Not Without Hope

by Nick Schuyler

  They arrived at the Coast Guard station in St. Petersburg and spoke with Captain Close. The station was right on the water, a white stucco building with a Spanish-tiled roof. The building was built in a way that made it seem hunkered down against a storm. Captain Close was cordial and supportive. He showed them the command center and told the Schuylers that everything possible was being done to find their son and his friends. The Schuylers left their phone numbers. Captain Close told them to call anytime.

  Marcia and Kristen left the station about three thirty, avoiding the news media parked outside. Stu Schuyler, Nick’s father, arrived, and he was upset.

  “It’s not good,” he said to Kristen. “I know he’s gone.”

  “Don’t you dare say that,” Kristen replied.

  Her father was inconsolable.

  “I’ll kill myself if he’s gone,” Stu said to Kristen. “I can’t live without him.”

  Stu Schuyler walked to a pier at the Coast Guard station and was told by someone that the forty-seven-foot motor lifeboat sent out earlier that morning had returned. Rough seas had hampered the search for the missing boaters.

  Stu thought to himself that if his Jet Ski wasn’t under repair, he would ride into the Gulf to help the rescue attempt. He knew it was a foolish idea, but his son was out there. Anything was better than standing around. How he and his ex-wife didn’t have heart attacks he couldn’t explain. Stu and his second wife, Jackie, spoke briefly to the media, believing it might somehow help in the search. At least it couldn’t hurt, though it was hardly comforting.

  Stu kept saying to himself, They’re in the water. I know they’re in the water.

  A short while after we swam back to the boat, Will said he was thirsty.

  “There’s got to be more stuff under the boat,” he said.

  Earlier, he had wondered, “You think we can eat some of that fish we caught yesterday?”

  On the floor of the boat, in the back, was a trapdoor that folded back. It was the box where we kept the fish. It was a production every time we caught one. We had five plastic gasoline cans back there. We had to move them to open the door and toss the fish in.

  As I said, I hate fish, the taste, the smell, the texture, everything, except for maybe that time Marquis forced me to have a bit of the grilled and fried fish after our first fishing trip. It probably started when I was nine or ten, and my mom tricked me at Long John Silver’s. She told me it was chicken until I ate most of what was on my plate. Then she said, “You just ate fish.” I was so mad, I spit out what was in my mouth and threw down the piece I had in my hand. But now I was hungry. I would have contemplated eating my own arm.

  This fish wasn’t cooked, though. It might not even be dead.

  “Would we get sick on it?” I asked Will.

  “Well, there’s sushi,” he said. “People eat sushi and don’t get sick.”

  I thought about how disgusting it would be, holding a fifteen-pound fish and gnawing on something that might still be alive. But I was willing to do it if it worked. Still, I had another concern and I brought it up with Will: “If we open that fish box and there was no water in there, is it going to take on water and is the boat going to go down?”

  We went back and forth, and finally decided not to take a chance.

  If the boat went down, we were both screwed. Still, we were starving.

  “I’m going to try to go back under,” Will said.

  Will had ripped free one of the twenty-gallon coolers the day before. There was one remaining. The cooler was wedged in place between the deck and the captain’s chair at the center console. Before we set out, Marquis had secured the lid tightly with a bungee cord. Now the whole thing would be upside down.

  “There’s got to be some sandwiches,” I said.

  We were so thirsty and hungry. We had given everything to Marquis at his house, and he had stored it on the boat. We knew he hadn’t put a couple of cases of beer in the coolers. But we didn’t know if the beer had fallen off the boat when we turned over. We figured there was more stuff in the storage bin where Will had found the backpack. It was like a small closet.

  He went under a few times and got nothing. He came up gasping for air. It had only been a few seconds, but it seemed like he had been holding his breath for minutes. I got nervous. Suppose he hit his head and didn’t come back up?

  He came up another time and said, “I think I can get to the cooler.”

  “The sandwiches have got to be in there,” I said.

  “I’ll reach in and grab what I can,” he said.

  With the bungee cord holding the lid shut and the waves moving the boat, he would only have a few seconds. He went under twice more, and then the third time, he brought up a bottle of Gatorade. G2, low-calorie. Twenty ounces. Purple—my least favorite, but beggars can’t be choosers. I held on to it. I didn’t drink it right away.

  “I think I can get some more,” Will said.

  He went back down two more times and got nothing.

  “I’m gonna try once more,” he said.

  It was exhausting him. I could see it in his eyes. I could hear him breathing hard. He looked very pale, very tired. Still, he went under again and the third time, and he was able to retrieve a small bag of pretzels. Pretzel bits, I think they were called. Little squares. They were honey-mustard. Usually, I would have eaten fish before I ate those pretzels. But at this point, I was happy with anything. And I was grateful to have Will with me. He was beating himself up, going under the boat. Still, I never thought the two of us wouldn’t get out of it. We had already fought those waves earlier in the day, and now they weren’t so choppy; we were able to stay out of the water for the most part.

  We split the Gatorade. We took real little sips. I drank exactly half. It was almost like a tease. My throat was hurting so bad, like real bad strep throat. It almost felt like my throat was cracking. It didn’t do a lot of good.

  “Do you like it?” Will asked.

  “Yeah, sweet,” I said. It seemed like I tasted every single flavor in the drink.

  The pretzels were so dry. Will took a couple, but that was it.

  “I can’t eat those,” he said.

  “Why’d you buy this nasty shit?” I had asked Will the night before our trip.

  They were all we had now, and they were better than nothing, but they were as dry as dirt.

  “Dude, you should try them,” I said.

  “No, I can’t,” he said.

  I was so hungry, I ate as many as I could. I don’t know if I was eating too fast or not swallowing all the way, but the pretzels were getting stuck in my throat. My mouth and throat felt blistered. I was choking the food down.

  I tried to keep the bag closed to keep the water out. We only had a quarter of a bag left when a wave landed on us. The pretzels went from damp to soaked.

  “You want any more?” I asked. “They’re done.”

  “No,” he said, and I let them go.

  WILL WENT BACK under a couple times. He was a man on a mission, but he wasn’t able to pull anything up. He was physically drained now—he had nothing left. Getting back on the boat was like trying to climb a fence. If you didn’t give it everything, you weren’t going to do it. Will floated in the water for a while and said, “I’m so tired. My heart is beating so fast.”

  Sometimes he stayed in the water five minutes or more, hanging on to a trim tab. I had to help him back on the boat. He sat behind me, holding on. It was quiet. We worked together as best we could, leaning into the waves. Sometimes, we still got thrown into the water. Will was now falling in a lot more than I did. We were both tired, but he had the added toll of diving under the boat so many times. We both put up with the same repetitive thing, hour after hour. Sit. Fall. Climb on. Sit. Fall. Climb on. Sometimes, for nine or ten minutes, I’d sit there in the water, too, holding on to the swim platform or a trim tab, and I’d just float.

  Please God, I prayed. I’ll do anything.

  I thought similar thoughts that
I had the day before. It was probably after three or four in the afternoon. We were physically exhausted. All we could do was wait and wait. And hope. I just wanted to let my mother know that I was still alive, that I was okay. I didn’t want her to worry, or at least I wanted her to worry less. I wanted the Coast Guard to continue to look for us and for her to know I was alive.

  I knew how my mom got. I knew how me and my sister had always come first and how my mom went out of her way to make our day better even if it made her day worse. I knew everyone was worried and scared. We were scared, too, but I wanted them to know that we were fighting, and as long as they were looking, we would keep fighting.

  Will and I said the Lord’s Prayer again as I held the cross on my necklace.

  “Please, God, I’ll start going to church every Sunday,” I said.

  We hadn’t seen a plane or a helicopter in a while.

  “I can’t believe they can’t find us,” Will said a few times.

  When the choppers had come and gone, Will had cried out in sheer frustration, rage, and disappointment. We felt helpless and discouraged. We were busting our asses, working so hard to survive.

  Once, Will was in the water and he peed, and he said, “Oh my God.” It felt so good. I wondered how he could pee when he was so dehydrated. I said, “Why didn’t you wait until I was in the water so I could feel the warmth?”

  I had no idea where we were. We could have been close to the Bahamas or to Cuba. We could have been a mile from where we overturned or close to Texas. I had no clue. I felt helpless. I didn’t know what we were going to do the next minute but sit there and pray and hope. We were always looking for a buoy. At least it would be stationary. We could cling to it. But there were no buoys out here.

  My legs were bleeding real bad. The salt water made the cuts a lot worse. I was in a lot of pain. My ass was torn up from sitting on the keel. A wave would come from the front of the boat and shoot up my back. It took my breath away. I had that same taste in my mouth, almost like crystal, like I was tasting my teeth.

  I put salt water in my mouth and rinsed it around and spit it out just to have some kind of moisture. I thought my body had already burned all its fat, most of it in my butt, and now I felt it was burning muscle. I was losing whatever padding I had, and it was getting more painful to sit on the keel.

  I thought about a million things. About life, about people who really mattered. I wondered what I would do if I got out of this. What would I do differently now that I had had a reality check? How would my life change? Will’s life?

  I thought about what had happened with Marquis and Corey the night before. How would I explain it if we got rescued? Particularly to their families. How would I explain that Will and I made it while we lost both of them? Why did the NFL players die and the two best friends live? Why did two white kids live and two black guys die? Would someone try to make a racial incident out of it? Crazy thoughts.

  I kept thinking about how I had to let go of Marquis, his head flopped back, his lifeless body floating in the water. His eyes were closed. I thought how that was the last time anyone would see him. I was the last one to say anything to him. I thought about holding on to his wrist, and finally letting go. Over and over.

  I went through the whole thing in my mind. Why is this happening to me? I wondered. Is this karma for things I’ve done bad in my life?

  I asked God, “Please.”

  I thought about high school, about friends who had grown distant and apart. I thought about my couple of years at college at Kent State. They were probably the best two years of my life, meeting new friends, staying up late, playing video games when I should have been studying and sleeping, eating crap food and going out late and partying. I thought about how I moved to Florida, wanting something different, a new start. I was over living in dorms and ugly, rainy weather.

  I thought about working out a lot and my best friend at home, Nate Milstead. He went to Kent with me. We lived on the same floor of the same dorm. He got hurt in a snowboarding accident, damaging his back and rupturing his spleen. His family was in a tough financial situation, so he had to leave school. He went into the army. He was so frightened he would get deployed to Iraq. The last time he visited me in Florida, he was scared to death. He believed he wasn’t going to come back. He had too much to drink one night down here and got all emotional. He said to tell his little brother Zack that he loved him. “Tell my mother I love her,” he said. “I’m not stupid. I know I’m not coming back.”

  But his back was so messed up, he got out of the army. He was excited, ecstatic. He became a cop in Akron. That’s what he wanted to be. He was a hands-on guy, good with people. But that night down here he had been so scared. And now I was as scared as he was.

  I thought again about all the important people in my life. My high school girlfriend, Megan Frank. She was married now. I thought back to the motorcycle accident with my friend Daniel Turner. I thought about my friend from college, Matt Smith, who has muscular dystrophy, and how fortunate I was. I thought about another friend, Ryan Barry, and how we partied at school and joked around. I thought about Amanda Smith, a girl I had partied with in high school.

  I thought again about how worried my mother surely was, and that she was doing all she could do, and the Coast Guard was sending choppers and everyone was doing as much as possible, but I knew people felt helpless as well, as helpless as I did.

  I thought about how I couldn’t have my mother come to my funeral. I knew if I didn’t make it through this, my mom was going to have to go through life without her son. That’s probably the worst thing a mother can go through, losing a child. A parent shouldn’t have to bury a child. It should be the other way around. No one is strong enough for that.

  I could picture my mother making the arrangements with the church and the funeral home and the graveyard. I tried not to think about it, but I couldn’t help it. I thought about who would attend my funeral. I went through everybody in my head, friends, aunts, uncles, cousins, the parents of my friends. Even my old teachers and coaches. Would they come all the way down from up north? It made me extremely sad.

  I thought about one of my favorite teachers, my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Sweet. I felt like I was her favorite student. She was a short and cute older woman who found a way to make everything funny and not school-like. She’d read stories to the class. She changed voices for each character. If there were five characters, she changed voices for each one.

  Third grade was still my favorite grade. Nine years old. Carefree. When we had show-and-tell, the one who gave the presentation would leave the class and everyone would comment and say good things about that person. We all had a chart and she would laminate comments on it. One of the kids had commented about me, “He’s cute.”

  Third grade was my first year of football. The Munson Mustangs. We went to the Pee Wee Super Bowl. I was one of the fastest guys in the league. Some of the parents called me a ball hog and gave me a hard time, even though the coaches called the plays. I scored fourteen touchdowns that year. We lost in the championship game, six to nothing. I had never cried about sports, but after that game, I broke down. It was the only game I hadn’t scored. I felt like it was my fault.

  I thought about my sports career beyond that. I think every athlete has this characteristic, whether they admit it or not: “When I’m in my prime I can do it, I can go another step.” Like I had the night before, I thought back to some decisions I made—not continuing to play football my last two years of high school. I knew I had a better chance in college with football than basketball. I thought about how I had torn my ACL the summer after my senior year of high school—hurt it in a pickup game. I thought about working out with Marquis and Corey and how I was in just as good a shape as both of them. I had done endurance lifting for so long, and it was new to them. Constantly moving, resting one body part while working another, ninety minutes to two hours of constant work.

  I thought about my chances to play football at USF.
What if I had stuck it out and sat out one year and played the next? Another year—you think that’s a long time, but it’s really not. I should have stuck it out.

  Everything in my mind now was what-ifs. What if I don’t make it out of here? What if that plane did see us and is making its way back? What if no one finds us? There was a lot of hope and prayer and frustration.

  IT WAS PROBABLY five o’clock at this point. We had seen maybe one more helicopter in the distance. I took my life jacket off and swung it over my head, but nothing. The chopper flew away. The sky was kind of overcast. Earlier in the day the sun would poke out for ten or fifteen seconds once in a while. It was so nice. “I wish it would stay out,” Will and I kept saying. Then the sun would go behind a cloud. You could really feel the difference.

  The swells, consistent ten-footers, were getting a little more choppy. We were still getting thrown off the boat. There were no big gusts of wind like before, but we were still freezing. I looked at my legs. There were little cuts all over, particularly on my calves. My butt was bleeding. I could see blood on the back of my knees. My ass and my back hurt so bad. My knees were scraped up, and pieces of skin were missing. The strawberries you get on your hip from sliding into home plate, I had them all over my body. I felt contusions and bone bruises. My hands were freezing. I still had my gloves, but the fingers were shredded. It felt like my fingers were broken.

  I had the sandals from my backpack, but the tops of my feet were getting torn up, holding on against a trim tab or the swim platform, gashing my feet against metal and fiberglass. Will’s arms and legs were cut up pretty bad, too. My neck was stiff. It felt like someone had taken a baseball bat and swung at me. I was completely slouched over, sitting on the keel, my shoulders forward, just holding on to that motor for dear life. I tried to burrow myself into my jacket, to get my chin under my sweatshirt so that only my eyes showed.

  Will and I were getting quieter and quieter. I could tell he was getting weak. We would get thrown into the water and it would take him longer and longer to get back on the boat. Or he would just float for a while, out of energy. “Oh my God, I’m so cold,” he said. He was choked-up, sad.