The 100 Year Miracle (34 page)

*   *   *

Hooper’s master key opened the camp’s business office, which was a single room with two metal desks pushed together, so that their occupants would be nose-to-nose all day long. The walls were wood paneled, and something—it was hard to know what—smelled like mildewed carpet.

Hooper had not intended to scare Rachel the night before. He hadn’t intended for her to know he was there at all. It hadn’t been terribly difficult—between what he had gotten from John and what he read of her notebook—to figure out what she was doing. He just needed to know how she was doing it and how far along she was. He checked his watch. Tonight was the last night the creatures would glow. Tomorrow the adults would begin to die, leaving only the eggs to float out into the Pacific. There was very little time left, and he still hadn’t found his damn cell phone. He picked up the landline on one of the desks and said a small prayer that went something like “please, please, please.”

It worked. There was a dial tone.

Hooper punched in the number, and a receptionist picked up. “Tern Laboratories,” she said. “How can I direct you?”

“Dr. Cahill, please.”

Hooper had met Cahill at a conference two years before. They’d passed time in the hotel bar talking about dart frog venom. His lab was in phase II research for the development of a nerve pain treatment derived from the toxin. This had been only moderately interesting to Hooper at the time, but the two had kept up a friendly, if sporadic, professional correspondence.

“How are the frogs?” Hooper asked after they’d progressed through the pleasantries, which included a recounting of Cahill’s son’s broken arm.

“The research didn’t progress to the third phase,” he said. “The initial results were promising, but there were too many anticholinergic effects to go forward.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It is. I had hopes.”

There was a slurping noise, and Hooper imagined the other man was taking a sip of something hot, probably coffee.

“I may have something equally hopeful if your lab is interested.”

There was a pause, and Hooper imagined him setting the mug down. “We’re always interested. Are you planning to step away from academia?”

“I’m going to need you to sign a nondisclosure agreement before we go into detail,” Hooper said by way of an answer.

“Naturally,” Cahill agreed. “Can you give me some general idea of what we’re talking about?”

“A painkiller,” Hooper said, “unlike anything on the market. Revolutionary.”

“How far are you?”

“Far enough.”

“I’ll get the agreement.”

After hanging up, Hooper jogged to the van in a hurry to get back to the site before he was missed. With one hand he started the engine and with the other felt for the seat belt, which was too old to retract properly. His fingers brushed something hard wedged down in the small well between the bottom of the door and the base of his seat. Grabbing the edge, he pulled it out.

It was a phone, the small flip kind without GPS or Twitter, the kind that only sent text messages if you were patient enough to hit the number 2 three times to type the letter C. It was the phone of an old person or a broke person. It was his.

“Un-freaking believable,” he said aloud and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

*   *   *

Tilda could feel it coming. She felt it in her bones as much as in the wild pitch and roll of the boat. The waves were coming up over the side and flooding the cockpit. She clung to the tiller, no longer steering but only hanging on. She knew she needed to get the bow of the boat pointed into the waves, but knowing and being able were not the same thing. It was so loud, the waves and the rain and the snapping of the sail, that she could not tell one from the other anymore. There were no lights, not from any land, not from the sky, not even a bolt of lightning. Blinded and deaf and unable to steer or even see the waves until she felt them hit her, she could barely keep herself upright, and it was hard to think of a good reason to try.

Another wave gathered. It sucked the boat down and then pushed her sideways. She went up and over, over and over. The wall of water smashed into her. Her head snapped on her neck. It was like a car accident, like being hit by a train. There was no time to recover, no time to find air. She felt herself rising up. She was riding the back of some giant creature. It pushed her portside. Farther and farther, the boat rolled and kept rolling. Tilda scrambled for purchase, for a handhold, for anything to keep from being thrown into the sea. The mast neared horizontal. Her body smashed into the hull. It felt as though her patella cracked in two, a problem so small she barely noticed.

Desperate, she clung to the boom, willing the world to right itself, willing gravity and the gods to allow the tiny vessel to drop back down toward the earth again. All around her rigging snapped and flew like cracking bullwhips. The ocean raged in the wind, and the hull groaned like a downed boxer, unknown bits splintering and cracking like bone. And then a whole sea’s worth of water broke over her. It came and came, and she thought she would drown. She was sure of it. And just then, just when she was blacking out and losing her grip, all the water that could flow over her had, and the boat dropped back down, falling from a great height and hitting the roiling surface as hard as concrete.

Crouched on the floor, the water up to her waist, her head pulled into her body, she had no sense of time other than it was short, and her heart pounded while her brain screamed “hurry, hurry, hurry!” With numb fingers, she grabbed at the old-fashioned orange life preserver around her neck, feeling for the straps, pulling it tighter. She reached into the pocket of her jacket, feeling for her phone. It seemed an insane thing to hope, a signal here between islands, but she had made calls on ferries before. Maybe, just maybe, she would get this one thing, this one lifeline. She pulled it from her pocket, her arm still wrapped around the boom, the sail snapping in her face. She felt for the On switch, but the small screen seemed too dim. Was it dying? Had it been too wet for too long? She pressed the emergency call button, but she could not hear if anyone was there, could not read the tiny symbols on the screen, not with the sail and the water and the terror that clouded in front of her eyes and behind them.

The ocean was coming up below her, rising again, pushing on the hull. There was no time. Her fingers were slipping. She could only yell, scream into her phone as though it were the marine radio she did not have, hoping some dispatcher somewhere was there.

“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is
Serendipity
.” Tilda repeated the name of the boat two more times. “Mayday. This is
Serendipity
. Five miles south-southwest from Carpenter’s Island.” She choked on the tears, and her voice shook. “Sailboat taking on water. Capsize feared.”

Another wave came over the deck. The boat was going over. The outrigger was directly above her, straight up in the air, like the fin of a shark. The hull had become the floor. All around her it sounded like wood being splintered apart by giants.

Tilda continued to scream into the phone at anyone or no one. “One adult on board. Immediate rescue needed. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is
Serendipity
. Five miles south-southeast from Carpenter’s. Mayday.”

She would never know if anyone heard. The mast touched the sea. The water took it and snapped it. It had been as thick as the trunk of a small tree, and it had broken like a chopstick. And now there was nothing, nothing that could be done, no one and nothing that could help.

Tilda and the boom were loose. The roll would not stop. She was falling, falling, falling, and the world was coming down on top of her. It was as though she had jumped from the top of a building and the building had come with her. She hit the water, as solid as the earth, earth that split open and sucked her down, deeper, deeper, deeper.

39.

The only way Tilda knew she was not dead was that being dead would not hurt so much.

The cold was paralyzing. It gripped her and squeezed. It squeezed her arms and her legs and her lungs, which let out the last gasp of air she’d managed to rescue and left her without oxygen in less than a second. She was upside down in the Salish Sea. It was December. Tilda was wearing no protective clothing, no flashing beacon, nothing at all of any use but the orange life preserver. It was the upward pull of the floatation device that told her she was ass over tea kettle. There would have been no other way to know.

Down, down, down, and then, just as suddenly, up. Up more slowly but up. The life preserver pulled her, and she let it. It was impossible to have thoughts, to fight or to give up, to move or be still. There was only what happened, what the ocean allowed, what her body could do or did do. She felt things in the water, big things pass near her face, bits of the boat, maybe the mast or maybe a monster. She willed herself to move away from the debris, to protect what was left to protect, but it was impossible to know if she was succeeding.

Everything hurt, and what did not hurt was numb. Everything around her was black whether her eyes were open or closed. Her oxygen was gone, and Tilda knew that if she did not drown, the hypothermia would kill her.

She did not want to die. That was the only thought she had or could hold, a thought not so much in her head as in her limbs, in her muscles and lungs. The pieces of her, each of its own accord, did not want to give up.

Just like at the Y, she told herself, and with the last bit of strength she had, she pushed her arms and her legs. She let muscle memory carry her when her conscious mind could not, and she swam clear of the wreck, popping her head up to the surface, gasping.

Tilda’s teeth chattered so hard she could barely gulp in the air. She was losing control of her limbs and, in the cold, knew she would soon lose consciousness. She spun in place, her mind doing the same, looking for what to do next. A wave picked her up and dropped her down, putting more distance between her body and the upside-down
Serendipity
. Rain was still coming down hard, and the white wooden shape was the only thing she could see. There was no land in any direction. Another wave.

When it passed, she inhaled sharply and began to swim toward the boat, the life vest floating up around her face.

Stroke, stroke, breathe. Stroke, stroke, breathe.

*   *   *

“Dad! Dad!” Juno had his hands on Harry’s shoulders and was shaking him hard. “Dad, it’s me. It’s Juno.”

Harry’s cheeks were wet, but he couldn’t feel them. Not really. He had been shouting. He knew that. He hadn’t meant to wake Juno. It was the middle of the night. His own door had been closed, along with Juno’s and Tilda’s. Everyone had been closed up alone in their own cells. Except, of course, for Harry. Harry hadn’t been alone in some time.

He had tried to keep her out. He had put the simple wooden chair—the Shaker one that Tilda had bought years before—under the door handle. He wedged it there like he had seen people do on television, but it hadn’t done any good. Becca was on one side of the door, and then she was on the other, just like that. And now the chair was broken. Juno had broken it trying to get in. It had surprised Harry that he could do it. Juno had thrown himself against the door from the outside. Harry had heard him slamming his shoulder into the wood, which began to splinter and crack but did not give way, not until Juno put the sole of his shoe to it. The doorframe split, and kick after kick, the back of the chair made of beautiful old wood gave. Harry heard it all, but he did not get up from where he was, and he did not look. He was afraid to look.

Harry, fully clothed, had been curled up on his bed, his chin to his chest and both arms covering himself like someone was beating him. That was when Juno got him by the shoulders, but no amount of shaking could get Harry to uncover his face.

“Dad!”

The sobs racked Harry’s shoulders, and it was hard to form the words. They came out in wet bubbles, one or two at a time. “Don’t—hurt anyone—Please, don’t—hurt anyone.”

“I’m not going to hurt anyone,” Juno said. “Why would I hurt anyone?”

Harry opened his eyes and let his arms drop just a little. “Is she here?”

Juno reeled back at the sight of his father’s face. Harry knew why. He had seen it earlier in the evening—seen himself in the bathroom mirror, just a glimpse before he’d had to shut his eyes against the overhead light and feel frantically for the switch to turn it off. He was pale and drawn, but his eyes were terrifying. The pupils were enormous, so large they took over nearly all the iris. He looked like something that lived underground, something out of the tunnels and caves. He had begun to look on the outside the way that he felt on the inside.

“Is she here?” Harry repeated.

Juno was trying to rearrange his face into something less revolted. Harry could see the effort he was making as he answered. “No, Mom’s not here. I called her. She said she was coming. She should be here by now.”

“No, not Tilda,” Harry said. “Becca.”

“Becca?” Juno shook his head and leveled his voice, speaking slowly with exaggerated calm, as though Harry were quite elderly and demented. “Becca is dead, Dad. You mean Rachel, the scientist lady.”

Harry shook his head. “She’s not dead. She’s not.” Harry tried to see behind his son, to see into the corner where she had stood. Juno looked over his shoulder, too, not, Harry knew, for a ghost but for anyone he might hand this problem off to. Neither Harry nor Juno saw who they were looking for, and Juno’s eyes landed on the phone by Harry’s bed before coming back to him.

“Dad, Becca died a long time ago. She died when she was a little girl.”

“No.” Harry pushed himself up. “She came back. It’s because of the Miracle. I know it is.”

“Dad, you’re upset. Did you take the medicine Dr. Woo gave you?”

Harry shook his head. He shook it like he was trying to clear his mind, to make a fuzzy picture snap into focus, but really what he wanted was for Juno to see. He wanted to shake him as he had been shaken, but he didn’t have the strength.