Red Sea

by Diane Tullson

  The thought of the eggs broken below, and Eggman, makes the milk in my stomach turn over.

  They won’t even know that we left port. They probably think we got an updated weather forecast and we were the smart ones to stay put, that we were snug on the seawall, fighting over whether “xerox” is a permissible Scrabble word, while they were fighting to keep their masts out of the sea.

  As I sit here, Jimmy’s wife is making BLTS with tomatoes from Djibouti, each tomato costing more than some workers make in a month, and Jimmy cleans the barrel of his M – 16, eyeing the horizon for the happy chance to unload it into someone.

  I wouldn’t mind if Jimmy chose Eggman and his boss. I really wouldn’t.

  We never should have left. We should have waited for the next flotilla. We’d never catch up with Emma and Mac, never see them again, but somehow I don’t think we’re going to anyway.

  I never should have left my mother alone in the cockpit.

  If I could use the engine, I could travel in the general direction of the flotilla. Not that I’d ever find them, even. I might be able to find a commercial ship, but if you believe Jimmy, they wouldn’t respond to a radio call. Not that I can use the engine, not with the fish net wrapped around the propeller. Not that I’m going anywhere.

  Not that Duncan or my mother can help me. This morning, my mother’s sweatshirt smelled sour with blood. The smell reminded me of a meat shop we once went into, dim, with sawdust on the floor and the skinned carcasses of goats and sheep suspended from a low ceiling. My mother asked for lamb, and the butcher unhooked a small carcass and tossed it onto a wooden chopping block in the middle of his shop. With an immense knife he pried free a rack of ribs, rehung the rest of the lamb, then, with a cleaver, whacked the ribs into chops. Duncan told me to stand back, but I didn’t, and bits of bone and blood hit my cheek.

  With that image, the cookies and milk rise up in my throat, abate, then with a burning fierceness, burst out my mouth and nostrils, spraying the cockpit floor. I cough, heave what’s left and heave again. I haven’t thrown up since second grade and I’ve forgotten how vomit scalds the nasal passages. I’m crying again, my nose running all down my face. I bring my feet up out of the mess, onto the bench, bending my knees under my chin. My hands smell of vomit. I want someone to come and clean me up. I want someone to deal with the toss. Tossed cookies, literally. The movement of the boat is sloshing the puddle back and forth on the floor of the cockpit.

  I grab the bucket Mom keeps tied to the stern rail, drop it over the side to fill it, haul it in, and slosh the cockpit mess out over the transom. Bending over the rail to refill the bucket, I stop myself from looking at the sea, at the inevitable panic I feel at the thought of falling in.

  With the mess finally gone, I collapse onto the cockpit bench. Next time I’ll just hurl into the bucket. That’s what Mom does. On passage, the green bucket is her best friend. She carries it with her like a handbag.

  Duncan says, or Duncan said, I mean, that fear can make a person seasick. I don’t think of my mother as a fearful person. Cautious, for sure, and a bit manic when it comes to germs, worms and things you can catch from doorknobs. I remember once when I was really little grossing her out in a public washroom by crawling on my hands and knees under the cubicle doors. Apparently, and I know this because when I emerged from my commando crawl, she drilled it into my head for the full five minutes that she scoured my hands: The highest concentration of germs in a bathroom is not on the toilet seat, or even the bowl, but on the floor. I have no idea how this can be, but I still wouldn’t test the theory by touching a toilet seat in a public washroom.

  Ty, once, at McDonald’s, followed me into the women’s restroom. It made me laugh the way he just walked in like it was perfectly normal and acceptable. I don’t think anyone even noticed, and if they did, Ty wouldn’t have cared. In the tiny stall, I wondered if I’d ever get the knees of my jeans clean and if people would be able to tell from my jeans what I’d done.

  Duncan says, or said, that what doesn’t kill you makes you strong.

  I reach for the bucket again.

  NINE

  THE ONSET OF NIGHT MAKES me anxious. I’m not afraid of the dark, but it’s unnerving, not being able to see. I’ll find myself constantly reaching for a light switch. Since mid-afternoon, Mom has been making noises in her sleep, little moans that have increased in volume. She’s woken a few times, and I was able to give her a little water. I had to change her quilt. When I unwrapped her to check her leg wounds, I found that she’d peed herself. I managed to get a pair of shorts on her and improvised a diaper with sanitary pads. This should test how much these things really hold. Mom’s gunshot wounds look about the same except now there’s more weeping fluid. I washed the wounds and covered them with clean dressings. Then with fresh water I washed her, head to toe, and brushed the snarls out of her hair. Afterward I turned her in her berth and wrapped a dry quilt around her. She cried out when I turned her and woke long enough to drink some. She feels a little warm, but I might be imagining that.

  I washed the soiled quilt in a bucket of seawater. It was bloody and could have used a proper hot wash and laundry soap cleaning, but that’s a luxury for port. We’ve spent entire days in port doing laundry. I wrung out the quilt, then rinsed it in a bit of fresh water so that it would dry soft, and hung it over the boom to dry. The air probably did as much to freshen the quilt as the washing.

  I don’t feel like eating anything, but I open a pouch of tuna. It’s strange what the pirates took, like the canned corned beef, the stuff with a cow head on the label. I can’t stand it, none of us liked it, that’s why we still had several tins of it in the locker. Mom bought a crate of it in Australia because she said all sailors eat canned corned beef. The pirates took every last one, loading it into a pillowcase like it was Halloween. And the sardines in mustard sauce, they’re welcome to those. A lot of the labels have come off the cans, either from floating in bilge water or sometimes Mom takes off the labels if she’s afraid there might be cockroach eggs under them. Then she writes the contents on the lid of the can. I eat the tuna straight from the package, then drink the milk I had opened earlier. The milk is warm so I plug my nose and chug it; I won’t have to taste it.

  With darkness settling into the corners of the boat, I make a final check of my mother—her moaning has subsided—and the boat. Out in the cockpit, I see the headsail tugging on the sheet, just fretting with it, nothing to get excited about. I make sure the sheet is cleated, check that the boom is secured so that it doesn’t crash back and forth in the night, then I take in the quilt and stretch it out in the main cabin to finish drying. For a small moment I entertain the notion of sleeping in the cockpit so I can better hear any freighters that might plow over us in the night, but with no way to get out of a freighter’s path, I think I’d rather die in my sleep. I head back down into the boat and as a precaution or out of habit, I don’t know which, I close the companionway hatch and slide closed the lock bolt.

  Boats are easy enough to get into. Once, in Djibouti, I got back to the boat to find Mom and Duncan had gone out, locking up the boat behind them. I didn’t carry a key, but I just crawled in through a small open window in the bathroom. Head. That’s what a bathroom on a boat is called. That’s using your head. Hilarious. On passage, the only thing that would come through the windows is seawater, and on quiet nights like tonight, we’d leave the windows open. I must be feeling creepy because I check all the windows and leave only a tiny porthole open over the galley.

  I should be more afraid of the freighters. Maybe I almost wish we’d get run over in the night.

  SOMETHING WRENCHES ME from sleep. My body feels like it weighs twice as much as it does, like when your hand goes to sleep and it feels like someone else’s. I try to lift my head and the muscles in my neck scream with pain. I drop my head back onto the pillow, hating what woke me from the escape of sleep.

  A fragment of dream pokes at my conscious mind, a dream of a kiss th
at makes me want to wipe it off my mouth. It’s Ty’s kiss, but it’s not Ty in the dream, it must be the pirate. Duncan is there too, and other people. I shiver and pull the blanket more tightly around me. Duncan in the dream is smiling, or he seems to be. I can’t really see his face.

  Awake now, I can’t even bring Duncan’s face to mind.

  I think of the photo in the bottom of the go-bag and I wish I had it, that and a flashlight so I could see Duncan’s face. I have a photo of Ty, but it’s an old one from when he was in high school, and I don’t think it looks like him anymore.

  The air in my cabin feels suddenly close, like it doesn’t have enough oxygen. My heart pounds, I can feel my temples bouncing with the pulse. And I’ve soaked my shirt with sweat. The blanket now restrains me, fights me, as I struggle to untangle myself. It sticks to my bare legs, and I claw it from me. In the pitch black, my cabin feels like a coffin.

  I yank at the collar of my shirt, seeking air. With scrabbling fingers, I loosen the latches on my cabin window, pressing my face against the screen, gulping night air. The coolness from outside runs down over my face and the back of my neck. The drumbeat in my temple quiets. Breathe.

  Now I feel like laughing, but I don’t trust myself. What if I laugh like a crazy person? What if I am crazy?

  I roll out of bed and find my way out into the main cabin. Briefly, I think that maybe Mom is gone and my heart resumes its race, but I find her with my hands, exactly like I’ve left her. I smooth her hair. Her forehead does feel warm. I loosen the quilt around her shoulders. She mutters, which makes me jump, but then she falls quiet again. Her breathing sounds quicker than it did in the day. Is it tomorrow yet? I reach under the quilt to her watch and slip it off her wrist. It’s a good watch, with tiny illuminated dots so you can tell time in the dark. Duncan got it for her before we left on the trip, and a matching one for himself. He wanted to buy me one, but I said I wouldn’t wear it. A quick and brutal image floods my mind of Duncan, his arms stretched out in flight, and yes, his watch, and the horrible way his skull disengaged before he disappeared over the side. I grip the watch, focusing on the tiny swimming dots. At last, my vision clears. It’s five, thank God, almost morning. I strap the watch onto my own wrist. I will not go back into my cabin. Instead, I grab the quilt that I washed yesterday and wrap up in it on the seat next to my mother.

  According to the time zones, it’s still last night at home. Ty hasn’t gone to bed yet; he probably isn’t even home. Jesse is curled up in her pajamas, doing her nails, watching reality TV, microwave popcorn at the ready. Dad’s watching TV too. He has the news on, but he’s fallen asleep. He’ll wake up in his chair in a couple of hours and stumble off to bed.

  If I could call them up right now, what would I tell them? What would I say to Ty? Hey, Ty. Met someone new, a pirate with big teeth and bad breath. And to Dad. Hey Dad, I ditched Mom on her watch and now she’s half-dead. Duncan is totally dead. This is your big chance to be the hero. With Jesse, I wouldn’t get a word in. She’d be telling me about how her Mom won’t let her wear the new shirt she bought because it makes her look like a whore, that her newest boyfriend wants her to get a tongue stud, that she might, that it blows her mom’s mind, that tongue stud, she’ll say, and then she’ll laugh. I’ll say, Hey Jesse, talk about mind-blowing. I washed bits of Duncan’s brain out of the cockpit. Worse even than the brain were the clumps of his hair with fragments of skin attached. Sticky.

  I draw the quilt over my head and rest my forehead on my knees. My fingers trace a sore on my shin, a new one, I guess, from cleaning up after the pirates. The scab is still soft, but I find the edge with my fingernail and pry it off my leg. I feel blood on my fingers.

  I could say anything to them, and no one would really understand what it feels like. How could they? I’m not sure if I even know what I’m feeling. I should be crying more, grieving for Duncan, worried about my mother. I can’t feel anything right now, not even the wound I’ve forced open on my shin. I lift my fingers to my mouth and taste the blood. I don’t know why, but for an instant, I think I find the scab on my fingernail and put it in my mouth. I shudder and wipe my hand.

  TEN

  THERE’S A PALE LIGHT in the cabin, and I heat a kettle of water on the butane stove to make tea. I can’t find the teapot and the Thermos is gone, I know that, so I put the tea bag right into the kettle. The mug I take out to use is my mother’s. The labeled letter “J” makes me think of washing dishes with Duncan and him asking me to stand watch with Mom.

  I don’t know what difference it would have made, me being there with her. What was I going to do, leap into the pirates’ boat like a human sacrifice? They didn’t even want me. They just wanted our stuff. I rummage in the cupboard for a container of sugar and find it open, the sugar like concrete with the exposure to the damp air. Using the handle of a spoon, I chisel crystals into the bottom of the mug, then pour the tea on top. I guess I could have stood between Mom and the bullets. They wouldn’t have shot at her if she’d just stopped the engine. The first shots they fired didn’t hit the boat. Like Mac said, they were warning shots. Maybe if I’d been out there, I could have calmed Mom down, I could have stopped her from firing the flare at them. What did she think, anyway, that a flare gun was going to stop them?

  The tea tastes like tank water. Duncan liked to filter the tank water before making tea. The metal taste of the tea reminds me of blood, of Ty. It burns the back of my mouth and makes my eyes water, too hot to swallow but I do. Strands of sugar trace over my tongue.

  I don’t know what Duncan expected of me. Did he really think I could protect my mother?

  I reach into the canned goods locker, selecting one without a label. I don’t look at the magic-marker label. I heft it, trying to guess its contents. “Green beans.” I check and I’m right. I toss the can back into the locker and pick another one. This one feels solid, like canned chili. I toss it back without reading the top. I want peaches, or canned pears, something in syrup that I can drink. I bring out another, shorter can. Pineapple. Bingo. This lid needs an opener, and I find one in the jumble of a drawer. Mom’s labeled the can pineapple tidbits but it is actually rings. I hook a ring with my finger and eat it over the sink. I make myself eat all of the fruit before I tip the can to drink the juice.

  The tea has cooled so that I can gulp it down. I’m hungry suddenly, totally ravenous. I wish for a fat pink ham, adorned with pineapple rings and red cherries like old ladies used to make. French fries and ketchup. Chocolate cake. A box of chocolate truffles dusty with cocoa. Normally, the canned goods locker is jammed to the top. There’s maybe a dozen cans left. The eggs are gone, of course. We only had a few loaves of bread and these I’m sure went out when I was bailing. We probably have flour. I could make bread. Emma showed me how she does it in a heavy pot on the top of the stove. Maybe I could make a chocolate cake. Oh yeah, no eggs.

  I lift the hatch that covers the fresh vegetable bin. We keep potatoes and onions in one, and it is still full. I peel open the plastic lid on another bin and find two heads of cabbage. Well, I’m not going to starve. The tomatoes we keep in a basket over the counter and these are gone, either by the pirates or the storm. Too bad. I find some apples but these have been rolling around inside a locker and already they smell sickly sweet with bruises. I pare the worst off one and eat it right down to the seeds. With the apples I find one of Mac’s lemons. I hold it up to my nose and inhale. It’s intensely lemon, far more so than lemons we buy at home, and bigger.

  I never had any of that lemon pie.

  I look over at Mom, on the dining bench. Her cheeks look flushed. Walking slowly, as if that will hide my concern, I take the lemon over to her. I hold the lemon under her nose. “You need to wake up.”

  I know what will wake her. But first, I pour tea into a water bottle and add a generous stream of sugar. If I’m hungry, surely Mom is too. At the very least she needs fluids. I shake the bottle until the sugar dissolves in the just-warm tea. Then I cut open the l
emon and squeeze the juice into the tea.

  I know what will wake my mother, and maybe I’m twisted, or maybe it’s just what I have to do. I slip my arms under her quilt and yank her onto her back.

  As her gunshot leg hits the bench her eyes snap open, and her mouth, and she sucks a breath. Moving quickly, so I don’t have time to think too much, I haul her into a sitting position.

  “Morning, Mom.”

  Her eyes well, and she moans, a horrible grunting moan that seems to rise from her belly and lodge in her throat. I can’t stand the sound, the utter animal sound, but it comes and comes until I think I will cover my ears. Then she stops. Her eyes track vague circles around me.

  I put the water bottle against her cracked lips. “Drink.” She tries to close her lips, but I jab the bottle against her teeth. “Open your mouth and drink.” She blinks and her eyebrows knot, but she drinks.

  “Good.” I show her the half-empty bottle. “You did really well. Maybe I’ll make you some soup or something.” She seems to be looking at me, but I can’t be sure. “Would you like some soup?”

  Her eyes slide under her lids until all that shows is white. “Mom?”

  I put my hand on her forehead and snatch it away. “You’re hot. Too hot.” I rip the quilt away from her leg. The smell from her dressings makes me want to retch. The gauze fabric has crusted to her leg. I grab the teakettle and a towel that’s still folded in the drawer. I can only hope that it’s clean. Using a corner of the towel, I dip it into the kettle, then work it under the edge of the bandage. Carefully, a bit at a time, I remove the old bandage. The skin under the bandage is hot to the touch and red. Around one wound, the skin has puckered like a crater, and what was initially clear ooze is now yellow pus. It’s infected.

  My mouth goes dry, my mind goes blank. The first aid course I took echoes in my head. In case of infection, the victim needs medical attention. The victim needs a doctor. Call 9-1-1. I can’t do any of those things! I listen to my mother’s heart. It doesn’t seem as fast as mine, but I can’t be sure. Tears burn the corners of my eyes. I check my mother’s pads. Except for one with a small, pungent spot, the pads are dry. So she’s dehydrating too. I replace the one pad. With the cooled tea I clean the leg wound and cover it loosely with fresh gauze. I turn her so that she’s laying on her other side and pull the quilt back around her. Wherever I touch my mother, heat comes off her in waves.