Not Without Hope (9 page)

Paula Oliveira awoke again near dawn, and called the home of Rebekah and Marquis Cooper. But the family was moving, and the number had been disconnected. Paula didn’t have Rebekah’s cell phone number. So she turned on her laptop computer and Googled the Coast Guard. She called the St. Petersburg station and apologized if she was calling the wrong number, but said that her boyfriend had gone on a fishing trip and had not returned. The Coast Guard officer seem to know Nick’s name and hers, too. The officer asked for Nick’s date of birth and the spelling of his name. He wanted Paula to describe Nick’s features. She said he was 6 feet 2 inches, 240, brown hair, green eyes, a big guy with a muscular build.

“What’s this all about?” Paula asked.

The officer explained that Rebekah Cooper, or a family friend, had contacted the Coast Guard and reported the boaters missing. They had been searching for them since about one thirty. Paula began sobbing. She left her number with the Coast Guard and asked them to pass it
along to Marquis’s wife. Paula then called her father in Fort Lauderdale. She couldn’t speak. She was sobbing.

“Paula, what’s wrong?” he asked.

“I’m okay,” she said. “Nick is missing.”

As Paula spoke, her cell phone beeped. It was Rebekah Cooper. She was sitting in her car in the parking lot at the L.A. Fitness where Nick, Marquis, and Corey trained together. Rebekah was waiting for the gym to open at eight. She planned to go inside and ask for a phone number for Paula, who was also a member of the gym. In the meantime, the Coast Guard had passed along Paula’s number to Rebekah.

Rebekah’s voice was calm and reassuring. The guys probably ran out of gas, or their GPS system wasn’t working and they were just drifting, she told Paula. They were probably fine and the Coast Guard would find them. It was daylight now; it would probably take only an hour or two. Paula didn’t call Nick’s mother. No need to alarm her over nothing.

“I went from pure hysteria to okay,” Paula said. “It made sense. Of course that would happen. That gave me peace.”

At about eight thirty, Paula made a second call to the Coast Guard in St. Petersburg. Rebekah Cooper had seemed unaware that Will Bleakley had also been on the boat. Paula gave Will’s name and birth date to the Coast Guard, along with a description of him—similar to Nick but with darker hair, 6 feet 3 inches, 230—along with his cell phone number.

The morning was chilly. Paula opened the door to let her three dogs out and her feet got cold. She put on a pair of boots and a sweater with her jeans and drove to St. Paul’s Catholic Church on North Dale Mabry in Tampa. She had
been raised Catholic but did not practice her religion. She arrived just as the service was ending, and walked in crying. People seemed to be staring at her. No one said anything. She went to a pew and sat by herself, asking God to bring Nick, Will, Marquis, and Corey home safely and soon. She stayed for ten minutes and drove to the home of her close friends Nery Tijerino and Kendall Lawson. The Coast Guard called Paula there in late morning, about eleven. She might want to inform Nick’s family now, an officer told her. The media were going to be alerted. Before eleven, the Coast Guard would confirm that there were four men missing, not three, and that two of them were NFL players.

“High media interest is expected,” said a Coast Guard dispatch.

Except for Nick Schuyler and Will Bleakley, no one could have known yet that the two NFL players were already dead.

Earlier, Paula had become frustrated. “How could they not see them yet?” she wondered about the Coast Guard. Her friend Nery had admonished her, “Paula, you don’t know how big an area this is.”

When the Coast Guard called her this time in late morning, she asked again what kind of progress it was making. The voice on the other end was comforting, supportive: “We’re very hopeful. We have a lot of light out now. It’ll be easier.”

Paula called Nick’s mother, Marcia Schuyler, who lived with her daughter, Kristen, two hours south of Tampa, in Fort Myers. Marcia didn’t pick up the call. She was in her living room, speaking with Kristen, who had just walked in the door. Marcia would get back to Paula in a little while. They had some catching up to do.

When the call went to voice mail, Paula was relieved. No one ever wants to tell a mother that her son didn’t come home.

Next, Paula tried Kristen Schuyler. This was odd, Kristen thought. It was not like Paula to call that early.

“What’s wrong?” Kristen asked.

“It’s your brother,” Paula said.

Kristen thought they had had a fight or had broken up.

“He’s missing,” Paula said.

Kristen felt dread in the pit of her stomach. She had driven home earlier in the morning from Tampa, where she had attended a black-tie fund-raiser for breast cancer the night before. She had texted Nick on Saturday night, telling him that Major League baseball players had been in attendance. He had not replied, but this didn’t alarm Kristen—Nick sometimes didn’t respond unless Kristen asked him a direct question. She had called her brother again this morning to tell Nick about her 5K race on Saturday. Her call went straight to voice mail. Now she knew why. Nick had not returned from his fishing trip. And now the weather had turned cold and windy. This could not be good. The Coast Guard was about to make an announcement on television.

Kristen hung up with Paula, paced around her bedroom and then walked outside without speaking to her mother. She kept waiting for her phone to ring again to say that everything was okay, that Nick was safe and sound. The call didn’t come. Ten minutes later, Kristen returned and sat next to her mother in the living room.

“Is everything okay?” Marcia Schuyler asked.

“I don’t know,” Kristen said.

Marcia noticed a blank look on her daughter’s face, as if she had been crying.

“Oh my God, what happened to your brother?” Marcia said.

Nick had not returned home from a fishing trip, Kristen said. Marcia went to the bathroom and threw up. They tossed some clothes into a bag, took a shower, and headed to Tampa. Kristen could hear her mother sobbing in the shower.

She called her father, Stu Schuyler, and he became upset. He had phoned Nick the morning before, telling him the weather was expected to get bad and to come home early.

“Damn it, I told him not to go out,” Stu said to his daughter. He was angry, yelling.

“Dad, this is not the time,” Kristen said. “This is not going to help.”

Kristen was usually the rock of the family. She didn’t cry until she got into the shower. Something is really, really wrong, she thought to herself.

Paula Oliveira called Bob and Betty Bleakley, Will’s parents. The boys never made it back and the Coast Guard was looking for them. Betty replied that she had told Will the trip was a bad idea. Paula told her the Coast Guard had offered reassuring words. The search would be easier in the daylight.

Within a half hour, Stu Schuyler called Paula. She tried to reassure him, but he was pessimistic. “I’m not oblivious to what Mother Nature can do,” Stu said.

“We can’t think that way,” Paula replied. “We have to stick together and be positive.”

“You’re right,” Stu said.

T
he storm began to settle down in midmorning or late morning, the waves changing from chop to swells. They were less random, less crazy. Then we began seeing helicopters. You would hear them, then you would see them. They were all in the distance. We would see one, then fifteen minutes later we would see another. Then we didn’t see another one for an hour or two. We couldn’t tell if it was the same helicopter or not. It didn’t really matter. The helicopters were orange and white. We knew they were Coast Guard. We knew they were looking for us.

We would see a helicopter and all of our attention would go to that. We would yell and wave our orange life jackets. We wouldn’t pay attention to the waves, and the next thing we knew, a swell would hit us from behind and flip us back into the water.

The helicopters never came real close. It seemed like they were a mile away or more. They seemed higher than the one I thought I saw the night before.

“Help, help, we’re down here!” we would scream. I tried to picture what they were looking at, and I had the same thought as last night: our boat would look like just another whitecap among thousands of white waves.

We would see a helicopter and get ready to take our life jackets off and wave them, excited, saying to each other, “Here we go—this is it—this is our chance—they got us!”

“You see one over there?” Will would say, and our hopes would go up, then deflate again. We’d get excited and then frustrated. It didn’t feel hopeless, but I felt I was not in control whatsoever. The effort Will and I were putting out was helping us to survive, but not to get rescued. It was like a roller coaster. Help was so near, and then it was gone again.

We kept asking each other, “What else can we do?” We knew our chances were getting smaller and smaller. We were still somewhat hopeful, but not as excited. It was getting further and further along. They had missed us so many times before. I kept thinking about Marquis and Corey, worried that Will and I would begin to deteriorate, too.

“I can’t believe they can’t see us!” I would yell.

“How can they not see us?!” Will would scream.

He thought about the flares that had been useless the night before.

“I sure wish we had them now,” he said. “With those flares, we would have been saved.”

A
T ABOUT TEN
thirty or eleven in the morning, I looked just off the right side of the boat and said, “What the hell is that?”

At first I thought it was a white cloud in the water. But it moved closer and went under the boat. I think it was a squid. It had long, white, purplish-grayish tentacles. They were long and skinny, like a giant version of what we had used for bait the day before. Altogether, it seemed ten feet long. I couldn’t see its body, but I could see the tentacles hanging out from under the boat.

Will looked, too.

“Oh my God.”

After all we had just gone through in the last twenty-four-plus hours, what could possibly make me more scared than I already was? This was just something else to freak me out. It wasn’t moving, it was just floating. The tentacles looked like the alien in
Independence Day,
when Will Smith is dragging it on the ground. Not snakelike, but wet, yolky leather. It was disturbing even to look at.

“No way in hell I’m falling off this boat now,” I said.

I didn’t know that stuff was in the Gulf. I knew they were in deep water. I knew that when we were fishing the water was 150 feet deep, but here I had no idea: 200-plus feet? 75 feet? I figured it was deep, because I knew the deeper the water, the bigger the waves.

“How do they eat?” I asked Will. “Can they kill us?”

“I think they have beaks,” he said.

“Do they sting like jellyfish?” I wanted to know.

It must have stayed under the boat two hours. We bear-hugged each other on the motor, but we did fall off a few times. The squid was behind us, more toward the front of the boat. It was freaky. I would fall in and get right back up. Before, we would sometimes sit in the water to regroup. Now I was scrambling to get right back on the boat. If Will lingered in the water, I would scream at him, “What are you doing? Get out of there!”

At one point, it came within about five feet of us.

“What can it possibly be doing under there?” I asked Will. “Is it getting the fish we caught? Our bait? Is it in the cooler? Is it waiting for us to fall in?”

Sometimes we wouldn’t see it. We thought it was gone and then it would come back again.

“I can’t believe that thing is still here,” I said.

The waves were still kicking. A little less than fifteen feet, about thirteen. The random stuff was gone. They were consistent swells now. And, finally, the squid was gone, too. We never saw it again.

O
NCE WE WERE
sure it was no longer beneath the boat, Will took off his life jacket and dived under, looking for cell phones, food—anything that might help us. I told him to be careful. We were bleeding a lot. He would hold on as best he could, wait until the waves were right, take a deep breath, and dive under the boat. Sometimes he judged the wave wrong, got nailed, and came right back up, his mouth full of water. Then he made it under and opened the storage bin, now above the steering wheel. He came up holding my backpack, which contained our cell phones and a pair of my sandals.

I grabbed Will’s cell phone, but it was waterlogged and didn’t work. I had a water-resistant and shock-resistant phone, a construction type, because I had been through so many of them. I thought it had zero chance of working, but it turned on right away.

Here’s another shot, I thought to myself. I got no reception bars, but I dialed 9-1-1 anyway.
connecting
, it read.
connecting
and dot, dot, dot. Same as before.

“I don’t fucking get it,” I said. So much for 9-1-1. A little bit of hope had been shot right back down again.

I sent out a text to Paula, my mother, and my sister: “We’re alive, find us.”

no service. send when service available
? it said. I clicked
yes
.

I would put it away and try again a few minutes later. Still no service. Nothing.

T
HE
N
IKE BACKPACK
was black, a LeBron James model, L23. He and I were the same age, from the same state. He was from Akron, I was from Chardon. In high school, he was first team All-State; I was third team. We had that in common. We both graduated in
2003. I didn’t so much look up to him as keep watch on him. Just small talk, like, “You see what LeBron put up last night?” Every week, they would run the scoring averages of the top players in the state, and he would be near the top or at the top, and I would be in the middle of the list somewhere. You always saw his name on TV and in the paper. He was on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
. It was cool because he was an hour away. I remember one big newspaper article, a whole page, and it had some of his features. He was 6 feet 7 inches, 220 or 230, with freak-of-nature speed, strong hands, a muscular build. I knew he was awesome. They talked about him being the next Michael Jordan. He was good in football, too. He was like an All-State receiver as a sophomore. We wanted to play them, but it never worked out.

When he got drafted by the Cavaliers, I became a big fan. He’s a humble guy. His idol was his mother. We were alike in that way, too. She worked extra hours or extra jobs just to make sure food was on the table. His mother was his best friend. She always put him first. She never missed a game. She reminded me of my mom.

T
HE BOAT SEEMED
a little lower in the water, and we kept wondering whether there was anything we could use for flotation if it eventually sank. I remembered the week before, when Corey asked Marquis if he had any life jackets on the boat. “Yeah, we got life jackets,” Marquis had said. “This entire boat is a life jacket.”

The sides of the boat were cushioned. You could lean your thighs against the sides when you fished. It wasn’t soft like a pillow, but it was soft leather. Marquis also said the cushions came off the two seats in the back of the boat. Will went under again, but came up empty-handed.

“It’s not coming off,” he said.

He tried a second time, and after he seemed to be under a good
ten seconds, he kind of ripped off one of the seat cushions. He swam to the back of the boat and handed it to me. The cushion had little grooved panels on it.

“This’ll work,” I said.

Will seemed exhausted. He had been holding his breath, fighting the waves and the current to get under the boat. He seemed to use all his strength to get that cushion loose. When he came up, I could hear him gasping for breath. It was like he was seconds away from drowning or had run a bunch of sprints. He was spitting water from his mouth. We hadn’t talked about taking turns under the boat. He was the better swimmer, and he had been under the day before, so he knew what everything looked like.

I found an immediate use for the cushion. I put it between my crotch and the motor. I would take a hit from a wave and slam forward, and there was almost no pain. It was like having a protective cup in football. When I smashed up against the engine, at least now it was tolerable.

“God, that’s so much better,” I told Will. He was so amazing to think of others ahead of himself.

I
N EARLY AFTERNOON
, a giant Coast Guard plane flew directly over us. It was orange and white and seemed bigger and fatter than a 747. And it seemed to be flying slow. It came from behind us and it seemed so close that I could almost throw a baseball that high. If I had a flare, I felt like I would have hit the plane.

We swung our life jackets again. We knew the plane couldn’t stop like a helicopter and hover. We knew that it wouldn’t drop anything for us. But we were excited: “We got it, we got it!” we hollered. “They found us! This is it!”

We yelled, “Thank you, God!” We were just hoping they had marked our exact location, our precise longitude and latitude. We
knew they saw us. Or we hoped they did. Surely, they would send someone back to pick us up. Then we saw nothing for probably two hours. That was a complete buzzkill. Here was our chance to get out of it. Two out of four of us, anyway. And now, nothing.

“They had to see us,” I said to Will. “There’s no way they couldn’t see us.”

The plane had flown straight for a long distance. It didn’t change directions. Maybe the pilots were distracted at that particular moment they flew over us, I thought grimly. Maybe one of the Coast Guards was going to the bathroom or not looking down. They’ll probably head back to shore now to refuel, I thought. I was pissed.

We had been in the water almost twenty-four hours. At this point, we were both feeling defenseless, feeling like we were just waiting to die. Neither of us said it out loud, but we both felt like there was nothing more for us to do. We really just had to sit there and wait.

“Please, God,” I said. “I’ll do anything. Please, God.”

A while later, as we crested a wave, Will said, “Is that land over there?”

We went back and forth.

“I don’t know,” I said.

We kept talking. We had been awake for almost thirty-six hours. We were cold and starving. Were we hallucinating, too?

“I don’t know if I’m frickin’ losing it or what,” I said to Will.

“Dude,” he said. “I think that’s land.”

It was about midafternoon. We kept looking, trying to convince ourselves that we weren’t imagining this. We went back and forth for ten minutes. We rode up one wave, then another, trying to stand slightly off the hull to get a view from higher up. It looked like some taller buildings, maybe off of a beach. They appeared to be seven or eight miles away. They were tall, rectangular buildings, or almost like big drums or a water tower. Cylinder-shaped.

The Coast Guard would later say that it was highly unlikely that we saw land. Maybe it was a passing freighter or cargo ship. At that moment, though, desperate for hope, after ten minutes of going back and forth, we decided it was land. Now, what were we going to do about it?

“Dude, do we take a chance on it?” Will said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how far that is.”

“Well, it’s at least five miles,” he said. “If we’re drifting toward that way, if we can swim a couple miles per hour, we’ll be there before it’s dark.”

I wasn’t concerned that Will was too tired after diving under the boat again. He was a terrific swimmer. And we were desperate.

For another half hour we debated whether to swim for it. We hadn’t seen a plane in a while. The sun never really poked out. If we stayed with the boat, maybe things would get worse than they already were. The waves were straight swells, one after another. We were able to stay on the boat for the most part. Every twenty minutes or so, a random wave would come and knock us off. But it was much better than before.

Finally, Will said, “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

I asked again about sharks.

“Do you think sharks can get us?” I asked Will.

“I don’t think so, no,” he said.

I knew there were sharks out there. We had caught some on our trip. Small ones, but they were still sharks.

I asked him about the blood from our legs. We were bleeding from being tossed around so much and banging ourselves on the motor. I could see blood on the boat. Will only had his swimsuit on and a T-shirt under his life jacket. His legs were bleeding. I knew it was a possibility that could attract sharks. You always hear about that stuff.

“It’s too rough,” Will said. “They’re not going to come up this high.”

That made sense. I dropped it from my mind.

But there was something else to worry about. If we tried to swim, how would we stay together in the water?

I got an idea. There was a black wire connected to the motor. The steering cable, I guessed. I thought it connected to the helm. I started pulling it. It took all my strength, but I yanked it through the keel six inches at a time and tore one end free. Then I cut the other end off, slicing it on the propeller. It had lots of little wires inside. It seemed similar to the wire used for cable TV.