Sing It to Her Bones (26 page)

“The goddamned boat’s sinking! She must have pulled one of the through-hulls!”

From above, I heard Connie laugh.

Hal scrambled into the cabin, flipped on the cabin lights, and began wading in my direction. “Which one was it, damm it?”

I waited where I was, with the door ajar. Soon he would notice that I wasn’t where he had left me.

“Hannah?”

I extracted the lure from my pocket and gripped it in my right hand. With my left, I removed the red plastic plug that protected the hook and dropped it into the water. I didn’t think I’d be needing it again.

“Hannah?”

Naturally, Hal expected to find me in the forward cabin. As his profile appeared in the doorway, I lashed out, sinking the lure deep into his neck.

Hal screamed, a hideous sound that will haunt me forever, and dropped the gun. It sank to the floor, but neither one of us dived for it. Hal was too busy bellowing and clutching his neck, and I was staring in horror, appalled by what I had done. At first there was surprisingly little blood. Then Hal tried to remove the hook, but the barb held fast and began to tear his flesh. “Hannah!” he cried. The man was in agony. He fell back against the cushions of the V-berth. I couldn’t bear to look into his eyes.

I turned and floundered away, moving as quickly as
I could in my waterlogged shoes. I headed for the pilot berth where Connie kept the life preservers.

Connie’s head appeared in the hatch. “Connie!” I yelled. “Is it too late to cork it?”

“Oh, God, yes.” She jumped onto the seat by the navigation station.

Connie flipped on the ship’s radio, punched the button that activated Channel 16, and spoke more calmly than I could believe into the microphone. “May Day, May Day, May Day. This is the sailing vessel
Sea Song
. We’re about two miles off Holly Point near the shipping channel, taking on water fast. Three … uh … four adults. One overboard. We’re abandoning ship now.” The radio crackled, hissed, then went silent. “Damn!”

“What’s wrong with the radio?” I was looking around for the flashlight, but who knew where Hal had dropped it?

“I don’t know,” Connie moaned. “It’s gone dead. Water probably shorted out the wires.”

Standing in water nearly up to my knees, I held out the life jackets. Connie threw them into the cockpit and pushed me up the ladder. She slipped her life jacket over her head, snapped the buckles together across her chest and waist, and helped me do the same. I held up the third life jacket. Connie sucked in her bottom lip and shook her head, but I couldn’t do it. Just before the rising water shorted out the electrical system and all the lights went out, I tossed it at Hal. “You don’t deserve this, you son of a bitch!”

Hal caught the life jacket in his bloody hands. The hook in his neck flashed and sparkled. Blood dripped from the yellow feathers at its tail, drenching his shirt. He looked so pale and weak that I wondered if I had severed his carotid artery.

Connie grabbed a couple of small floating cushions, handed one to me, and we stood together on the seats in the cockpit, waiting. When Connie judged the time was right, we jumped. Hal was on his own.

Connie and I swam a good one hundred yards from the boat, then turned around, treading water. Silhouetted against the gray night sky, we could see
Sea Song
’s regal mast and her sails flapping like wet sheets on a clothesline. Then she tilted, nose down, and sank beneath the water. Connie moaned. “It’s like losing Craig all over again,” she sobbed.

I felt rotten. I was a curse. A jinx. “Oh, Connie, I’m so sorry. But I couldn’t think what else to do. He was going to leave us out here to drown!” I gasped. My lungs burned, as if they would never get enough oxygen.

“It was the right thing.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Absolutely the right thing.”

As I bawled and made well-intentioned promises to God if He’d just help me out of this mess, a cloud bank slid across the sky and the moon, nearly full, laid a silver path on the water. I had my answer. I couldn’t wish anybody dead. I expected to see Hal’s head bobbing nearby, but although I scanned the water for several minutes, I didn’t spot him.

“Where’s Hal? I thought sure he’d get out.”

“Maybe he’s on the other side, treading water like we are.”

“Hal! Hal!” I called, but the only answer was the sound of my own labored breathing and the clang of the bell on a nearby buoy. I gasped, choking back tears. “I didn’t want him to die, Connie. I never wanted him to die!”

Connie grabbed my life vest by the straps and pulled me toward her until we were so close that our foreheads nearly touched. “Of course you didn’t, sweetheart.” Waves licked at my chin as I sobbed. “C’mon. We’re only in about twenty feet of water.”

“I’m not that tall,” I wailed.

“What I mean, silly, is that if we’re lucky,
Sea Song
’s mast will still be visible.”

I looked all around me. Miles away I could see lights glimmering onshore. A pair moving in tandem must be a car, its driver heading home after a late day at the office. One thing I knew for sure: It was too far to swim.

“Do you think the coast guard heard your call before the radio died?”

“I hope so.” She tugged on my vest. “There she is!” I looked where she pointed and saw the top twenty feet of
Sea Song
’s mast, jutting out at a sharp angle from the moon-spangled waves.

We swam, arm over arm, and grabbed on, exhausted. My arm and side ached as if I’d spent twenty minutes on the inside of an industrial clothes dryer. I wondered
what had happened to Hal. I wondered if he’d focused on those beckoning lights and tried to swim for shore. In spite of all that had happened, I found myself praying that he’d make it.

chapter

19

Lights can be deceptive on the water at night.
While I clung to the mast, I scanned the horizon for approaching lights that might signal a rescue was at hand. Behind me green and red flashing buoys marked the shipping lanes. I thanked my lucky stars we hadn’t sunk out there where we could easily have been run over by a freighter on its way up to Baltimore with a cargo hold full of new Toyotas. To my right I stared long and hard at a bright white light. Connie and I argued about it, thinking it might be the mast light of a sailboat under power, one near enough to rescue us, but when it hadn’t moved for a while, we decided it must be Venus, always the brightest star in the early-evening sky. Ahead and to my left, scattered lights flashed green or white at two- or four-second intervals, marking the channel into the Truxton, or so Connie said.

The drone of a high-speed motorboat raised our hopes. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” We gripped our flotation cushions by their straps and waved them in the air as the boat passed, unseeing, within two hundred feet of us, swamping us in its wake as it went rooster-tailing by. I inhaled water and coughed, wiping water out of my eyes with a free hand. “See why I hate powerboats?” Connie delivered a rude gesture toward the back of the disappearing boater.

I shivered. “I’m getting cold. How warm is the water?”

“About seventy degrees.”

“That’s okay, then. It’s room temperature. We should be okay.”

“We’ll be fine for a couple of hours, but I don’t want to stay out here too long, if we have a choice. I wish we had something to stand on. Water pulls heat from your body very quickly.”

I hugged myself, tucking one hand under my armpit. “How long do you think it will take them to find us?”

“I don’t know. Soon, I imagine.”

I went back to my original harebrained plan. “Can we swim to shore?”

“No. Two reasons that’s a bad idea. One, it’s a hell of a lot farther than it looks, and two, it’s easier to spot the boat than it is to find a lone swimmer, particularly at night.”

My teeth began to chatter. Connie explained that this was natural, the body’s way of staying warm. For once I wished I had more insulating body fat, but I hadn’t gained back the weight I’d lost during chemo.

“Shivering and chattering’s normal, Hannah. I once took a survival course. They say what you have to watch for are the umbles—mumbles, stumbles, fumbles, and grumbles.”

“Well, I’m certainly not going to stumble out here, but I might grumble.”

Connie, whom I trusted to be experienced with such things, said we should huddle for warmth. She instructed me to wrap my clothes as tightly around myself as possible, then embraced me in a bear hug with our legs twined together.

“That was really brilliant what you did back there,” Connie said after a moment.

“Thanks. I figured if the cancer was going to do me in anyway, I might as well go out in a blaze of glory! Sorry about taking you and the boat along with me.”

Something brushed against my leg, and I freaked, breaking away from Connie with a shriek. “It’s only a fish, silly! I felt it, too.” She grabbed my life jacket by the straps and pulled me back. We floated there, bobbing in the waves.

“Tell me something, Connie. If we’re going to die out here, I’d like to know. What’s really going on between you and Dennis?”

“I think we’re falling in love.”

“But why keep it such a deep, dark secret?”

I felt Connie shrug. “It was too soon after his wife’s death. And in addition to her other problems, his daughter, Maggie, is still grieving. She’s made it very difficult for us to see each other.”

I looked into my sister-in-law’s eyes, just inches from my own. “Why didn’t you tell me this before? What is there to be ashamed about?”

“I don’t know exactly. Perhaps I was feeling disloyal to Craig. Dennis and he had been such pals.”

“I still don’t understand why you wouldn’t share your feelings about Dennis with me, particularly when they were so obvious.”

“It’s silly, now that I think about it. But I thought I was protecting you.”

I was incredulous. “Protecting me? From what?”

When Connie spoke again, her voice was husky with emotion. “I didn’t tell you that Dennis lost his wife to cancer. I knew you weren’t out of the woods yet, medically speaking, and I was afraid you’d think that the first thing a husband widowed by cancer did was to dash off into the arms of the nearest available lover.”

“And you thought, because of Jennifer Goodall …” I squeezed Connie tightly and laughed. “And you think I’m wacky!”

We floated quietly for a while, still wrapped around each other, taking turns holding on to the mast. “You know, I was thinking back there, if we got shot or if we drowned out here, I’d never get to say good-bye to Paul. I’d never be able to tell him how much I really love him.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’ve decided that one benefit of dying of cancer is that you usually have time to get your affairs in order. You can prepare your spouse for the time when you
won’t be around anymore. It’s like saying a long good-bye.” Connie didn’t say anything, but I thought I saw tears on her cheeks.

I was resting my head on Connie’s shoulder and vice versa, trying to separate navigational markers and lights onshore from the lights of would-be rescuers or a tug towing a barge or another hot-dogging power-boater hightailing it back from dinner on the Eastern Shore. After a while it all seemed a kaleidoscopic blur.

I was cold, and I was tired, so very tired. The next thing I remember was Connie’s voice, spiraling down to me from the end of a long tunnel. “Sing!” it was saying. “Sing!”

“What?” My eyes snapped open, and my head lolled back against the neck roll of my life jacket.

“Sing!” Connie threw her head back, eyes closed, and launched into song, her voice off key, but hearty.

Do your ears hang low
Do they wobble to and fro
Can you tie ’em in a knot
Can you tie ’em in a bow
Can you sling ’em over your shoulder
Like a Continental soldier,
Do your ears hang looooow!

Just before she got to the last line, she punched me playfully on the arm and I joined in, a
loooow
in perfect two-part harmony that would sound to anybody hearing it from the distant shore like the mating call of a pair of lovesick cows.

“I haven’t sung that song since Girl Scout camp in California!” I sputtered.

“I thought singing would help keep our spirits up.”

In the next hour we warbled our way through every camp song known to God and man—“John Jacob Jingle Heimer Schmidt,” “White Coral Bells”—with a few nursery school songs, like “Eensy Weensy Spider” thrown in for good measure.

I was trying to remember all the words to “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” when a cool breeze fanned my cheek. Connie had raised her head. “I think they’re coming!”

Keeping one hand on the mast, I turned to look. When I first clapped eyes on those flashing blue lights, I did the nautical equivalent of jumping up and down for joy, kicking my feet and bobbing like a Halloween apple. Connie and I screamed, “Help! Help!” and waved our cushions again, hoping they’d be picked up by the rescuers as flashes of white against the dark sky.

The beam of a powerful searchlight pierced the darkness, swept across the water, and passed over us. My throat was raw from screaming and the salt water I’d swallowed. “They missed us! They passed right over us!” Tears of despair ran down my cheeks. Suddenly the beam stopped, shuddered and swept back, focusing on the cushion that Connie held aloft. I kissed Connie on the cheek. “Thank God, thank God!”

The vessel approached at a high rate of speed, the roar of its engine the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. And to think I’d so recently consigned all motor-powered boats to low places in hell. The engine throttled
down, and the boat slowed, circling, but the searchlight never left our bodies. As it drew within fifteen feet of where we clung to
Sea Song
’s mast, I could see that it was an inflatable inner tube–like boat about twenty feet long. The dark outlines of several crewmen moved about on board.

“Ahoy!” one of the crewmen called, and I thought what a quaint, old-fashioned thing to
say
, but every bit as effective, I supposed, as “Hey there!” “Sit tight. We’ll get a line to you in a minute.”