The Great Wide Sea (13 page)

Dylan sat up. He pulled on his shorts and rubbed his face.

“Don't wake up Gerry,” he said. “He'll be scared. Let's go look again.”

“Gerry will be scared. And you're not?”

“Shhh,” Dylan said.

He tiptoed past Gerry's bunk and up onto the deck.

Eight o'clock is hot. Eight thirty is hotter. The wind had almost completely died, and the air was heavy. The rollers were smooth and glassy across their curving backs.

“Dad!” Dylan called. I guess he figured I hadn't thought of doing that.

“His cup,” Dylan said. And it was. His coffee cup, half-empty and cold.

“His lifeline,” he said, and was right again. Dylan held up the end attached to the boat. The other end was supposed to be hooked to Dad's safety harness, but he had taken it off. In the middle of a night watch. Alone. Why?

The autopilot ground and whined in the wallows.

“Look at the dinghy,” I said.

He went forward and lifted it just as I had. “Where's the pack?”

“Don't know.”

We sat in the cockpit. I picked up the winch handle before it slid across the floor again. The sails cracked against themselves. I turned off the autopilot and disconnected it. The air filled up with silence. The tiller bounced against my thigh. I grabbed it and held it still.

“What was our heading supposed to be?” I asked Dylan.

“Thirty-five degrees north-northeast.”

“We have to make a one-eighty,” I said. I made sure the engine was in neutral and started it. The engine sputtered, then settled into its rhythm. Now we were wallowing in diesel fumes too.

“Lower the jib?” Dylan asked.

“No. Let's see what it does on the new course.”

He turned to handle the lines as we swung around. I reached for the mainsheet, pulling the sail in hard. The mechanical purr of the ratchet block tightening down sounded like normal life, like an afternoon sail on the lake. I snagged
Chrysalis
's mainsheet in the cleat and shifted the engine to forward. With a little way on, I slowly eased her around to 215 degrees.

We adjusted the sails to the whisper of wind and I killed the engine.

Dylan looked past me to the ocean. Our wake still showed in the smooth rolling sea. “I'll double-check the course,” he said, and backed into the dark below.

I could hear Dylan searching the boat again. I heard him opening the lockers and the engine room and climbing around in Dad's bunk. Then he was quiet, and I was sitting there alone in the middle of a huge, round ocean under a brilliant dome of sky. There was nothing, nothing in sight except the monotonous curve of the waves and the occasional blinding glint of sunlight on the water.

We both knew it was impossible. Even if we could go back toward Spanish Cay at exactly the same angle as we had left it, we would be tracing a different line. We had no way of knowing how far east or west we were of our original path. And we didn't know how long Dad had been overboard. How long had he been drifting in the current? How long had we been wallowing without wind?

Then Dylan reappeared. He was holding a piece of paper and Dad's poetry collection. His lips were almost white.

“Ben,” he said. He held up the paper, and I saw it was a letter in Dad's handwriting. “It's a letter to Mom.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

DYLAN HANDED ME the letter. I didn't want to read it, but I did. It wasn't what I expected. It was a poem, but not from Dad's collection. He started out with her name, just “Christine.” Then he wrote:

 

I read it through twice, then crushed the paper into a tight ball. “It's a suicide note,” I said.

“It's about a song,” Dylan answered. He took the paper from me and carefully began to pick open the ball.

“But listen to the words,” I said. “He says she's the sea. He says she should open her arms.”

“They had the CD.” He flattened the paper against his thigh. “They listened to that song all the time.”

“Rivers flow into the sea, Dylan. And he's gone into the sea. In the middle of the night. He unhooked his harness. He—”

Dylan bent slightly to look down at the note, held smooth against his thigh by his boy hands. When his hair fell forward slightly, I saw the smooth curve of his neck rising from his shoulder.

“Dylan,” I started again.

He looked up. “Shush,” he said, and tucked the letter back into the book.

Gerry had appeared in the companionway. He was holding Blankie bunched up under his chin. He didn't say anything. He stepped out, barefoot and wearing his Batman underwear. They were baggy in the seat—too big. Mom had planned a little too far ahead with them. Gerry sat by Dylan, then lay down on his side, curled around his stomach. He took a corner of Blankie and gently rubbed the silk against his cheek. He crossed his feet over each other. His breath came steady and even. His cheek was so smooth. His eyes staring across the deck were so quietly pale. I could have counted each rib, each vertebra. He couldn't float because he had no body fat.

Looking at Dylan and Gerry, I felt I could scream loud enough for Dad to hear me wherever he was. I felt I could climb to the top of the mast and yell at the sky. I felt I could terrify the depths of space with the scream inside me.

Gerry was watching me watch him. “What's wrong, Ben?” he asked.

I looked away. I picked up the book with the stupid letter sticking out the top. I slammed it onto the seat cushion.

“I hate him,” I said.

“Don't say that,” Dylan said.

Gerry sat up straight, alert, looking at the book in my hands. “Where's Dad?” he asked me.

I bit my lip.

“Dylan.” Gerry's little voice was shaking. “Where's Dad?”

I stood up and headed down below. Dylan picked up a corner of Blankie and rubbed Gerry's other cheek. Gerry was already crying when I laid myself out on Dad's bunk with his pillow over my head and his book pressing a square hole in my chest.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I HAD GONE TO sleep again and was dreaming I was suffocating with that pillow over my head when Dylan shook my foot. “Wake up,” he said. “We need to talk.”

I rolled over and remembered everything all at once.

“Talk,” I said, and followed Dylan into the cabin. Gerry was on deck holding the tiller with one hand and Blankie with the other. Beside him sat a can of orange juice. Dylan had spread the charts out on the chart table.

“We need to figure out where we are—or were—so we can figure out where we're going.”

I rubbed my face hard with the palms of my hands. “We're lost,” I said. “The GPS is broken, and we've been drifting in the sea in an unknown direction at an unknown speed for an unknown period of time.”

There were simply too many variables. When Dad went overboard, the boat sailed on alone for a while, the autopilot maintaining a perfect course. Then, at some point, the wind changed and the boat stopped moving forward. It just rolled and wallowed wherever the wind and waves took it. But when did Dad go over? What speed was the boat going then? When did the wind change? What direction had it come from since then? How strong? Did it change again? There were too many things we didn't know.

“We're lost,” I repeated, and sat down.

Dylan ignored me and sat at the chart table making dots with the pencil, drawing lines with the parallel rule, and calculating speed. Then he paused and glanced toward Gerry at the helm. “I told him we were going back to get Dad.”

“In other words, you lied,” I said.

Dylan's mouth tightened. “What would you have said?”

I kicked at a pencil that had dropped on the floor.

“Besides,” Dylan went on, “Dad has the EPIRB. If we don't find him, someone else will.”

I stared at Dylan. “What makes you think a man trying to drown himself would turn on the EPIRB?”

Dylan looked squarely back at me. “What makes you think he was trying to drown himself?”

“For crying out loud, Dylan! You read the note. Why would he do any of the things he's done? He's crazy and selfish and scared. And by now, he's probably dead. Just like he wanted to be.”

“You're wrong,” Dylan said quietly.

“Did you hear anyone call?” I asked. “Did you?”

“No.”

“Don't you think he would have yelled if he had wanted help?”

“We were asleep.”

“Grow up, Dylan,” I said, and bent to pick up the pencil I had kicked.

When I sat up again, he was looking at the chart. “I made a note here last night,” he said, “at the end of my watch.” He carefully placed the pencil point on a dot well northeast of Spanish Cay. “We were going about four and a half knots on a heading of thirty-five degrees north-northeast. If the boat kept on for another two hours, it would have been about here”—another touch with the pencil—“when Dad went overboard.” He paused. “But we have to figure in current. The water is moving over the ground at about five knots. We were moving through the water at four and a half knots.”

Dylan's pencil worked some more. He swung the dividers along a line he'd drawn. “Okay, so we'd have been about here when he went over.”

Dylan made a new dot and erased the other one.

“If he jumped at two o'clock,” I said.

“Fell,” Dylan answered.

I shrugged. “But what if it was twelve thirty? Or three o'clock? Or six o'clock?”

Dylan's boy fingers crunched around the pencil. “You want me to figure all those, too?”

“No.”

“I can.”

“I know you can. You're brilliant. But it doesn't matter. Dad is still gone, and we still don't know where we are.”

“No.” Dylan drew a thin squiggly line along the margin of the chart. “We're lost.”

I flopped back against the settee. “We don't know where we are. So we can't know where we're going. Depending on where we started from, we could land right smack in the harbor at Spanish Cay in seventy-two hours. Or we could slide right between Florida and Cuba and end up on the Yucatan Peninsula. Or I suppose we could be farther east than that and miss the Bahamas altogether and end up in Turks and Caicos or the Dominican Republic. All of them are lovely destinations. I leave it to you to choose.” I thumped the pencil against the cushion. “If he had just made a note of the time. If he had only kept up the log.”

Dylan worked on his line.

“He should have thought about us,” I continued quietly. “He should have—”

“If it had been on purpose,” Dylan said, “he would have.”

I looked up and saw Gerry standing at the helm. His hair was so blond it looked white in the sun. But the light around him seemed funny. I stood up to see the horizon. There wasn't one. The line where sea and sky should meet had disappeared in a broad black swath. The edge of the black clouds billowed out toward us. They stretched all the way across the ocean. From end to end. Rolling over the water and filling up the sky.

Dylan stood beside me. We looked at the storm coming.

Gerry was watching us, his sun-browned hand and overgrown fingernails scratching at his thigh.

Something stronger and colder than I'd ever felt was holding on to my insides. I felt the hair rise up on my neck and chills riding down my spine.

“Dylan,” I asked, not daring to turn my eyes away, “do any of the books say what to do with this?”

“What is this?” he asked very quietly.

I held on to the companionway rail. “I think,” I said, “that it's the end of the world.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

DYLAN AND I stood frozen for long enough to die and come back to life. I lost the feeling in my fingertips. Then thick fat raindrops began to drop on the boat, and the wind freshened. We'd done storm drill at anchor a thousand times, but never at sea. I didn't know what to do.

“We'll just keep our course,” I told Dylan, “and ride it out.”

“What about Dad?” Dylan asked.

I didn't answer. I shrugged on my foul weather gear and handed Dylan his.

“I guess I know two things about storms,” I finally said. “The first thing is you want to go just the right speed. You don't want to go so fast down into the trough of a wave that your bow plows into the ocean. It would be like putting on the brakes on your bike's front wheel. You'd pitchpole—flip upside down, front first. And you don't want to go so slow that a wave crashes on your stern and flips you over backwards.”

Dylan nodded.

“The second thing,” I said, “is that you want to stay pointed in the right direction. You don't want to get sideways to the waves. You have no stability that way. The waves will broadside you, and you'll broach—go over sideways.”

Gerry was standing now, looking from us to the cloud behind him. The wind was beginning to whip his hair and twist his shirt against his chest. “Ben! Dylan! Look!”

“Hold on. We're coming, bud.”

Behind Gerry the advancing wall of rain shattered the silvery surface of the water into a rolling layer of flat, pock-marked tin. I turned to Dylan. “I just thought of a third thing I know. You don't want to hit any land.”

“Or coral heads,” Dylan said, and we came out into the cockpit.