by Paul Griffin
Dri was gone. The railing she was tied to had pulled out of its fitting.
I thought I saw her in the face of a wave. When the boat stopped spinning and hovered in the trough, and my arms stopped whipping around, I was able to put my hand to my chest to unclip my life-vest strap. John unclipped himself and lunged for my hand. “No way,” he said.
“Get off me,” I said. I twisted his hand away and pressed in on the buckle to click the release.
“Matt, look,” he said. He was pointing backward, over his shoulder.
I turned to look and didn’t see anything. When I turned back his fist smashed my face. Lights out.
NAVIGATOR’S LOG, AUGUST 31, 06:21 HOURS EST
Captain Braswell is scrambling helicopters to coordinates 40.025651 by -68.664551, where a small vessel has been sighted.
I woke up I don’t know how much later. The storm was still raging. I went to unclip my safety strap, and this time I blocked John’s hand. I clicked the buckle and was free of the boat. I washed into the ocean with the next wave and swam toward where I thought I’d last seen Dri.
I found a bright orange splash on the other side of a mountain the color of sludge. Dri’s life vest. She was waving her arms. I swam down the wave to her. “Look,” she said. She pointed to a pink light shining off a wave. The light swung at us and blinded us. Then I heard the chuck-chuck-chuck of the helicopter. A yellow box hit the water and exploded into a life raft. Dri and I climbed aboard. A safety cage dropped down with a guy in black scuba gear. He took us both into the cage. The hoist jerked us up. I kept screaming for the rescuer to look down into the water. John had washed out of the boat. It had capsized. He was swimming toward us. Another mountain range of ocean was rolling at us. The water was falling apart as it rose. The crests broke off the wave and slid down its face toward John.
“Wait,” I said. “He’s right there.”
“No time,” the rescuer said.
“We can’t leave him.”
But we did. The copter lifted us out of the wave’s path. After it rumbled under us the sea was empty. John was gone. I turned to Dri. She was gone too. The helicopter was gone. I was alone, nowhere, and now I knew I was dreaming, or dead.
NAVIGATOR’S LOG, AUGUST 31, 07:08 HOURS EST
Helicopters have been recalled. The small vessel was actually a lost cargo container and not small. It’s reported to be big enough to sink a ship. It was probably tagged with GPS but our crew fired a GPS bullet into it anyway. Salvage teams have been notified and will locate and sink the container when the storm abates.
I woke up I don’t know how much later. I woke up twice actually. The first time I came to only halfway, and I didn’t like what I saw, so I closed my eyes again. The monster waves were gone and so were John and Dri. The idea of being strapped to a small boat out in the Atlantic Ocean, all alone? No, I wasn’t ready to believe this was my reality. So I clamped my eyes shut and forced myself to give into my exhaustion, and I guess I passed out.
The second time I opened my eyes must have been a good while later, because the seas were almost calm. The hard rain was back, though. Dri and John were back too, passed out on the floor of the boat. Dri’s life vest was ripped at the shoulders, but it had stayed on her, at her waist. John wasn’t wearing a vest. His was still strapped to the railing on the other side of the boat. I was trying to piece together what had happened when Dri told me. Her eyes barely opened, and she didn’t lift her head from where she was, facedown on the boat’s floor. “He did it,” she said. “Your idiot friend. He came out with a safety line and latched on to me. We reeled ourselves in, between the crests. Why?” she said. “Why’d you do it?”
John didn’t answer. He wasn’t moving. My hands were too heavy to lift to my life-vest strap. I was pinned to the railing, but I could reach John’s shoulder with my foot. I nudged him with my toe. He pushed my foot away and went back to sleep. His hands were a bloody mess.
Now Dri shook him. Her hands were rope-burned too. She still didn’t have enough strength to sit up. “Hey, idiot?” she said. “Why didn’t you leave me out there? I wish you would have just left me out there.”
“You couldn’t tell me that before?” John said. They both passed out.
My shoulders were cut where the life vest had burned into me as it kept me tied to the boat. I couldn’t hear out of my left ear. I shrugged and figured what the heck, I might as well pass out too.
John was sitting next to me. He was shaking my shoulder. I winced and pulled my shoulder away. Dri was still passed out on the floor of the boat.
John rubbed his knuckles. “I think I broke my ring finger,” he said, or that’s what he seemed to say. I was reading his lips.
“What?” I said. “I can barely hear you.”
“When I hit you.” He showed me his finger. It was bent. “Head of rock you got there. But we knew that already. I didn’t make my fist tight enough. My pinkie too.”
“Good,” I said. “My face feels terrific, by the way.”
“Doesn’t look it. You’re uglier than you ever were. Have a nice black eye there in a bit. How’s your neck? Whiplashed you pretty good there. I won’t say sorry.”
“Don’t.”
“You don’t want me to.”
“I don’t.”
“Let me say this much,” John said.
“Don’t say anything. This is crazy.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean this is totally wrong,” I said. “Why didn’t you let me go after her?”
“You’d leave me out here all by myself?”
“I was going to say the same to you, and anyway, what are we waiting for here? We’re nowhere. We’re nobody.”
“Matt? You might want to unbuckle yourself from the railing.”
“Why?”
“We’re sinking. Maybe we better wake her up too.”
“Now there’s an idea,” I said.
NAVIGATOR’S LOG, AUGUST 31, 10:48 HOURS EST
End of mission called at 10:46 hours EST. All souls presumed lost in the wake of Carlotta. RIP, Martins, Gonzaga, Costello, and Halloway. May God bless you, dear children. May God keep you safe.
We dropped the engine, gas and all, to shed weight. It wouldn’t start anyway now. The boat still took on water. Its nose was splintered, and the hull was cracked. The water seeped in slowly. We bailed with our hands, and that was all we could do. We’d lost the distiller setup, the tarp, jugs, paddles, tools, rags, everything but the bloodstained sail, which was too worn and torn to hold water. The storage cabinets had smashed open in the storm.
The sea was full of garbage. Spilled cargo, broken furniture, plastic lawn chairs, a basketball. The storm’s wake dragged it along with us in clumps. The water was the color of tarnished silver. The rain was cold now, but soft. We caught it with our mouths and laughed at one another, at how ridiculous we looked, three bedraggled kids sticking our tongues out at the sky. Our wet clothes hung so loosely on us I could have sworn we’d been shrunken, and we had been, I guess. Dri went from cracking up to crying, back and forth. I man-cried, or how I thought a man should cry, which is to say I just made my face look tough and angry when all I felt like doing was bawling for my mom. John looked like he always did, no emotion, maybe half a smile here, an eye roll there when Dri’s sniffling was too loud for him. We were losing it, and more than that, I was losing her.
She didn’t want to be next to me anymore. I was going to ask her why, until I realized I probably didn’t want to know the answer. If I so much as looked at her, she cried.
The sky had a mad, haunted glow to it, white embers. The waves were fast but small, and they didn’t break. The storm had cleared out the sharks, but for how long? I didn’t care if they came back now. A coil of electrified wire was shorting out in my head where John had hit me. My eye twitched.
Behind us came a creaking noise. I was afraid to turn around. I gasped inside and Dri gasped out loud when we dared to look at it: a whale, a hundred footer. Now
two whales. Three. They were ganging up on us. I sat back in the sinking boat. I was done. Dri sat back too. I tried to hold her hand but she wouldn’t let me. And John?
John cried.
“Get up,” he said.
“Why?”
“We’re saved. They’re logs. They’re giant logs.”
“So? How’s that save us?”
“Can we start with this?” John said. “They’re not sinking.”
We climbed aboard the logs with nothing more than the life vests we were wearing, the bloodstained sail, and JoJo’s phone, which didn’t work anymore but which I’d been keeping in my pocket. Not that I thought we’d live, but on the off chance we did I wanted JoJo’s and Stef’s parents to have the pictures, the same ones that were my last connection to Dri before she hated me. “You’re mad because I didn’t swim out after you, right?” I said.
“Matt, no, okay?” she said.
“I tried, but—”
“I know. John told me. I can’t talk about it. I wouldn’t even know how to. My head hurts. I can’t think. I don’t want to either. I don’t want to think.” She shimmied toward the point where the logs were highest above water. They were banded together at one end by an iron chain as thick as my leg, or as thick as my leg was before I got onto the boat two weeks earlier. The logs crossed each other at slight angles. Where they were chained, their ends overlapped like the spokes of a tepee that had fallen on its side. One of the spokes rose a few feet above the water, and we straddled it. Sitting on top of the logs we could keep ourselves mostly out of the water. The parts of our legs that stayed in there too long puckered and bled heat into the ocean. Dying of hypothermia at the end of August. None of it seemed real anymore. I started thinking I’d died in the storm, and this was some weird limbo where you didn’t care what happened to you.
John patted the log. “They can’t leave this stuff out here,” he said.
“Why not?” I said.
“They’re huge.” He was right about that much. The logs were the biggest trees I’d ever seen, as wide as I was tall. They were tattooed with Japanese kanji. “You can’t have something as big as a city bus drifting into the sea-lanes. A ship runs into it, you get a Titanic situation. We’re saved, I’m telling you.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said.
“You’ll see, I know. You’re going to survive this thing if it kills me. By tonight we’ll be watching towboat TV.”
But John was wrong.
A few hours after sunset, day fourteen …
The sky cleared and the wind came back cold. We needed to huddle to keep warm, and Dri forced herself to be wrapped in the sail and shiver with us. The dehydration cramps wouldn’t stop. My fingers and toes tightened and twitched. A knife jabbed my right kidney again and again, with my heartbeat. My eyes throbbed and the stars pulsed. I thought I saw the ones JoJo had pointed out to me, Hercules or Heracles or who cared anymore.
I’d never forget the gush of blood that hit the surface when the sharks jerked him down. I knew Dri would never forget it either. John, though? I didn’t think he’d sweat it much. I bet he’d forgotten about it the second we paddled far enough away so the blood slick was out of sight. “That’s why they call him the Iceman,” I said to myself. Or maybe I wasn’t talking to myself. Maybe I wanted John to hear me. He did. He looked away. Dri turned toward me. “What are you talking about?” she said.
“How’d it feel, Johnny boy?” I said. “The crack of his skull vibrating up the hammer, up your arm, into the hole in your chest where your heart is supposed to be.” This was why Dri couldn’t stand me anymore. I’d let John kill JoJo.
John nodded. He almost smiled even. “I knew you figured I did it.”
“You’re sick, John. How were we ever friends?”
“Matt,” Dri said.
“He was a day away from a bacterial infection that would have stopped his heart,” I said.
“A long day away,” John said.
“Matt, he didn’t do it.”
“He did. Look at him. He isn’t even bothering to deny it.”
“John, you really are sick,” Dri said. “What’s wrong with you? Why are you letting him think this way?”
“He’ll think what he thinks,” John said. “I don’t care anymore. I don’t. He wants to believe I’m a murderer? Fine. He’s right too. I would have done it if I had to anyway.”
“You did do it,” I said.
“He didn’t, Matt, for the last time.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I did it,” she said. She turned to John. “Tell him, John. You saw me. I know you did. You pretended to be sleeping, but you had one eye open the whole time we were on that boat. You watched me do it. Go ahead and tell him how I did it.”
“Why are you doing this?” I said to her. “Why are you lying, taking the blame for him? You’re covering for him to protect me. So he and I can still be brothers, right? So I don’t totally and completely despise him.”
“John was right,” Dri said. “It had to be done. I didn’t think John would do it, and I still don’t. I also didn’t want you to think I was a murderer, in case we … if we ever were rescued. He—JoJo—he was talking to himself in his sleep, I thought. But after a while his eyes opened. He was talking to Stef, saying he was thinking maybe he should join her. He knelt and prayed to her, and he was crying. I sat next to him. He said he felt her calling out to him, whispering his name over and over. ‘Do you think I’m crazy?’ he said. ‘That I hear her voice?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I heard her too.’ I pointed to the water. ‘And I see her. Look.’ The sun was coming up, but the moonshine was still bright on the water. It was beautiful, a shiny line that led to the horizon, a strip of silver cutting through the cleanest gold. I said that maybe it was a message from Stef. A map, a trail that led to where she was waiting for us. ‘I just want to be with her,’ Jo said. ‘That’s all I want now, Dri. To hold her hand again. To laugh with her. Do you think I should go?’ And then I—oh my God, I can’t believe I did this. I want to tear my skin off and escape from me. I said, ‘Go. Be with her.’ He kissed me and thanked me and slipped into the water. I sat back and pretended to be groggy after nodding off.”
“That’s not the same as hitting him in the back of the head with a hammer,” I said.
That made her mad. “I might as well have pushed him,” she said. “I’m insane, truly. I was before I did it too. I’d have to be to think I’d be able to live with myself, to think I could be with somebody like you after doing something like that. Killing my cousin’s boyfriend.”
“You didn’t kill him,” I said.
“I didn’t stop him, you jerk! He was my friend. How do you forgive somebody for that kind of treachery? That kind of betrayal. How do you forgive yourself? You just don’t.”
“Dri,” I said.
She cut me off. All she said was “No.” She shrugged my hand off her shoulder and crawled as far down the log as she could to get away from me.
“It’ll be okay,” John said.
“Are you out of your mind?” I said.
“She did it for you. She did it to protect you. That doesn’t go away, that feeling. It never goes away. It might take some time to come back to where she lets you see it, but it’ll always be there, deep in her where she’ll never be able to cut it out.” He studied Dri and nodded. “Tell you what. I like her now. I like her a lot. Her telling you that? That was the bravest thing I ever saw.”
Morning, day fifteen, the last day …
The ticks between time stretched out again. Commercial jetliners, minor glints and distant hum, took years to cross the sky. Thousands of fins. No. Just jags in the water. Dri was as far away from me as she could get, at the last part of the log before it started to angle underwater. I let myself slip off the log. John tried to pull me back onto it. “We gotta hang in,” he said.
“Really we don’t,” I said.
“You never know,” he said.
“Som
etimes you do. Yeah, let go of me. I’m done.”
“Not yet you aren’t.”
“You look bad too.”
“I feel better than I look,” he said. “Now quit being a wimp and get back up here.”
“Get back up there, Matt,” Dri yelled. “I’m serious. I’ll be madder at you than I am now.”
“Why are you mad at me anyway?”
“Just get back up,” she said. “Stop being an idiot.”
“You heard her,” John said.
“I don’t know why you want to live so bad,” I said to John.
“I don’t know why you don’t. You have that nice girl over there ready to fall in love with you all over again. Quit moping. You’ll see.”
“Why are you doing this?” I said. “Why do you keep trying to save me?”
“Right about now I got nothing better to do.”
A gull had been circling us for hours. It was alone. It tumbled into an updraft. Its wings were wrong, flimsy like cheap cloth. It dropped down fast and perched on one of our logs. It was shaking. Its left wing hung limp.
“Leave her,” I said. My throat was a gritty pipe. “We’re dead anyway.”
“So’s the bird,” John said. “It’ll give us another couple of days.”
“You really want another couple of days out here?” I said.
“Shh.” He was arm’s length from the gull. He grabbed her by her broken wing. She didn’t fight him. He covered her head with his fingers and started to twist her neck.