Close Reach (24 page)

“Give it! Fucking give it to me!”

She was shouting over the roar of the wind and spray hitting the windows. Urging
Freefall
to shoulder through the waves, to get up on her keel and fly. Hollering herself hoarse at the wind, at the sky. She held on to the wheel, David’s screams just a part of the raging sea, and steered for the center of the storm, using the radar screen as a guide. Aiming for the fiercest wind, wind with the power to drive
Freefall
ahead on her chase.

* * *

For six hours, she never left the helm.

After the waves organized, they built into moving walls of water. Forty, fifty feet high. Sea foam and bits of broken ice raced against the wind up the waves’ faces and slid down their steep backs.
Freefall
would mount a wave face and power up it, driven equally by the wind and the engine, and then would reach a tipping point when half her hull was hanging in nothing but rain-blasted air. The boat would seesaw down and crash into the trough, sending plumes of spray to either side. At times the pilothouse was ankle deep in water, which would slosh side to side and then drain over David and through the cockpit to the stern.

Kelly was in a trance. Her mind became a perfect lens of concentration, open on one side to receive an infinite input of waves and wind gusts and angles and focusing all this to a few simple decisions. Whether to bear off to starboard or point up into the wind, whether to attack
the waves with the bow or slip up them diagonally, whether to sheet out the main and spill wind from the sail or grind it in and bend the storm’s power to her own ends. The helm in her hand became a surgical instrument; a cut either way could mean life or death.

And she reveled in it the way she always did.

Riding the storm was like entering a sick man’s brain. She came in with a plan and a purpose, but in the end, it was an art of touch and reaction as she followed folds too complex to map. The naked gray ridgelines, the pulsing currents, electric with unknown thoughts and shrouded intent. She cut and burrowed to the heart of it by the feel of the instruments in her hands. David was gone. Dean was gone. It was just her and the screaming darkness, the blade of
Freefall
’s keel slicing the Southern Ocean on her way northwest, to Chile.

* * *

The southern solstice had been ten days ago, before
La Araña
had come growling over the horizon and into their lives. And
Freefall
was moving north, away from the perpetual cold light of the Antarctic summer. There was half an hour of true darkness on either end of midnight, and when the sun rose again from its brief immersion, she passed through the worst of the storm and saw that the barometer had risen. She unfurled a piece of the genoa to keep her speed, and then she looked behind her at David. He was curled into a shivering ball on the high side of the trap. The only thing that had kept him alive was the wool blanket, which was thick and so impregnated with lanolin that it was almost waterproof. As they passed into the northernmost bands of the storm, they entered the cold air mass that had been driving it forward. The temperature dropped into the twenties. Frost sparkled high in the rigging.

For the first time since the storm hit, she was able to set the autopilot and go below. She shut the companionway doors and moved through the galley to the pilot berth.

It was empty.

The saline bag swung with its tube hanging over the vacant berth, and the catheter bag lay on the cabin sole, a spill of dark urine running along the teak baseboard till it drained into the bilge.

“Dean?”

He couldn’t have gotten up. She knew that.

Even if his legs weren’t broken, he had no strength to stand. But the straps were unbuckled and lay on the empty mattress. Understanding grew inside her like an ice bloom. Even sick and broken, Dean would not stop. He couldn’t. It was why she loved him; it was why she’d almost left him.

She held on to the bulkhead and looked at the empty bunk. She knew what had happened. He’d woken to the howling wind, the boat bucking in waves the size of houses. And he’d known she was at the helm, facing the storm alone, with a murderer behind her. She turned and worked toward the bow, stepping carefully because the boat was still rocking through the last of the big waves.

She found Dean wedged under the salon table, on his side. His back was facing out, and his knees were curled up to his chest. To get there, he would have slid across fifteen feet of hardwood, banging past the corner of the galley counter. Then he somehow had tumbled up a ten-inch step to lodge between one of the table legs and the lower portion of the settee. He’d hooked his left arm around the table leg to hold on.

Maybe even then, clinging to the table leg, he’d thought he could do it. Gather himself and climb into the pilothouse and help her take on the storm.

She glanced back and this time saw the trail of blood marks along the baseboard, at the foot of the step leading up to the table. He’d been sliding back and forth with each wave, maybe for hours, before he’d wound up here. She should never have left a calm harbor and sailed into a storm with her husband so sick.

“Dean?”

She put her hand on his shoulder and rolled him over. Immediately she put her fingers on his neck, under the line of his jaw, to feel for a pulse. His skin was cold, and she felt no beat of blood moving through his jugular.

“Dean!”

Getting him out from his last place of refuge was hard. He’d held on to the table leg to the end, had gone out with his arm flexed and his fist curled around the tapered block of teak. She pried him out and pulled him onto the sole, laying him on his back. They started to slide with the next pitch of the boat, and she used that momentum to hustle him up onto the couch opposite the table. She started cardiopulmonary resuscitation right there on the couch, her foul weather jacket dripping freezing seawater onto his chest as she went through the first compressions. In an hour she paused only once, and that was to tear back to the pilot berth for her stethoscope.

But even with that, she couldn’t find a heartbeat.

She couldn’t make one, either. She dug the heel of her palm into his sternum and braced it with her other hand, her elbows straight and her arms rigid to drive the force of her body’s full weight into his chest, into his heart. And it was for nothing. At the close of an hour she sank shaking and crying to the floor next to him, her back against the bulkhead and her knees up to her chin.

“Why, Dean?” she whispered. “It was just a storm. And I had it. I
had
it. All you had to
do was rest.”

But he’d unbuckled the straps. He’d tried to come up and help. The tears nearly took her vision when she understood what had driven him to do it.

He’d forgiven her, but in the end he hadn’t believed in her.

He hadn’t trusted her.

She looked at her dead husband, and she looked at the marks of blood he’d left when he’d been sliding and tumbling alone through the cabin like a fish that had been yanked from the sea and tossed to die on a pitching deck. She thought about the bowl of fruit and the kiss he’d given her thirty thousand miles ago in a warmer sea, the taste of the forgiveness that she’d never done enough to earn. She held on to Dean and she cried into his neck, and she kissed him and let herself go into the soft toughness of his skin one last time.

She looked at the companionway stairs leading up to the closed doors. She looked at the doors and thought about what lay beyond them. There was no single point at which her mind settled on a decision, came to a course of action. But as her vision tunneled and narrowed until the companionway encompassed her entire world, her tumbling thoughts snagged and held on the jagged rock of a single idea. There was an eye to the storm that had blasted her to this shore. It was here, on her boat.

Its name was David.

She came into the pilothouse like a breaking wave,
Freefall
’s five-foot fish gaff in her hand. She used it to bang on the top of the cage, hard impacts that jolted up her wrist and arm and hurt.

“Wake up, you fucking piece of shit!”

David rose onto his knees and tried to move away to the far corner of the trap. He was too cold to coordinate. His blanket snagged, and he fell and rolled to the downslope wall. Then he was up again and struggling with his good hand to get the folds of wool back around his blue body.

“You did this! You fucking did this!”

She jabbed the gaff through the funnel in the side of the trap, hooked the blanket in its center, twisted the handle a full rotation to wind the blanket around the hook, and then hauled it off him and out of the trap. He tried to fight her, holding on to the last wet corner.

“Kelly, please!”

“Give it, you shit!”

By then she had half the blanket out of the trap and was pulling on it with both of her gloved hands. David didn’t have a chance. He had only one hand, and it was weak and numb with cold. He’d have had trouble holding a spoon with it, let alone fighting both Kelly and her rage. And the rage was like having a second person standing beside her.

She got the last of the blanket and wadded it into a ball. She pitched it over the side and watched it disappear into the green-white froth of the wake.

“You fuck! You murdering, raping fuck! This is what you get. This is what you did to us!”

She went to the back of the cockpit and flung open the aluminum panel that covered the deck wash hoses. There was a freshwater shower there, hot and cold. But there was also a high-pressure saltwater hose. She uncoiled it with a hard yank and bent to turn on the flow of water. David was on his side, curled in the same pose Dean had taken under the table at the end. His fingers were clenched tight into the chain link, blood coming from his knuckles where he’d skinned them against the bottom of the trap.

“This is for Dean. You fucking cocksucker.”

The hose was fitted on the end with a bronze nozzle that shot a tight stream of thirty-degree seawater. She aimed it at his face and kept it on him no matter where he moved or flailed inside the trap. He was blue and bloody and screaming. She came up close to the trap and
sprayed him with the water, cursing and screaming and crying. Finally she shut off the water and went back into the pilothouse.

David was a crying ball in the corner.

“Ke-Kelly!
Please—
”

She put her hands over her ears and screamed so she didn’t have to hear the rest. She went through the open companionway doors and slammed them. She sat again on the floor next to Dean, her hands still clamped over her ears. She was sobbing and shaking. Later, as the boat rolled in the swells, she was sick onto her lap. Through her pressed palms, she could hear David. Sometimes he was calling her name; sometimes there were no words at all.

It went on a long time before he finally quieted.

After she wrapped Dean in blankets and braced him once more with webbing straps so he would not roll off the couch, she fell into their bed in the stateroom, staring out the starboard portholes at the water rushing by in a race of green and blue-white foam, looking through the skylights at the graceful shape of the staysail, the rise of the mast against the slate-gray sky. She lay in a daze, stunned by her sorrow, locked by the rigor of terror and shame. She hadn’t heard David yelling for a while now. She was horrified at what she’d done, yet she had no thought of going out to him. It probably wasn’t even over. But for her it was done. It wouldn’t be reversed.

He’d be getting hot soon, tearing at his skin because he thought he was burning. And then, at the last, he’d try to hide any way he could. To dig down or make himself small in the corner the way a dog will crawl away under a porch to die by itself. There was a name for this stage of death by hypothermia. She thought of it now and imagined David trying to do it, the trap hampering him in his last desire.

Terminal burrowing, it was called.

He’d rip his fingertips to bloody nubs trying to claw his way to any hidden place.

Still, she didn’t get up. She pulled the tartan blanket around her and lay so she could look at the water. Every four minutes was a mile under the keel, a mile closer to the end. She counted them off by the second: one one thousand, two one thousand. After ten miles she fell asleep, but there was no real rest for her there.