The Great Wide Sea (15 page)

Even so, a piece of my insides unwound enough to think, and I wondered if maybe Dylan had been on the radio this whole time. Maybe rescuers were out there waiting for the storm to calm down enough so they could come and get us. But where would we say we were? We didn't know where we'd started from, and now we'd traveled more than twenty-four hours in a basically southerly direction at an average speed of at least eight knots. Wherever we were, we were definitely a long way from wherever we started.

After a while I saw the hatch boards begin to move. The top one wiggled out and I saw Dylan. He took out the rest of the boards and then crawled out on deck with me. In his foul weather gear he looked like a yellow caterpillar easing through the companionway and clinging to the slanting deck as he crept to my side.

He sat right next to me—bone to bone—and yelled in my ear, “It's my turn.”

I looked down at him. Dylan didn't have Gerry's shock of blond hair. His hair was a brownish color. It was too long, of course, and it hung down his neck and over his forehead in wet points. He reached out for the tiller and I saw that his hand was bigger than I remembered. When I didn't let go, he tried to push my hand away.

“You're not strong enough,” I screamed, and suddenly had to shove the tiller way to the other side of the boat. Dylan lost his balance and tumbled onto the cockpit floor. I watched the yellow heap sort itself back into arms and legs and he stood again.

“You're not, either—anymore,” he yelled back at me. His eyes were so intense and sad. Just looking at them made me feel a little scared.

“I can do it!” I shouted.

“So can I. You're tired.”

He put his hand on mine again and pushed. This time my fingers let go their grip. When they moved they hurt. Tears started in my eyes. The boat took a wave too much on the side and suddenly heeled hard to starboard. I fell against a winch and Dylan pulled the tiller tight up against him. Slowly the bow turned south again. We didn't have as much speed without the screaming wind. Steering was going to be different.

“What's the course?” Dylan was staring at the compass.

“No course. Just keep the stern to the waves. That's been roughly south, but we're swinging through eighty degrees.”

He didn't look at me. He just nodded once, peered deeply into the compass, and shoved the tiller away from him as he felt the bow swinging around.

He was doing it by feel, exactly the way he should. I rubbed my ribs where the winch had gotten me. A wave dumped a couple of bathtubs of water on top of us, and for the first time since the storm began, I stood and looked aft out across the ocean.

There was enough light now to see, and the sight sent shock waves through me. We were in the trough of a wave. I was staring into a wall of water. I looked up for the top of the waves. I kept looking. I craned my head backwards.

Forty feet? But I was afraid of exaggerating. Thirty feet at least. Three stories of water, topped by blowing spray, rolled like a moving wall toward the boat. At the bottom of the trough we almost stalled for a moment because the wall blocked the wind. But our momentum from our slide down the front of that monster kept us moving. The rudder still worked. We could still steer. We rose up again to the top of the waves.

The stern began rising first as the wave rolled under us. Then the bow. And by some miracle, the whole massive wall slid underneath us, and we were riding on top of its broad smooth back.

I looked at Dylan. He was like I had been, totally focused on the tiller. He was not conscious of anything around him except keeping our stern facing the waves.

I looked aft again. As far into the gloom as I could see were more waves rolling like an army convoy toward us. One behind the other, each exactly the same, each huge, each mindless, each deadly. How did they get so big while I was watching the compass? Where were they coming from? How long would they go on?

Dylan glanced up at me quickly. “Go down below,” he ordered. “You're tired. We need you to rest.”

Dylan had already seen the waves. He had seen them hours ago when the sail exploded. He had seen them just now when he came up and insisted on taking the tiller. He knew about them and he wasn't scared.

I had looked at Dylan practically every day of my life. I knew what he looked like. But sitting there like that, a little blob of yellow holding on to a tiller while thirty-foot waves broke on top of him, slinging the water out of his eyes and peering into the compass, suddenly Dylan looked different to me. I went down below.

Gerry was still wedged between the cushions on the floor. I knelt close to his head. He opened his eyes. “I went pee,” he said. “Right here on the floor.”

“It's okay, buddy,” I said. “We all have.” I looked down at him. His eyes were pools of darkness in the half-light, but his lips were outlined clearly and the white of his teeth showed between them. The teeth were all still baby teeth. I saw he had bruises on his face. “You're hurt.”

He nodded. “I fell off the bunk—a long time ago.”

I nodded back, then lay down beside him, the top of my head just touching his. I could feel his warmth and hear him breathing.

“Has Dylan been on the radio?” I asked.

He shook his head. “He tried. It didn't work.”

I closed my eyes.

“What about Dad?” he asked.

“Go back to sleep,” I said, and then my body and my brain turned off. Dylan was right. I wasn't strong enough. Not anymore.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

WHEN I WOKE up, I realized I had made another mistake. I might have slept longer if I hadn't done it, but I had forgotten to put the hatch boards back in when I came below. Water came flying through the companionway and dumped on my head, just like somebody throwing a bucket of water right at me. I felt the water squishing down into my clothes under my foul weather gear. Then the boat shifted and the water rolled back across the cabin floor and into my face again. I lifted up my head and looked around.

The inside of the boat was a little lighter. Everything loose was on the floor. Cans of food were rolling around. Books were lying open, wet and flapping. Dad's charts were pushed up into a corner in a wet heap. As I watched, the sea lifted us high on the starboard side and all the water sloshing on the floor rolled to port. Something plastic swirled around on top. Some of Gerry's little cars flew from the starboard bunk where they had landed in some earlier twist of the boat. They crashed on Gerry's legs where he lay on the floor, his eyes still closed, his arms still crossed over his chest.

I pulled myself back to sit, but it hurt. My ribs were especially sore where I had crashed into the winch, and my left arm felt weak from the time I had spent gripping the boom to tie down the sail. The elbow and wrist ached even when I didn't move.

The boat rose up the front of a wave passing under our stern. Our bow pointed down sharply and everything rolled forward. I reached out and grabbed a can before it rolled into Gerry's head.

I was thinking very slowly, trying hard to be careful but not really awake. I set the can upright, wedged on the floor so that it could not roll from aft to forward again. The boat leveled out on the top of the wave. The wind hit us and raced through the open hole of the companionway. The books fluttered like scared birds, but the charts didn't move. They were a soaked mass of useless paper now.

Then the wave began to move out from under us. The bow tilted up, the stern fell back, and we slid down the wave's back. The can fell over and rolled aft. I came awake completely. There was no such thing as safely wedged in this boat. I felt the boat stall in the trough, and another load of water rushed through the companionway.

I stood and looked at Dylan framed in the companionway opening. He was a yellow spot against a vertical background of black, curling water. The runoff from the last wave was still rolling off his shoulders. He was squinting against the wet and salt in his eyes. One hand clutched the tiller, the other held fast to the rail. The boat yawed in the trough, and he worked with the tiller to keep the boat's stern to the waves. He glanced back for one second to see the next wave coming. The stern began to rise. He looked forward again and saw me standing in the companionway watching.

I came up and out into the storm again.

The sky was lighter and the rain had stopped completely, but the wind was still fierce. When I came topsides, I could hear it howling. It slapped me in the face and pressed against my foul weather gear. It swept my hair back away from my forehead and flung spray into my face, burning my eyes with the wet and the salt.

Then we began to slide down into another trough and the wind eased. Suddenly, I could hear. I sat down beside Dylan. He turned and looked at me, and I saw that he wasn't an eleven-year-old boy anymore. He was an eleven-year-old man. I reached for the tiller.

“I can go longer,” he said.

“Don't exhaust yourself,” I said. I reached up and pushed the points of hair away from his forehead. Then the top of a wave dropped on us. When it rolled away, his hair was plastered down on his forehead again and water was dripping off the end of his nose. I pushed his hand off the tiller and took over the helm. “Try the radio,” I told him.

“I already did,” he said. “It's not working.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “Same problem. I can hear other people, but they can't hear me.”

“What do they say?”

“Get to a safe port.”

We sat together for a minute. “Go below,” I finally said. “Eat something. Drink. Take care of Gerry. Come spell me again in a few hours. We'll take turns.”

In the eerie quiet of the trough, I could hear his voice talking to Gerry as he slid the hatch boards into the companionway opening.

Then I was alone again with the waves and wind. The sun was still high somewhere behind the thick cloud cover—it must have been early afternoon now of the second day—but here on the ocean, the light was dim and there was a new rhythm for me to learn. The race across the top of the waves, the foaming wake, the flying spray, the pull of the rudder against the tiller. Then everything getting slower and slower, quieter and quieter, as we slid down into the windless vacuum of the trough, yawing dangerously at the bottom before slowly climbing up to the top once more.

The light was beginning to fade toward night when my brain moved and I decided the wind was lighter. Maybe there wasn't even as much spray. Maybe the waves would get shorter soon. Maybe when things were calm I could fix the radio. Probably just one little wire loose or something. Then we could call for help. Maybe we were just a few miles off an island. Maybe all this was almost over.

I was letting myself come back to life and it wasn't feeling good. I hadn't remembered anything since the storm started. Not Dad or the Bahamas or Mom. For a tiny second, they all glinted through a crack in my consciousness. Then the crack closed as I realized less wind meant we had a whole new set of problems. Now we weren't moving fast enough.

We struggled up the next wave like a tired climber. Then the wind caught our stern and pushed us forward. We rested at the top a moment then began to slide down. At the bottom of the trough, we slowed almost to a stop. The boat yawed to starboard, and we didn't have enough momentum for me to bring her back on course. We were turning sideways to the wall of water behind us. I pushed the tiller back and forth as hard as I could to create forward motion. The starboard swing slowly corrected and we rose up the back of the next wave pointing more south than southeast. The wind took us at the top and we straightened out. It was a hard puff, and it took us safely down and up again.

Okay,
I was thinking.
What now?
My heart was racing. How many more dead troughs could we get through? Going forward to hank on a sail would be suicide. And the wind on the wave crests was still too much for
Chrysalis
to handle.

Then I remembered—the engine! Of course. All I had to do was get the engine going and we could easily ride through the troughs and wouldn't be overpowered on the crests. My fingers felt for the little silver toggle switch. It was smooth and cool, just like all those times we anchored. I touched the controls gently and lightly with my fingertips. The engine chugged. It turned over. It caught. I adjusted the rpms and listened. It was a beautiful sound, rhythmic, deep, and steady. It filled my ears and replaced the wild noise of the wind and waves.

And my plan worked. We moved straight through the next trough and up again. I settled the compass into a course that was roughly south. I think I was smiling when Dylan started pulling out the hatch boards again.

He sat beside me but didn't take the tiller right away. He looked out on the ocean. I looked up at the sky. It would have been nice to see the stars starting to come out. It would have been nice to hear Dylan droning on about this one and that one. He pushed my hand off the tiller.

“Less wind,” he said.

I nodded.

“South?” he asked.

“Stern to the waves. If they change, we change.”

I sat for another minute.

“Go below,” Dylan said.

“Anything changes. Anything at all—”

He nodded.

I went below, carefully replacing the hatch boards this time. I pulled off my foul weather gear. I drank water. I ate cheese. I checked over my bruises. I tried the radio. Then I lay down on the floor next to Gerry and slept.

This time I woke up when I felt my head lift slightly off the cabin sole and bang down again. My ear hurt. The engine was chugging away. It was pitch-black in the cabin. I sat up. The movement of the boat had changed and instantly I understood why.