“Miriam!” cried Christine. “Sasha!”
“It’s you!” said Miriam. “Go downstairs!”
The wind died abruptly. The rain all but stopped. The ship went quiet. It was just the pitching waves, the roar of the surf, far below. The air in the room was charged with negative ions, dim and cool and humid.
Kimmi came to stand at the console with Mick and Christine, Sasha and Miriam, the five of them shoulder to shoulder, looking out through the salt-crusted windows at the wild foam and water, expectantly, as if they were all waiting for something.
“They made us read a horrible thing in Bible school when I was a kid,” said Kimmi, out of nowhere. Her face glowed in the stormy light. “Revelation 8:8: ‘And the second angel poured out his vial on the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea.’ ”
“That’s terrible,” said Christine.
“I know,” said Kimmi. “What the heck kind of story is that to tell small children?”
“The Song of Miriam is better,” said Miriam. “That’s a song of redemption and hope. I loved the way you sang it.”
The Isabella moaned and gave a little heave to port, rocked by a monster swell.
“Listen to her,” said Kimmi. Her teeth were chattering, not from cold, Miriam thought, but from a strange excitement. Miriam felt it too. “All night, I kept telling her, ‘You can do it, Izzy, just hold it together, come on!’ ”
While Kimmi talked, the ship was hit by another wave, smaller than the last one, but still powerful enough to make the ship lurch. Mick tightened his grip on the hand railing below the console. He felt something wrench and twinge in his right shoulder. He held on so tightly his knuckles cracked as the ship slowly, shudderingly righted herself again and everything quieted.
“No way,” said Kimmi. “Over there. Look!”
They all looked in the direction she was pointing. Far away, a streaming bolt of sunlight lit up a patch of stormy ocean, the rain and spray creating a dazzling column of air, shimmering almost gold.
“It looks like the ladder to heaven,” said Christine.
They all laughed, no one knowing quite why, apart from the fact that it felt good to laugh.
“We can’t climb it,” said Sasha.
“But what a beautiful sight,” said Miriam.
Just as quickly as it had appeared, the faraway shaft of sunlight was swallowed again by the clouds. But somehow the air on the bridge seemed brighter. It was so quiet, they could hear the ocean running against the hull far below. The Isabella listed, just a little, but they all felt it.
“Are you guys ready to go downstairs?” said Kimmi. “We should go.”
“What is that?” said Christine. She was staring straight ahead at a wide, dense, blue-black mountain of a wave veined with white coming toward them. It grew as it came and filled the windows until it blotted out the storm. The Isabella tilted upward, rising easily into the air as if a hand had reached down and lifted her from the sea.
“Here we go,” said Mick.
He held his breath and felt a swooping in his stomach as the ship climbed the marbled face of the wave, up and up. The Isabella seemed to balance on the crest, trembling and weightless. The windy green-and-white foam disappeared and the whole world went gray and silent.
Mick looked at Christine in the sudden hush. Her mouth was open, her face astonished and full of anticipation. He wished he could stay up here with her forever, and never come down.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kate Christensen is the author of six previous novels, most recently The Astral, and the memoirs Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose. The Great Man won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has written reviews and essays for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, The Wall Street Journal, and Food and Wine. She lives with her husband in Portland, Maine.
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