Red Sea (4 page)

Actually, I wouldn't mind reading that book about the woman pilot in Africa.

I'm hungry, so I make supper: soda crackers for Mom, warmed-up lasagna for Duncan and me. We eat in the cockpit so that Duncan can keep his watch. We always stand watch when we're sailing, especially at night. Freighters and fishing boats can't always see sailboats. We need lots of time to get out of their way; a sailboat doesn't outrun anything. On passage, I usually stand one three-hour watch each afternoon, although no one called me from my cabin today so I didn't have to do it. Duncan and Mom do all the rest.

A white-winged bird buzzes the boat so close that I duck my head. The sea is still narrow here, and birds pass easily from Africa to Saudi Arabia. The bird dive-bombs again, narrowly missing the wire shrouds that hold up the mast. “Crazy bird!” Duncan follows my gaze to the circling flock overhead. The birds' movements seem tumbled and erratic, like socks in a dryer. Only Mom doesn't seem concerned that the birds have lost their minds.

The islands Duncan mentioned this afternoon are pale purple humps behind us now, or I assume it is those islands. It's not like the sea has signposts with arrows and mile markers. In sight of land we compare lighthouses and landmarks with those indicated on the chart to figure out where we are and check the
GPS
, an electronic positioning device, for our latitude and longitude. Even with the
GPS
, I'm always a little surprised that we find exactly the right entrance to a harbor. It's like finding a house address when none of the houses are numbered or the street signs are missing.

The faded islands are the only land I can see. Ahead of us, there's just water, the edge of everywhere and nowhere and only a pencil dot on the chart tells me we're anywhere at all.

As we eat, Mom's gaze never leaves the sea. I resist, I try, and then I ask her, “Watching for pirates?”

Duncan shoots me a warning look. Mom turns the color of toothpaste. “That's not funny, Lib.”

Duncan unclips his tether from his harness and passes it to Mom. “Lib and I will wash the dishes. You stay up here.” He gathers our plates and forks, and with a determined nod, motions me down the companionway.

Duncan washes, I dry. Apparently, I use too much fresh water when I rinse. He hands me a glass to dry. “I'd like you to stand watch with your mother tonight.”

“Why? What did I do?”

That tiny muscle in his cheek clenches. “It's not a punishment, Lib. Your mother's stomach is upset from being at sea, she's not getting her rest when she's off-watch, and she's nervous. She could use the company.”

I dry the glass. It has a label, the letter “J” for Janine. Duncan labels everything on this boat. I put away the glass. “You want me to fight off the pirates?”

Duncan sighs. “Your mother is entitled to be nervous.” He takes a long time cleaning a plastic lasagna tub. “She has you to think about.”

I barely hold in a snort. If Mom were thinking about me, I'd be home with Dad right now, watching big-screen
TV
and burning every light in the house. If Mom were thinking about me, she'd have let me stay at home too. But Mom isn't thinking about me. I say to Duncan, “Maybe you should stay up with her.”

His hands pause in the sink. “I can't be awake all night, Lib.”

I shrug. “Yeah, well, I was going to catch up on my novel study.”

Clench. Unclench. Clench. If I'd tried that line on my mother, she would have launched a very long argument about how I should have used my time in port to get the assignment done, that I'm not managing my correspondence courses, that if I want to repeat ninth grade when
we get back, then that's fine with her. When he speaks, Duncan is firm. “Just while we're in the southern Red Sea, Lib, I expect you on deck with your mother.” He wrings out the sponge and leans on the sink. “Tomorrow or the next day, hopefully, we'll catch up with Emma and Mac and the others, and that will make your mother feel better. Right now we're not even in radio range.” He looks at me, hard. “I don't expect any problems, but if you see anything, and I mean anything, out of the ordinary, you're to come and wake me.”

I
POUR A CUP OF TEA
from the Thermos in the cockpit, choosing the warmth of the drink over the real threat of having to pee while wearing nineteen layers of foul weather gear. Night watches are always cold, even in warm climates. I offer Mom the Thermos. She's standing at the wheel, nibbling a cracker with one gloved hand. The wind is light, and we're motoring with the mainsail. The engine is revved about as high as Duncan will allow for fuel conservation. Mom isn't wasting any time. She's tethered to the wheel post. I'm clipped on at the companionway, which means I can huddle on the cockpit seat under the canvas spray hood
and stay out of the worst of the weather. Mom waves away the tea with a “no thanks.”

“Of all of us,” she says, “you're the one best suited to sailing. You never get seasick.”

I slurp my tea and tip my face to the night sky. “I can't think of a place I'd rather be.” In the dim light of the compass binnacle I watch my mother's face grow hopeful. The furrows in her forehead smooth out, a strand of brownish gold hair wafts against her cheek. When she was young, her hair was red, like mine. Her eyes brighten, hazel eyes that change from green to gray. My eyes. Mom smiles at me, and it reminds me of when I was younger, before Duncan, when it was just us. I start to smile back. But she should never have agreed to this trip. I say, “Unless that place was with my friends. Or my father. Or in an orphanage, if it meant I wasn't here.”

Her smile disappears and she shakes her head. “You're not giving this trip a chance, Lib. When I was fourteen I would have done anything for this opportunity: a trip to Australia, then a one-year sailing journey to the Mediterranean.”

“Through some of the most pirate-infested waters on the planet.” I look pointedly at the handheld two-way radio dangling from her wrist and the arsenal of distress flares beside her in the cockpit.

She seems to ignore my comment, but I see her shoulders tighten and she scans the blackness behind the boat. “If you just let yourself, I think you'd enjoy this trip. You could learn so much. You could pick up your marks...”

“Don't start.”

That stops her, briefly. “What I meant was, you're a good student, and without as many distractions
...
”

“If by ‘distractions' you mean friends, then you're right. I don't have any friends.”

“We have our sailing friends on the other boats.” She extends her hand out into the night. “They're out there, Emma and Mac, the others. They'd do anything for us.”

“They didn't wait for us.”

“Emma and Mac hung back as long as they thought they could. You were too late getting back to the boat.”

“Are you going to rant again about me being late?”

“You brought it up.”

I hurl what's left in my mug overboard. “You like to think that this trip is such a good thing for me. But it's not about me, this trip. Not the smallest bit of it. This trip is all about you. Everything is about you. You and Duncan.”

Her voice is quiet. “This trip is for us, Lib. I'm prepared to do whatever it takes to get us back on track. I don't ever want to feel like I could have done more. But I don't want to hear
anything
about Duncan.” She takes a breath, pauses, then says, “You are so angry. For five years, you've been angry, ever since I married Duncan. You've made him into some kind of a monster, and he only wants what is best for you.” I release one small guffaw. She says, “Duncan and I wanted to make this trip—”

I cut her off. “No. Duncan wanted the trip. You want what Duncan wants, so you went along. Thanks for dragging me with you.”

“Let me finish. We wanted to make this trip with you, while we could, while there was still time to get your marks back up for university applications.”

“Ha. You'll be happy if I finish high school. You took me because you don't trust me. You need to control my every waking moment and what better place than a floating bleach bottle half a world away from anything and
anyone
that's important to me.”

She recoils after that last comment. Then she says, “You're important to me, to both of us.”

“Both of us. You and Duncan. Duncan and you. Duncan who can do no wrong.”

“Duncan isn't perfect, Lib, but you know he would never hurt you.”

“And that makes me, what, the liar? Couldn't he be lying? Couldn't you be lying, just to protect him?”

This silences her, briefly. “Lib, Duncan is my heaven-on-earth, but I wouldn't protect him, not if he was harming you.” She doesn't even blink. She pauses, breathes in, then says, “It's not that I don't believe you.”

“How can you make those two statements? Don't they cancel each other out?”

Mom chooses her words as if she were picking up broken glass. “I think that you're confused.”

“Oh, thanks very much. It's nice to know you have such faith in my mental capacity. Nice that my tea mug comes without a sippy lid.”

“It won't hurt for you to be away a while.”

“Away from what?”

“I've talked to you about Ty. You just don't want to hear me.”

I make my voice mimic hers, “He's so much older than you, Lib.” Then I say, “You marry a dinosaur, but Ty is too old for me.”

She's losing her patience; her voice is clipped. “It's not just that Ty is nineteen, although I hate that he trolls for girls in the ninth grade.”

“Trolls? You make him sound like a predator.”

“It's not just me who thinks so. Lindsay told Denise that Ty is bad news.”

Lindsay is my old best friend Vanessa's sister, in grade twelve now. Denise is her mother.

“How would Lindsay know?”

“Because she went out with him too when she was fourteen.”

“No, she didn't.”

“She did. For two weeks, then he threw her back and picked someone else. Apparently, he said she was ‘too reserved,' although that might be Denise's euphemism.”

Understatement, more like. Lindsay probably still covers her eyes in movies when people kiss.

I say, “Oh, so you're basing your opinion of Ty on Lindsay's two-week relationship?”

She inhales, her hands rest on the wheel as if it were a lectern or pulpit. “Nothing I've seen makes me think any differently.”

Ty came to the door the first time we went out. After that, he said to watch for him and just come out to the car.
He never comes in if they're home. I say, “You don't even know Ty.
He'd
do anything for me.”

I can see Mom wringing her hands on the wheel. Her voice is tight when she says, “Oh, I know Ty. I know him from that going-away party he threw for you at our house.”

I say, “It was just a little party.”

“We arrived home to police cars, Lib. We had to hire a drywall crew, and if that was the worst of it, then I'd be happy.” Her voice starts to break. “You were so out of it.”

I hardly remember that party. I change the subject. “You yanked me from all my friends. They'll ditch me, and you like the idea that I won't have any friends, any
distractions
.” I turn so that she's looking at my back.

After a long time she says, “I just want us to be together, Lib.”

“You should have thought of that five years ago when you left Dad.”

Her voice softens and she says, “Lib, I really need for us to get along. I feel like I hardly know you anymore.”

I get to my feet. “It isn't going to happen. Get used to that.” I reach down to unsnap my tether. “I'm going to bed.”

I'
M NOT SURE WHAT WAKES ME
. Through my cabin window I can see that it is just dawn, still Mom's watch. Weather must be changing; a thin line of red indicates the rising sun. Mom has throttled up the engine, and the sound rattles the inside of the boat. Duncan won't be happy about her revving the engine. I close my eyes. Then, over the din of the engine, I hear my mother's voice on the two-way
vhf
radio at the chart table. She must be using the handheld radio in the cockpit.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday.”

My feet find the cold floor of my cabin. I toss on my sailing jacket over my pajamas and bolt from the cabin.
Duncan's door is still closed, and I bang on it as I scramble up the companionway steps.

There's a thudding crunch on one side of the hull that almost shakes me off the steps. Then another. Duncan's door crashes open and he emerges, his hair all rucked up and his eyes still doped with sleep. I can hear another boat engine. Duncan pushes past me on the steps.

Over his head I see a flare streak low. Mom's fired a distress flare. She's screaming for Duncan.

“Get below!” Duncan shoves me down the steps.

I follow him back up. At the top of the steps he stops, and I peer out into the cockpit from under his elbow. I can see a dhow, an open wooden boat motoring alongside, thudding into our hull. The three men in the boat are shouting at my mother. Ski masks cover their faces. From the edge of the sun, another boat hurtles toward us.

I sense the gunfire more than hear it. It's like the sound is inside my head, and I swear I can feel my eardrums vibrate as if they are making the sound. I duck my head lower into the companionway. Duncan is yelling at Mom, “Those are warning shots. Cut the engine. They won't hurt us if we cooperate.”

I push up onto the last step so I'm standing beside Duncan. Mom's eyes are crazed with fear. Maybe she doesn't hear him over the sound of the engines. Maybe she's hearing Jimmy's voice in her head. She levels a flare right at the oncoming boat. I lose her for a moment in the smoke of the flare. The flare rockets toward the boat and explodes on their bow.