The Great Wide Sea (25 page)

I stood up in the dinghy. I screamed. I waved my arms. I was thinking about Dylan and Gerry. I was praying they were still alive. So I stood up in the dinghy and screamed and waved my arms.

I can see it now like it was a movie in super-sharp focus. I see the bow gently pushing through the waves. I see the captain at the helm looking out at me and then his face changing.

What did he see? The dinghy with a mast rigged from a spinnaker pole and a sail cut with a knife from a rag of a jib. And me standing there waving and screaming—skin burned to deep red, hair like dried seaweed, clothes streaked in salt.

He was shouting. I thought he was calling to me and I was yelling back, “Dylan and Gerry are on the island. They're waiting for me. Dylan is hurt. Gerry is too small.” I stood there in the dinghy, waving and yelling and thinking that I had to make them hear over the engine noise. They had to see I was desperate.

Now I know, though, that he had cut the engines back to idle and that all the men who had hired the boat for that day were rushing to see me. The captain was telling me to sit down but I wouldn't. Then they lowered their dinghy and the captain left the helm with his mate and came to me because they were afraid that if their big boat bumped my dinghy I'd fall over and drown.

So he came over in the dinghy and he reached out and took the gunwale of my boat. His hand was strong and brown and his fingernails were dirty. His beard was flecked with gray and his eyes were deep brown. He looked at me and he said, “Sit down, son. It's gonna be all right now.”

So I did. They took me aboard. One of the fishermen pulled out his handkerchief to wipe the tears off my face. One of them gave me water. They brought me in from the sun. They tied the dinghy to the boat. Somehow they made sense of what I was saying.

The captain was on the radio calling for help. I heard him saying “search” and “doctor” and I thought I heard him saying, “We'll get him to the nearest port right away.” So I tried to untie my dinghy and get back in, and I was telling them about Dylan and Gerry and the voices in the sea. But they held me like in a wrestling match and looked at one another, and then the captain shouted to the mate and the boat turned around. Due east. Toward the island. Toward my brothers.

The mate gunned the engines and they let me go. The water flew away from the bow and our wake spread out behind us like a widening fan. I stood in the bow pulpit as the boat tore through the waves. I screamed at the ocean, “I'm coming back. I'm bringing help. I love you. Don't die. For God's sake, don't die.”

We found the island two hours later. The captain radioed the position. We lowered his dinghy and motored in. The sun was still high but the beach was empty.

I had expected to see Gerry running up and down the beach waving to us. I had imagined splashing through the waves and grabbing him up and carrying him laughing and crying to where Dylan was waiting.

But no one was there. The captain was watching me. “Sure this is the place, son?”

I nodded. Of course. I would remember it when I was dead. When we beached the dinghy, the sand felt like home.

My feet walked toward the tent where Dylan had lain. The leaves of the sea grapes rattled. I saw a lizard slither under a fallen palm frond. Then I saw my brothers. They were lying there, side by side, Dylan on his back and Gerry on his stomach. Blankie was spread across their legs and Gerry's arm was flung across Dylan's chest. They were facing each other. They lay as still as death.

I fell on my knees.

The captain touched my shoulder. “Son—” he said.

I heard myself moan.

Then Gerry turned and sat up in one fluid movement. He saw me. He pushed the hair away from his eyes. He smiled.

“Dylan's better, Ben,” he said. “He says my name again.” His little hand touched Dylan's shoulder. “Dylan?” he said gently. “Ben's here.”

Then Dylan turned too. Slowly. You could see it hurt him to move. His smile was ragged and out of focus. “I knew you'd come back,” he said. “Didn't I tell you, Gerry? You needn't have cried so much.” Dylan tried to push himself to sit. Then he fainted and collapsed onto the sand.

CHAPTER FORTY

SUDDENLY EVERYTHING WAS people and moving. I kept grabbing Gerry and trying to put him in my lap. I wanted to count his ribs or do “spider up your back.” I wanted to knock Dylan on the shoulder or rub his hair up like Einstein. But we couldn't stay close to each other. A seaplane came for us, and I watched our island disappear. The viselike rocks, the waving spinnaker, the secret beach—they all spun away, and another island rose on the horizon, one with an airstrip, a marina, a town, and a hospital. They put us in baths. They fed us. They hurried Dylan away for surgery then brought him back stretched in a web of traction. When he opened his eyes, his voice was thick with drugs, but I understood him. “I knew you'd come back,” he said. “I knew it.”

“I tried,” I said. “I love you, Dylan.” Then the nurse came and hushed me. With her hand firm on my arm, she walked me back to the room where Gerry lay sleeping. I climbed in my bed and pulled up the clean sheet. They had told me we had been on the island almost three months. Now we were here. Now Dylan would get well, and Gerry would forget. Now I would take care of them. I lay in bed and I planned it all and I felt strong.

Two days later, they let us stay with Dylan all day. At night we went back to our room. Gerry wanted stories. I didn't know any, so he made me sit on his bed and hold one corner of Blankie while he fell asleep with another corner pressed against his cheek. When he was quiet, I crept back to Dylan's room.

“How's Gerry?” he asked.

I shrugged. “He's scared. He doesn't want me to leave. He has nightmares.”

“Nightmares,” Dylan echoed. “Me too.”

“We all do,” I said. “But we'll be okay. I'm going to take care of us now, Dylan. I'm old enough. I'm almost seventeen.”

“Really?” His eyes were closing.

“I'm going to fish, Dylan. And we'll get a little house here. A white one, maybe with green shutters. And one of those bushes out front—boogin-something.”

“Bougainvillea,” he murmured.

“Yeah, that. I'll take care of you. We'll be okay, Dylan. Just us. We'll be okay.” When he didn't answer, I straightened his sheet, turned out the light, and left.

The next afternoon we were sitting in Dylan's room, making spitballs and shooting them with the straw from Dylan's lunch tray. Gerry was in my lap. I was teaching him how to aim, saying, “Go with your gut, Gerry.” Dylan was talking about projectile angles and speed of launch. We were laughing, and Gerry still couldn't hit the same spot twice.

Someone knocked on the door, and Dad walked in.

No one said anything. We just looked.

Then Gerry left my lap and went to Dad. “Oh, Daddy,” he said. Dad reached down and picked him up. “Ben said you'd come,” Gerry said quietly, and pressed his face against Dad's shoulder.

“My boys. My boys,” Dad said, and rocked Gerry in his arms and cried.

Then Dylan's IV started to beep. I reached up and pushed the button the way the nurse had taught us. She must have been just outside the door because she came immediately. She changed the medicine bag. She chatted cheerily. Dad smiled at her and wiped his face. Then she left.

“I thought you were dead,” I said.

“And I thought you—” Dad started, but then his face twisted and he was quiet.

“You had the EPIRB,” Dylan said.

“It saved me,” Dad said.

“Instead of us,” I said.

Then we were all quiet again. “I'll tell you my story,” Dad finally said. “When you're ready, you tell me yours.” His story wasn't very long. He said it was an accident. The night had been quiet. He had been thinking too much, he said. The coffee was making him nervous. And the thinking.

“Actually,” he said, and paused. “I was thinking about your mother.” He shook his head. “I decided to do a safety check, a quick walk around to stretch my legs.” So he unhooked his safety harness from his life jacket and went forward. He started at the anchor and worked his way to the stern.

Of course everything was fine. We had done it all exactly right. We always did. It was ridiculous that he would do a check in the middle of the night.

“The moon was brilliant,” he said. “I decided I could even check the emergency pack. It would be easy to see. There was plenty of time.” He untied the dinghy and lifted it slightly. The pack came almost out, then snagged on the dinghy seat. He tugged harder. His grip slipped. He stumbled backwards. As he fell over, he grabbed the lifeline. The pack slid loose, flopped to the edge of the boat, and then fell in. He grabbed it with his left hand and held the lifeline with his right hand, his injured hand.

He called out, he said. He was almost beside Dylan, except for the fiberglass hull between them. “But you know Dylan,” he said. “He can sleep through anything.” He shouted again and his grip loosened. Then a wave tore him away from the boat. He watched the boat sail away. Five knots, steady wind, perfect steering. The boat was out of sight before he remembered to be glad he had on his life jacket.

He was staring at his hands.

“You tell a good story,” I said.

He looked up at me quickly then continued. He drifted for a long time, he said, before he remembered he had the EPIRB. Then he floated on the pack, holding the EPIRB and watching the clouds. By the time we woke up, we were already miles away from him and the storm was building.

I felt sick listening to him tell it all.

The wind was blowing the crests off the waves when the rescue boat finally located him. He tried to get them to look for us, but they refused. Their boat couldn't go head on into the forty-foot waves they were reporting. “Sorry, sir,” the sailor had said. “We'll try to radio. That's the best we can do.” Dad said something about being cold and drinking coffee. Something about fifty-knot winds and forty-foot waves. Something about staring out windows blinded by horizontal rain.

All I heard was the sound of the wind screaming through the stays and the explosion of the mainsail as we skidded down the front of that wave. All I could see was the waves breaking behind us as high up as the top of the mast and as black as tornado clouds. And then Dylan like a yellow caterpillar unfolding to take the helm and Gerry alone on the floor, wearing a red life jacket and clutching Blankie.

Dad rented a room in Miami. There were broadcasts and airplanes. There were newspaper stories and sightings. But they couldn't find us. Nobody imagined how far the storm had blown us. They never even came close to our island. After a month, the authorities closed the search, but Dad kept on. He went back to the Bahamas and took the ferries among the islands. He asked everybody he saw but everybody agreed—after a storm like that, the most likely place to find us was at the bottom of the sea.

After another month, Dad went home. He rented an apartment. He started teaching again. “ ‘My life closed twice before its close,' ” he read aloud, but the students didn't understand. He turned the page and cried out to them, “ ‘Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.' ” Then the class was over. The students yawned and stretched. They closed their books. They left.

At night he stared at the TV or at the ceiling, depending on whether or not he was trying to sleep. Until yesterday—when they called.

“And so I came,” he said. “To bring you home.”

I laughed. “Home?” I said. “Where's that?”

They all looked at me. I twisted in my chair and looked out the window. There was that blazing island sun. There was the bougainvillea. There was a lizard clinging to the screen and tasting the hot, damp air. I thumped the lizard off the screen into the bushes. I crossed the room and stood in front of Dad. I looked him level in the eye and it surprised us both.

“You've grown,” he said.

“Yeah. I got hair on my chest while you were gone.”

Gerry reached out and tried to pull up my shirt. “Really, Ben? Let me see.”

I turned away. “It's just a way of talking, Gerry.”

“It's time to think about a car,” Dad said, and smiled.

“I don't want a car.”

“I called Andrew,” Dad said. “He's looking forward—”

I pushed Gerry's hair away from his eyes. “It's hot in here, bud,” I said. “I'm going to take a walk.”

“Ben—” Dad was saying as I walked past him and out the door.

Then the small, close room was behind me and the low, cool corridor and the swinging door, and I was outside. I leaned against the concrete-block wall and felt my heart racing. I imagined Dad coming to find me. I couldn't talk to him. I couldn't listen to his voice. I couldn't stand to let my eyes touch his face or his hands or his shoes.

I had said I would walk, so I would walk, but suddenly the island seemed small. There was nothing but the town itself with its hospital and houses and marina all bunched up along the beach and then the long, white, glaring road that led to the crushed-coral airstrip about a mile out of town. A taxi was parked at the grocery store. The driver sat with his door open and his feet rubbing on the dusty road. He sipped at a soda in a paper bag and talked with a man sitting on a bench. Outside one house, a woman was braiding a little girl's hair, and a baby wearing just a diaper was mashing an acorn into the dust.

I paused in the shade of some tall casuarinas growing near the shore. I rolled acorns into a pile with my toes and watched a clutch of chickens scratching close to me, then scattering away. I was turning to keep walking when Dad found me. He sat down on an empty oil drum a few feet away. I picked up a handful of acorns and pitched one across the road into the dirty edge of the sea.