by Watt Key
I felt weak, like I was about to faint. Jim held up a finger signaling his co-workers to wait a moment.
“Are you okay?” he asked me. “Do you need anything?”
I shook my head.
“Water? Food?”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
Then the pilot walked up and gathered around me with the other three men.
“Tell us what happened,” Jim said to me.
I didn’t have the energy to go into it all, so I just gave him the basics. “We were scuba diving out of Gulf Shores, Alabama,” I said. “We came up and the boat was gone. We floated out here. There were three of us.”
“Where are the others?”
“One drowned. The other one’s down below.”
“How long have you been here?”
“About a month,” I said. “I don’t know exactly … I had a calendar inside.”
Jim motioned with his chin, and the pilot returned to the helicopter and put on his headset. He left the door open and I heard him talking to the Coast Guard, but I couldn’t make out what they said. After a moment he took his headset off again and came back to us, nodding to himself in amazement.
“Yep,” he said. “They gave up searching for you nearly three weeks ago. They can’t believe you made it all the way out here. They’re sending a chopper.”
“They need to tell my parents I’m alive,” I said.
“I’m sure they’re doing that right now.”
“I want to know that they told them.”
The pilot glanced at Jim and Jim nodded to him. “Yeah,” the pilot said. “I’ll go call them back and get verification.”
“My friend’s down there,” I said. “He’s lying inside the generator room.”
Jim turned to his co-workers. “Why don’t you two go check it out,” he said. “I’ll stay here with her. Then we’ll get her home.”
The men, the rig, all of it was getting blurry.
“I’d like to stay until he leaves,” I said. “Until they get him.”
Jim nodded considerately. “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”
He studied me closely. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and steadied me. “You sure you’re okay?”
47
I heard the drone of the helicopter and felt myself lying in a cramped space. I opened my eyes and saw Jim and the others sitting forward of me. At first I thought it was a dream, and then I remembered. I sat up, and Jim turned and smiled at me. I noticed they were all wearing headsets. I couldn’t speak above the noise, but Jim pointed out the window at a Coast Guard chopper off our left side. Then he opened a bottle of water and handed it to me. He watched me while I drank. Then another man passed a headset back and Jim put it on my head.
“Welcome back,” he said.
I took another drink, trying to clear my head.
“We’re about ten minutes out,” he continued. “We’re taking you to the Gulf Shores airport. Your friend’s in the Coast Guard chopper. It’s continuing on to Brookley Air Force Base, where they’ll transfer him to an ambulance.”
“Will he be okay?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. They’ve got him stabilized, but he has some internal bleeding.”
“They have to save him.”
“They’re doing all they can,” Jim said.
“Do my parents know?”
“They’re meeting us on the tarmac.”
“Both of them?”
“I assume so. The Coast Guard said parents, plural.”
It was probably a mistake, I thought. Surely Mom was back in Atlanta. It would be hours before she could make it down. But Dad would be there, his whole goofy self in khaki and plaid.
“Lucky you floated up on that rig,” Jim continued.
“Why is it like that?” I said. “The rig, I mean. Why is it empty?”
“They shut it down when the price of oil got too low. Couldn’t make money. There’s hundreds of abandoned rigs out there. They say maybe they’ll start it up again one day, but I doubt it. I think they say that because it’s too expensive to take it down.”
It made sense, but the idea of such massive waste was hard to understand.
“Good thing for you, huh?” Jim chuckled.
I nodded. Jim looked out the window again. The Coast Guard chopper was starting to peel off to the northwest. Then he turned back to me. “By the way, did you take out that hazard beacon?”
“He did,” I said. “My friend did.”
“That was pretty smart of him.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s smart.”
* * *
I saw them standing below as we descended to the tarmac. Mom and Dad beside each other, holding hands. I couldn’t imagine what she was doing there, but I remembered when they used to stand like that, watching me play in the waves at the beach.
The chopper eased down, and Jim pulled my headset off and helped me up from my place on the floor. Then he opened the door and guided me out, ducking and holding me close against him. In a moment I was in their arms, the three of us squeezed together and crying.
There was a crowd of reporters snapping pictures. They began asking me questions, but I didn’t answer them. Then Dad let go of me and turned to Jim and shook his hand. Jim nodded and pointed to an ambulance parked nearby. Two paramedics were walking toward us.
“Come on, sweetheart,” Dad said. “They need to check you out.”
The reporters seemed worried that I was going to get away from them before I answered their questions. They came closer and held microphones in my face.
“Leave her alone,” Mom demanded with her lawyer voice. “She doesn’t feel like talking right now.”
To our relief Jim stepped between us. “I’ll take your questions over here,” he said. “Let them do what they need to do and go home.”
The paramedics took me with them to the ambulance and got me to lie on a stretcher inside. They did some tests on me and asked me questions about my health. I took off my gloves and showed them my hands and told them about the cuts on my legs and my scratchy throat from breathing in the mold. They said I needed to go to the hospital to get on antibiotics.
Mom and Dad rode with me, one of them on either side of the stretcher, holding my arms.
“I knew if anybody could make it, you could,” Dad said.
“Shane might die, Dad.”
“Let’s hope not. I talked to his mother, and she’s flying in to be with him.”
“I should be there, too.”
“I think we need to stay out of the doctors’ way right now,” Dad said.
“We never gave up hope on you,” Mom said. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through.”
“Have you been here the whole time?”
Mom looked at Dad like they had something to tell me. “Your father’s been sick,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
Dad squeezed my hand. “I’m all right now. But that day on the boat, I got sick.”
“The anchor pulled,” I said. “It was barely clinging. I should have come up.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he assured me. “After you went down I started having some problems up top. If it wasn’t for that, none of this would have happened.”
I knew then I was about to finally learn the rest of my story.
“I don’t know if you remember, but I was feeling bad,” he said. “It was a little more serious than I figured. After I watched you go down, I must have gone back to the wheelhouse. They say they found me in there. But all I remember is waking up in the hospital with some DKA crap.”
“Gib,” Mom said, frowning. “It’s called diabetic ketoacidosis,” she continued. “He went into a coma and almost died. Fortunately, a fisherman saw the cabin door swinging open and stopped to check it out.”
“The anchor pulled and reset itself,” Dad said. “Probably not fifty feet from the tanks.”
“But you’re okay?”
“Heck, yeah, I’m okay,”
Dad said. “Now that I got you back.”
“He’s going to be fine,” Mom said. “They’ve got him on a special diet, and he’s watching his insulin more closely. Isn’t that right, Gib?”
I detected Mom’s motherly tone. It had been a long time since I’d heard any soft feelings in her voice regarding Dad.
“That’s right, doll,” he said. “Watching it like a hawk.”
And I hadn’t heard him call Mom that in years. I looked at both of them.
“Mom, are you staying at our house?” I asked.
She didn’t answer me. Just then the ambulance pulled into the emergency entrance and stopped. The back doors opened and they began sliding me out.
48
At the hospital they performed tests and doctored my hands and gave me medicine for mold exposure and malnourishment. It was hours before I was finally taken to a room and left alone. I fell into a deep sleep like my body had died and left my mind trapped in a dark liquid aurora of dreamy snapshots that had no end and no beginning. Until finally I was back at Fort Morgan, surfcasting off the beach. The Gulf waves rolled gently against my toes, and seagulls called and dove into shimmering schools of bait fish.
But the water was strangely empty of boats, and it dawned on me that maybe I was the only person left on earth. I turned back to see Mom and Dad lying on a blanket under the oak tree. At first I was comforted at the sight of them, but then a moment later they were gone. I turned back to look over the water again and saw a dark line of clouds on the horizon, flickering with lightning that made no noise and dragging a long curtain of rain.
I woke to Mom standing over me touching my forehead.
“Julie,” she said.
The sight of her and Dad standing behind her washed away the lingering images of the nightmare.
“Are you okay?” Mom asked.
“I’m fine,” I said, closing my eyes again.
* * *
The next day the doctor told me I was healthy enough to go home. My lungs would probably eventually clear of the mold, and my hands were healing fine. I would have scars, but no tendons were cut and I’d regain full use of them after some therapy.
“What about my friend?” I asked him.
He didn’t know anything about Shane. After the staff was finished with me, I joined Mom and Dad in the waiting room, where they were standing with a Coast Guard officer. He was about Dad’s age but tall and thin with a mustache.
“Julie,” Mom said, “this is Officer Barnett. He’d like to ask you some questions if you feel up to it. Or we can do this later.”
“Is Shane okay?” I asked.
“The boy who was with you?”
“Yes.”
“Last I heard, he was in stable condition.”
“So he’ll live?”
“That means the doctors don’t really know yet.”
I nodded that I understood.
“I’ll make this quick,” Officer Barnett said. “I know you’re ready to get home.”
He asked me some questions about the Jordans, and I told him all I knew. Then he expressed his amazement that Shane and I had survived, and I didn’t have anything to say to that.
I was thinking, It just happened like it did. I wasn’t in control of any of it. I didn’t do anything but stay alive the best I could, like anyone else would have.
When Officer Barnett was finished he told my parents that he might have some more questions later, but that was all for now. Then he offered us a ride back to the airport, and I finally felt done with all the attention and questions. I desperately wanted to be alone with my parents somewhere familiar. And it wasn’t until I was sliding across the seat into Brownie, breathing in its wet-towel smell and squeezing in next to Dad as Mom climbed in beside me, that I felt like I was truly home.
“Do you want to stop and get anything?” Mom asked.
“No,” I said. “I just want to go home.”
Dad patted my hair and put his arm around me. “Me too, sweetheart,” he said.
* * *
Dad helped me to my old bedroom, with Mom following. The air conditioner in the window had the room cool and pleasantly full of comforting background noise. I climbed under the sheets and buried my head into the pillow. Then Dad pulled the quilt up to my shoulders and patted me on the back.
“We’ll be here when you wake up,” he said.
Dad left the room, and Mom came to sit on the bed beside me.
“What’s going on?” I asked her.
“What do you mean?”
“What happened with you and Dad while I was gone?”
She kept her hand on me but looked away at the window. “He’s got to take care of himself, Julie,” she said.
“I’m not worrying about it all anymore, Mom. There’s nothing I can do.”
“He says he’s going to take his health more seriously.”
“It was never about the tanks, was it?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “It was about me. I think I was jealous.”
“What do you mean?”
She thought about it for a moment. “You know, Julie,” she said, “there’s two kinds of people in this world. There are those who make things happen and those who watch things happen. Your dad’s a doer. And it’s taken me a while to admit that I’m just a watcher.”
“But you’re a good lawyer. You made that happen.”
“That’s no dream. It’s only a job. A crappy one.”
“Did you quit?”
“Your dad needs me. I need his dreams. Life isn’t life without them. And if he can give me the dreams, I think I can hold the rest together.”
I sat up and hugged her. She squeezed me tight and I sobbed against her shoulder.
“I want it to be like it was,” I said once the tears had stopped.
“Me too,” she said.
“I don’t want to go back to Atlanta,” I said.
I heard Mom sniffle and breathe deep through her nose. “We’re going to try again,” she said.
“No, you’re going to make it work this time. Both of you. That’s his biggest dream of all. He’ll do anything you say.”
“I know, sweetheart,” she said. “I know. And I’m here.”
49
I stayed at the house and rested and recovered. I desperately wanted to know how Shane was doing. I tried calling the hospital about him but I was told they couldn’t release any information. I had Mom call Officer Barnett and he said he knew Shane was in stable condition but that he couldn’t find out anything more. Then I looked up his home phone number in my old elementary school directory, but when I called I got a recording saying it was disconnected. Finally, on the morning of the third day, Dad came into my room and held out his cell phone to me.
“It’s Mrs. Jordan,” he said. “She wants to talk to you.”
I studied him curiously as I took the phone.
“Julie?” a woman’s voice said to me. “This is Carol Jordan, Shane’s mom.”
“Hi,” I said.
“I know you’ve been calling the hospital. I wanted to tell you personally that Shane is recovering. And I want to thank you for all you did.”
“So he’s going to be okay?”
“Yes,” she said. “He’s got some broken ribs and a concussion, but they’ve stopped the internal bleeding.”
“Can I come visit him?”
“Yes,” she said. “He’d like that very much. And I’d love to meet you.”
* * *
Dad drove me to the hospital that afternoon, where we met Mrs. Jordan in the waiting room. She was very pretty and much younger-looking than I expected. We followed her down the hallway to a large room, where we found Shane lying in bed with IVs in his arm and bandages up to his neck. He smiled at me.
“How you doing, kid?” Dad said with good humor.
“Fine, Mr. Sims.”
“That’s good to hear. Thank you for taking care of my girl out there.”
“I’d have died if
it weren’t for her.”
“Well, sounds like you make a good team.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“All right, then. Get to feeling better again. You two catch up while Mrs. Jordan and I meet with Officer Barnett in the cafeteria and sign off on a few things.”
Dad and Mrs. Jordan walked out and left us alone. At first it was awkward. I didn’t know where to begin.
“Your mom’s nice,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s pretty messed up about what happened to Dad.”
“I didn’t see her boyfriend,” I said.
“You didn’t?”
“No. Is there one, really?”
“I haven’t asked her yet. You think I should?”
I smiled and shook my head. “No. Not yet.”
“I told you breaking that stupid light would work.”
“You got lucky.”
We laughed. It was a relief that we were both still the same even after being swept into real life again.
“So when are you leaving?” I asked.
“I guess when I can walk again,” Shane joked.
“I mean, smart-aleck, when are you leaving for school?”
“August twenty-third.”
“You going to cut your hair?”
“Maybe. You want me to?”
“Just a little bit. Not much.”
“I thought you were going to do it,” he said.
“When do you come home from boarding school?”
“It’s just Bay St. Louis, a couple of hours away. I can come home on the weekends.”
“So when you come home, I’ll cut it.”
“But you’ll be in Atlanta.”
“No,” I said. “I’m staying here.”
“Really?”
I smiled and nodded. “Yeah. With Mom and Dad.”
He studied me for a second. After all our talks out on the rig, I knew I didn’t have to explain anything to him.
“It all worked out, didn’t it?” he said.
“I think so,” I said.
“Now I just have to fit in at a new school.”
“You’ll do it,” I said.
“I’ll do my best.”
I realized right then that all Shane had ever done was his best. And now I was sure his best was only going to get better.