by Celia Jerome
“What a freaky storm. They never mentioned it in the forecast I heard on my way over.”
I guess that depended on what station you listened to.
We turned to go back inside, where we couldn’t be hit by falling tree limbs. But I heard a noise, different from the storm. “Pewil! Twee, pewil!”
“Is that the bird? It’s calling for a pearl?”
“No, I think it means peril.”
He looked at me as if I’d grown another head. Hey, he was the one who heard my mother.
“Oey? Where are you? Come out where we can see you, or on the porch where there’s less peril.” I pointed toward the house.
Nothing. I ran inside and grabbed my pad and a marker.
“Twee? Twee?”
I drew two trees, and pictured two in my head. “That’s right, two twees, er, trees.”
I flipped the pages and made Matt’s tree an oak, tall and proud and sturdy, shielding the willow from the wind. “Yes,” I thought, and spoke aloud. “This is Matt, a friend.”
Matt looked over my shoulder. “You see me as a tree?”
“Hush. You want me to draw a door mat? You think it’ll understand a welcome sign? Besides, it’s not exactly welcome. Everyone wishes it would go home.”
I heard a loud, plaintive, “Pewil! Pewil” coming, I thought, from the roof of the house. I tried to hold up my pendant, so it could see. “Not now. Now all I want is to keep you safe. Friend, care, share, love.”
“Fwiend? O-ey”—and a lot more syllables and pictures flashing in my head—“new fwiend?”
If not for Matt I’d be blown over, craning my neck up. “Yes, he loves all creatures. Now come to the porch where we can talk.”
“Tweeth.”
Matt got into the spirit of the thing. “Tweeth. Two trees. Friends.” He wrapped an arm around me, to hold me steady, and to show trust and closeness. “And no peril.”
I thought he muttered “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” but the wind carried his words away.
“Wuve?”
For crying out loud, had Oey been talking to my mother, too? “Friends.”
But Matt was saying yes. Was he crazy, too? He held up our joined hands, then we made a dash to the back side of the covered porch, sheltered by the house from the brunt of the hurricane-force winds, which dropped off the second we reached shelter.
Oey must have been convinced because it popped up on the railing. The bird head turned this way and that, studying us. “Thecth?”
“None of your business. Oh, that. Yes, he is a male. I am female. What about you?”
“Bowff.” I got a picture in my head of the bird laying eggs in the water, the fish coming to fertilize them. Good grief.
Matt hadn’t moved an inch, except to drop his jaw. I guess the first sight of Oey could be a little unnerving, to say the least.
“You do see it, don’t you?”
“I see something like a patchwork quilt, only it’s talking.”
“Can you see the pictures in your mind?”
“No pictures. My mind got blown away when your … friend showed up on the porch.”
“Yup, that’s Oey. Except its name is something huge and long and filled with pictures and emotions and clicks and glubs and past history and the future of its kind. Oh, and the parrot part is female, the fish is male.”
I thought he might turn tail and run. Matt, not Oey.
“I’ll explain later.”
“If you can explain this, you’ll have a TV show of your own, like Dr. Phil.”
“For now it’s enough that you can see what’s not a pink-toed Patagonian pigeon. The mind thing is optional.” I took a step closer to the railing while Matt shook his head, as if that would clear it.
“Okay, Oey, introductions over. Get serious now. We’re friends, we want to help. But here’s the thing, you don’t belong here. You are disturbing the weft of the worlds. Maybe causing this freak storm. You have to go back.”
“Pewil.”
“Yes, but if you leave, the peril might end.”
Oey jumped up and down on the railing, screeching, “Pewil, pewil!”
“Okay, got that. You’re not making the storm. It’s almost passed now anyway. But there’s some other danger? And you’ve come to warn us?”
The parrot head bobbed. “Thinking.”
“I am thinking. Matt is, too, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m thinking we’re both crazy, and this is some kind of science experiment gone haywire. Or someone put a little something extra in those brownies. I mean, a talking bird is one thing, but this … ?”
Oey changed to a fish, with the long feathered tail.
“Holy cow.”
The fish flopped on its side on the porch near my feet, going glub, glub.
“Stop that, you’ll hyperventilate or dry out or something. Get up and tell us what we are supposed to be thinking about.”
The bird appeared again, with the fish tail flapping in agitation. Matt jumped back out of the way and almost broke my fingers, clutching my hand so hard.
“Pewil! Pewil!”
“Got it, for Pete’s sake.”
“Piet? Fiwa?”
“No, not Piet the fireman.” If, as I suspected, Oey was a minion of M’ma’s, he knew all about Piet and the fireflies. “What kind of peril?”
“Thinking!” And the fish fell on its side again, glub glub.
“Stop that! I cannot understand you when he can’t talk.”
“Thip thinking.”
“I can’t understand, damn it!”
Oey cocked her head and shut her eyes. I saw an image in my head, realized what it was and collapsed against Matt, shaking. “Oh, my God. It’s a ship, sinking. People drowning. Glub.”
“How do you know?”
“She shows me pictures, in my mind. I can visualize. You can’t.”
He accepted that, for now. “And she—it—they have come to warn us?”
“Pewil! Pewil!”
“Where, Oey? Where is it?”
“Thee.”
I was learning. “Right, in the sea. Which sea? When?” I thought I’d get a brain cramp from trying to read another picture that never came. I shrugged helplessly.
“Damn, it could be anywhere. How can we call the Coast Guard and warn them that a bisexual birdfish that does not exist on this world shows mental images of a boat in danger? How can we rescue anyone when we don’t know when—”
Now.
We heard sirens over the storm, the emergency klaxon to get all the volunteers, what used to be air raid warnings or tornado alerts. Every phone rang inside, and Matt’s cell in his pocket. Oey disappeared, now that he’d done his job. I ran into the house. The emergency scanner in the kitchen kept repeating code this and code that. I had no idea what they all meant except the call for volunteers to respond.
Matt was checking his cell for text messages.
“You’re a volunteer fireman or EMT?”
“No, I can’t be away from the practice for that long. But they call me when an animal might be involved in the emergency, like a house fire or a traffic accident. The message said to stand by.”
“I don’t think this is any house fire or accident.” The sirens are coming from every direction now. I called my grandmother, who knew every time someone sneezed in Paumanok Harbor.
“All I know so far is that a cruise ship headed to Nova Scotia with hundreds on board was off course because of the storm, then got hit by a rogue wave and capsized. Survivors are being brought to Montauk as the nearest port. Only a couple of commercial fishing boats are nearby, and they’re slow and can’t possibly take on enough passengers. So all the big party boats from Montauk and the Block Island ferries are setting out. And the Coast Guard cutters, of course. Private sea planes from Montauk and East Hampton airports are already in the air to shine lights and drop off more supplies. And the Air National Guard Sea Rescue helicopters from Westhampton are on the way with divers. They’re
mobilizing everyone from Block Island to Shinnecock.”
But they couldn’t get there fast enough. The water was cold. The night was dark. Did they get to deploy the ship’s rafts, put on life jackets? How many people were injured? Many, we had to assume.
How many sharks in the water?
Many. Oh, my God.
Susan rushed in. “We’re making soup and coffee. Tons of coffee for the volunteers, too. Got extra blankets? Towels? Clothes?”
Matt helped us fill garbage bags to drop off at the police station. They wanted no one but emergency crews to drive to Montauk, clogging the only way in. They wanted Montauk Highway kept open for helicopters to land, for transport to Southampton and Stony Brook and any other hospital that could handle some of the estimated hundreds of victims suffering from hypothermia, injuries, shock. And sharks.
Matt put the TV on.
Every station had breaking news banners and dramatic music. On one, the commentator looked as if he’d just rolled out of a bar, his suit wrinkled, his tie askew. Another reporter got through makeup so fast his hairpiece kept falling over one ear. At a third, it was the weatherman who tried to juggle all the notes and memos as they got handed to him. He looked ready to cry. Streaming messages ribboned across the bottom of every screen.
The newsman Matt settled on read directly from a statement released by the Coast Guard. We knew most of it already. Then the reporter switched to first-person accounts as they came in from cell phones from the life rafts, with pictures and videos.
“Modern technology,” Matt grumbled. “People taking pictures while their fellow passengers are drowning.”
According to these new reports, the ship had over five hundred passengers. They first moved off course because a pod of dolphins refused to yield the usual shipping lanes. Then they got buffeted by a sudden storm. The passengers were told to don their life vests, but by the time they remembered where the things were stored—or ran to get their cameras—half of them were too seasick to follow the crew’s orders. Without warning, a huge wave rose out of the water to starboard, three, maybe four times the height of the tall cruise ship. Opinions varied. There were no pictures of the wave, naturally, as everyone got tossed around as the ship heeled over under the weight of the wall of water. Half the people got washed overboard instantly. Others fell or jumped into the water as the boat tilted, one panicked woman cried into her phone. Some clung to the railings still above water. Many more, it was assumed, were trapped on board. We saw pictures of rafts floating here and there, some empty, but hard to count in the limited camera range.
The screen next flashed the cruise ship, looking like a turtle on its side. Susan started crying. Matt held us both.
“But here’s the amazing thing, folks,” the excited announcer said, while the screen changed. “Those dolphins stayed! And they are helping people into the rafts!”
Someone already in a lifeboat was talking, trying to hold his camera steady while the boat bobbed up and down in the waves. “There’s one,” he shouted, panning around to a dolphin shoving a woman toward a raft, then rising up so she fell in. Another swam with a man on its back, heading toward eager hands reaching down from a half-filled raft. All over, everywhere the camera aimed, dolphins kept people afloat and headed toward safety.
The reporter sounded as amazed as we were, watching. “We have reports of some of the filled rafts being towed toward shore! Can you believe that, folks?”
“Frankly, no,” Susan whispered. “Could this be some kind of hoax?”
If so, every single station had fallen for the prank. They all showed amateur films, still shots sent from iPads and Blackberries. The pictures weren’t of the best quality, but the tragedy was definitely unfolding, along with the astounding rescues.
Except some of the people being pushed to a raft had no visible dolphin under them. And one raft moving away from the half-sunk ship had no friendly sea mammal pulling it.
The commentator peered at the pictures along with the rest of us. “Those valiant dolphins must be under water.”
No, they must be from another universe, where cameras don’t work.
The local news on Channel 12 had pictures of the rescue operation: Montauk’s motels getting ready to house hundreds, four-wheel-drive trucks nose to tail along the beach, with men in waders, wet suits, and dories ready to pull in rafts and, hopefully, survivors. We saw a view of Montauk Harbor, of boats loading up with blankets and life vests, then streaming out past the jetties. Another shot showed ambulances and fire trucks lined up facing west, ready to roll away as soon as the first rescues came in. We heard sirens in the background as Amagansett, Springs, and Paumanok Harbor emergency vehicles raced to join Montauk’s crews already in position along the rows of docks in Montauk’s harbor. The big parking lot near Gosman’s Restaurant stayed empty, awaiting helicopter landings. More ambulances and volunteers, we learned, were being directed to the East Lake side of the harbor’s inlet, near the small airport. Montauk’s school, library, both churches, and the community center had their doors open for volunteers to prepare for the onslaught, hopefully, of cold and wet but uninjured passengers, the ones who didn’t need ambulances and hospitals. After the medical teams were done, the volunteers would feed the people, hand out dry clothes, then ship them to the motels. There’d be room, thank goodness, in this off-season.
We also saw National Guard jeeps moving in a convoy across the Nappeague strip, hazmat units and school buses and all the Jitneys they could round up for transport, all headed east. There’d be enough help.
Uncle Roger came by to pick up our filled bags. He was a volunteer with the fire police, heading toward Montauk in his pickup after stopping to gather more donated supplies at Town Hall. He’d drop Susan off at the firehouse to help prepare food for the rescuers and, with luck, the survivors.
After they left, Matt and I stayed on the sofa in front of the TV, changing stations to see the latest pictures. We’d be there all night, I knew, holding hands, sitting near each other, the way people did in a disaster.
The new pictures and videos came from the first private planes on the scene, small seaplanes that couldn’t do much but shine their lights. The reporter had sense enough to keep quiet and let us absorb the images.
They showed helicopters arriving, dropping more inflatable rafts, then divers to help load people onto them. We saw a few brave divers in wet suits climbing aboard a vessel that could go belly-up at any moment, but coming out with injured people in their arms. They formed a chain with what we took to be crew members, getting survivors into helicopters, onto rafts, onto the first boats courageous enough to get close to the capsized ship.
More boats showed up in the distance, horns blasting, going full throttle toward the disaster. I worried they’d collide, or mow down people in the water, but Coast Guard and Marine Patrol boats circled the scene, giving directions, making order out of chaos, sweeping floodlights across the area.
And we saw the dolphins pulling rafts away, with smaller boats assigned to clear their path and take over if the dolphins showed signs of tiring. We saw other dolphins in a circle around some people floating in the water in life vests, protecting them from sharks until help arrived.
The reporter came back on. “We have a report that the manifest lists five hundred and twelve passengers aboard the Nova Pride, plus a staff of eighty-five. We do not know how many made it off the ship.”
The station flashed clips from The Perfect Storm, to explain rogue waves, citing a recent rash of mid-ocean seismic activity as possible cause. That and a flurry of volcano eruptions across the globe. Maybe sunspots. We flipped to a different station that showed videos of people in the streets of Manhattan, pouring into churches, gathering in Central Park. Up and down the East River, all along the FDR, people held hands and held candles, a sign of hope in the dark night. Tragedy brought even hard-case New Yorkers together.
Matt’s cell phone chimed. He listened. He swore. He said, “I understand.” He swore so
me more. “I’m on my way.”
“What—?”
“There were dogs on board.”
CHAPTER 14
“THEY HAD FIVE DOGS LISTED: two toy breeds, a Maltese and a Yorkie, both already in rafts with their owners. And three Newfie pups, going to buyers in Nova Scotia, location unknown. The breeder has a broken arm, but she’s near hysteria, refusing to leave the scene until her dogs are found. She threatened to jump back in the water if they tried to take her to shore. She’d just crated them for the night in the lower deck kennel facility. The others must have smuggled their dogs into their cabins somehow. The Coast Guard says they can’t do anything until they have the people secured. No one knows if the dogs were released from their crates, or left in the lower level to drown.”
I hugged Little Red so hard he tried to nip my fingers. “That poor woman. I’d be frantic, too.”
“They put her on one of the Coast Guard boats for now, with a temporary splint on her arm. There’s a vet in Montauk, but they want me on standby here. I am going there. I’ll fetch more supplies and head out until someone tells me where to wait. I am not going to lose another dog tonight.”
“Can I help?”
“I thought you don’t know anything about veterinary medicine.”
“No, but I can comfort a terrified dog while you work. If there are only two doctors for five dogs, you’ll need an assistant. And even if the little dogs never touched the water, they’ll be cold and frightened. If they did …” Neither of us wanted to think of a tiny dog, wet and freezing. The Newfoundlands were built for cold weather and water, except these were young dogs, and maybe caged, without a chance. If they never got to shore, Matt still needed someone at his side. “I want to help.”
He had his jacket on and his keys in his hand. “Maybe you can, if you can ask them where it hurts, like your mother. After the bird thing, why not? Or you could get your mother to tune in and help.”
He wanted me to connect with my mother in my head? I had enough trouble with her on the phone. I grabbed more towels and blankets—Susan and I could share what was left—and raced to his car. With the brownies.