Nothing.
“Big ship, look at your radar screen. I’m the blip behind you. My mother needs help.”
The ship grows smaller in the swells, disappearing so quickly that I can imagine it is avoiding me.
“Help me. Please.”
It’s gone. The sun is slipping into night. And the light on the radio fades to nothing.
Maybe the battery was too low. Maybe they couldn’t hear me. If they did, I wonder if they spent even a second wondering who I am.
I STARE OUT at the waves so long that my eyes feel gritty and my head hurts. For minutes at a time I watch in one direction, willing the island to appear out of the sea, then in another direction. I even look out behind the boat, as if it might suddenly burst from the waves like a submarine. I won’t go below for fear of missing a glimpse of it, not even for drinking water, and by nightfall, I’m watching through a glaze of tears and I’m so exhausted that the waves all look like islands. I actually chased one, veering off course to pursue what I thought was brown land but it was water. Just water.
I should have gone below. When I finally do, Mom is awake, her eyes open, fixed, her lips parted. Circled in red, around her wound the skin is dark and blistered and crackles when I touch it. Where I touch her leg, it is dead.
TWENTY - ONE
I TURN ON EVERY LIGHT INSIDE the boat, flinging the curtains wide to send out pale beams into the dark. I switch on all our running lights and the light at the top of the mast we normally use only at anchor. If I’m sailing blind, then my only hope is to draw the attention of someone looking for me.
Will they be looking for me? Do they even care? We haven’t known Emma and Mac that long. Maybe they’ve just shrugged us off. Maybe Jimmy and his wife are their new sailing buddies. Maybe that’s how it works. Out of sight, out of mind.
Emma thinks Ty has moved on, I know she does. She might be right. Three years ago he moved on from Lindsay so fast that I didn’t even realize that they’d ever been together. If he hasn’t, then Jesse would say so. But she says nothing about Ty, which is like saying everything.
I guess I knew Ty would. At my going-away party, other girls were circling like vultures. It might even be Jesse that he’s seeing now.
The thing about running with all the lights is that it ruins my night vision. In the cockpit all I can see is the light streaming from the boat. Everything outside of the light vanishes, which is no good since I have to watch for the light on Masamirit. If I was on the bow, in front of our light, maybe I could see better. I clip my tether onto the jack line and make my way forward.
The movement up here is enough to loosen my joints, like standing on the back of a pitching Brahma bull. I creep from one handhold to the next, keeping my weight low to offset sudden dropping waves. Finally, I reach the bow. I brace myself on the deck with my butt just in front of the headsail, my boots wedged against the toe rail. I’m wearing full foulies against the spray from the waves and the relentless wind that, at the very front of the boat, buffets me like hammers. Away from the engine noise, I can hear the waves churning under the bow. I can see better, but I have to squint against the wind to keep watch for the light.
No wonder Duncan never went forward unless he had to.
It’s mesmerizing, peering into the night. Tonight, clouds cover the sky; there are no stars, no moon, just a fleece blackness and invisible sea. No light from Masamirit. And no Duncan. It amazes me that Duncan would sleep while I was alone on watch. They’d take an afternoon nap, he and Mom, and get right into bed. I’d have to wake him when my watch was done. At first, when I took the afternoon watch, I’d wake him many times: if I saw a freighter, or if the sail started to ripple, or just to ask him a question. He never minded getting woken. He said he could sleep while I was on watch because he knew I’d come and get him if I got into any trouble. He said trouble was inevitable, that there was no use worrying about it, that when it happened, we’d do all that we could to deal with it. Worry and hope, he said, they just make a sailor impatient.
How would you deal with Mom’s leg wound, Duncan? Have I done everything I can? If I don’t spot the Masamirit light, then she could die. Shouldn’t I worry about that? Shouldn’t I hope for the light?
In the density of night, I imagine black shapes appearing on the waves, the shadows of shadows, of freighters and trains, strangely, like the train that bore down on Vanessa and Bree. I can almost smell metal, the same smell as blood, repellent and exciting and it makes my stomach turn. The peapod of this boat creates a new world in the blackness. My eyes could be open or shut, and in fact I blink to make sure I’m still awake. My dream replays on the lightless stage, the one about the kiss. I shudder. Jesse said she wouldn’t leave the night of my party, but she did. She said she left me in my own home, not at some stranger’s place, and it wasn’t her fault I passed out. She said she’d met a guy and that he wanted to leave. I shake my head to erase the dream. I rub the insides of my arms to erase the bruises of the dream. It was just a dream, and not even that. It was a memory of a dream, like a strand of cigarette smoke from a darkened window.
Cigarette smoke. I smell it again before it registers. I can smell someone’s cigarette! Crazily, I look behind me to the light of the boat, but I know it can’t be coming from here. I lean forward on the bowsprit, poring into the blackness. I see the red end of a cigarette arc toward the waves, then nothing.
“Hello!” My voice is ridiculously small in the wind. “Hello!”
I strain to hear. No engine noise, but someone is out here, on this one sea, a fisherman maybe, having a smoke. “I need help. Is anyone there?”
I hang over the bowsprit and I sniff sweat and dust, foreign scents that leap to my nose after days at sea. Faintly, I hear someone cough. A baby cries. And in the black sack of night I sense it more than see it, a dark more deep than the night. Another boat.
“Hey!” I shout. “Over here!”
They can see me, of course they can.
“Help me! Mayday!”
I strain to hear a response. I think I hear a man’s voice, a muffled command. The baby falls abruptly silent.
Why are they running without lights? Why don’t they acknowledge me? Then the night shatters and their engine starts.
“No! Don’t leave me!”
I scramble back into the cockpit, let loose the headsail, and yank the wheel in the direction of the sound of their boat. For an instant, their bow appears in the circle of my light, a wooden boat so overloaded that it barely clears the waves. It’s a dhow, a boat just like the pirates used.
My hands freeze on the wheel. They used no lights, no engines, because they didn’t want to be detected. They had seen me and were hiding.
My throat sticks closed. What made the baby stop crying like that? In my memory I smell the metal blades of the pirates’ knives. I smell Duncan’s scotch, Mom’s lasagna; I smell Eggman.
If I steered away now, their boat would slip past mine. They seem to be traveling south, the wind behind them. Maybe they wouldn’t turn into the wind to catch me. Maybe they would let me go.
But they had every opportunity to catch me and they didn’t. They didn’t want to catch me. They were hiding from me, not waiting for me.
With the wheel hard over, I accelerate into their path. I can see their bow veer, but they don’t have time to get out of the way. With a shuddering crunch they broadside our boat and their engine gutters and dies.
I throw the throttle down and knock the engine into neutral, then I rush to the side of the cockpit. The people on the wooden boat are making no attempt to be quiet now. I hear men shouting, and a dark face appears on their bow, shaking his fist at me.
“Please! My mother. I need help!”
His mouth is wide with anger. I can hear the sound of their engine cranking, turning over, then sputtering again.
“It’s my mother. Please!”
He turns his back. Behind him, in the hollow of the boat, I can make out at least a dozen people huddled to
gether. A woman’s head scarf flaps in the wind and her hand reaches up to gather it under her chin. As the waves scrape our boats against each other and the light on the top of the mast dips toward their boat, I see that she’s holding a baby to her breast. She looks up at me, her face drawn with fatigue and a worn-out desperation that’s like looking in a mirror. A man beside her shouts, and she drops her head over the baby. He drops his head too just as another man steps through the huddle of people, a man with the bearing and authority and absolute control of the gunman.
I don’t know where this man lives, but I speak to him in Arabic, the language of both sides of the Red Sea, words I’ve heard Mac use in greeting. “As-salam alaykum.”s
At first the man says nothing, then, grudgingly, he responds. “Wa alaykum as-salam.”
I’ve exhausted almost my entire repertoire of the language, so using my hands, I motion to him to board our boat.
He makes a gesture that, in any language, can only mean go to hell, then shouts at another man who is bent over the engine. The man at the engine seems to indicate there is some problem. The man in charge yells at him, and he bends again to work on the engine.
“My mother is sick,” I implore. The man ignores me.
Money. He’ll help me for money. I scramble below to Mom’s cabin and grab the zipper bag with our passports, credit cards and cash. I dump out everything except the cash and dash back out to the cockpit.
“My mother is sick,” I repeat. Then I show him the money. “Please, help me.”
He looks at the money, at the holes in the side of the boat, then he motions to a man who leaps lightly from their boat to ours.
He’s younger than the others, maybe not much older than me, wearing a faded plaid shirt, pants worn thin at the knees, and knockoff Nikes. He reaches for the money, but I gesture for him to come below. The man at the engine says something and laughs. He indicates with a leer that the boy should go with me.
I lead the boy down into the boat. He stands for a moment looking dazzled, by the lights or the interior of the boat, I don’t know. He seems transfixed with the torn electronics panel. I touch him on the arm and he jumps. I point to my mother in her berth.
He peers into the lee cloth, then straightens, his forehead creased. He asks me something. I point to her leg. He looks, and his breath whistles between his teeth. I say, “Please, you have to take my mother. She needs a hospital, a doctor.” I’m speaking too fast. The boy steps around me, wants to leave. “No. La.” I grab his arm. “You must take my mother. Take her to Port Sudan.”
He stops dead, and his eyes widen. He says something, but all I understand is the word police. Then he yanks his arm free and climbs out into the cockpit. I follow him, pulling at his pant leg. “Please don’t leave me!”
He has one foot over the side when he remembers the money. He reaches out his hand. I pull back the money. I’m crying, I can’t help it. “Please, you have to help me. Mayday. Please.”
The man in control shouts at him or me, I can’t tell. The boy hesitates. I grab the chart and gesture to me, to the sea. “At least tell me where I am.”
The engine on their boat starts in a cloud of oily smoke. I jab my finger at the island on the chart. “Masamirit?” Then I cast my hand over the sea. I ask again, “Masamirit?”
“Masamirit,” he says, his pronunciation different from mine. He thumbs over his shoulder and says something. All I understand is yirmi.
“Yirmi? Twenty what? Miles? Hours? Days?”
The man screams at the boy. He snatches the money out of my hand then jumps down into their boat. He indicates again the direction. “Masamirit,” he says. The man cuffs him in the ear and grabs the money. The boy scrambles away. Then their engine revs up and they wallow out onto the waves. The woman with the baby watches me from under her arm as the boat slips again into darkness. I listen to it a long time until maybe I just imagine that I can hear it. Then it’s gone.
I haul in the headsail so it stops its flapping and put the engine in gear. The course the boy indicated is more westerly than mine. I alter course to the west and crank the engine full on.
THREE TIMES I decide he misunderstood me and showed me the wrong way, or showed me the wrong way just because he felt like it. Three times I change back to my original heading. Three times I zig and zag across the night on his heading, on mine, sweating in my foulies, peering into the blackness for the Masamirit light. I think about the woman and child on the boat. Were they going home, or fleeing it? What was so awful about their lives that they got in that boat on a sea like this? But what can I know of the desperation of people who live along fine fluid lines of blood, religion and geography?
When it first appears, I think it must be a freighter again, just a faint white light between the darkness of sea and sky. But freighter lights don’t flash, and I sail closer, close enough to count the flashes, to match the pattern with that on the chart, to know, yes, I’m looking at the light on Masamirit. I sail another mile toward it before I can no longer convince myself that I’m seeing things, then I believe it, I only just believe it; now I can reach Port Sudan. I am almost there.
TWENTY - TWO
IT’S LIKE BEING HIGH, this frenetic cocktail of exhaustion and nerves. I’ve followed Duncan’s waypoints from the light on Masamirit, estimating actual distance where he would have used his electronics, and I’m lucky, really lucky, because with each course change, I see more freighters, more garbage in the water, more signs that I’m on track for Port Sudan. Now, an almost continuous line of tanker traffic marks a westward path in the night. If I had to, I could follow them in. But I plot each mile I make, penciling my own path on the chart, translating each hour in the cockpit to a new place on the sea, tiny steps west toward help.
Each time I go below, I hold my breath until I find my mother still with me, her heart still beating, and I tell her how close we are to landfall. “Two hours until first light, Mom.” Then, “I can see it now, Mom! I can see lights on the African coastline.” And finally, just as the sun burns a white line on the horizon, “Lights, Mom, from the city!”
I haven’t slept, haven’t eaten, don’t care. I stand in the cockpit with my eyes on the distant city, plotting the chart with certainty, now that I can take bearings from landmarks. My penciled line creeps closer toward Port Sudan, and I’m grateful for it because just looking at the far-off city isn’t real enough.
I’ve notched up our speed and the sound of the engine hums through my feet and legs until I feel like I’m more part of the boat than the world. I stand at the wheel and steer, imagining that I’m steering a knife-edge course, trying to believe that I’m getting us there faster.
It’s been hours since I first spotted the city and now, finally, it emerges in focus. I can make out the white-pillared oil tanker station, a city in itself, and from that, and Duncan’s notes on the chart, the course to find the harbor entrance. At this point, I could plunk us against almost any hard place on the shoreline, even the tanker pontoons, but I know where I need to go to get the fastest help for my mother. I have to find Pandanus.
With one hand on the wheel, one on the chart, I visually navigate a line toward the coastline, marking radio towers and mosque domes and water towers, matching the icons on the chart with what I can actually see, marking my progress toward the basin where sailboats would dock. I call to my mother from the cockpit, “Just five more miles. We’ll be there in time for breakfast.” Then, from behind a massive stone breakwater, “I see sticks, Mom! I can see the masts of boats!”
I’ve shrugged off my jacket and fleece, but I’m still in my foulie pants and boots. Sweat is running down my legs. I flip on the automatic steering and unearth two rubber fenders from the cockpit locker. These I tie onto the rail on the side of the boat to cushion the boat from the dock. Then I scramble to attach a line at the stern and the bow of the boat, and one in the middle to hold us to the dock. I jump back into the cockpit just as the boat reaches the opening in the breakwater.
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I throttle down and ease the boat into the harbor. Instantly, the sea flattens and the wind dies in my ears, the scent of land fills my nose. I hear cars and the sounds of halyards clanking against masts. A huge lump lodges in my throat and I have to work hard not to cry. I can’t cry. Not now, not yet.
Boats are tied along several concrete pontoons. It’s early, and I don’t see anyone in the cockpits. I see flags from Sweden and the Netherlands, many flags, but I stop myself from searching for Pandanus and look for a place to tie up. Any place will do, even against another boat. But there’s a vacant spot on the very end of one pontoon, and this is what I aim for.
Boats don’t have brakes, and it’s not pretty. I crunch the boat against the pontoon, popping the fenders back onto the deck, scraping fiberglass against concrete, the engine roaring in reverse to stop us. Now several heads emerge from their boats. I kill the engine, grab the spring line at the middle of the boat and leap over the rail onto the pontoon. The sudden hardness of land makes my knees buckle and I stumble, but I manage to loop the line over a cleat and snug Mistaya to the pontoon. The bow is yawing, but the boat isn’t going anywhere. People are running now; I hear feet pounding on concrete coming toward me, voices calling. I’m on my knees, struggling to get to my feet. “Help.” It comes out as a croak. “Help!” Now I’m crying. A bare-chested man lifts me, speaks to me in a German accent. I indicate the boat. “My mother!” Another man jumps aboard Mistaya, tosses the bow and stern lines to others now on the pontoon. “My mother! You have to help my mother!”
“Lib!”
I hear Emma and now I can’t stand. The German man catches me, lowers me to the concrete. Emma is running, her eyes on me, the boat, the shreds of mainsail bound on the boom, the bullet holes, her eyes taking it all in. I motion to the boat. “My mother.”
Without breaking stride, Emma points to a woman on the pontoon. “Get us a vehicle. No, two, an ambulance if you can.” The woman’s eyes widen and she stands, dazed. “Now!” The woman blinks, then moves off toward the ramp. “Run!” The woman runs. Emma vaults onto Mistaya and disappears below.
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