Time After Time (49 page)

"You just nap here for a
while, honey," whispered Liz, pulling up a blue cotton blanket with
a big gold anchor on it. "We'll be home before you know
it."

Susy roused from her sleep
enough to take it all in. "Mommy?" she said. "I like this
bed."

With a bemused shake of
her head, Liz went back to the wheelhouse. She was determined to
monitor both the weather and the Coast Guard radio frequency. She
saw Cornelius on the afterdeck with a drink in his hand, keeping
his own silent vigil over demons that she, for one, would never be
able to see.

The old man — right now,
standing at the stern with shoulders bent, he looked very old
indeed — had found a blanket and covered Deirdre with it, which
made Liz melt a little toward him.

Maybe there are no real
villains in his marriage,
she
thought.
Just as there were none in
mine.
It was the first time since the day
Keith walked out that she was able to admit it. The realization
made her a little bit older, a little bit sadder, a little bit
freer.

She stood in the dark
wheelhouse, staring at the radio's red "22" as if it were a ghost,
willing it to say something. The boat was bobbing up and down a
little more now; a chill, damp breeze was blowing through the open
windows of the wheelhouse. The flashes of lightning were brighter;
the thunder seemed less distant. The front was coming
closer.

Come and save us,
she pleaded to the silent radio.
Save us now.

She saw Jack's dark shadow
emerge from below. He stood alongside her, staring at she didn't
know what, absorbing something she didn't understand from the sea
around them.

"I've got one more thing I
want to try," he said in a voice more taut than before. "Would you
mind sacrificing your pantyhose for it?"

She had to laugh; how
could she not? "Anything for the
Déjà
Vu,"
she said. Without asking for details,
she hiked up her skirt and peeled away the hose, then handed them
to him. "Good luck — Cap'n."

"I'll need every bit of
it. And I'll need you, to hold the flashlight while my dad monitors
things up here." He called his father in from the afterdeck and
said to him, "I just listened to the weather. The watch has been
upgraded to a warning. If the boat goes beam-to, yell."

"Won't be much we can do
about it, son."

Here was a detail Liz
preferred to know. "What does it mean if the boat goes beam-to?"
she asked as they headed for the engine-room.

"It means we're dragging
the anchor," Jack said tersely.

"Does that really matter
out here?" Liz asked him.

"It does if you're upwind
of a rocky ledge."

"A ledge, way out
here?"

"Check the chart," Jack
snapped.

Liz left it at that. Even
she could see that the stakes were escalating with each new roll of
thunder.

Ducking her head low, she
followed him into the cramped and narrow area alongside the exposed
engine. It was a brute of a thing, much bigger than the little mass
of efficiency that powered her van. Jack flashed the light over it,
focusing on an obviously unbelted pulley.

He adjusted the beam of
the flashlight to spread wide and said, "Keep it aimed at my
hands."

She did as she was told,
watching with skeptical fascination as he measured off her
pantyhose against the broken belt, then cut off one of the legs and
began fitting it around the two pulleys.

"Boy, suddenly I wish my
legs were an extralong," she said fervently as she hovered above
him with the flashlight.

He laughed softly and
said, "Your legs are perfect the way they are."

Ridiculous, to feel a
thrill shoot through her at a time like this, but there it was:
goosebumps.

"Have you done this sort
of thing before?" she dared to ask. It was bad enough that he knew
about hooks and eyes; it would be terrible if he knew about
pantyhose fan belts.

"Hmm?" He was
concentrating on his task, pulling the pantyhose as tight around
the pulleys as he could before removing it and tying a knot in it.
"No, I've never tried this. But I thought to myself — what would
MacGyver do in this situation?"

She smiled at his
self-deprecating humor and said, "He'd probably string together
paper clips and a bobby pin."

"You don't use bobby pins
in your hair."

True; too true. He knew
everything about her, inside and out now. If only he knew how much
she loved him. Why hadn't she beaten him over the head with it?
Instead she'd let him drift away — back to the old life, back to
the Cynthias in it.

No. Not to Cynthia.
Whatever Liz thought she'd overheard at the shipyard office
earlier, she'd heard wrong. There was simply no way Jack would make
a move on a married woman, any more than his
great-great-grandfather would have done. So she must've heard
wrong.

Jack was finished. He blew
air through puffed cheeks and said, "Let's give it a shot. Stand at
the bottom of the cabin steps where I can see you and where you can
see my father. Tell him to start it up when I give you the
signal."

Liz took up her post and
waited. She could see Jack's elongated shadow on the engine-room
walls, and the slanting beams of his flashlight as he checked over
the engine one last time. "Okay," he said to her.

Worried that Susy would go
jumping out of her berth from the noise, Liz nonetheless passed the
signal to Cornelius. She heard the uncovered engine roar to life
and waited one minute — two, three — for Jack to signal her to have
the engine shut down again. When he let it keep on running, her
heart soared. Fixed! They could go!

"Shut it down!"

Shit.
Shit shit shit! She passed Jack's disheartening command up to
his father and then, struggling awkwardly now, climbed the steps to
the wheelhouse to check the sky.

After the quiet below, she
was shocked by the change on deck: the wind was howling now, and
rain pounded against the windows of the wheelhouse, reducing
visibility nearly to zero. The dull red glow of the running light
to her left and the even duller green glow to her right seemed
pitifully inadequate to warn off approaching ships. A white light
high above the wheelhouse threw a bleary halo over the
Déjà Vu,
just enough to
let her see that she could see nothing. But she knew the sound of
breaking seas; and she could hear seas breaking all around her. The
yacht was pitching much more than before; she had to grab things in
the dark to keep herself from hurtling off balance.

Why hadn't Cornelius lit
the kerosene lamps?

She turned on her heel,
impelled by a loud crack of thunder, intending to warn Jack and to
check on Susy; but Cornelius, whom she'd scarcely noticed, called
her back to him.

"Liz ... Liz ... get
Deirdre inside ... and I ... can't breathe ... tell Jack. He
staggered back and collapsed in a sitting position onto the settee
behind him, abandoning his post at the helm.

For one endless pinpoint
in time, Liz's mind simply shut down: too many people needed her at
once. Then she snapped out of it, prioritizing the demands.
"Jack!"
she cried. "Come
up here!"

She staggered through the
door that led to the afterdeck and tried to rouse Deirdre, but the
girl was in too much physical agony to move. Soaking wet from the
rain that slanted under the open roof of the afterdeck, Deirdre
clung to the cushions, resisting Liz's efforts to help her
up.

"Oh,
God,"
she moaned, "I want to die ...
get me off this thing ... please ... oh, God ... just let me
die."

Wine, fear, and
seasickness: it was a deadly combination. Liz had no time to
cajole. Rain-soaked herself now, she hauled Deirdre forcibly up
from the cushions and stood weaving with her on the pitching deck,
trying to regain her balance. She was reaching for the handle on
the aft door to the wheelhouse when it slammed shut after an
especially violent lurch of the boat.

It wouldn't open. Liz
could see the shadowy form of Jack bending over his ailing father.
No help there. She decided to go around to one of the side doors of
the wheelhouse. She staggered with her burden to the left deck,
closest to where Jack and his father were. The rain, cold and
sharp, stung her face and her eyes, making her blind, forcing her
back. She bent her head and plowed forward with her moaning
burden.

The
Déjà Vu
had been rearing up higher,
it seemed, with each oncoming wave. Now it rose to a frightening
angle and fell off to its side with a shudder, like a horse taking
a bullet in a western movie.

Instantly, horribly, Liz
understood the meaning of
beam-to.
The
Déjà Vu
had ripped out its anchor from the bottom of the
sea and was dragging it along uselessly as the boat faced the wind
and the seas broadside.

Liz and Deirdre happened
to be on that side.
The port side,
she realized irrelevantly.
Port means left in their godforsaken lingo.

A sea, higher, wetter,
colder than everything that had preceded it, rose up and came
crashing down on Deirdre and her, sending them both skidding and
falling on the watery deck.

"Get up.
Get up!" Liz screamed in Deirdre's
ear.

By sheer force of her own
strength and will, Liz pulled Deirdre's dead weight off the deck
and got her moving forward again. When she got to the cabin door,
it flung open wide to receive them. Jack was there, pulling them
both into the relative safety of the wheelhouse. A small mountain
of water followed them in, making a headlong rush for the cabin
steps and below.

Liz felt no comfort from
being inside:
Out of the fire, into the
frying pan
was her only
thought.

"I have to go to Susy!"
she cried, furious now that Deirdre had used up her time and
energy. The boat was lying at a ghastly angle; Susy wouldn't
understand.

Jack grabbed her arm. "Not
now!" he said loudly over the din of the storm. "My father may be
having a heart attack. You've got to stay here, responding to the
Coast Guard, while I try one more time on the engine."

"What! With that stupid
pantyhose? It'll never work, Jack! Let me go!"

She tried to bolt past
him, but he dragged her to the radio.
"Watch me.
Watch what to do!" he
said, picking up the transmitter. "Press it when you talk, let go
when you listen.
Don't leave it pressed
after you talk,
or you won't be able to
hear them."

He pressed the button.
"Point Judith Coast Guard, the
Déjà
Vu!"
he said, reducing the distress call
to its essence.

The Coast Guard came back
immediately, and Jack, in half a dozen sentences, conveyed the
emergency, gave them the coordinates of their position, and handed
the job of further communications over to Liz.

God only knew how close
they were to the rocks by now. Liz accepted the transmitter with a
trembling hand, and Jack jumped down below, leaving Deirdre and
Cornelius slumped on the settee like casualties in a MASH
unit.

And what about Susy and
Caroline? Where were they? Knocked out cold? Screaming in panic?
How would Liz know? Above the horrendous, fearful noise, how would
she know? It took every ounce of discipline she possessed to stay
with the radio, ignoring her child.

Susy's safe; safe
below,
she told herself. But another big
wave broadsided the boat, forcing its way through the wheelhouse
windows, the doors, through every possible seam and cranny, and she
realized that boats could sink from above, not just from below. She
resolved to run down to the stateroom, just to see, just to know,
just to.

Trust him,
Elizabeth.

The words vibrated through
her, cutting through the howl and crash of wind and sea. No need to
ask who spoke them. Liz stopped in her tracks, waiting for
more.

The radio crackled.
"Déjà Vu, Déjà Vu,
this
is the Point Judith Coast Guard, Point Judith Coast
Guard."

Liz pressed the button the
way Jack showed her. "Yes? This is the
Déjà Vu."
She remembered, barely, to
release her death-grip on the button.

"Déjà Vu,
Point Judith Coast Guard. Ma'am, can you repeat
the coordinates that your captain gave us just now?
Over."

What're you, deaf?
she thought. Aloud she said, "He's not here—"
Then she remembered to press the button, and in that split second
she also remembered the latitude and longitude that Jack had given
them. "Point Judith Coast Guard, this is the
Déjà Vu,"
she said clearly. "The
coordinates are: 41 23.5
north; 71 28.5
west. Over."