The Great Wide Sea

by M. H. Herlong

  The light was beginning to fade toward night when my brain moved and I decided the wind was lighter. Maybe there wasn’t even as much spray. Maybe the waves would get shorter soon. Maybe when things were calm I could fix the radio. Probably just one little wire loose or something. Then we could call for help. Maybe we were just a few miles off an island. Maybe all this was almost over.

  I was letting myself come back to life and it wasn’t feeling good. I hadn’t remembered anything since the storm started. Not Dad or the Bahamas or Mom. For a tiny second, they all glinted through a crack in my consciousness. Then the crack closed as I realized less wind meant we had a whole new set of problems. Now we weren’t moving fast enough.

  We struggled up the next wave like a tired climber. Then the wind caught our stern and pushed us forward. We rested at the top a moment then began to slide down. At the bottom of the trough, we slowed almost to a stop. The boat yawed to starboard, and we didn’t have enough momentum for me to bring her back on course. We were turning sideways to the wall of water behind us. I pushed the tiller back and forth as hard as I could to create forward motion. The starboard swing slowly corrected and we rose up the back of the next wave pointing more south than southeast. The wind took us at the top and we straightened out. It was a hard puff, and it took us safely down and up again.

  Okay, I was thinking. What now? My heart was racing. How many more dead troughs could we get through? Going forward to hank on a sail would be suicide. And the wind on the wave crests was still too much for Chrysalis to handle.

  Then I remembered—the engine! Of course. All I had to do was get the engine going and we could easily ride through the troughs and wouldn’t be overpowered on the crests. My fingers felt for the little silver toggle switch. It was smooth and cool, just like all those times we anchored. I touched the controls gently and lightly with my fingertips. The engine chugged. It turned over. It caught. I adjusted the rpms and listened. It was a beautiful sound, rhythmic, deep, and steady. It filled my ears and replaced the wild noise of the wind and waves.

  And my plan worked. We moved straight through the next trough and up again. I settled the compass into a course that was roughly south. I think I was smiling when Dylan started pulling out the hatch boards again.

  He sat beside me but didn’t take the tiller right away. He looked out on the ocean. I looked up at the sky. It would have been nice to see the stars starting to come out. It would have been nice to hear Dylan droning on about this one and that one. He pushed my hand off the tiller.

  “Less wind,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “South?” he asked.

  “Stern to the waves. If they change, we change.”

  I sat for another minute.

  “Go below,” Dylan said.

  “Anything changes. Anything at all—”

  He nodded.

  I went below, carefully replacing the hatch boards this time. I pulled off my foul weather gear. I drank water. I ate cheese. I checked over my bruises. I tried the radio. Then I lay down on the floor next to Gerry and slept.

  This time I woke up when I felt my head lift slightly off the cabin sole and bang down again. My ear hurt. The engine was chugging away. It was pitch-black in the cabin. I sat up. The movement of the boat had changed and instantly I understood why.

  The waves were shorter and closer together. When we traveled to the top of one, we didn’t have time to slide into the trough. We crashed down into it, then plowed immediately up the back of the next wave, then slammed down into the next trough. The waves were shorter because the wind had been lighter now for hours. They were closer together because the water was shallower. Wherever we were, we were closer to land that we had been before.

  I stood up. I slid the hatch boards out and felt the rush of fresh air. It was so dark outside, I couldn’t see Dylan. “Dylan?” I called.

  “Hold on!” he yelled. “Here it comes!”

  I was standing on the companionway ladder, holding on to the rails. I felt the boat fly off the top of the wave. I bent my knees to break the jolt, waiting for us to crash against the hard surface of the water. Still we went up. We flew.

  Then we began to fall.

  “Hold—” Dylan started again, then we hit. My knees buckled. My fingers tore away from the handholds. I fell backwards into the cabin. My head slammed against the navigation table and then the floor. Complete dark swallowed me, and all I heard was the vacuum rush of air in outer space. I saw the stars and then I saw and heard nothing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT is so confused and crazy that I can’t really tell it in a true way. Maybe it is because I got knocked out that I only remember snatches like pieces of a dream. Maybe it is because things really happened that way—in jerks and flashes. Everything completely dark and rushed like a roller coaster through a tunnel, and then everything all brilliant and frozen as if a searchlight were fixed on us.

  I woke up hearing Dylan’s voice screaming and feeling Gerry poking me in the sore place on my ribs. Then I knew it was Gerry who was doing the screaming at me. Dylan was yelling at Gerry, “What happened! What happened?” And when I realized the engine noise was gone, I realized that actually Dylan was asking about the engine, not about me. He didn’t even know about me. I reached out and shoved Gerry away.

  “Stop that!” I yelled. “It hurts. I can’t think.”

  Engine gone. No engine. Maybe Dylan killed it on purpose. I staggered up the companionway into the cockpit feeling dizzy and sick.

  “Engine?” I asked.

  “It died.” Dylan’s voice was tight. He was scared.

  The waves bashed the boat. We were almost sideways to them with no headway. “Stern to the waves!” I yelled.

  “How?” Dylan yelled back.

  We were swept up a wave and then dropped like a rock into the trough. My knees collapsed under me and I sprawled in the cockpit.

  “I’ll check the engine,” I yelled at Dylan, and somehow made my way back down below. To get to the engine I had to lift away the companionway ladder. The wooden panel behind it could be removed to expose the engine compartment. Just that first step in the tossing boat took precision planning, starting with where to put the loose ladder once I got it off. Then I crawled into the compartment as much as I could—only my head and shoulders, really. The problem, it turned out, was simple. There was air—or water—in the line, just like when we were crossing the Bank. I bled it off and crawled out. Thumbs-up to Dylan, and he started the engine again. I lifted the panel to cover the engine hatch and the engine died again.

  Back into the hole. Bleed it again. Out of the hole. Thumbs-up. Dylan starts it. Good sound. It dies. Back into the hole. Throw up into the bilge. Bleed it again. Cut my hand on a wing nut. Out of the hole. Thumbs-up. Dylan starts it. The sound is beautiful. It keeps going. It doesn’t skip or race. It purrs. And then it stops.

  God, I’m thinking, we’ve got water in the fuel tanks. All that banging and slamming. We knew something would give. The tanks themselves? The seals at the throat? A loose connection in the engine? I crouch to go in again. What else can I do?

  We slam into the trough of the waves and the bow swings to starboard as the force of the wave pushes the stern forward. We’re sideways to the waves. I can feel us going over. Green water is pouring in the dorade vents on the port side. I wonder where Gerry is. I am holding myself rigid in the square opening to the engine compartment.

  Then we are upright again. We didn’t broach. Bleed the engine, I think. I reach for the nut. The diesel fumes sicken me and I puke again. This time right on my own hands. I feel us suspended in air, then falling.

  We smash onto something not water. Something hard. The bottom. Rock. We’re aground. The wave slams us again and we float off.

  Gerry is on his knees looking at the cabin sole under the navigation table. Water is oozing up through the planks.

  We slam again. What’s under us? What’s out there?

 
It’s dark. The waves are wild.

  We’re going to sink, I think, and grab Gerry and throw him into the cockpit.

  I hoist myself through the companionway and crawl to the dinghy lashed to the cabin roof. I’m picking at the lines. Chrysalis slams off a wave. My grip slips. The dinghy balances a moment and then begins to slide uncontrolled toward the water. Suddenly Dylan is there too, grabbing the lines with me as they snake toward the sea, and we are crawling to the cockpit. We lash the dinghy off the stern, blinded as the waves crash over us. Holding our breath. Eyes stinging. Gerry at the helm. Blankie clutched between his knees. Throwing himself against the tiller. Pulling and straining. His face rigid with concentration.

  But it didn’t matter. There was no such thing as steering Chrysalis anymore.

  Time stopped and we waited.

  All my senses stretched to read the ocean before us.

  Where were the coral heads? The rocks? The shoals? My ears strained for the sound of breakers on a beach. My eyes searched for a lighthouse, a marker, or a darker mass that didn’t change. Where was the scent of wet sand, of sea grapes or palms, of dead fish caught in the rocks? What was out there? Where were we going?

  Then the boat lifted, and the darkness in front of us solidified into a mountain rising out of the water. The waves thrust us up and toward the dark, toward the rocks. And then they dropped us. Chrysalis fell square onto a coral head and shuddered from her keel to the tip of her mast. We collapsed like cloth dolls onto the cockpit floor.

  Chrysalis pitched forward off the rock, but the waves were not done. They caught us before the bow buried itself underwater and then lifted us again, higher and closer to land. The smell of wet rock and sand blew at us. The waves took us higher and higher and then slammed us bow first into an open wedge in the rock. The boat screamed as the fiberglass sides scraped against the stone. Our forward motion stopped, but the top of the mast above us swung crazily forward, still moving toward land.

  Then it swung aft in a powerful whiplash toward the stern and broke. Four feet above the cabin roof, the shrieking metal separated with the pressure of the wild swing. The whole mast crashed down toward the cockpit, then swung to port and splashed into the ocean, dragging the shrouds across the cockpit and pulling the hull slightly sideways with it.

  Then the boat was still.

  We lay huddled together in the cockpit. I saw that Gerry was spooned up against my belly and I was covering him with one leg and arm. Dylan was curled up facing us, his arms around his head. He was looking back at me in the sudden stillness.

  Now the waves slid against Chrysalis the way they slide against a dock. They could no longer move her. They had lifted her too high, and she was wedged in too tight. Chrysalis held her ground in the dark. She would never sail again, but she wouldn’t sink, either. We were safe for a while. It was time to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  IT WAS DEEP into the night, but I still was not sleeping. Chrysalis’s bow had stayed wedged into the rocks, only scraping occasionally against the coral growing at the foot of the rock standing there in the sea before us. The keel also was jammed into the living coral, but the stern hung over a chasm plunging deep into the water.

  The waves had calmed as the hours passed. Now they only licked at the hull and tapped here and there like tiny baby hammers. The dinghy floated just aft, momentarily touching the stern and then drifting away. The wind had softened to a breeze, and the clouds were scudding away, leaving a big round moon to light us up where we huddled on our shattered boat.

  Dylan lay on the starboard cockpit seat. The cockpit itself was a snarl of lines, a snake pit. But Dylan had gathered the starboard jib sheet and rolled it into a mound to serve as a pillow. His hair was wet and it stuck out from his head like the leaves of a palm. Still, he slept.

  I watched him, wondering how he could do that. How could he lie like that—flat on his back, his lips slightly parted, his breath as easy as if he were back at home with the telescope pointed out the window over the roof of the house next door.

  And Gerry. He had slept earlier, using his soaked life jacket for a pillow. Now he sat on the jacket in the corner of the cockpit floor. He held his knees clutched to his chest. His face was buried between his knees. Ropes circled under him and around his feet. His bent head and curled body looked very small in the moonlight. I couldn’t see his face, but when he was sitting there like that, his hands looked as small as when he was maybe two. When he was making the discovery that he could open the cabinet doors in my room, take out my models one by one, and pick them apart. Those same hands were holding his knees now, and he was shaking very slightly.

  I realized then that I was cold too. I thought of Gerry’s chest, where we could count his ribs.

  “Are you cold?” I asked.

  His head shot up and his eyes looked wet in the moonlight.

  He was crying. Now that we were okay, he was crying.

  “Stop crying,” I said. “You’ll wake Dylan.”

  Then the boat lurched slightly when a bigger wave than usual lifted the stern and set us an inch or two higher into the rocks.

  Gerry looked out at the sea. “Do you think we’re going to sink?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can I stand up?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He unfolded himself and shook his feet out of the lines. “I’m cold,” he said. “I need Blankie.”

  “You dropped it on the stern when you were steering. Besides, it’s wet. I’ll get something else down below.”

  The mast lay a little across the companionway. The shrouds and halyards made a spiderweb across the opening. I pushed them away and eased into the cabin. Mom used to say our room looked like a tornado had hit it. I wonder what she would have said if she could have seen that cabin. Anything that could break had broken. All the electronics were lying on the floor with little pieces scattered around. Everything was wet. I made my way to the V-berth locker and found two blankets that were half dry. I hugged them to my chest and turned to go back on deck.

  I could see Gerry then, silhouetted against the night sky, standing on the stern. I saw him reaching down for Blankie. He was cold. He was scared. He leaned even farther.

  Then he was gone and there was a splash and the stern was empty.

  I don’t remember crossing the cockpit or screaming his name, but Dylan says I stepped on him and woke him and then fell over him screaming.

  I do remember standing on the stern, looking into the inky black water that seemed solid like onyx as it reflected back the moon and hid the depths below.

  I remember the feel of the water hitting me as I jumped in and Dylan calling my name. Then I descended into blackness as the water closed over my head. I was blind. The boat, the dinghy, the moon, the rocks, the coral, everything disappeared and all I heard was the strange, echoing gurgle the water made running past the dinghy and the slap of the dinghy towline on the ocean surface.

  I reached out into the liquid black, knowing that I would hit the rocks soon, that I would scrape and cut against the coral, expecting the stab of the sea urchin spines.

  But there was silk. Corn silk floated through my hands and I slowly closed my fingers. Too late. It was gone and I knew it had been Gerry’s hair.

  My lungs were hurting. I imagined the red bubbles in them exploding and my lungs filling with blood.

  My hands pushed me down deeper into the black and I reached again. And again. With my hands, my feet, my toes. My body searched the blackness around me. Then the silk passed me again. Like the air, it was a breeze glancing against my thigh. I grabbed. I got a handful of silk and pulled. Then I got his arm. I felt the T-shirt drifting around his chest and the muscle and bone of his shoulder. I dragged him toward me and locked him under my arm and pulled us up.

  The red bubbles were bursting in my eyes now, and the blackness was thick over our heads. Then I heard the dinghy again and that slapping towline and then the lightening circle above me solidif
ied into the moon and then Gerry’s head and mine were up out of the water and Dylan was screaming our names over the stern.

  I grabbed the line Dylan threw me. I handed Gerry up. Dylan dragged him on board. Still clutched in Gerry’s hand was Blankie.

  How I found Gerry, I don’t know. How he survived, I don’t ask. We poured water out of him, actually holding him upside down. Dylan breathed air back into him, and when he stirred, Dylan wrung out Blankie and held it next to his face. Dylan talked to him and hugged him and found the blankets where I had dropped them. He wrapped up Gerry and then turned and tucked one around me.

  All this time, I just watched. I sat on the cockpit floor, clutching my knees to my chest, shivering and watching. Then when Dylan had wrapped us up and Gerry was still and sleeping, I realized that the salt water on my face was warm and the sobs I was hearing were mine.

  THE ISLAND

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE THING ABOUT life is that it goes on. You wake up and there is the sun like always. There is your own body with bad breath and bruises and a headache. You have to move. You have to pee. You have to get a drink. No matter what happened the day before, you wake up and there is life and you have to do something about it.

  When I woke up that day, I was lying on the cockpit floor in a snarl of hard lines. One was pressing into the sore place on my ribs. The floor hurt my bruised skull. My hands felt cramped and stiff. My mouth was dry.

  Gerry shifted quietly where he was sitting above me on the cockpit seat. A corner of Blankie slipped down and tickled my face. He snatched it back up and looked down at me. Our eyes locked, but we didn’t say anything or even smile. Dylan sat quietly on the stern, gazing into the gently moving water, his hand resting lightly on the tiller.