Winter's Tide (12 page)

I
walked along the sand blindly. There was a buzzing in my head, and I couldn't get my thoughts straight. I tried to remember what Dr. Shrink had told me about taking deep breaths and the Moronic Mood-O-Meter, but I felt so confused I couldn't focus on a number. How could Stephanie have done that to me? I just felt totally, totally betrayed.

The winter wind was freezing on my face and ears. I jammed my cold hands into my coat pockets. I hadn't even said good-bye to the horses.

All those people calling me names for over a year, and it was because of Stephanie? Stephanie started it? Stephanie, who, after all these months, I had finally started to trust? Stephanie, who I thought cared about me?

I felt numb.

I stumbled through the meadow and onto the sand, confused. I couldn't even look at her. I sneaked a glance at Jeremy. What must he think?

But he was standing beside the water with his hands hanging limply at his sides. He turned to me with a look of anguish on his face.

And then I looked out at the water and saw it. The tide had come in. Our boat was floating away.

It was about twenty yards out, bobbing up and down on the water. It seemed to be slipping farther away with every second.

“I forgot to drop anchor,” Jeremy said.

Of course Stephanie freaked out. She gasped, tightly wrapping her arms around her body. “Oh, my gosh, what are we going to do?”

With a groaning growl of fury, Jeremy picked up a shell, and threw it at the boat. It flew over and disappeared into the water.

Then we all three stood in silence, staring at the bobbing boat. Seconds ticked by at a crawl. My thoughts raced.

“We have to do something quick!” I said. “One of us has to swim in after it!”

Stephanie looked at Jeremy with terror on her face. He drew a deep breath, took off his coat, threw it on the sand, and ran splashing into the surf, yelling at the shock of the cold water.

He waded as deep as he could, then started to swim. I ran over and picked up his coat, shouting encouragement at him. “Go, Jeremy! You can do it!”

He looked small as he stroked his way toward the boat, his reddish curls turning dark and wet. As he got closer the bow raised up and crashed down, and he dodged away, angling toward the back. Then he disappeared behind the boat. For long seconds I held my breath, waiting for him to reappear.

“Where is he?” Stephanie asked. I didn't answer.

At last I saw his head pop up over the stern, and he pulled himself, dripping, over the edge and dropped into the boat. I could only imagine how freezing he must be. He stumbled to the steering wheel and struggled with the key. It seemed to be taking him forever to start the boat. Then I realized he was shivering so violently he was having a hard time getting the key into the ignition.

“I'm sh-shaking too hard,” he yelled. And then he threw a rope toward us. I ran in ankle deep and grabbed it. “Pull me in,” he yelled.

I pulled as hard as I could, running up the beach, until the boat sluggishly moved into shallower water the way it had been before.

“Get in!” he called. The boat was still in a few inches of water.

I waded in, gritting my teeth against the shock of the cold water. I threw Jeremy's coat onto the boat and then clambered and shimmied onboard. Jeremy was shaking really hard, breathing through his teeth, and when I realized he was shaking too hard to put his coat on, I put it on for him.

While I was catching my breath, I could see Stephanie stop a moment to consider whether to get her new Christmas boots wet. She sat down on the sand and pulled them off. Disgusted, I ignored her when she tried to hand her boots up to me. She threw them in, and one of them landed in the bottom of the boat; the other landed on the seat.

With a rush of anger, I picked up both of them and threw them into the water.

“Oh no!” she cried. “Diana!” A look of horror crossed her face, and she raced after the boots into chest-deep water. She screamed when she felt how cold it was.

“What did you do that for?” Jeremy shouted at me. His hands and face were both bright red from the cold water.

“I'm paying her back!” I said. I caught his eye, and he looked quickly away from me with an expression of anger and disapproval. My heart thudded. Just minutes ago he had looked at me completely differently.

Stephanie had gotten the boots now and was half-wading, half-swimming back toward the boat. Jeremy reached over the side to grab the boots from her, tossed them on the floor of the boat, and then leaned over to grab Stephanie's red hands and pull her on board. She tumbled, with a wash of freezing water, onto the floor of the boat

“Are you okay?” he asked, touching her shoulder gently with a shaking hand.

She was gasping with the cold. “I'm-m-m freezing,” she chattered. Stephanie picked up the boots and tried to pour the water out of them.

Jeremy gave me a dirty look. “Why did you ruin her boots?”

“She ruined a year of my life! It's not even a fair trade!” I yelled.

He shook his head, and then started looking through the storage compartments under the seats. Among a collection of lumpy life jackets, he found two old towels and a blanket. He wrapped one of the towels and the blanket around Stephanie and wrapped the remaining towel around himself.

Stephanie sat on the floor, crying. And shivering so hard.

I didn't care! She deserved it. She'd started everything. Just like I always thought, she was my enemy.

As I walked past Jeremy, intending to sit in the front, I saw that he was shivering to the point that he couldn't get his hands to stay on the steering wheel, and, like Stephanie, he was gasping with the cold.

“Di-Diana,” he said. “D-drive.”

Me? I didn't know how to drive a boat. I didn't know how to get back to the dock. But I looked at the way Jeremy was shaking, and I knew I had to do something. He handed me the keys and pointed to the ignition. He pointed at a T-shaped handle that was beside the wheel and described the way I had to move that handle forward to get the boat into gear and then get it moving forward. I took the wheel, and he pointed a shaking finger toward the mainland, just to the left of the island he had called Carrot Island, and I steered that way.

He sat in the passenger seat with the towel wrapped tightly around him, gritting his chattering teeth. His hair was slicked against his head and his lips were blue. I was the only one who was dry, the only one who wasn't freezing. And, of course, Stephanie was only wet because of me. It was my fault.

Nobody talked on the way back. Thank goodness it
was winter, and there were no other boats out here. I don't know what I would have done if a bunch of other boats came flying at me. My heart was in my throat, beating so hard I was sure it showed through my skin. I steered the boat where Jeremy pointed, careful not to go very fast. Stephanie huddled in the floor of the boat, still gasping from the cold.

We bumped over the waves as we headed back to shore, and I thought back to that summer of the wolves when I talked Stephanie into letting the wolves go. When my friend Russell, who loved the wolves, found out that I'd let them go, his attitude toward me was forever changed. He no longer considered me a friend, and he hadn't forgiven me.

It looked like Jeremy, who had liked me before, didn't consider me a friend any more either. Well, I didn't care!

But I did.

I glanced back at him, then at Stephanie, who was huddled on the floor of the boat, still crying. And at that moment I knew, in my core, the truth: Whatever Stephanie had said about me, she hadn't said it to hurt me. She hadn't done anything on purpose. That wasn't something she would ever do. I knew, because I knew her. She was the girl who had struggled with her fears to help me free the wolves. She was the girl who had
convinced me to forgive Cody for hitting the horse at the Outer Banks. She was the girl who had believed, on the cruise, that Manuel was a good person, even though he had been persuaded to smuggle an iguana. She always believed the best about everyone.

“W-we're going to be late,” Stephanie said through chattering teeth. “W-we need to tell Daddy and Lynn.” She had her phone out but she'd gotten it wet when she went in the water. I realized I would have to make the call. And we were going to get in a ton of trouble.

But I had to concentrate on driving right now. I was headed toward the coast of Beaufort, with Carrot Island on my right-hand side and the Duke Marine Lab on my left. Waves lapped at the sides of a big research boat docked at Pivers Island at the Marine Lab.

“S-stay away from the research boat,” Jeremy said.

I adjusted the wheel to move our boat farther away from the boat's bow as we drove by. I had figured out that I could move the T-handle toward me to slow the boat, and since we were approaching land, I did that.

With seagulls soaring above us, we slid by the houses along the Beaufort waterfront now, the sound of the water slapping against the shore. There, at last, was the dock.

“S-slow way down so you're hardly moving,” Jeremy said. “Put the handle back into neutral. Just pull up alongside the dock. M-my dad can put it in the slip later.”

I did as he said.

“C-cut the engine by turning the key, then grab that boat cleat and wrap the rope around it,” he said. “But l-leave some p-play in the rope.” He stood up to try to show me but was still shaking too ferociously to actually do it.

I turned the key to cut the engine, but of course the boat kept moving forward, so I raced to the side of the boat, leaned out, and grabbed the boat cleat as we slid by. The rear of the boat swung out and went all the way around until we were facing the other way, but I managed to hang onto the cleat. Then I threaded the rope from the bow through and around the cleat the way I'd seen Jeremy do it at Cape Lookout.

He had managed to grab another cleat, but his hands were shaking too much to get the rope in the stern over it, so I did it for him.

He nodded when I finished. “Okay.”

I jumped out of the boat and held out my hand and pulled both Jeremy and Stephanie up onto the dock. Stephanie clutched the wet boots to her chest and wouldn't look at me. They were both still shivering so much I knew something was seriously wrong.

I took out the phone Dad had given me and pulled up Mom's number.

D
addy screeched up to the entrance of the emergency room. Lynn jumped out of the car, leaving the door hanging open, and ran inside.

Diana had called Lynn after she'd pulled the boat up to the dock, and five minutes later Lynn and Daddy were there to pick us up. I kept trying to tell Daddy we were sorry, but I was having trouble concentrating on anything.

I was still unable to get control over my shaking.
My fingers had been bright red before, but now they were blue.

A few minutes later, Jeremy and I were inside the emergency room, both on gurneys, wrapped in layers upon layers of warm white blankets. Fast-moving people in colorful scrubs had gotten us out of our wet clothes, wrapped us up in the blankets, stuck needles in our arms, and started IVs.

“It's saline solution,” Lynn said, patting my arm. “It will warm you up.”

I vaguely understood that Jeremy was in the cubicle next to me, a curtain drawn between us. Jeremy's parents rushed in, and between my confusion and drowsiness, I caught bits and pieces of the conversation they had with Daddy and Lynn.

“He did not have permission to take our boat out,” his dad said. “I can't imagine what he was thinking, on a winter day like today …”

“And we've taught him to always drop anchor,” said his mother. “I can't imagine where his mind was today.”

A vague thought swam to the surface of my consciousness. I knew where Jeremy's mind had been. He'd been trying to impress Diana, that's where.

“Well, thank goodness they're going to be okay,” Lynn said.

I started to feel drowsy then, and I think I fell asleep for a little while.

When I woke up, I had finally stopped shaking.

Daddy was standing by my bed. His face looked so worried. “How are you feeling, honey?”

“Okay,” I said. My voice sounded weak.

“Wow, you gave us a scare,” he said, stroking my hair back from my forehead.

I thought they would be so mad at us, but they weren't. They just seemed shaken and tremendously relieved. Diana was sitting in a chair in the corner of my cubicle, her face pale and serious.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“I guess so.”

She nodded, biting her lip. I had never seen her like that before.

I couldn't keep track of the people taking care of me. My clothes, warm and dry from the dryer, appeared, and Lynn helped me put them back on and then wrapped me back in a new set of warm blankets.

A stern-looking doctor came by. Apparently he had seen me earlier, but I didn't remember. “Feeling better?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Well, I can let you go home now. But I want you to know how lucky you kids were,” he said. “Swimming
in water that cold can be life-threatening. You and the young man both had hypothermia. People have died swimming less than a hundred feet in cold water.”

“Is Jeremy going to be okay?” I asked.

The doctor nodded. “His case was worse than yours, but fortunately, he's going to be okay too.”

And then I heard a familiar voice.

“I can't believe I'm coming downstairs to visit my granddaughter in the emergency room! Pretty soon we'll have a family member on every floor of this hospital!”

Candace, the friendly nurse with short, dark hair we'd talked to on our first day wheeled Grammy into my cubicle in a wheelchair. “Look who's here,” she said.

“Stephanie, what in the world were you doing, going into the ocean this time of year?” Grammy asked. She was pale and thinner than normal but seemed back to being her old self. “I know you wanted to be here for my surgery day after tomorrow, but you didn't have to get admitted to the emergency room. You could have just come to visit like other people.”

I smiled, feeling a rush of love for her.

“Diana, what were you doing, letting her go swimming?” Grammy asked Diana.

Diana shrugged her shoulders silently and wrapped her arms around herself.

Grammy had Candace wheel her close to my bed, and she reached over and grasped my hand very tightly. “My dear granddaughter,” she said, “you better promise never to scare us like that again.”

I squeezed Grammy's hand. “I drew a picture of a shell for you.”

And then we just stayed there, without talking, holding hands.

An hour later, Daddy helped me out of bed. On the way out to the car, we stopped by Jeremy's cubicle.

He was terribly pale and covered with blankets up to his neck. His parents stood on either side of his bed, his mother seeming concerned and his father looking angry.

“I hope you kids have learned your lesson,” Jeremy's father said. “Jeremy is going to be grounded until spring break for this.”

I knew Daddy and Lynn weren't that strict, and though we probably would be grounded, it wouldn't be for that long. I felt bad for Jeremy.

I glanced at Diana. Now the two of them wouldn't even look at each other.

“Get better,” I said.

“Yeah,” Diana mumbled.

Jeremy nodded forlornly.

Once we got home, Lynn fixed soup, and I fell right
back asleep. Diana and I didn't talk. I knew we needed to, because there were a lot of bad feelings between us, but I was too tired.