Now, she could see Alex clearly, his head tipped back and to the side on the collar of his life jacket, his arms loose in the water, the jacket’s light on his shoulder. He seemed still ten metres away until a wave picked them up and hurtled them towards the rocks, and suddenly, Alex was right off the stern.
“Got him!”
Travers was hanging off the rear deck, his leg hooked in a rope, the muscles in his arm bunching as he gripped the pole. Erin held their position as Travers hauled Alex aboard, his body limp inside his orange life jacket, and the rocks danced only metres away.
Alex didn’t move. Erin stared in horror, looking for signs of life. Anything to tell her he was really okay. That this hadn’t just happened.
“Erin, move it!” yelled Travers.
She snapped back in. Her hand was on the throttle, gunning the motors and sending them thudding back into the open sea. She had to watch the water ahead, steering them through the channel as the rain beat into her face. She could only hear Travers grunts and curses as he worked around Alex, but she had no idea what he was doing until they finally broke the line back into the bay and the swell diminished. Then she saw Travers had Alex flat on his back, his jacket and shirt torn away, his hands spread on his chest, elbows locked.
Her hand shook as she groped for the radio. “Great Haven, Great Haven, Great Haven,” she began.
“Erin?” Sandy’s voice crackled over the radio, distraught. “We thought you were—”
“Call an evac right now,” Erin cut in, cold cutting in the spaces between her words. “We found him.”
Chapter 24
It seemed the whole town were waiting at the jetty, half of them in raincoats, the others simply letting the storm soak them. The rain was falling steadily, but at least the wind was nothing like it was outside the bay.
Skye and Anna had pushed to the front of the crowd, and with Sandy they were shooing people to make room, and throwing spare fenders over the jetty edge to cushion the boat. Erin parked ungracefully, the inflatable fenders groaning as the sea shoved them into the wooden piles. Travers was barking instructions, his hair slicked with rain and sweat. Three men managed to transfer Alex onto a stretcher and then up onto the jetty while Travers kept up the CPR.
Erin hugged herself, numb with cold shock. She watched her mother slide in on the other side, keeping pace with Travers, then taking over to give him a rest. Then Travers was on the radio as other people formed a ring to hold a tarp over them all. But Alex still didn’t move. Erin’s body was unresponsive, too, stiff with disbelief. She had no idea what was going on. Anna had her head tilted over Alex’s mouth, her fingers at his neck while Travers dug in a first-aid bag. Erin had seen Alex move like that himself, the night that Helmut had been sick. Her father, too, long ago, when someone was gravely ill. She felt she was back in those last hours with him on the Pacific Ocean, the sky so full of stars, being dragged unwilling through a night of unretractable change.
Finally, Skye’s voice broke through, her sister’s hand shaking her shoulder. “Erin. Travers thinks he has a heartbeat again. Erin?”
Erin finally snapped her gaze from Alex’s blue lips to Skye’s face, so oddly alive and warm.
“The evac plane has to wait for the storm to pass, but they’ll be here as soon as they can. Are you going with them. Erin?”
The shake was harder this time. “Yes,” Erin croaked. Her voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else. Desperate for a sign, she wrenched her eyes around to Bella’s Leap, but no one was there now. Only the tendrils of mist over the rocks, and the foaming sea below.
Two hours passed before they reached the mainland hospital, by which time Erin was feeling the full horror of what had happened. A female doctor spoke to them for five minutes before disappearing back to Alex, and then Erin couldn’t remember a word she’d said.
Skye put an arm around her. Her mother sat on her other side, a steady comfort, somehow knowing to say nothing. Travers collapsed in a chair across from them, his big hands tremoring as they held his head. The waiting room TV in the corner played the news with subtitles. Even the triage nurse seemed subdued. Everyone seemed to grasp the gravity of what had happened.
“What did she say again?” Erin whispered. “I was trying to listen but—”
A tear slicked down her cheek. Her body seemed outside her control, crying and shaking without permission.
“He’s in surgery,” Anna said gently, rubbing warmth into Erin’s arms. “He had a head injury, probably from the boom, and they need to relieve the pressure on his brain.”
“After that, they’ll take him to intensive care,” Skye added.
“Is he going to die?”
Skye and Travers exchanged a look that said they were trying to think of what to say without admitting defeat.
“His heartbeat came back, Erin. And he was breathing on his own,” Travers said. “Those are good signs. Plus, it was cold in the water. That can help.”
But.
Erin heard the unsaid qualification. But none of that could matter. But no matter how much you want him to wake up, he won’t. Her father was going to die tonight and it was her fault.
Erin shook herself, shooting up out of her seat, out of her mother’s grasp. She rushed out of the waiting room, through the front doors and into the gathering night. The sky was still clouded over, not a star to be seen. Alex. She meant Alex. Not her father. That night was done with. But she felt the despair of knowing it would never leave her, nor would the guilt of keeping it from Skye and her mother.
The next moment, a blanket came around her shoulders, heavy and warm, and the triage nurse appeared. Erin’s eyes dropped to her name tag: Wendy.
“There, now, you’re frozen,” Wendy said. “And you’re still wet through. I’m going to show you where the showers are and find you some dry clothes.”
Erin allowed herself to be led, as Wendy kept talking. “We’re all amazed at what you did. Alex is ... well, we all want him to recover. We’re all scared.”
None of the fussing touched the well of grief inside Erin, but it seemed to keep her moving. Soon she was in the shower, mechanistically warming in the spray, then drying and putting on the offered hospital scrubs. When she re-emerged, Travers had also changed, the small group in its huddle. Erin didn’t want to rejoin them, but then the female doctor appeared again. Erin finally remembered her name. Karen Bailey.
“He’s come through the surgery,” she told them, “and he’s in intensive care now where we can closely monitor his progress. We’re keeping him asleep for now with medication, until we’re sure that it’s safe to wake him up. We’ll also be doing scans to check there’s no more bleeding.”
“Can we see him?” Skye asked.
“It can be a bit cramped for room, and there’s lots of machines. It can be a bit confronting,” Dr Bailey said. “So it would be best if it’s just family and very close friends for now.”
All eyes turned to Erin.
Travers and Skye came with her. All the way to the door, she floated in a weird in-between of now and then. It wasn’t until she crossed into the intensive care space, with its ring of three curtained beds and the orderly central station, that she could push aside the long-ago images in her head. Of her father, appearing as though he was simply asleep and might wake at any moment, a cruel illusion when she knew he would never stir again.
Alex was nothing like that. He was swaddled in hospital blankets and diminished by the equipment around him – a tube in his mouth, ECG leads running to his chest, monitors showing his heart beat and blood pressure. A thick white bandage around his head. She sank into the hard chair beside the bed and sucked a breath of air that smelled of nothing at all.
His fingers were cold. Erin tried to remember what they’d felt like when they were warm. When he’d been part of her future. She feared she had to let him go, but she wasn’t ready. Just like she hadn’t been ready before.
And so she sat, hunched and unprepared, as the mi
nutes became hours, as the nurses came to take observations and asked gentle questions to which she shook her head. Nothing else could reach her now, because she knew how this would end. History repeating itself, just as it had for Alex.
He’d survived the sea once, but he wouldn’t again. And Erin was sure she would see two men die before their time.
The night deepened and the shift changed, but no one asked her to leave. The clock’s hands closed on midnight, then spread apart as morning began, and all the while Erin felt time retreating.
I’m ready, Erin.
She heard her father’s voice, waking her in the hour before dawn, as he had many times to go sailing. But this would be the last morning. They pulled up the anchor and left the bay, the only sounds from the gathering wind and waves.
It was that hour before dawn again now. Alex lay unchanged, maybe it would be the last dawn for him, too. Erin wanted to tell him before he went. She looked around. The station nurse was in the office with a large stack of charts. The other beds were empty.
“Alex,” she whispered. “I have to tell you something.”
Not a flicker. She didn’t know if he could hear, but suddenly it seemed only to matter that she was speaking. A tiny crack had formed in the walls around that last night, and words were flowing through it like water, widening and widening, until everything behind would be seen.
“My father was sick, Alex, but no one knew. He didn’t tell Mum or Skye. But he told me. He had pancreatic cancer. That’s the one that celebrities tell everyone they’re fighting, and that they’re going to beat, but they always die anyway. I was angry at him, because he didn’t want treatment. He said it was pointless. His cancer had already spread, and he would only have a few months. He didn’t want to spend them in hospitals.”
She paused, remembering the bizarreness of that time; their conversations late at night on the main beach, or on the boat, or in the surgery, but never in the house where someone could overhear. Erin hadn’t understood why he wouldn’t tell Skye, and he’d tried to explain what he’d seen on cancer wards in his work. That he didn’t want to be a patient after a lifetime of helping them. That he wanted freedom from the other side of the table, from pain and suffering. Erin had loved him deeply, and that love had forced her to respect his wishes, however much she disagreed with them. She tried to explain this to Alex.
“I don’t know if you would agree with him. Maybe you would,” she said softly. “But the hardest thing was when he told me he wanted to die. Not just wait for the cancer, but beat it to the punch. That’s how he put it.”
The tears were back again, fat drops that streaked down her cheeks.
“He knew all about the technical side of it. He had bottles and vials – I have no idea what they were. And he knew what he wanted – to be on the boat, somewhere the horizon was an unbroken circle around him. He called it the primordial ring, which was a bit of a joke, but not completely. The ocean was his first love and he was returning to it. That was the only part I understood at first.”
Erin remembered it, that calm stretch of water, the sky just lightening. The stars still sparkling in the sky. It’s time, Erin.
“Otherwise, at first I was horrified. He said he didn’t blame me, but that I should try to understand him. So I tried. He was already in pain. He’d watched so many patients die, I figured he should know more about it than me. He didn’t exactly ask me to help, but I realised that if I didn’t, I’d wake up one morning and find him gone. Then maybe we’d find the boat drifting somewhere without him, and never know what had really happened. Never be sure. If he’d been scared, or lonely, or …” She swallowed. “So I said I would go with him.”
“He tried to make me change my mind. It wasn’t legal to help, and he thought it was risky for me. But I told him he would need someone to help sail, and I didn’t want him to be alone. So we went on a long trip east into the Pacific, the last one ever. He was in a lot of pain by that point, and having trouble hiding it, but he’d wanted to wait for the right season. I could see how relieved he was as soon as we’d left the jetty – he didn’t have to pretend anymore. He’d told everyone he was doing some kind of shake diet because of all the weight he’d lost. But as we sailed down the channel, I remember him just lying back on the deck, watching the Leap, like he was trying to fix the island in his mind. And he was calm in a way he hadn’t been before then.
“Anyway, as we sailed, he waited for the right forecast: the possibility of storms. And on that last morning, the weather was finally right. He lay on the couch up on the back deck with the line stuck in his arm, watching the sun come up through the clouds. And then ...”
And then he was gone. Erin put her hands over her face, remembering. There had been a fog across her reality until that moment, as if she were acting out a part. Doing her job. But as soon as he was gone, the fantasy crumbled. Grief had come down on her like a house in an earthquake. Then had come anger, at him and herself, at a world that would make this the way things had to happen. And then, the loneliness. The great void that her father had left in her life.
Now, she sensed the void that Alex would leave, too. She kept talking, as if the words could keep that moment from arriving.
“He had planned everything, and I did what he had asked. I sailed towards a storm and a let him slip into the water. The storm was a bad one. I tore the sail coming back, surprised I didn’t lose the mast, too. I told the police in Fiji that he’d fallen over the side when we were in the middle of it. They searched, of course. I always expected that they’d find him. But they didn’t, and eventually the search was called off.
“I came home, but not for long. Mum’s face ... I couldn’t bear it. And I hated lying, even though Dad made me promise. So I left. I went as far away as I could and tried to forget. But the world isn’t big enough for that.”
Erin was aware she’d made a warm patch on Alex’s hand. She had a moment of hope, before she heard a squeak behind her. A shoe shifting on the floor. Erin whipped her hand around and pushed back the curtain. Skye stood there, her face frozen, two coffees forgotten in her hands.
“Skye—”
“How dare you,” she whispered.
“Skye—”
“Don’t!” she hissed, and she turned and ran, the coffees sloshing from their cups. Erin stared after her with eyes of sandy tears. Through the hall window, the sun was just breaking the horizon, a pastel streak of pale pink, promising a new and lovely day. But Erin couldn’t see how that was possible. Skye had heard what she had said, and now the secret was out.
Chapter 25
Erin caught up with Skye in the long hall that ran past the hospital’s cafeteria, its roller door still closed. At the end of the hall was the rear exit that led to the car park. A fluoro light flickered overhead.
“Skye, wait.”
Erin didn’t know what she would say if Skye actually stopped. Ask her to keep her mouth shut? Ask for understanding? She knew she could ask for neither.
So when her sister did stop, right under that flickering light, Erin was utterly speechless.
Skye stared at her, furious, her toe tapping. “So, nothing to say?”
Erin flinched. Skye’s tone cut like a flying guy-wire.
“I knew something was wrong,” Skye went on. “I knew it. I even asked you if Dad was all right, and you! You told me you had no idea what I was talking about!”
“That was what he wanted—”
“Bullshit! That’s not normal, Erin. Families are supposed to stick together. He must have been depressed. You should have told us!”
“He wasn’t depressed,” Erin said softly.
“He can’t have been thinking straight—”
“He knew exactly what he was doing, Skye.” Erin’s voice had found its own edge, like the icy wind of a winter’s squall. For the first time since it had all happened, she could accept she was responsible for what she hadn’t told. But she’d been there. She’d known her father, maybe better than anyone.
She wouldn’t have Skye projecting her own idea of what happened.
“He knew exactly,” she repeated. “He’d seen a specialist on the mainland. There was no option for surgery, no chance of a cure. He’d seen enough other people go through it. He didn’t want to die in a hospital!”
“You are deluded,” Skye spat. In the flickering light, her face was grey and pinched. She stabbed her finger into Erin’s shoulder. “You are not my sister.”
“Where are you going?” Erin called after her, terrified Skye would go straight to their mother without any thought for the consequences.
“To find someone who knows what family’s about,” Skye yelled back.
Erin found Travers still in the waiting area, half-asleep, wedged uncomfortably into a hard chair. Her mother was nowhere to be seen.
“What’s news?” he asked, cracking an eyelid.
Erin hardly heard him, searching around in her panic. Where was her mother?
Travers was fully awake in an instant. “What’s happened?”
Erin’s voice shook. “Skye’s stormed off mad and I don’t know where Mum is, and, and ...”
“Erin, stop,” he said gently. “She just went down to the bathroom.” He pulled Erin into a chair and tried to persuade her to tell him what had happened with Skye. Erin clamped her lips shut. She’d dared to speak it once, and look what had happened. She shoved her hands between her knees, and stared fixedly at the mute television in the corner, which was just starting up a vacuous morning show.
“Skye said she was going to find someone who knows what family’s about,” she said finally.
At this, Travers sighed. “Then she’ll be going straight to Mr Moneybags, you know that, right?”
“Tristan? After what he bloody did!”
“I don’t think anyone could convince her he’s not a nice person. I couldn’t, and my powers of persuasion used to be good.” He tried to smile. “I’m getting quite good at surviving this kind of thing. I’ll tell you the story of Katie some time.”
On a Starlit Ocean Page 24
