Red Sea (12 page)

If nothing else, with all this dolphin activity there's not another fish of any kind anywhere near the boat.

Most of the pod leaves, but three stay with me until the salt has dried white on my skin and even my hair is mostly dry. I miss them when they don't reappear, and for a long time I wait, hoping they'll return. When I can avoid it no longer, I climb down to the swim platform, onto the ladder, then slip into the water.

I'm making progress on the net, but it has wreaked enormous havoc on the propeller. In full motion, the prop spun the net into a dense fat rope, then twisted the rope around and around on itself. I have to cut through the tangled strands layer by layer, the knife not being big enough, or me strong enough, to saw through the entire thickness.

I got my hair caught in a hairbrush once, the round metal kind. I got scared when the brush wouldn't come out and managed to snarl my hair so badly that Mom spent an hour trying before she reached for the scissors. I begged her not to cut my hair, probably promised that I'd be good forever if she didn't. So she took me to a hair salon where two of them worked the whole afternoon to ease the brush out.

Sorry about breaking the promise, Mom.

I think about the dolphins and the power in their bodies that so easily challenges the resistance of the water. I don't have it. I am a land creature and the water repels me like oil, driving me back to the surface. I'm using most of my strength just to reach the propeller.

When the dolphins jump clear of the water, is it just momentum that carries them high into the air, or do they somehow swim through the air? Surely it's more difficult for a dolphin to overcome gravity than it is for me to overcome buoyancy. I envision the dolphins as human swimmers, long hair streaming over smooth, strong shoulders, bodies lithe and sleek. When Mac dives, he uses just his fins to propel himself, and I've seen him kick with his feet together just like the dolphins, a smooth, undulating up-and-down motion that seems to start under his ribs and ripple from his feet. Now I see Mac as a dolphin, and I shake my head to clear the image.

If I could pull myself down to the propeller...

Use a jack line. The answer comes to me just like that, as if a sympathetic classmate whispered it in my ear as the teacher tapped her fingers. Use a jack line, a long line from the ladder to the propeller, use it like a handrail that I can pull myself along. I detach the tether at my end and loop it over the others so that I'm attached to the line of tether instead of the boat. The unclipped end I will have to secure at the propeller. In the meantime, I clip it at my waist so that I'm still connected with the boat. I take a big breath, then dive.

The tether just reaches the propeller, and I loop it around the shaft and clip it onto itself. Then I pull myself back to the surface. I risk a small smile. This is going to work. Using the tether as a jack line, I haul myself easily downward to the propeller. Once there, I anchor myself with one hand holding the net and my feet braced on either side. This way I can use the knife like a saw. The diving is actually a relief. It's the constant pressure of the knife that burns from my fingers through my wrist and elbow then radiates in my shoulder and neck. Every two dives, I switch the knife to the other hand.

The net ball is loosening in reluctant strands. I leave these in place, pulling on them to find the path of the snarl. Sometimes a good length comes free, and I reward myself with a rest on the ladder. I can see the edge of the propeller blades now.

The sun slips toward evening when I crawl up into the cockpit. My hands are raw from pulling on the net. I'm sore from the bottoms of my feet to the top of my head. I drain a bottle of water, then rip into the granola bar. Then I go below to check Mom. She's out, but I talk to her as if she can hear me. “You wouldn't believe where I've been,” I say as I wash her and change her dressings. “Under the boat. Remember when you signed me up for swimming lessons and I stood in the shower until each lesson was over?”

I dump the can of chili into a pan and set it on the flame. I'm so hungry that my hands are shaking, and I don't wait for it to get heated through. I eat it just warm, right out of the pan, then clean the pan with my fingers.

“Dad gave me a knife. It makes me feel good, like he trusted me to use it, not just that I wouldn't cut myself, but that I could actually use it like a tool. That I'd know what to do with it.”

Mom is so not with me. I hold the knife out as if she is looking at it.

“I'm not making any sense, I know. But that's the way I see it. Dad knew I could do this. Maybe he didn't know that I could dive under the boat, but he knew I could figure out something that would work. He gave me the cake with the file in it.” Mom's breathing is quiet, her closed eyes a door between us. “Anyway, I need to get back to work. I don't want to be under the boat if the wind comes up.” I rinse the chili pan with a little water. “I need to finish what I started.”

It's harder than this afternoon. During that brief break my muscles have set like concrete. I can barely close my hands around the knife. The tether has rasped my skin raw and when I dive, the salt water sears every tiny scratch. So that I don't feel it, I count, sometimes backward, sometimes in French; sometimes a manic drill sergeant pounds along beside me, screaming in my ear,
Hut, two, three, four, saw-the-net-and-do-some-more
.

I may be crazy, but I don't remember when I've felt saner.

Closer to the prop, the net is wound more tightly, which makes it easier to saw, almost like wood—almost. It's more like sawing a telephone pole with a handsaw. My knife blade is wearing dull, and I have to work harder to cut through the tough fibers of the net.

I don't know how many times I dive down, maybe fifty, maybe one hundred. And then it's done. A final length unwraps from the shaft, and when I drop it, spirals down, down, down and away. I detach the jack line from the prop and follow it one last time to the surface.

T
HE ENGINE SEEMS LOUD AFTER
the quiet of not having it. I lean across the cockpit bench and check the
RPM
indicator. I keep the throttle at about twenty-four hundred
RPMS
, fast enough for speed, but not so fast as to use up all our fuel. In contrast to the last couple of days, it feels like a giddy pace.

At first when I tried to start the engine, it turned over but too slowly to catch. Then I remembered to switch to the starter battery. It was that fast, my remembering, and the engine started as smoothly as if it had just been waiting, saying,
Come on, what's taking you so long? Let's get out of here!

The engine means I can charge the battery, which means I can use the autopilot. I can leave a soft light on in the cabin. When I need to go below, I can take my time, prepare something to eat, check Mom. Check and check and check Mom. Sometimes her sleep seems almost normal, and I swear she stirs when I touch her. Other times, it's like she's dead.

When I got out of the water after clearing the prop, I rewarded myself with a hair wash. I used the shampoo from my kit and worked it into my hair, wetting it with more sea-water, lathering it up into a good foam, then rinsed it in more seawater. Finally, I ran a couple of cups of fresh water through my hair to take out the salt. It's dry now and feels glorious, like salon hair, everything being relative.

I've put on my warm pants, and from the pocket I extract the remaining cookies in the Hobnob package. “Duncan used to love these too. At home he'd buy the kind with chocolate on one side, but it's too hot here for chocolate. It would just melt and make a mess.” I take another bite. “His brain made a real mess, but I'm not going any further with that because I don't want to waste my Hobnobs.”

“Duncan used to buy these cookies at the little store on the corner.” I wave the package at my imaginary audience. “He loved that store. He said it was like all the stores used to be when he was young: friendly, small, where they knew you by name. From the woman who owned the store he bought curry paste that he'd bring home in a small jam jar he saved for the purpose. She mixed it for him the way she liked it. He cooked curried prawns once that were so hot they made Jesse cry. She actually wiped her tongue with paper
towel.” I finish the cookie and dig for another. “Mac eats fries with his curry, mixes them all up together. So gross. When Duncan cooked a curry, we always had ice cream for dessert to cool everything down. Duncan loved maple walnut ice cream. I'd eat it, but only if that's all that was left. My favorite ice cream is mint chocolate chip.” I inspect the cookie package. “There's one left.” I offer it to the air-guests but no one bites.

“The thing with maple walnut is that the nuts scrape your tongue, not so much if you eat it with a spoon out of a bowl, but from a cone, which is how ice cream is meant to be eaten anyway. Spoons just get in the way. With ice cream, what you're after is total tongue contact.”

I wonder if Jesse got her tongue stud. Maybe she just got a new boyfriend. Jesse is practical that way.

Jesse says she can tell if the relationship is going to work the first time she kisses a guy. Not sparks, she says. That's just physical. She says she can sense a guy's soul through his lips.

Maybe. I don't know how much you can believe from someone whose longest “relationship” has been three weeks and that was only because she didn't want to break up with the guy on his birthday. She's a humanitarian, that Jesse.

Ty doesn't spend a lot of time kissing, not anymore.

“Nothing like savoring the moment.” I empty the crumbs from the package into my mouth then fold the plastic into my pocket. My hands are stiff from hacking at the net and I rub them like those wrinkly women in the Advil commercials.

With the engine, I can run the lights; I can see when I go below. I can run the bilge pump, which is good because with our increased speed we're taking on some water, probably through the bullet holes in the hull. I can't charge Mom's handheld
VHF
radio because I can't find the charging unit. I'm not sure if any of the ships I see as distant shapes would respond to my radio call. It would be nice to try.

Could be I lost the charging unit when I bailed in the dark. Could be my fault for that too.

Tough to follow the trail of mistakes I've made. At first, Mom blamed my disasters on Jesse. She never said as much, but I could tell. It took Mom a while to abandon the idea that by being her daughter I was, by default, damn near perfect. Her first clue might have been my dumping Vanessa at the beginning of seventh grade, my best friend from even before kindergarten. My mom and Vanessa's mom are still friends. I'd still be friends with Vanessa except Jesse doesn't like her. Then there were the calls from the school: “Lib wasn't in math class today.” “Lib missed her science test today.” “Lib's in the office waiting to be picked up. She's suspended for lighting up in the girl's change room.”

Vanessa doesn't even recognize me anymore. Maybe she does, and it's just easier for her to pretend she doesn't.

Then there were the guys at the mall, the ones we met last year before my birthday. Jesse had hers picked out from the minute she spotted him at the food fair. She assigned me mine, my first
date
, a tall guy with little pimples where his forehead met his hair. He was fairly nice, didn't try anything in the movie. He ate all my popcorn, and Jesse's too. She
told me to hold it for her, that she'd be right back, she and the guy. I didn't know then where she was going.

I always wait for Jesse. Once I waited with one of her boyfriends while she hooked up with someone else in the other room. They're always nice guys, Jesse's boyfriends. Sometimes I almost felt bad for them.

Jesse doesn't always wait for me, though.

And the thing with Jesse is she is never wrong. Ever. She used to have a dog, Jesse did, a taut, wiry thing called Bree. Jesse got her when she first moved here in fifth grade. We used to take her for walks, Vanessa, Jesse and I, down onto the bog trails. We had to cross a set of train tracks, and Jesse never kept Bree on her leash. One time Bree ran out ahead of us just as we heard a train whistle, and she stopped right on the tracks. She was wagging her tail, and if she saw the train, she didn't know what it was. She was still young, practically a pup. Vanessa ran for the dog and I followed her. This scene plays out in stop-time and I couldn't invent it, no one could. Vanessa stumbled, caught herself, then stumbled and fell, right onto the tracks. I know she fell on the tracks because I heard the
clink
of her eyeglasses on the rail. I guess I screamed. The dog was still wagging her tail. The train whistle was screaming, that I know, one long, drawn, pleading blast, and I reached down for Vanessa. It's true what they say about having more strength when you're desperate. I yanked Vanessa clear to her feet, yanked her so hard she left the ground. The train was just three yellow lights, on us now, compressing the air in front of it so that at first it was hard to breathe, then the air punched to the bottom of our lungs, making us gasp.

What I was thinking right then was,
Oh no, Jesse is going to see her dog get killed.

She didn't. As Vanessa and I moved back from the train, the dog bounded off the tracks toward us. Jesse caught her collar. The train finally came to a stop a ways up the tracks, but we didn't stick around. We ran, and Vanessa started to laugh, but I'm thinking that was just so she wouldn't cry. Or maybe so I wouldn't.

Jesse told me later that it was Vanessa's fault the dog was on the tracks, that she shouldn't have chased the dog. That Bree thought she was playing.

About six months after that, Bree got out of the yard and took off. Jesse said that she probably found a good place to live and more power to her; if she came back, then fine. The dog never did.