Red Sea (7 page)

“I
F YOU THINK
,” I
HURL
a bucket of water out of the cabin into the cockpit where it drains away, “that this changes anything,” I refill the bucket, “then you're crazy.” My arms are burning with the effort of hoisting bucket after bucket of water. “I have enough to do, thank you very much.”

I know she can't hear me. Even if she could, what's she going to do? Jump out of her bed and rescue us? Still, I talk to her. It fills the emptiness. “Yes, we have the radio. But the radio battery is low. Low, low, low.” My pail scrapes against the floor as I bail. I've got almost all of the water out of the boat. “And who knows where the charging unit is. Maybe
one of the pirates is putting it on his mantle right now, like a trophy.” I hoist the bucket out. “We have to get closer to our friends, closer to anyone, before we call for help.” No one is hearing us where we are. No one except the pirates. I quickly squelch that image. “So if you just want to lay there, fine. But don't expect me to keep you company. It's that simple.”

I remove the last of the water with a mop. At least I can see the floor again. The boat still looks like hell. I've managed to cram everything back into place, but it reminds me of cleaning up the house after a party when nothing looks quite like it did before. I found an opened package of cookies that escaped the water, and I take these and the milk carton and sit on the bench beside my mother.

“Yum. Hobnobs. You love these cookies.” I break a bit of the cookie into my mouth. The buttery sweetness makes my mouth water. Even the milk tastes good, and normally I hate Tetra Pak milk.
UHT
, ugly horrible taste, but it lasts forever. I eat the cookie, then pry another from the pack. “I'll try to save some for you.”

I lean back so that I can see her face. The cookie snaps in my fingers and the milk stops in my throat. Mom's eyes are wide open.

I swear, then say, “You startled me!” Her eyes swivel up to mine. “You're awake. That's very good.” I try to smile, but the ghostly color in her face makes it difficult. She doesn't speak and her eyes seem fixed and glazed.

“Mom?”

No response.

I grab a water bottle and hold it to her lips. “You must be thirsty. Have some water.” I squirt a small stream into her mouth.

Her eyes widen and she coughs, weakly at first, then she sucks a breath and coughs again. Her eyes fill; she draws one more interminably long breath, then finally clears the water from her throat.

“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I gave you too much.” I hold the water bottle against her lips. “I'll be more careful.” This time I dribble the water over her tongue and she swallows it. I hold my breath. Her forehead crinkles as if in pain, but she drinks slowly, fighting for every swallow, and she drinks the bottle down. Then her eyes close again.

“Mom?” I sweep the hair from her forehead. Louder this time, “Mom!” I press my hand against her forehead, willing her to open her eyes. Her head feels heavy, inert. She's out again.

My throat clenches and tears hit me so that I'm sobbing like a little kid.
“Mom!”
I want to crawl into the berth with her like I used to do a million years ago when I'd get into bed with her in the night and she'd put her arm around me and pull me against her, vanquishing whatever had sent me running in the dark.

I wipe my eyes on my shirt, sniff my nose. This is like every Disney movie, with the mother or father always getting offed, leaving the young on their own to face the perils of the wilderness or the wicked witch or whatever. Of course they're never all alone. Cinderella had the fairy godmother; Simba had the farting warthog. I'd take a
farting warthog right now, anything other than this being alone.

I climb out into the cockpit. The sun is directly over my head. Noon. There's no wind, although the waves wrench the boom back and forth over the cockpit. The pirates used a fishing net to foul our propeller. I know something about this because once, before we left Australia, Duncan backed down on a dock line that I'd left trailing in the water. It took Duncan over an hour in the water, diving down to the propeller, hacking away the rope, coming back up for a gulp of air, before he could start the engine again. In Australia, the water was so clear you could see the bottom. It was just one rope, not an entire net. Now, we're in the middle of the Red Sea. Goose bumps lift up on my arms.

There is nothing left of the mainsail, but I could unfurl the headsail, maybe, except that there's no wind.

“What do you expect of me, anyway?” I slam my fist against the side of the boat. “I'm fourteen. I can still fit into clothes from the kids' department.” My throat aches with fatigue and new tears threaten. “I could quit right now and no one would blame me. Not Dad, that's for sure.” Dad can get lost in a parkade. Dad says we're heroes for going on this trip. Especially me, he says, because I'm normal, not an adventure-crazed thrill-seeker. I'm not sure that Mom or Duncan fit that description either, but they definitely have more adventures than Dad. When we were together, Dad's idea of a high-risk experience was staying at a two-star hotel. The first thing Mom did after the divorce was take me camping in Mexico to see the pyramids. Dad made
me pack water-purification tablets, not that he needed to worry. Mom wouldn't let me even rinse my toothbrush with tap water.

I wonder what he's doing now, Dad? It's the middle of the night where he is.

I don't even know which rope is for the headsail. I study the jumble of multicolored ropes in the cockpit. “So much for neat-and-tidy, Duncan. I guess the storm undid your coils.” Each rope feeds through a cleat on the cabin roof. Each of these is labeled, of course. I find the cleat labeled
Mainsheet
and haul on that rope to secure the boom. The one marked
Headsail/Genoa
I begin to unravel from the others.

When Duncan unfurled the genoa, he did it at the same time as he pulled it in on one side of the boat or the other. That way the sail doesn't flail, which I guess is hard on the sailcloth. I know which ropes control the sail. (“Sheets, Lib, not ropes.” I get it, Duncan.) These feed through blocks on either side of the cockpit and have figure-eight knots in the ends. This was the first knot I learned to tie, the figure-eight stopper knot. Duncan taught me using a string of black licorice. Every knot I tied right I could bite off and eat. My mother hates black licorice. Duncan's not wild about it either. He bought it because I like it.

In the mess of ropes I find one sodden flare that disintegrates when I pick it up. I toss the ruined flare in the sea. I coil all the ropes, making sense of which go where, including the one attached to the top of the mainsail. This one is called a halyard, who knows why. If I lowered the mainsail, I could pack the rags of sail into the long canvas bag
attached to the boom. The pirates took Duncan's spare sails, so there's nothing to hoist in place of the tattered mainsail, but at least the useless sail would be out of the way and not making me crazy with the flapping. I've never done this job by myself either, but I've helped Duncan and my mother. They like to lower the sail into orderly folds that they flake evenly over the boom before drawing the bag around it. I'm not after beautiful sail stowage. I uncleat the halyard and let the rope fly.

About half the sail plummets into the cockpit, an immense expanse of tattered sailcloth that piles onto my head. Cursing, I mound it onto the boom and cram it down inside the canvas bag. The boom is higher than I'm tall, so I stuff the sail above my head, feeling with my hands where there's room to shove more sail. With each armful of sail-cloth I'm able to stow, more bursts free from the constraints of the bag. Finally, though, I can pull the rest of the sail down into the bag. As lumpy as I've stuffed the bag, it's impossible to pull the zipper closed to hold everything in place. Instead, I wrap the boom in three places with webbing straps. The bag looks like a giant snake that's eaten several distinct meals.

I turn my attention to the headsail. Furled, the genoa is wound into a tight roll at the bow of the boat. In a perfect world, it will unwind into a powerful, pulling wing. But it is not a perfect world, that much I know. I let slip the furling line.

There's not much wind, so the genoa uncoils like a flaccid flag. Optimistically, I winch it in on the left side of the
boat, cleating the genoa sheet, ready for the imaginary wind that will take me out of here.

Although, which way I should steer is not immediately clear. The gunman's bullets managed to miss the compass on the steering post. I remember from plotting the course with Emma that we're heading northwest, not that I'm going anywhere anyway. I flop down onto the cockpit bench. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I tip my head to rest on the back of the bench.

Each one of my muscles feels like an over-stretched rubber band. There must be several hundred muscles just in the back of my neck. The ones in my legs are denying all direction from my brain. Apparently, I even have muscles in my lungs, because the act of breathing is difficult.

The others in the flotilla will be wringing themselves out after the storm. Emma has her foul weather gear hung out to dry in the cockpit. Mac is making them lunch, a peppery omelet, maybe.

The thought of the eggs broken below, and Eggman, makes the milk in my stomach turn over.

They won't even know that we left port. They probably think we got an updated weather forecast and we were the smart ones to stay put, that we were snug on the seawall, fighting over whether “xerox” is a permissible Scrabble word, while they were fighting to keep their masts out of the sea.

As I sit here, Jimmy's wife is making
BLTS
with tomatoes from Djibouti, each tomato costing more than some workers make in a month, and Jimmy cleans the barrel of his
M
– 16, eyeing the horizon for the happy chance to unload it into someone.

I wouldn't mind if Jimmy chose Eggman and his boss. I really wouldn't.

We never should have left. We should have waited for the next flotilla. We'd never catch up with Emma and Mac, never see them again, but somehow I don't think we're going to anyway.

I never should have left my mother alone in the cockpit.

If I could use the engine, I could travel in the general direction of the flotilla. Not that I'd ever find them, even. I might be able to find a commercial ship, but if you believe Jimmy, they wouldn't respond to a radio call. Not that I can use the engine, not with the fish net wrapped around the propeller. Not that I'm going anywhere.

Not that Duncan or my mother can help me. This morning, my mother's sweatshirt smelled sour with blood. The smell reminded me of a meat shop we once went into, dim, with sawdust on the floor and the skinned carcasses of goats and sheep suspended from a low ceiling. My mother asked for lamb, and the butcher unhooked a small carcass and tossed it onto a wooden chopping block in the middle of his shop. With an immense knife he pried free a rack of ribs, rehung the rest of the lamb, then, with a cleaver, whacked the ribs into chops. Duncan told me to stand back, but I didn't, and bits of bone and blood hit my cheek.

With that image, the cookies and milk rise up in my throat, abate, then with a burning fierceness, burst out my mouth and nostrils, spraying the cockpit floor. I cough,
heave what's left and heave again. I haven't thrown up since second grade and I've forgotten how vomit scalds the nasal passages. I'm crying again, my nose running all down my face. I bring my feet up out of the mess, onto the bench, bending my knees under my chin. My hands smell of vomit. I want someone to come and clean me up. I want someone to deal with the toss. Tossed cookies, literally. The movement of the boat is sloshing the puddle back and forth on the floor of the cockpit.

I grab the bucket Mom keeps tied to the stern rail, drop it over the side to fill it, haul it in, and slosh the cockpit mess out over the transom. Bending over the rail to refill the bucket, I stop myself from looking at the sea, at the inevitable panic I feel at the thought of falling in.

With the mess finally gone, I collapse onto the cockpit bench. Next time I'll just hurl into the bucket. That's what Mom does. On passage, the green bucket is her best friend. She carries it with her like a handbag.

Duncan says, or Duncan said, I mean, that fear can make a person seasick. I don't think of my mother as a fearful person. Cautious, for sure, and a bit manic when it comes to germs, worms and things you can catch from doorknobs. I remember once when I was really little grossing her out in a public washroom by crawling on my hands and knees under the cubicle doors. Apparently, and I know this because when I emerged from my commando crawl, she drilled it into my head for the full five minutes that she scoured my hands: The highest concentration of germs in a bathroom is not on the toilet seat, or even the bowl, but on the floor. I have no
idea how this can be, but I still wouldn't test the theory by touching a toilet seat in a public washroom.

Ty, once, at McDonald's, followed me into the women's restroom. It made me laugh the way he just walked in like it was perfectly normal and acceptable. I don't think anyone even noticed, and if they did, Ty wouldn't have cared. In the tiny stall, I wondered if I'd ever get the knees of my jeans clean and if people would be able to tell from my jeans what I'd done.

Duncan says, or said, that what doesn't kill you makes you strong.

I reach for the bucket again.

T
HE ONSET OF NIGHT MAKES
me anxious. I'm not afraid of the dark, but it's unnerving, not being able to see. I'll find myself constantly reaching for a light switch. Since mid-afternoon, Mom has been making noises in her sleep, little moans that have increased in volume. She's woken a few times, and I was able to give her a little water. I had to change her quilt. When I unwrapped her to check her leg wounds, I found that she'd peed herself. I managed to get a pair of shorts on her and improvised a diaper with sanitary pads. This should test how much these things really hold. Mom's gunshot wounds look about the same except
now there's more weeping fluid. I washed the wounds and covered them with clean dressings. Then with fresh water I washed her, head to toe, and brushed the snarls out of her hair. Afterward I turned her in her berth and wrapped a dry quilt around her. She cried out when I turned her and woke long enough to drink some. She feels a little warm, but I might be imagining that.