Close Reach

by Jonathan Moore

  She climbed the rest of the way to the pilothouse and slammed the doors shut.

  According to the clock on the chart plotter, it was 1 p.m. on Tuesday, the thirty-first of December. It meant nothing to her, although later she would remember the date with absolute clarity. Just then, the only measure that had any meaning was La Araña’s lead. She had to be cutting into it. She’d been running the engine and sailing hard, keeping the sheet lines as taut as iron bars. When the wind seemed to hold at just twenty knots, she unfurled the staysail, presenting all of Freefall’s canvas to the wind. In the big gusts, she pointed upwind to depower the sails and level the boat, knowing any extra distance she bought toward the west would be like money in the bank later, when the storm hit. She shut off the autopilot and worked as close to west as she could go. The sun was transiting behind the northern storm clouds; when she raced into their shadow, the gusts were stronger and carried cold knives. But she didn’t shorten sail until the last minute.

  She didn’t want to give up any ground.

  She and Freefall hit the low-pressure system at 6:30 p.m., when they were just past a hundred nautical miles northwest of Deception Island. She saw it on the radar twenty minutes before it hit. The leading edge of the system curved from one side of the radar screen to the other, a moving wall of wind and frozen rain the size of Connecticut. There’d be no dodging this. She could turn and run from it, but she’d be in the Atlantic, east of the Falkland Islands, before she escaped it. She used the autopilot to steer up into the wind and then went to the mast to reef the mainsail.

  The wind was already picking up.

  Her heavy tether line lifted in the air and curved down to the jackline in a trembling, gravity-defying arc. Spray and foam whipped across the deck. Water on the cabin top blew sideways in clean lines like raindrops on the window of an airliner. She put three reefs in the main, working back to the pilothouse along the boom, tying in the knots so that the reduced sail would hold its shape.

  Back in the pilothouse, she rolled in the genoa. The first of the real winds came right after that. She saw them coming over the face of the sea, a moving line on the water, ripples turning to froth, waves bowing and flattening as if prostrating themselves to the greater force of air racing toward her.

  The cold wind hit like a sledgehammer.

  “Come on!” Kelly screamed.

  Freefall kicked over on a forty-degree heel. The wind was screaming through the rigging, but the sails weren’t flapping because Kelly had them trimmed and tight. She looked behind her and saw that David had tumbled to the low end of the trap. He was in a foot of foaming green water. The spray was coming into the cockpit like a running river, draining out the open transom exactly as Dean had designed it. The rain came next: wind-driven, half-frozen drops that hit the pilothouse windows like gravel. David’s screams caught in the wind and were carried away to the east. The anemometer showed a sustained wind speed of forty-nine knots, and in a minute it built well past fifty. Kelly was standing in front of the helm seat, her right leg cantilevered against the pilothouse wall to prop her body against the extreme angle of heel. At first, the waves were almost flat in the face of the storm, but as the wind built, the seas organized into long-period swells.

  She scanned the instruments. Freefall was hitting twenty knots in the gusts. She could point just west of her landfall in Chile without losing any power in the sails. The engine was turning steadily at 3,500 rpm, just under its optimal running temperature, because the seawater in the heat exchanger was so cold.

  “Give it! Fucking give it to me!”

  She was shouting over the roar of the wind and spray hitting the windows. Urging Freefall to shoulder through the waves, to get up on her keel and fly. Hollering herself hoarse at the wind, at the sky. She held on to the wheel, David’s screams just a part of the raging sea, and steered for the center of the storm, using the radar screen as a guide. Aiming for the fiercest wind, wind with the power to drive Freefall ahead on her chase.

  * * *

  For six hours, she never left the helm.

  After the waves organized, they built into moving walls of water. Forty, fifty feet high. Sea foam and bits of broken ice raced against the wind up the waves’ faces and slid down their steep backs. Freefall would mount a wave face and power up it, driven equally by the wind and the engine, and then would reach a tipping point when half her hull was hanging in nothing but rain-blasted air. The boat would seesaw down and crash into the trough, sending plumes of spray to either side. At times the pilothouse was ankle deep in water, which would slosh side to side and then drain over David and through the cockpit to the stern.

  Kelly was in a trance. Her mind became a perfect lens of concentration, open on one side to receive an infinite input of waves and wind gusts and angles and focusing all this to a few simple decisions. Whether to bear off to starboard or point up into the wind, whether to attack the waves with the bow or slip up them diagonally, whether to sheet out the main and spill wind from the sail or grind it in and bend the storm’s power to her own ends. The helm in her hand became a surgical instrument; a cut either way could mean life or death.

  And she reveled in it the way she always did.

  Riding the storm was like entering a sick man’s brain. She came in with a plan and a purpose, but in the end, it was an art of touch and reaction as she followed folds too complex to map. The naked gray ridgelines, the pulsing currents, electric with unknown thoughts and shrouded intent. She cut and burrowed to the heart of it by the feel of the instruments in her hands. David was gone. Dean was gone. It was just her and the screaming darkness, the blade of Freefall’s keel slicing the Southern Ocean on her way northwest, to Chile.

  * * *

  The southern solstice had been ten days ago, before La Araña had come growling over the horizon and into their lives. And Freefall was moving north, away from the perpetual cold light of the Antarctic summer. There was half an hour of true darkness on either end of midnight, and when the sun rose again from its brief immersion, she passed through the worst of the storm and saw that the barometer had risen. She unfurled a piece of the genoa to keep her speed, and then she looked behind her at David. He was curled into a shivering ball on the high side of the trap. The only thing that had kept him alive was the wool blanket, which was thick and so impregnated with lanolin that it was almost waterproof. As they passed into the northernmost bands of the storm, they entered the cold air mass that had been driving it forward. The temperature dropped into the twenties. Frost sparkled high in the rigging.

  For the first time since the storm hit, she was able to set the autopilot and go below. She shut the companionway doors and moved through the galley to the pilot berth.

  It was empty.

  The saline bag swung with its tube hanging over the vacant berth, and the catheter bag lay on the cabin sole, a spill of dark urine running along the teak baseboard till it drained into the bilge.

  “Dean?”

  He couldn’t have gotten up. She knew that.

  Even if his legs weren’t broken, he had no strength to stand. But the straps were unbuckled and lay on the empty mattress. Understanding grew inside her like an ice bloom. Even sick and broken, Dean would not stop. He couldn’t. It was why she loved him; it was why she’d almost left him.

  She held on to the bulkhead and looked at the empty bunk. She knew what had happened. He’d woken to the howling wind, the boat bucking in waves the size of houses. And he’d known she was at the helm, facing the storm alone, with a murderer behind her. She turned and worked toward the bow, stepping carefully because the boat was still rocking through the last of the big waves.

  She found Dean wedged under the salon table, on his side. His back was facing out, and his knees were curled up to his chest. To get there, he would have slid across fifteen feet of hardwood, banging past the corner of the galley counter. Then he somehow had tumbled up a ten-inch step to lodge between one of the table legs and the lower portion of the settee. He
’d hooked his left arm around the table leg to hold on.

  Maybe even then, clinging to the table leg, he’d thought he could do it. Gather himself and climb into the pilothouse and help her take on the storm.

  She glanced back and this time saw the trail of blood marks along the baseboard, at the foot of the step leading up to the table. He’d been sliding back and forth with each wave, maybe for hours, before he’d wound up here. She should never have left a calm harbor and sailed into a storm with her husband so sick.

  “Dean?”

  She put her hand on his shoulder and rolled him over. Immediately she put her fingers on his neck, under the line of his jaw, to feel for a pulse. His skin was cold, and she felt no beat of blood moving through his jugular.

  “Dean!”

  Getting him out from his last place of refuge was hard. He’d held on to the table leg to the end, had gone out with his arm flexed and his fist curled around the tapered block of teak. She pried him out and pulled him onto the sole, laying him on his back. They started to slide with the next pitch of the boat, and she used that momentum to hustle him up onto the couch opposite the table. She started cardiopulmonary resuscitation right there on the couch, her foul weather jacket dripping freezing seawater onto his chest as she went through the first compressions. In an hour she paused only once, and that was to tear back to the pilot berth for her stethoscope.

  But even with that, she couldn’t find a heartbeat.

  She couldn’t make one, either. She dug the heel of her palm into his sternum and braced it with her other hand, her elbows straight and her arms rigid to drive the force of her body’s full weight into his chest, into his heart. And it was for nothing. At the close of an hour she sank shaking and crying to the floor next to him, her back against the bulkhead and her knees up to her chin.

  “Why, Dean?” she whispered. “It was just a storm. And I had it. I had it. All you had to do was rest.”

  But he’d unbuckled the straps. He’d tried to come up and help. The tears nearly took her vision when she understood what had driven him to do it.

  He’d forgiven her, but in the end he hadn’t believed in her.

  He hadn’t trusted her.

  She looked at her dead husband, and she looked at the marks of blood he’d left when he’d been sliding and tumbling alone through the cabin like a fish that had been yanked from the sea and tossed to die on a pitching deck. She thought about the bowl of fruit and the kiss he’d given her thirty thousand miles ago in a warmer sea, the taste of the forgiveness that she’d never done enough to earn. She held on to Dean and she cried into his neck, and she kissed him and let herself go into the soft toughness of his skin one last time.

  She looked at the companionway stairs leading up to the closed doors. She looked at the doors and thought about what lay beyond them. There was no single point at which her mind settled on a decision, came to a course of action. But as her vision tunneled and narrowed until the companionway encompassed her entire world, her tumbling thoughts snagged and held on the jagged rock of a single idea. There was an eye to the storm that had blasted her to this shore. It was here, on her boat.

  Its name was David.

  She came into the pilothouse like a breaking wave, Freefall’s five-foot fish gaff in her hand. She used it to bang on the top of the cage, hard impacts that jolted up her wrist and arm and hurt.

  “Wake up, you fucking piece of shit!”

  David rose onto his knees and tried to move away to the far corner of the trap. He was too cold to coordinate. His blanket snagged, and he fell and rolled to the downslope wall. Then he was up again and struggling with his good hand to get the folds of wool back around his blue body.

  “You did this! You fucking did this!”

  She jabbed the gaff through the funnel in the side of the trap, hooked the blanket in its center, twisted the handle a full rotation to wind the blanket around the hook, and then hauled it off him and out of the trap. He tried to fight her, holding on to the last wet corner.

  “Kelly, please!”

  “Give it, you shit!”

  By then she had half the blanket out of the trap and was pulling on it with both of her gloved hands. David didn’t have a chance. He had only one hand, and it was weak and numb with cold. He’d have had trouble holding a spoon with it, let alone fighting both Kelly and her rage. And the rage was like having a second person standing beside her.

  She got the last of the blanket and wadded it into a ball. She pitched it over the side and watched it disappear into the green-white froth of the wake.

  “You fuck! You murdering, raping fuck! This is what you get. This is what you did to us!”

  She went to the back of the cockpit and flung open the aluminum panel that covered the deck wash hoses. There was a freshwater shower there, hot and cold. But there was also a high-pressure saltwater hose. She uncoiled it with a hard yank and bent to turn on the flow of water. David was on his side, curled in the same pose Dean had taken under the table at the end. His fingers were clenched tight into the chain link, blood coming from his knuckles where he’d skinned them against the bottom of the trap.

  “This is for Dean. You fucking cocksucker.”

  The hose was fitted on the end with a bronze nozzle that shot a tight stream of thirty-degree seawater. She aimed it at his face and kept it on him no matter where he moved or flailed inside the trap. He was blue and bloody and screaming. She came up close to the trap and sprayed him with the water, cursing and screaming and crying. Finally she shut off the water and went back into the pilothouse.

  David was a crying ball in the corner.

  “Ke-Kelly! Please—”

  She put her hands over her ears and screamed so she didn’t have to hear the rest. She went through the open companionway doors and slammed them. She sat again on the floor next to Dean, her hands still clamped over her ears. She was sobbing and shaking. Later, as the boat rolled in the swells, she was sick onto her lap. Through her pressed palms, she could hear David. Sometimes he was calling her name; sometimes there were no words at all.

  It went on a long time before he finally quieted.

  After she wrapped Dean in blankets and braced him once more with webbing straps so he would not roll off the couch, she fell into their bed in the stateroom, staring out the starboard portholes at the water rushing by in a race of green and blue-white foam, looking through the skylights at the graceful shape of the staysail, the rise of the mast against the slate-gray sky. She lay in a daze, stunned by her sorrow, locked by the rigor of terror and shame. She hadn’t heard David yelling for a while now. She was horrified at what she’d done, yet she had no thought of going out to him. It probably wasn’t even over. But for her it was done. It wouldn’t be reversed.

  He’d be getting hot soon, tearing at his skin because he thought he was burning. And then, at the last, he’d try to hide any way he could. To dig down or make himself small in the corner the way a dog will crawl away under a porch to die by itself. There was a name for this stage of death by hypothermia. She thought of it now and imagined David trying to do it, the trap hampering him in his last desire.

  Terminal burrowing, it was called.

  He’d rip his fingertips to bloody nubs trying to claw his way to any hidden place.

  Still, she didn’t get up. She pulled the tartan blanket around her and lay so she could look at the water. Every four minutes was a mile under the keel, a mile closer to the end. She counted them off by the second: one one thousand, two one thousand. After ten miles she fell asleep, but there was no real rest for her there.

  * * *

  She woke cold and hungry on the morning of January 2. Dean was a stiff lump beneath the blankets in the salon. She turned off the diesel heater. She had tried so hard to keep him warm, and now she would have to keep him cool. That was her first job as a widow. Maybe on Isla Clarence, when she was finished, she would find a proper place for him. A slope with a view of the sea. A tree to shade him in the summer mon
ths, to shield him from the winds in the wintertime. A spot with stones nearby so that she could pile them atop him to keep animals away.

  She would not bury him in the Drake Passage.

  That was where she was going to put David, and she didn’t want that thing anywhere near her husband.

  She drank a glass of cold water standing in the galley. Then she dropped the plastic cup into the sink and put on her hat and gear and went up into the pilothouse to do what needed to be done.

  * * *

  His spit and blood were twisted together into a single icicle that flowed from his nose and mouth and pooled in the chain link at the bottom of the cage where it had turned into a bubbly puddle. His fingers were locked around the bar in the corner of the trap, and he was on his side with his knees drawn up to his body. She stood looking at him a long moment and realized she felt nothing. She pulled her rigging knife from its sheath on her chest harness and used its serrated blade to cut through the webbing straps that held the trap in place. Then she clipped her tether to the jackline and went up to the mast for the spinnaker halyard.

  Once she had the cage winched up, it swung with the heel of the boat and hung out over the water. She used the boat hook to trip the lanyard she’d tied to the halyard’s snap shackle. The trap fell free, hit the moving water with a muted splash, and was gone. She pulled in the spinnaker halyard and made it fast to its cleat at the mast, then came back into the cockpit. With the hose, she sprayed what was left of David off the deck and into the scuppers to the sea.

  * * *

  In the late afternoon, she made radar contact with land, comparing the green shape of the target with the landfall marked on her charts and judging the mass ahead to be Isla Cook.

  Three and a half hours later, she saw it.

  Gray mountains cleaved by glaciers and green-brown hills in the lowlands dotted with a few hardy trees. She sailed past its shore and then, eight miles later, threaded into the narrow labyrinth of islands that would lead eventually to Isla Clarence.