Red Sea (14 page)

I grab the chart. “The wind is from the north now, which means we're probably close to halfway up the Red Sea. The north wind against us means the current probably is as well and I can knock a couple miles an hour off of the engine speed. If we're that far north, then I should be seeing this island, Masamirit.” But I'm not. All I see is green water and whitecaps. Masamirit is the turning point. From Masamirit, Duncan has penciled in careful course changes to make Port Sudan. “Masamirit has a light, according to the chart, so I should be able to see it night or day. But what if the light isn't working? Emma said lights in the Red Sea aren't one hundred percent reliable, or was it Duncan who said that? What if I sailed by Masamirit in the night and didn't realize it?” My throat begins to ache. “What if I'm too far east or west? According to the chart, the light on Masamirit has a range of ten miles. What if I'm just out of range and can't see it?” I jam the chart under the seat where it won't blow away. “I don't know why I bother with the chart. I may as well be sailing with a blindfold.”

I MUST HAVE DOZED OFF
. Early evening, and the flash of light makes me jump to my feet. Immediately I know it's not the lighthouse, but a freighter, a far-off flash of low sun on a light-colored hull. Still, this freighter is closer than any have been. I watch it, trying to figure out if I'm looking at its stern or bow. The stern. They're going away from me. But surely my radio is in range. I dive through the companion-way and down into the boat.

“Can't talk right now, Mom.”

I grab the radio from the chart table and scramble back out to the cockpit.

When I press the power button, the yellow battery light seems even more pallid than before. I check that the radio is set to transmit on the emergency channel. Then, with my eyes fixed on the distant freighter, I make the call.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is
Mistaya, Mistaya, Mistaya
.” My throat is suddenly dry. This is where I'm supposed to give my position. “Mayday. I don't know where I am. I am a small sailboat and my mom is in serious danger. Please help me.”

I release the button and listen. I hear ghost voices from transmissions farther away. Nothing from the freighter. “Big ship.” I'm crying now. “Please turn around.”

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.

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 together. 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
.