Time After Time (50 page)

The young man at the other
end of the radio signal repeated the numbers, then said, "I have a
vessel en route to your position, making the best possible speed at
this time. At this time I would advise you to be sure that everyone
is wearing a life jacket. I'll check with you again in a few
minutes to see how your situation is. Please stand by on this
channel; over."

She pressed the button and
said, "Point Judith Coast Guard, this is the
Déjà Vu.
Yes. We'll stand
by."

She staggered back to
check on Jack's father, leaning at the same cockeyed angle as
everything and everyone else. "How are you holding up?" she said,
unable to tell on her own.

"Ah ... hanging in there,"
he said with what she thought was extraordinary bravery.

"A rescue boat is on the
way."

"Yes ... I
heard."

"They want us to put on
life jackets," she suggested as calmly as she could.

"No ... no ... Won't be
needing 'em."

And in the meantime
the
Deja Vu
was
being lifted and thrown, lifted and thrown, ever closer to its
destiny. She thought of the
Titanic;
she thought of the
Mary Deare.

She thought of the life
jackets. Would Susy and Caroline have dared take them off? Suddenly
she wanted the girls in the wheelhouse, ready to hand over to their
rescuers. She groped her way down the cabin steps and stumbled into
Jack.

"Back to the helm," he
commanded. "We're ready to try again. I want you to count to five.
Then turn the key. Then press the ignition button and hold it till
you hear the engine catch. I'll be up after I've made sure the fix
works."

Mentally, Liz was already
abandoning ship. She marveled at Jack's can-do spirit, but she was
in no mood to join in. She was about to tell him that, when she
heard — felt, really — Christopher urging her again.

Trust him. Trust
him.

"All right," she said.
They were the hardest two words she'd ever spoken.

She turned and made her
way back up the steps and took up her position at the
helm.

One potato. Two potato.
Three potato. Four potato. Five potato.
She turned the key. Pressed the ignition button. Held it
until the engine caught.

And then she
waited.

The boat continued to lift
and fall, lift and fall, in an interminable dance of death. The
horror Liz felt turned to agony and then, as the minutes ticked by,
to something like dreadful hope. This time ... this time ...
maybe.

In the meantime the wind,
which had swung so viciously into the black northeast, showed no
signs of abating, and the seas were worse than ever. Wind and sea:
two thugs as old as time itself, brutalizing the pitifully
fragile
Déjà Vu
and her mortal cargo.

It made Liz want to fall
to her knees and weep.

But there was no time to
feel humbled. Jack rushed up the cabin steps, his voice tight with
urgency. "All right! Next, we get the anchor back
aboard!"

She was afraid it meant
he'd have to go on deck and brave the storm, but that wasn't
necessary: "The engine's charging again," he said. "We'll use the
windlass."

He headed the boat
directly into the wind; immediately the boat became upright again.
Liz couldn't see the anchor-chain being hauled aboard, but she
could feel the ratcheting action echo through the hull.
Clackety-clackety-clackety-clackety:
link by link, they were regaining control of
their destiny. She wanted to sing for joy.

"Now let's get the hell
out of here," Jack said, and he altered course away from the
perilous ledge.

The
Déjà Vu
was still struggling, still
thrashing, but even Liz could feel that it was doing so with
purpose now.

Liz left Jack in
communication with the Coast Guard rescue vessel and rushed below
to check on Susy and Caroline. Amazingly, Susy was sound asleep.
Liz had to lay her hand on Susy's chest to convince herself of
it.
You angel, you,
she thought, inexpressibly relieved.

Caroline, however, was
awake and scared. She sat huddled in the farthest corner of her
berth like a small wet cat, shivering and trying hard to hide her
sobs. Liz hugged her and comforted her and suggested that she tuck
in with Susy. Once that was done, Liz returned to the wheelhouse,
expecting to see Cornelius preparing to be offloaded to the Coast
Guard vessel.

She was surprised — and
yet hardly surprised at all — to find Jack and his father arguing
about it.

"I'm telling you, I feel
better!" Cornelius was insisting. "I don't need to be rushed to any
hospital, goddammit. Stop treating me like an old man!"

"Christ, Dad, you're not a
young one!"

"It was indigestion, I
tell you! Too much wine, too much everything."

"You're crazy, you know
that? Their forty-one-footer could get you into Newport two, three
times faster than the
Déjà Vu."

"You're the crazy one,
Jack!" his father said angrily. "You know how dangerous it would be
for them to come alongside in these seas? You'd put everyone in
jeopardy — and it'd be hell on the
Déjà's
topsides."

"We're talking about
your
life,
not a
paint job!"

"My life's just fine,
thanks. Butt out of it!"

Cornelius brushed past his
son and took up the transmitter. In a voice not unlike Jack's, he
raised the Coast Guard and called off the rescue mission. Only then
did Liz notice a brightly lit vessel astern of them, obviously the
forty-one-footer. The rescue boat offered to accompany the
Déjà Vu
and, indeed, did
so until it was called away on another mission.

Then the forty-one-footer
peeled away from the formation like a fighter jet, leaving Liz
feeling oddly bereft.

"Busy night," muttered
Cornelius to his son.

"Yeah. Reminds me of that
nor'easter that hit us out of nowhere in Nantucket that
time."

"Mmm. I remember.
Incredible damage in the harbor. Was that the one where the sloop
burned to the waterline?"

"Yep."

And so it went, with Liz,
wrapped in one of Jack's sweaters, listening in amazement to the
two men chatting quietly, almost nostalgically, about various
disasters while all hell broke loose around them and the
Déjà Vu
inched its way
through it, courtesy of half a pair of pantyhose.

Cornelius apparently felt
well enough to take the helm a couple of times and let Jack duck
into the engine room to check his handiwork. When he came back up,
his voice was almost bemused as he said, "She's holding, by
golly."

Eventually they slipped
into smoother water under the lee of Brenton Point and Castle Hill;
and then finally, miraculously, the granite bulkhead of Fort Adams
hove into view. The harbor, secure and welcoming and wonderfully
calm, lay to port.

They were home.

Within fifteen minutes
the
Déjà Vu
was
tied up snugly at its berth, and Liz and Jack were carrying two
wiped-out five-year-olds like sacks of grain over their shoulders.
Deirdre recovered almost spontaneously the minute she stepped on
land. It didn't surprise anyone: she had so damned much youth in
her favor. Under the docklights Liz thought Cornelius looked a
little ashen. But she felt a little washed out herself, so she
could hardly blame him.

Jack, with Caroline in his
arms, was leading the tired party to his father's Lexus; Deirdre
had already volunteered to do the driving back to East Gate. Liz
was behind them, carrying Susy.

"Mommy," Susy murmured
sleepily in her mother's ear, "I have to go potty."

Liz sighed and said,
"Jack, I'm going to take Susy to the bathroom."

"Use the one in the
office," he suggested.

"No, that's okay; the yard
one's closer." She didn't want Jack to have to detour with his keys
to the office for their sake.

She put Susy down, and the
two of them split away from the rest of the bedraggled party and
headed for the neat and shiny-clean set of bathrooms that were
housed in a permanent trailer on the shipyard grounds.

"How come you didn't use
the bathroom on the boat?" she asked her daughter in a gentle
chide; at this point all Liz wanted to do was go home.

"It's not a bathroom,
mommy; it's a
head,"
said Susy with nautical precision. "And anyway, Caroline told
me they're hard to use. She plugged it up one time just with toilet
paper."

"Oh. Okay."

She and Susy threaded
their way through the hauled-out boats, virtually all of them for
sale, that stood high and dry near the trailer of bathrooms. Liz
was grateful for the bright new lighting that Jack had had
installed since the sabotage began: it made it easier for them to
see around the obstacles.

They detoured around a
carpenter's wooden tool caddy that was sitting on the ground in
their path, and Liz thought,
It
can't
be too unsafe around here if
someone's willing to leave valuable tools out all night.
But then, she reminded herself, theft was not
what any of the incidents were about.

Mother and daughter went
up the two steps into the trailer, and Susy made a beeline for the
middle of the three stalls.

Liz took the time to wash
her face and hands, trying to wake up for the short drive home. She
stared at herself in the mirror: wet flattened hair; dark hollows
under her eyes; and — worst of all — a sweater that was navy blue,
a color that made her look old.

She was turning away from
her own dreariness when she caught sight of maroon fabric in the
slit along the closed door in the end stall behind her. She looked
down at the floor of the stall:
no
feet.

Her heart rammed up
against her chest.
Again!
Oh no oh no oh no...

In pure blind terror she
whipped open the door to Susy's stall.

Susy, surprised, said,
"Mommy, wait — I'm not finished yet."

"Shh. I'll help," Liz said
in a deathly whisper. Automatically she closed the door behind her
to shield them.

"No, Mommy — I'm not a
baby!"

"Never mind, I
said."

Liz yanked up the child's
underpants and turned to flee.

Outside their stall she
saw the pair of feet at last. Men's feet, shod in hiking
boots.

Oh no.

No time to think, no time
to weigh decisions. She put both hands up against the door. With a
sudden, instinctive, infuriated cry of
"Enough!"
she slammed the door
outward as hard as she could.

She heard a scream of pain
— a broken nose, at the least — and then a hand reached out and
caught her arm as she tried to escape with her child.

"Run, Susy! Get Jack!" she
cried.

Wide-eyed, Susy did as she
was told and took off while Liz struggled with yet another
assailant in her life. This time, the encounter was brief and far
more violent on her part than his: she pushed, she fought, she
scratched, she screamed. She was a wild thing, enraged and furious
and protective.

It wasn't long before
David Penny, blood still streaming from his nose, broke away and
fled from the trailer into the night, leaving his carpenter's tools
behind him. Liz ran out after him, terrified that he'd find Susy
and make her his hostage. It was only when she saw Jack running in
her direction that she knew Susy must be safe.

That was when she stopped
to think:
Was it possible that David got
caught using the wrong bathroom and was just trying to tiptoe past
them?

No.
It was not.

Jack arrived in a state of
breathless alarm. "Are you okay?"

When she nodded, he said,
"Did you see who it was?"

Liz, winded herself, had
no words for him. She pointed to the carpenter's tool caddy on the
ground.

"That's Penny's toolbox,"
Jack said. "What're his tools—?"

"That's — who it was:
David Penny."

"God
damn
,"
said Jack
in a black, black voice. "That's who it was."

"Unless he was perfectly
innocent and I've just broken his nose by mistake—"

"No," Jack said with a
sense of finality. "He's the one. Of course he is. It all
fits."

"What fits?" she said, her
fear easing nicely into a fit of anger. "Will you
please
tell me
what—?"

Susy came running up at
that moment with Deirdre and Caroline right behind and Cornelius
bringing up the rear. Liz dropped down nose to nose with her
daughter and said, "All a big silly mistake, honey. The man was in
the wrong bathroom, and when I bumped him with the door, he got a
little upset. But we worked it all out. Now you just wait here with
Deirdre. I have to talk to Mr. Eastman. I'll only be a
minute."