark blue and white crafts on either side of the main deck but I certainly appreciated them now. When the door was closed and sealed, the sound of the raging storm was almost inaudible.
The winch lowered us down and the mate fired the engine. We banged up against El Loco and the rocks that killed her a couple of times before we sped away from the wreckage and toward the forbidding coast of Corvo Island’s deserted north end.
“Can we make it to the port?” Dylan asked Stephen. The waves tossed us around, but the small craft bounced like a beach ball on the waves.
“I’d try it if we had more daylight. As it is, we’ll be lucky if we can find a landing place. Most of this coast is rock.”
Through the dim light I finally took a good look at our ‘refuge’. I was looking at a cliff that just ended in the ocean. There was no beach, no sand and no possible way up the rocky face. Angelo was sitting next to me and must have seen the despair in my eyes.
“Not to worry, Chef. This life boat is capsize proof. We’re all safe now.”
“Thanks, Angelo, but Dylan told me El Loco was unsinkable, too.”
Dylan sat down on my other side and took my hand. “Angelo’s right, honey. We’re safe now. We just have to find a place to put this boat and then it’s just a matter of making it to town.”
I patted Lady D. “Hear that Lady D.? We’re safe now.” It was then that I realized the monkey hadn’t moved in a while. In a panic, I pulled her out of my life vest. She was limp and her round little eyes were frozen in a picture of pure horror. “Oh, God!” I cried. “No. No!”
Dylan lifted her from my grasp and held her in his big hands like a stillborn infant. Then he raised her to his face and put his cheek against her lifeless form, still warm and limp. When he looked at me, I started to cry. The poor little thing was gone. Dylan’s eyes were the saddest blue I’d ever seen. They were a sea of tears, though none slipped out.
“She must have had a heart attack,” he said softly. In those close quarters, no one wanted to look at him. They wanted to give him privacy in his grief. “My little girl is gone.” He placed her gently in his lap and stared, seeing nothing.
“Over there!” Stephen shouted. Everyone except Dylan and I looked toward the shore. I couldn’t take my eyes from Dylan. His sorrow was so raw it cut through me. He put his hand over his beloved pet and stroked her softly.
“I’m so sorry. So very sorry,” I told him. He couldn’t hear me in his devastation. He paid no attention as Stephen maneuvered the boat into a small cove with a white beach about a hundred yards long. It was surrounded by sheer rock cliffs.
Dylan sat stone still as the boat was beached and the crew got off, one after the other until only Stephen, Dylan and I were left.
“C’mon, man. We need to get off the boat now,” Stephen said gently. Dylan looked up at him with unseeing eyes and then slowly started to move. When his feet hit the sand he started walking away from us in the driving rain. I started to follow him but Stephen stopped me. “Let him be. Give him a little time.”
Much as I hated to let him go off alone, I heeded Stephen’s advice. The crew quickly went to work erecting a shelter that was part of the life boat’s survival gear. They had a hard time with it in the fading light with all the wind and rain. The sun was dipping below the cliffs to the west when the clouds began to dissipate. The wind stilled and the rain slowed to a trickle. I could see the last rays of the day fighting to light the top of the rock to the west.
Down the beach, deep in shadows, I saw Dylan bury Lady D. He gathered stones and put them on top of the grave he dug until he had a little capuchin sized mound above her. Th
en I saw him sink to his knees and put his face in his hands. Even from a distance I could see his shoulders shake with his sobs. The last of the wind carried his cries away. I thought my heart would break for his grief.
I waited for him on a rock some distance from the bustle of the crew. They’d all made it out of a life and death situation and that terror had given way to a noisy jumble of laughter and orders as they organized their survival ‘camp’ on the beach. Stranded though we seemed to be, there was no doubt we’d be rescued and we knew where we were. Morning would see us safe and dry.
I wrapped the shiny silver blanket around my shoulders as darkness fell. It was a warm night, but I was still wet and chilled with melancholy. Dylan walked toward the light of our camp with slow, heavy steps. He sat down in the sand beside me and I rubbed his shoulder wordlessly.
“I lose everything I love,” he said at last. “Everything.” He looked out at the spot where his beloved boat lay in pieces on the rocks. Only the glow of the engine fires told us where El Loco had come to rest. The stars and the moon cast no light through the lingering storm clouds. “The old man got his burial at sea. I was gonna do it when we passed the Azores. Looks like he managed to go down with his ship.”
He sighed. “I’ll miss her terribly, you know.”
Did he mean the monkey or the boat? Maybe both. All I could say was how sorry I was for his loss. It didn’t seem adequate at all.
“I can get a new boat. I don’t want a new father. I can’t approach the sister I thought I’d lost and my monkey is buried down the beach.” He turned toward me and took my hands in his. “I had almost convinced myself that I needed to put the brakes on us. I thought I was trying to move too fast and that I didn’t have enough experience in love to know whether this—with you—was going to last.”
He turned my hands over and kissed each palm. “If I had lost you in that storm, like I lost Lady D. I don’t think I’d want to live. I can’t lose you, Rene. I’ve never said this to a woman and it scares the hell out of me to say it now, for the first time.” He took a deep breath. “I love you, Rene. I love you too much to even imagine my life without you in it.”
“I love you, too, Dylan. I’ve known it for a while. I knew it when you were so sick and I realized I would have gladly taken the poison from your body into mine. And I knew it when I looked into your eyes when you held Lady D.’s little body. I wanted to take your pain away even if it meant hurting myself.”
“I don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring, Rene. I have a thousand decisions to make about my life and what to do with it. But what I do know is that I want you to be there, beside me. I want you to be part of the decisions and the direction our life is going to take.”
Our life. Be mine. Just a few days ago I was terrified that he might ask me to marry him. Now ‘our life’ loomed like a neon sign in the night sky blinking ‘this is it, this is it’ over and over again.
I pulled him to me and hugged him hard. I tried to tell him in an embrace that I was completely his. “We’ll figure it out together,” I said at last. “Anything is possible together, my love.”
Chapter 14—Dylan
The sun rose angry after the storm. I could see El Loco listing to one side out on the rock I would later learn was called the Islet of Torrais. My boat would sink into the long and vicious history of shipwrecks on that treacherous reef. She’d take my father’s ashes with her along with several works of art I treasured far more tenderly than his memory.
A few short hours after I buried Lady Delaney, the skies cleared and the night mocked us with a bright half moon and thousands of stars. Rene burrowed against my side and fell into an exhausted sleep not long after we finished our really nasty MRE’s. They might have been ‘ready-to-eat’ but they sure weren’t ready to enjoy.
Rene smelled of salt water and monkey pee. Her hair was sticky against my face and the way she wedged herself against me made it difficult to sleep. So I didn’t. I spent the dark hours thinking and questioning and finding no answers. By the time the sun rose, I was stiff and sore and in a foul mood. I tried to slip out from under her without waking her, but she wrapped her arm tighter around my waist and murmured a protest.
“Sorry, love, but nature calls.” I gently repositioned her head on a lumpy pillow of sand. Not for the first time, I was thunderstruck by her beauty. No amount of grime could hide it. The perfect tilt of her nose, the plump lips of her heart shaped mouth, the long fringe of lashes that brushed her cheek—every feature seemed made to order just for me. As a man long used to seeing perfectly coifed and made-up women, it astounded me that I could find natural far more appealing than the alternative. No amount of ‘paint’ could improve the sweet face I watched glow with the morning light.
Looking at Rene pushed some of the clouds from my head. Remembering she loved me allowed the sun to shine through the remaining few.
I walked toward the little grave I’d made the night before. Since I wasn’t allowed pets when I was a kid Lady D. had been my first. Her loss hurt so much that I vowed she’d be the last animal I’d ever have. When Rene joined me at the burial spot I told her so.
“Everyone who ever loses a pet feels that way, Dylan,” she said gently. “I’ve gone through it more than once myself and it always hurts more than you think you can bear. But you’re doing her a disservice if her death means that no other animal will ever benefit from your care and kindness. You’ll feel differently later.”
“The only time I’ve ever felt this way was after Dawn went away. It probably sounds really shallow to compare the loss of my sister to a monkey’s death, but it hurts. Really hurts.”
“It doesn’t sound shallow. Grief is grief. Give yourself permission to mourn her.”
“Please don’t say things like that.” I snapped at her.
“Like what?”
“Like something you read out of a psych textbook. ‘Give yourself permission to mourn her’. No platitudes, okay?”
She put a foot or two of sand between us. “Sorry. I know you’ve been through a lot, but can you try not to take it out on me? I was just trying to help. I love you.”
I instantly regretted my sharpness. “I know you do. It’s just that some things snap me back into painful old memories. Shrink talk is one of them. Forgive me?”
“Always.” She hugged me and tiptoed up to kiss me and I loved her a little bit more. “I see Stephen stowing the gear. I guess we’re going to head out. I am not looking forward to getting on a boat again.”
“The sea has calmed. It’s almost like the storm never was. Except of course for El Loco out there on the rocks and Lady D. under them.” I took a last look at the small grave. “Bye-bye, Lady D. You were a great friend. Tell Bill I said hello.” Like a little child, I wanted to think of my pet and my old pal happy together again.
I gave a little salute to my tiny buddy and took Rene’s hand. There were tears in her warm brandy eyes and I nearly cried again at the sight of them. She felt me. For the first time in forever, I didn’t want to turn away from empathy. It felt good to know that someone cared enough to hurt with me. We walked back toward our group hand in hand and, in spite of all the tragedy, everything felt right with the world.
“Morning, Dylan,” Stephen greeted me. “Ready to shove off? It’s only a few miles to the town. We should be there in a flash.”
The island’s coast was almost totally sheer cliffs dropping into the sea. We were lucky to have found the little beach at all. Now that the weather had cleared, I began to appreciate the raw dramatic beauty of the tiny isolated island. Against the blue of the sky and sea, the emerald cap of brilliant green vegetation sparkled on top of the stark gray cliffs. It was quite a magical landscape.
We certainly caused a stir when our spaceship-like life boat pulled into the miniscule facility that made up Corvo’s dockage. It was an enclosed pod that would self right in the roughest seas. It had a capacity of forty passengers and a swift little engine. Without the weight of forty, it c
ould serve as an efficient rescue craft. Unlike the hideous orange clunkers that you’d find on a cruise ship, ours was actually a pretty and ultra modern design in navy and white with lots of smoked glass windows.
None of us had ever been to the Azores or knew much about the islands. Stephen’s knowledge came from his diligent study of charts and I was grateful for it. He headed around the southeast side of the island as if he’d been sailing those waters forever.
Turns out, the only town on the island had about four hundred total inhabitants, nowhere to stay and nowhere to eat. The natives rustled up some coffee and rolls from someone’s kitchen for us.
Angelo managed to communicate our situation with a combination of Spanish, Italian and a sprinkling of Portuguese. By ten in the morning, we made a group decision to carry on to Flores Island, about a two hour boat ride away. The folks at the little port were able to sell us enough fuel to top off the engine for the short journey. The sea was calm and the sky cleared blue, so Stephen opened up part of the cover and let in some air. We needed it; we were a smelly bunch. New sweat isn’t exactly perfume, but it ages worse.
Flores didn’t offer a lot more than Corvo. We were lucky to book enough rooms for all of us at a very industrial looking hotel that turned out to have incredible views and great service. The food was so-so, but it was hot and plentiful. The friendly proprietress rustled up a mish-mash of robes, sweats and pajamas so she could take our clothes for a wash. There was nowhere on the island to buy anything new.
After all had taken a much needed shower and had a rest, we planned to meet up in the dining room to discuss our next move. I wanted to get the crew home as fast as I could get them there; they’d been through so much and now their livelihood was soon to be at the bottom of the North Atlantic. I’d take care of them financially, but the fact remained that each one was facing major changes in his life. I didn’t know when or if I’d want another boat.
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