“I don’t want you to. I will.”
“And what are you going to do, Mom? Will you be able to take the propeller apart and clear it?”
“Okay, Cammie, okay. But you’ll wear a tether, in case you get in trouble?”
“Word of honor,” Cammie said. “I don’t want this boat drifting away from me. I’m not interested in being a hero.”
“In the morning, then,” Tracy said. “It’s almost sunset, Cammie. You know that’s when the sharks come up. It’s when they feed. Let’s please all try to sleep tonight.”
And they all did try.
Holly’s leg throbbed. She could smell her leg. It seemed to stink beneath the gauze. Gritting her teeth, she used a hot steak knife to lance it, sponged away the pus with alcohol—which hurt so much that she nearly swooned—and replaced the bandage. Thank Christ they were going home, one way or another. She would not alarm Tracy. Tracy already believed that even planning this trip had brought down the curse of the cat people on all their heads. Holly lay back and tried to think about her Christmas knitting, which she’d already begun, complicated argyle sweaters for Ian and Evan, who had decided to dress prep in the future. She dozed and watched her own sturdy hands coax and flex the soft yarn, and a certain peace stole over her. Ian’s sweater was almost completed. Holly never finished anything if she didn’t start ages in advance.
She had never been sought after. Boys called her to ask advice about wooing Janis or Olivia. She was popular as a friend, a girl everyone knew. But until Chris, no one had ever looked at her with the kind of helpless adoration she saw in boys’ eyes when they looked at Janis.
Holly could never quite achieve a look. It was only just before she lay down to go to sleep that her pageboy curled in identical commas against her cheeks and her skin looked translucent and pure, not mottled with excitement or exertion. So Holly adopted the role of the clown, the buddy, just a tiny bit off the pace, not the butt of jokes about herself, but the originator of the jokes. Olivia was the leader, the untouchable. Jan was the sexpot. Tracy was the alibi. Holly felt fortunate just to be able to rely on the conferred status. It no longer mattered. It had been another life. But seeing Olivia again, up close and arrogant, set it rankling within her. And she felt like a fool being unable to pull her own considerable weight because of a sting, a minute incident, an assailant too small to fight.
The important thing, Holly thought as she lay, trying not to pick at her leg, was Cammie.
Cammie had to get home. Michel was already lost. Lenny had at least experienced a taste of a fortunate life. Ian and Evan were presumably safe. But Cammie hadn’t had a chance for all that she, Tracy, and even Olivia had known.
She thought of the deer that awakened her one summer when the boys were small and they had picnicked in the Brezina Woods, the three of them falling asleep on a leaf-strewn blanket in the October sunshine. Of making spritz cookies at Christmas. Water-skiing at the cottage she’d inherited from her parents, far up in the north woods of Michigan, veering and leaping for hours before her strong legs even quivered. Roistering with the boys in their backyard pool that Chris had built from a kit. Smoking dope two years ago with Tracy, for their fortieth birthdays, on an abandoned green at the golf course. Swing dancing with Chris at his niece’s wedding—after weeks of dutiful classes at the local community college. Clearing away snow from the heads of her first crocuses. The sunroom that had been her tenth anniversary present from Chris, all glass and green plants, a cloister of oxygen and scent. She thought of huddling next to Chris, as if their spines had been magnetized. In fifteen years of marriage, they had never slept “apart,” as couples did over time, not without some bit of her body, if only her hand against Chris’s shoulder on a hot night, touching, linking them. She was so glad of that now.
Well, Holly thought, well.
She was not afraid of dying. She was afraid of missing the knowledge of how things turned out. Quietly, with firm certitude, she believed in the survival of the soul. But she could not envision herself as some sort of Tinker Bell–like creature in a white nightgown with gossamer wings, fluttering about her children’s headboards, breathing the correct definitions for the ACT test vocabulary section into their ears.
You’ll be fine, boys, she thought. Except for a few brushstrokes, you’re both of you finished. You have all the confidence and approval I could give you; and you have something I gave you only accidentally: each other.
Her leg pounded, thrumming like a machine whose product was misery. She had never felt worse pain, even in childbirth. But still she kept a corner bright for hope. She had seen worse things get better.
Day Nine
With Tracy watching anxiously, Cammie carefully pulled up her wet suit and zipped it, slipped her weights into her belt, and fastened them, settling herself, physically and mentally, as if she were getting into an airplane seat. She tested her buoyancy vest and peered at the gauge in the tank to make sure it was filled. She did a good-girl check.
Water was water. But diving down into five hundred feet of it, even if you were just going to skim, felt different from diving in the controlled confines of an underwater park or with a dive master by her side at a showy reef. She breathed in through her regulator and allowed her mother to help her hoist the tank onto her back. She had ninety minutes. Although she did not confide this to Tracy, Cammie didn’t believe she would need that long. She thought the motor was damaged beyond repair; but if she could repair it, if there was even a chance they could get it to limp, they would be saved, before anything got worse. Cammie sat while Tracy balanced the tank and attached the tether around her. Then she rose and made her giant step off the port side.
Once she had adjusted her vision relative to the boat, it was difficult to follow the propeller. The boat seemed stationary when they were on it, probably because the water was calm and they had no landmarks to measure their progress. But it was moving, and she had to kick her way to it. Soon she could see the prop shaft and glimpse all manner of shredded garbage hanging from it. Cammie kicked in great stiff scissors, her hands clasped beneath her breasts. Letting air escape the vest, she lowered herself and caught hold of the fore rudder. She worked her way down the boat. The hull was slick and sound, pocked only with tiny seaweed. She could see the propeller in front of her. There was the shredded bright green rope from the tender. It was just as she had imagined. The rope had wrapped around the propeller before the propeller cut the rope in two. The rope dangled, and a thickness of rags and weeds, too . . . and a shoe . . . a hand.
A hand.
A bone and a hand. There was more. Cammie jerked her head away and kicked for the surface.
She had to get up and out, fast, into the real air, to howl and howl.
Cammie broke the water shrieking into her mouthpiece.
It would have taken reason to remove it from her mouth. She had none.
Hers was an unhealthy cry, not of anger or even fear, but of something mortally injured, not sane. Still floating, making no attempt to haul herself up the tether toward the boat, she reached up toward Tracy as if supplicating, like a child begging to be carried. Tracy leaped into the cockpit and slammed the boat into reverse before she realized the boat wouldn’t move. The boat would take her nowhere.
She shouted, “Take out your regulator! I can’t hear you!”
Cammie bobbed and rose, screaming, the sound muted by the equipment. She was growing smaller as the current seized the boat.
“Cammie, pull yourself in!” Tracy yelled.
Holly asked, “What is the matter with her?”
“I’m going in after her,” Tracy said. “I don’t want her to get dragged against something.”
“No more of that,” Olivia cried. “None of us can do a thing without you! We’ll get her! It’s really going faster than we thought, though, isn’t it?”
“Cammie!” Tracy shouted. “Honey, look at me . . . Camille, look at me.” Cammie quieted and looked. “Drop the vest and the tank. I’ll thr
ow you the life ring.” Tracy threw the life ring, and Cammie hooked both arms through it, hanging limp.
Tracy yelled, “Good!”
“Help me, Olivia!” Tracy commanded, and together, they hauled Cammie hand over hand. “Throw the ladder over!” When Cammie got to the bottom rung of the ladder, she held on to the step and vomited. Tracy crept down and held her head, washing off her neck with seawater. Holly, her leg now wrapped tightly in a clean new Ace bandage, brought a towel. Cammie leaned over and vomited again. Olivia fetched a Coke from the cooler. It was warm, but Cammie rinsed her mouth and spat with it.
“I have to lie down,” she said. “I don’t mean in the bed. Right here. How do you feel when you faint, Mom?”
“I never have.”
“Like the world is getting louder and smaller and then . . . blink,” said Olivia, who had fainted during Tracy’s wedding.
“I’m better now,” Cammie said, taking hold of her two elbows to stop her quaking. Holly dropped a blanket around her shoulders.
“You are better, Camille. You’re safe, and you’re with us.” Cammie shuddered. Holly continued, “Look at me. You’re safe, and you’re with us, and you’re going to go home.” They all handed Cammie up onto the deck, and then Holly somehow found a way to ease herself down and pull Cammie onto her lap. To Tracy’s surprise, Cammie relaxed, trusting as a child, as Holly rocked her. “Do you want to tell us? Or wait until later?”
“Now,” Cammie said, her face half-turned against Holly’s shoulder. “But not get up.”
“You don’t have to get up,” Holly told her.
Cammie drew a deep breath and aligned her face. Tracy had seen her do this before—when she danced as a child, when she tried a sport, when she solved a math problem. She had asked Cammie what she was thinking when she made her face so serious, expressionless, and Cammie had told her, “I’m thinking, I can do this.”
“Mom, the propeller is hopeless,” she said. “The stern rope that Olivia kicked in was wrapped so many times around that it actually displaced the prop shaft out. The shaft is bent, so I can’t put it back in. I’m afraid the stuffing box is letting seawater into the . . . the . . .”
“The bilge,” Tracy prompted her.
“Long story short, what I’m worried about is that maybe seawater is getting in. What I’m afraid of is that it’ll get high enough that it’s going to do something bad to the electricity. Will it, Mom? What if the lights go out?”
“We’ll . . . that’s not going to happen,” Tracy said.
“What if it did?”
“We’d . . . use the candles and the lanterns that run on batteries. Don’t worry. The bilge pump is on. It’s going to be okay.”
“It’s not going to be okay,” Cammie went on. “Mom, there was something else.”
Tracy wanted to run. This wasn’t about a motor. But she said, “Cammie, I can hear it. Whatever it is.”
“Lenny is . . . Lenny was . . .”
“He’s down there,” Holly said calmly. “That’s what she saw.” She went on rocking Cammie gently. “Do you want to go on, Cam? Because we can wait.”
“I’m thinking of what to say.”
“Okay, then. You’re safe,” Holly said.
“Mom, he had the rope tied around him. He drowned. I hope he drowned. Maybe he hit his head on the boat in the waves. But I’m sure he was dead by then. The rope got tangled in the propeller. The fish must have done the rest. What is left of him . . .”
“Oh, poor, poor Lenny,” Tracy said, dropping her face into splayed hands. “All of it happened so fast.”
“No, Mom. If it was anyone’s fault, it was mine. Mine and Michel’s. We played around when we should have come back. The weather was getting rough. It was just seeing . . . his hand. I flipped out. But I decided when I got back on the boat that someday I’m going to think of all this and fall apart. But not now . . .”
“That’s sensible,” Olivia told her.
“Livy’s right. We could run that tape forever. I just wish there was a way we could . . . bury Lenny,” said Tracy.
“Mom, he is buried, where he would want to be buried.”
“He loved his wife so much.”
“There won’t be much left of him, I’m sure, at all, by the time we get back to St. Thomas. But maybe there’s a medical examiner who can collect enough so that she can bury him. They do that.”
“Why are we talking about this? It’s all so theoretical. Let’s get the hell away from here,” Olivia said.
“Shut up and go steer,” Holly said.
“Lenny’s wife, of all people, will understand. Not his death, but the rest of it. There was no trace of Michel.” Cammie pressed her lips together and shook her head.
“I’m going to try the radio again,” Tracy said. “I’ve been trying every hour, on every channel, and I haven’t been able to raise anyone.” She went up into the cockpit. Olivia came down.
They listened as Tracy identified them, the sailing ship Opus, said they were headed north, and spoke the ancient French- derived words for help.
“Wait!” they suddenly heard her say. “Yes, this is Opus. We are passengers, not the captain. . . . I can’t make out what you’re saying. What’s the name of your boat? Passion? Fashion? . . . I’m sorry. I can’t understand you. We have no sails or motor. Can you please call the authorities for us? Over. . . . I can’t hear you. . . . Please repeat. Over.” She could not hear anything else.
Tracy walked down the stairs.
“I don’t know if they heard anything I said.”
Day Ten
Holly found some Excedrin PM in Lenny’s medicine cabinet and fell asleep, again trying to send a message to her sons. Oh, I should never have spent so much time trying to escape from you and rest! I thought we had all the time in the world. And I thought it was funny. It was funny. I always could make you laugh. Remember that.
Holly Solvig was not given to sentiment. She hadn’t even cried, only grinned with pride, when her sons, in kindergarten, had shyly presented her with twin ceramic handprints, with a verse about how soon these hands would outgrow her own. But now tears slid from the corners of her eyes and wet her pillow. But then she prayed to St. Anne. She didn’t mince words as she confided that she certainly wasn’t ready to be through with her own life, but that if she had to be, then, please, could the patron of all mothers cut Camille a break? Holly would consider it a special favor, and so would Holly’s mother—whom Holly was sure St. Anne knew on a first-name basis.
Cammie woke just before she hit the floor, sprawled on her stomach, blood from her mouth spurting onto the floor. Her mother was trying to get to her feet, one hand on her berth, one on the wall.
“We hit something,” Cammie said.
“You’re hurt.”
“It’s nothing, Mom. I nicked my lip with my tooth. I’ll put a clean rag on it.”
“But what did we hit?”
Cammie grabbed the flashlight she kept under her pillow, and by its wavering beam she found the stairs, which were canted at a forty-five-degree angle. Using her fingers as feet, she walked her way up them. Abruptly, the boat righted itself with a shudder and thud. Olivia screamed. Holly called, “Liv! Be still. Let’s figure this out. No one can hear you anyhow.”
Olivia said, “I wasn’t screaming for help! It was involuntary.”
Cammie shined her light around the deck. “Check the bilge, Mom, and see if there’s water in it. See if whatever we hit damaged the side of the boat and it’s leaking.”
“It’s basically dry,” Tracy called back.
“So we probably scraped a rock underwater, but it didn’t come through. Why wasn’t anyone steering? Olivia, you were supposed to be on watch.”
“I don’t know how to make this thing go straight!” Olivia complained.
“I thought you had a lot of experience steering boats,” Tracy said.
“Boats with motors! Plus, every muscle in my body aches from pulling her out of the water!” She poin
ted at Cammie. “I just lay down in the saloon for a few minutes.”
“So no one was steering?” Tracy seemed to grow taller, outstripping her six feet. Holly thought, with delight, that Tracy might finally haul off and deck Olivia. But Tracy forcibly controlled herself. “Olivia, listen. I can’t do everything. Holly’s sick, and I’m worn out. You don’t have a choice here. You let us all down by leaving that cockpit. We could have run into a cruise ship or a freighter.” Tracy brought Olivia up to the cockpit and put her hands on the wheel. “I will tie you here if I have to. I mean it.”
But it was no good. They were hung up on something. It would have to wait until morning before Cammie could again dive to investigate or until the shifting currents or winds simply lifted them off. Holly thought, Tracy will never let Cammie go down there again. And I wouldn’t, either.
Perhaps someone would come along. Didn’t she use to tell the boys that? If you ever get lost somewhere, stay there? Don’t move or let anyone make you move? One of the freighters, Holly thought. She indulged in a grim laugh. It would probably mow the lightless Opus down like a newspaper sailboat in a storm gutter.
Tracy went back down to sleep.
It had to have been less than an hour before Holly heard Olivia screeching. “Tracy! I see something! I see something!”
She heard Cammie cry, “It must be one of those ships! The ones we’re supposed to call!”
So extinguished with weariness that she wouldn’t have cared if Olivia had seen a party barge with dancing pool boys and ice-cream drinks, Tracy slid out of bed. Holly came limping out of the stateroom, carrying a sealed package of flares and the last box of kitchen matches.
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