“But if anything should happen, you’ll tell them?”
“That you’re the bravest woman I ever knew. But it’s not going to be like that.”
They clasped hands and intertwined their fingers. And they sat un-self-consciously, like old lovers on a beach, watching porpoises frolic in a pod, for more than an hour, neither with the impulse to give a parting squeeze and withdraw her grasp. Tracy wondered if friendship was at all like being in love and if she had ever consciously preferred Janis or if their closeness had been only because their family connection tumbled them constantly together. She wanted to weep for all the mornings she had almost called Holly to go for a jog or run out for coffee and then neglected it because going alone was quicker. Holly wondered if the boys knew yet who their teachers would be. But no, they wouldn’t know yet. It wasn’t even the Fourth of July. They loved the fireworks at Navy Pier, and all fireworks. Holly hoped her boys would not miss the fireworks.
“This is Janis Loccario,” Janis told the Coast Guard operator. “Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you, Miz Loccario.”
“You sound very far away.”
“There’s a slight thunderstorm here, ma’am. We tend to have sluggish service in these conditions. Where are you calling from?”
“I’m calling from the United States, from Illinois. Well, of course, you’re in the United States, too. I mean the mainland. My cousin and my friends left from St. Thomas ten days ago, and they were to be in Grenada by now. But I can’t reach my cousin. I know she would answer me if she could. So I want to report a vessel missing.”
“It’s a little soon for that. If they were only supposed to be there today.”
“Yesterday.”
“It’s still a little early. Sailing isn’t precise. They may have decided to stop for a while somewhere. They may have tied up for two nights instead of one. I wouldn’t worry.”
“I just want you to check. Have you . . . Don’t sailing boats check in every day?”
“Yes, they do. They report their positions every day.”
“Well, will you check on transmissions from the charter boat Opus?” Janis asked.
“That’s Lenny Amato’s boat, Miz Loccario. I definitely wouldn’t worry about them now. I happen to know the fellow. Lenny knows these islands like the back of his hand. So does his mate, Michel Eugène-Martin.”
“I still want you to check. Will you please do that?”
“Of course I will,” the operator said. “Do you want me to call you back?”
“I’ll hold.”
“It could take some time.”
“I’ll wait. Now that I’ve got someone on the line.”
Janis fiddled with the purse she had found at a garage sale and was making over for Tracy’s birthday. It was nearly finished. She had only to affix the antique button and a trace of gold braid. It was purple. Purple was Tracy’s color. God, help Tracy, she thought. Help Cammie. Jim and Ted had not heard from them, either. In his innocence, Ted suggested his mom and sister were simply having too much fun. But there was a deep line between Jim’s eyes that morning when he returned the dish in which Janis had given them the Stroganoff. He’d asked her, “You do think they’re okay?” And she’d told him, “Of course.” And neither of them had believed the other. Janis had no idea how to call the Coast Guard, but it was surprisingly easy, right in the Blue Pages, just like the fire department. The number was different for St. Thomas, of course, but the woman who answered her had located it in no time as well. So, once Dave was off to work and the girls to school, Janis gathered her craft bag and her courage and made the call. Now she waited, measuring the braid. Too long. She snipped it. Just right. Rakish. She cradled the phone receiver on her shoulder and began to stitch.
“Miz Loccario?” said a male voice.
“I’m here.”
“I’m afraid we haven’t had a transmission from the sailing ship Opus in . . . seven days. But that doesn’t necessarily mean trouble. Lenny Amato had a conversation with Sharon Gleeman, another captain, on . . . let’s see, on the fifteenth. And there could be weather out there that might be interfering with their transmission . . .”
“So you’ll file a report? You’ll send out a message to look for them?”
“We take this very seriously, ma’am. We don’t start a formal rescue operation, which is huge and expensive, until we’ve already done that. But we’ll send out a bulletin immediately.”
Later, Tracy began to pick up glass—the glasses and the shattered casserole dish, the leaking, stinking cans, and the bottles that the men had smashed. Unable to think of what else to do with the evidence of their presence, she tossed the trash overboard. However long they had to wait or however long they . . . had left, Tracy knew none of them could survive and look at the staging area of the massacre. After pulling on Lenny’s thick rubber fishing gloves, she used a mop and a bucket of salt water to wash down the deck. She tried to keep herself from thinking of the boy’s once innocent blood, scrubbing harder and harder. She tried not to think of how his mother slept, unknowing. It was useless. Her mind went to dwell there. Did that mother stir and for a moment murmur his name? What was his name, and how, if ever, would his parents know that they no longer had their blond-haired son? Would Ernesto give up his name if he was caught, as he surely would be, bobbing about in a leaking boat with insufficient fuel?
Tracy finished with the mop and then used the towels she found in a locker to clean the blood out of the crevices where it had been driven deep. Her empty gorge rose as she forced herself to continue. Her mind buffeted her back and forth with each motion of the towel. The boy had not been good. He would have let Camille die to save himself. The boy was caught in an impossible place, for what reason Tracy would never know. He had died to save Camille. Swipe, swipe, swipe, she worked and sweated, until at least the inside of the boat was white again, as Holly and Cammie slept on. She wrung the towels into the water bucket that went pink, then rosy. She poured the water over the side, unable to stop herself from murmuring a prayer for the family of the boy.
And next, unable to still her nervous hands, Tracy decided to create a new, tiny sail. There was not a puff of wind; they sat rocking in what Lenny might have called the doldrums. Today, the sun would be as punishing as a blowtorch. Tracy did not believe she would ever see the sunrise again with anything except dread. But if she was lucky, her makeshift sail would work. She would sew it and then unfurl the genny and set them both. She would do just what the young man had said to do.
She would not think, over and over, not any more, of the hole opening in his side, just below his top rib, and the long, impossibly protracted shower of blood.
Briskly, she fetched the bedsheets from the room where Olivia had slept until the smugglers had come on board. Olivia had since moved back in with Holly, drawing the partition between their beds. Using the only needle she could find, a huge upholstery needle she imagined the men had used to mend canvas, Tracy sewed two bedsheets together lengthwise and poked a hole through one thickness of one of the top hems. Through metal lines that had sprung from their fastenings during the blowout she chopped away with the wire cutters until she had a thickness she could loop through one of the eye hooks on the mast. Then, using a strong new piece of line, she affixed another corner of the makeshift sail to one of the cleats along the side of the boat.
When the wind came, Tracy would be ready.
When Tracy took the wheel, Olivia reluctantly threw out the last of the sealed tray of desserts, which had spoiled beyond what she said even Louis XVI would have ingested, their creams and light fillings a straightforward invitation to food poisoning. In the one MRE she could find, the macaroni and dried beef swarmed with small white insects—the origin of which Olivia could not imagine. She tossed that mess over the side as well. There was a half-filled box of cereal and a bag of almonds left. Where had the crackers gone? She didn’t remember the men eating them. The only water was the single jug Tracy had hidden. Fou
r cans of ginger ale remained. Olivia drank one. She lined up two others next to the water jug. She filled a paper cup and she brought ginger ale to Holly, who swallowed it gratefully and then promptly threw it up. Olivia called Tracy, who washed the outside of Holly’s mouth with seawater and supported her like a doll to her bed, helping Holly to change into a clean shirt. She promised Holly she could come up again once the sun was not so punishing. “That kind of heat would make anyone sick,” she chattered brightly. But having accomplished all it took from her to break the lock and assemble the gun seemed to have extinguished something in Holly. Please, oh, please, Tracy prayed. Let me have another chance. Let me have more time to give Holly. Let Holly go home to her family. She is so much better than I am, Tracy prayed, knowing full well that this rationale had never sufficed as a cause for vouchsafing survival. Not ever, in human time.
At dusk, Cammie woke.
When she did, Tracy led her up from the cabin and sat with her in the saloon. She poured Cammie a glass of ginger ale. In vain, she tried to explain that Cammie needed to speak about what had happened. Cammie, Tracy noticed gratefully, at least shook her head. Tracy persisted. What she didn’t purge would haunt her, sleeping and waking, she insisted. Cammie took her cup into her own hands and drank the rest of it. Tracy put a few nuts on the table and encouraged Cammie to eat, which she did. But she went back to bed without saying a word. When Tracy looked in on her, her eyes were open, but she lay motionless, the sheets tucked neatly under her mattress, her sunburned face immobile as a doll’s. She did not even blink.
That night, after they had washed down their cereal with ginger ale, Tracy jotted down a water schedule. Each of them would be allowed a finger’s width of water twice a day until the jug ran out.
“That’s absurd,” Olivia told her. “A person can’t survive on that.”
“A person can,” Holly replied softly. She had told Tracy that she felt better when she kept moving. But she was wrapped in her blanket, and when Tracy touched her forehead, it was as hot as a spatula just out of the pan. “And a person can live four or five days without any water at all. And if you have to, you can drink the water from the slop tanks. And if you have to, you can drink your own urine, because it’s sterile.”
“Jesus Christ!” Olivia said. “Like an animal.”
“We are animals,” Holly said. “We’ll do anything to survive. Do murder. Eat our young. Maybe not our young. But become cannibals.”
Olivia cringed and told them good night. Tracy went up to begin her watch.
Day Fourteen
The next morning, after an hour’s sleep, Tracy searched every cranny of Opus to try to find a single bit of tinned food that had not been consumed by the pirates. For two hours, she scoured the bilge, the cabinets, the lockers and shelves. With flour and salt, she could have made an edible dough, but she could not spare water to congeal it. Finally, far back in the ama next to the bed where Holly slept, she found, beneath all the gear and tools Holly had tossed aside in her frenzy, a single can of tuna.
Pulling back the top of the can, she divided it into fourths, carrying Olivia’s portion to her on a saucer. Olivia turned up her nose, then ate the few bites.
“I need water,” Olivia said. “Will you hand me up some?”
Holly appeared at the bottom of the stairs. She was, Tracy noticed, using Lenny’s unloaded gun as a crutch, a deeply unsettling sight.
“I’ll call the media,” she said to Olivia. “We all need more water. But you don’t get another bit until tonight, unless you want to use up your ration.”
“Fine, I’ll use up my ration. This is bullshit. I’m sweating it out as fast as I’m drinking it,” Olivia snarled.
“So is everyone,” Tracy said. With Holly settled in the saloon, listening quietly to music, Tracy brought Cammie her portion of tuna. To her immense relief, Cammie stuffed it all into her mouth, using both hands.
“Honey, do you want to get up now?” she asked Cammie. “I need you. I have to get the water maker started. I can’t do it alone. If I don’t get the water maker to work, then we’ll all die. And we didn’t go through . . . that to die out here. Please, Cammie. Help me.”
Cammie opened her mouth as if to experiment with her voice. No sound emerged.
“Cammie, I need you to help me. I’ve slept one hour in two days.”
Finally, Cammie said, “Yes.”
Tracy held out both hands. Cammie said gently, her voice still raspy from her screams, “I’m not hurt, Mom. Nothing about me is physically hurt. How is Aunt Holly? I . . . blanked. I never thanked her and told her how much I love her for what she did. Is she okay?”
“She’s right down in the saloon.”
Cammie flew out of her cabin and down the steps to nestle into Holly’s arms. Although Tracy saw Holly wince against the impact of Cammie’s abrupt embrace, her friend tried to conceal it by shifting position.
“And here you are, back from your coma,” Holly said.
“I never thought I would be the kind of person who would ever see or feel anything like that,” Cammie said. Tracy felt an unwonted pang; Cammie had not confided in her. “When it was happening, all I wanted was for them to die. Then that boy did die, and he was trying to save us. Until last week, I’d never even run over a squirrel. And now I’ve seen people die.”
“Cam,” Tracy warned her.
Cammie glanced up, confused. “He was, Mom. You know he was whispering to me the whole time that as soon as he walked down one step, he was going to let me go and grab the motor from that fat pig and I was going to run for it—”
“Cam, stop!”
“No, Tracy. Let her say it. The boy I shot, the blond boy, he wasn’t a part of this?”
“Of course he was,” Tracy said, sitting down and slapping her hand flat on the table. “He was just as responsible as any of those men. He had been smuggling drugs with them for years.”
“Mom!” Cammie protested. “That’s not true. . . .” And then she seemed to gather up a handful of loose threads into the fist of her mind. “Aunt Holly! You didn’t do wrong. He wasn’t a . . . professional killer, like those other guys, but they would have forced me into the boat. He couldn’t have stopped them. . . .”
“Did I kill a kid who was trying to save us?” Holly asked Tracy.
Tracy said, “He was trying, but it wasn’t going to work.”
“Mother of God,” Holly said with a long breath.
“You couldn’t have known!” Cammie told Holly, stroking Holly’s face. “He wasn’t a good person!”
“He was someone’s child.”
“So were the other ones,” Tracy explained.
“You know what I mean. But when I saw Cammie in her underwear, and with him pulling her over . . . and saw her leg . . .”
“Of course!” Tracy said soothingly.
“Mother of God,” Holly repeated. “Trace, help me up. I want to go and lie down.”
“We have an active search in progress, Miz Loccario,” the Coast Guard officer told Janis. “Of course you can come, but it’s not going to change anything. We’re doing everything possible to find them, everything. We can’t raise them on the radio, so we assume they’re out of reach of a VHF handheld. The freighter Cordoba out of Costa Rica is actively searching for them.”
“If there aren’t so many boats out there now, and the storm passed them, shouldn’t they be easy to see?”
“It’s a big mass of water, ma’am. But I guarantee you, we’ll find them.”
“Will they be dead by then, though?”
“No. Most every boat has emergency rations. They should have plenty of food for a while, and if they have a water maker, they will be set for fresh water. No worries there.”
Janis looked up at the clock. “Okay. I’ll wait. And you’ll call me tomorrow, you promise?”
“I’ll call as soon as we see anything, anything at all. Or hear anything.”
Cammie felt terrible about what she had said to Holly.
She made it her new mission to get the water maker to work. It was nothing but a big filter, she reasoned, that ran on batteries. She filled it with seawater and let the treated water drip into empty jugs. She tasted it. It had a funny metallic edge to it, but it didn’t nauseate her. If Lenny had it, it must be safe, simply a long time unused. It took forever, though.
They watched as the level of the jug diminished. It was Cammie’s idea to alternate “good water” with “yuck water” for the daily ration. That way, a handful of almonds and a few swallows of spring water would seem like a treat.
So that afternoon, Cammie gave Olivia her scant ration in a Dixie cup. It was water that Cammie had made. Olivia immediately spat it out. “What’s in that crap? Some kind of sanitizing pill?”
“No, it’s safe water. It’s just made from seawater. The water maker takes out the salt.”
“Well, I don’t want any more,” Olivia told her. “I can’t handle it.”
“You have to,” Cammie told her, a slow boil commencing deep in her stomach. “We all have to. The jug water is for special—”
“No, the last bottle of wine is for special! I’m not drinking crap.”
“Then you’ll be thirsty,” Cammie said.
They all gathered at sunset for their “good” water and ration of nuts and cereal. Holly reminded them again: People could live for thirty days without food and need only minor medical treatment afterward. It was liquid that counted. Any liquid that wasn’t seawater. She vividly described the torments of those who, in desperation, drank seawater. Even Olivia was chastened.
Cammie spoke up. “I know that the water from the maker is gross. And on top of that, you’re going to have to wait for what I make. It goes so slow. You have to wait forever for, like, a pint.”
“Can’t you make it work faster?” Olivia asked.
“Livy,” Holly said, slumping deep into one of the padded benches in the saloon, “if you want it done faster, do it yourself.”