Between Here and the Horizon

by Callie Hart

  “All right, Linneman. Let’s get her in the water.” The two men picked up the boat via the plastic strapping on the side of the vessel, and then hurried it down to the water. “Lift!” Sully yelled. “Walk her out past the break!”

  That made sense. The waves were still high, still rough. If they tried to drive the boat out, they were going to be smashed back time and time again. With the boat hoisted above the water, resting on Sully and Linneman’s shoulders, they lifted it every time a wave crashed against the shore, threatening to push them back inland. Soon they were shoulder deep in water, out past the break, and they lowered the boat into the water. Sully vaulted into the boat, holding out his hand to help Linneman in after him.

  “Be careful!” Linneman’s wife shouted. And then, under her breath, “Lord, please be careful. I don’t think I can watch.”

  Sully levered the boat’s small engine down into the water and cranked it; I couldn’t decide whether the fact that it started immediately was reassuring, or if it would have been better for the thing to have failed and left them sitting there on top of the water.

  Sully was a machine. Efficient. Fearless. Determined. He didn’t look back at the shore once. They tore off away from land, the boat bouncing along the water like a skipping stone every time it hit a patch of rough water. Mrs. Linneman started crying.

  I ran back to the car as quickly as I could—the children were both still passed out, thank god. I grabbed Connor’s old binoculars and then raced back to the shore, frantically scanning through the lenses to find Sully and Linneman, but all I could see was roiling, angry, gray sea, and roiling, angry, gray sky, and my heart wouldn’t stop hammering in my chest.

  Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. Twenty.

  No sign of the boat. No sign of anyone in the water. Michael and his friend were helping Ambulance Guy, who had finally woken up and was swabbing the cuts on his face from a medical bag at his feet. Nausea twisting through me like a snake, I headed down the pier again, counting the steps, trying not to panic.

  “How deep is the water?” I demanded. “They’re not that far out. Why haven’t any of the men been able to swim back to shore yet?”

  Michael opened his mouth and then closed it again, apparently frustrated. “It’s not that simple, Ophelia.”

  “The water’s very deep,” the guy cleaning his cuts said. “The whole island was volcanic. The land falls away straight down underneath the water. Cliffs, dropping for hundreds of feet. And how far can you swim, Miss?”

  “I don’t know. Over six hundred feet, that’s for sure.”

  “In open water? In a storm? In the freezing cold? And in the dark? I don’t think so.”

  That shut me up pretty quickly. He was right. Maybe in a swimming pool I could swim for six hundred feet. Further. But with conditions the way they were out there…

  “If the men went into the water, they probably would have tried to swim into shore, but they never would have made it. The water’s too rough, but more importantly it’s freezing cold. You can only survive a matter of minutes in water like that.” Whoever this guy was, his attitude stank. He barely looked at me as he spoke, dabbing a cotton pad angrily against his lip. He was around my age, late twenties, and his Boston accent told me he wasn’t a local.

  Michael put a hand on my arm, warning me with his eyes—probably not a good idea for you to be here right now. If circumstances were different, I’d give this guy as good as he got, but I was exhausted. And looking for Sully and Linneman was far more pressing a task. I slipped by the men and walked all the way down to the end of the pier, holding each breath for five steps, holding each breath for as long as I could, as if that might somehow help.

  I peered through the binoculars, scanning the sea, and I waited. The gray and white and black stretched on forever. Eventually, I saw something moving through the water. A boat? No, a rock. No, definitely…it was the boat. Tearing inland, I couldn’t track it well enough at first to see how many men were on board. And then I could make out the shape of one man. Just one. The boat was too far out to tell who it was: Linneman, Sully, or someone else entirely. I took off at a sprint, crashing down the pier, past Michael and the other two guys, back down onto the beach.

  The boat was coming in fast. It slowed as it approached the shore and the break, but it was still traveling at a rate of knots. Cutting through the white caps and the rollers, it almost rocketed straight out of the water when it hit land. Linneman was first over the side of the boat.

  “Quickly. Get them out,” he yelled.

  Hands everywhere. Bodies, pushing and shoving. Ice cold water spilling over into my shoes, feet instantly tingling with pain. Water up to my knees, and then up to my waist.

  “Ophelia, get back. We can handle it. We’ve got them. Please!” Michael, shoving me back to the shore. I stumbled, fell down in the wash. Hands helping me up, and then bodies being lifted over the side of the boat.

  Cold.

  So cold.

  Soaked.

  Lifeless.

  “Does anyone know CPR?” Linneman was shouting. “Someone, start checking for pulses.”

  Then Sully.

  He was drenched, hair plastered to his head, breathing hard, his thin white t-shirt stuck to his check, rucked up at the back, exposing two long, bloody scrapes, and a patch of angry red skin. He jumped over the side of the boat, and then somehow managed to lift another man out behind him, throwing him over his shoulder like a sack of wet cement. The moment he saw me, he started to run through the water in my direction.

  “Don’t just stand there, Lang. Come on. Rally.” Grabbing me by the arm with his free hand, he started dragging me out of the water after him. I tripped and stumbled, barely kept up, but then I was on my knees in the sand, ears full of water, and Sully was taking my hands and placing them on the lifeless man he’d laid out in front of me.

  “Like this,” he said. “Link your hands together and compress. Up and down, up and down. Don’t stop until I get back.”

  I pumped my interlinked hands up and down on the guy’s chest like he showed me, stunned, unable to breathe a word, and Sully ran back the way we’d come. His shoes were gone, feet bare. Had he taken them off in the boat? Had he lost them in the ocean? There was blood on my arm. Blood on the sand next to me where he’d just been standing.

  One, two, three, four.

  One, two, three, four.

  One, two, three, four.

  One, two, three, four.

  I kept up with the compressions, not daring to stop. The roar of the boat’s engine shuttered into life again, and when I twisted, looking back over my shoulder, Sully and Linneman were already lifting the boat on their shoulders again, heading back out past the break.

  “They’re going back out?” I looked around, searching for someone to tell me what the hell was going on, but the people on the beach were frantically running to cars, carrying blankets, carrying bodies, administering CPR like I was, and no one heard me.

  One, two, three, four.

  One, two, three, four.

  One, two, three, four.

  One, two, three, four.

  I looked down into the man’s face lying before me. His lips were blue, parted, showing white teeth. His skin was worn like leather. Late sixties? Early seventies? How many storms had he weathered out on these waters? How many times had he nearly lost his life and won it back?

  I fell into a trance. I kept pumping my hands up and down on the stranger’s chest until my arms burned and ached, and I felt like I couldn’t go on another moment, and then I carried on some more.

  Another ambulance arrived, and then a sound, like the beating of a drum, like the racing of my heart, a paddle thumping at the air, everyone looking up, looking relieved. An air ambulance, bright red and white, descending from the heavens like a wrathful archangel. EMTs poured out of the chopper, jump bags over their shoulders, scattering across the beach.

  “Ma’am? Ma’am, thank you. If you could step back for a moment, I c
an take a look at him now.” The young guy standing in front of me didn’t look old enough to professionally save lives. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, though, as he dropped to his knees and began checking vitals.

  “No pulse. How long have you been administering CPR, ma’am?”

  The sky seemed to break open, and a bright, white light lanced down through the grim morning, illuminating the beach briefly before the clouds pressed in again.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Hmm?”

  “How long have you been administering CPR for?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Was he awake when he was brought out of the water?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. This man’s dead. Can I check you over? Have you been in the water?”

  “No, no, I’m fine. I—” My brain wasn’t working. Everything was snapshots, stills, shunting and jumping around, hard to focus on. The EMT wrapped a blanket made of a silver, crinkly material around my shoulders and sat me down on a bench by the pier.

  “Stay here, ma’am. Someone will be over to check on you in just a moment, okay?” The young EMT raced off, and I sat, trying to piece together what was happening.

  It was a long, long time before the boat came back again.

  When it did, I watched as Sully and Linneman dragged another five men from the boat, through the break, and onto the beach.

  “I can’t fucking believe it,” one of the EMTs said. “The guy in the white shirt swam out for all of them. He went in after every single one of them.”

  “That’s Sully Fletcher,” another said.

  “Ronan Fletcher’s brother?”

  “S’right.”

  “Huh. I guess heroics runs in the family.”

  I didn’t hear anything else. I watched as Sully raced back and forth up the beach, trying to coordinate everyone, brushing his wet hair back out of his eyes, ripping his wet shirt off over his head to hold the drenched material to an elderly guy’s forehead, applying pressure. I watched him secure the boat, pulling it into shore, the muscles in his back straining and popping as he worked—he was hurt pretty badly, his skin scraped and red and bloody. I watched as he helped lift a guy onto a stretcher, and then I watched as he buckled at the knees and fell to the ground, his eyes rolling back in his head.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Good Samaritan

  “It’s nowhere near as bad as they thought, apparently. Just a simple case of hypothermia. They’re bringing him back to the medical center later on tonight.”

  “God, it’s crazy that there isn’t a proper hospital on the island. Crazy.” It had been even crazier watching Sully being choppered off the island with the three surviving crew of the Sea King. In total, Sully had actually dragged eleven men from the water, but eight of them had either been dead already or died on the beach.

  Rose was making chicken soup, and I was teaching the children arithmetic and English at the dining room table. Amie was completely oblivious to the events of last night. Connor had slept through Sully’s arrival and hadn’t woken up until the chopper arrived, so he’d only caught a part of the rescue. He hadn’t seen Sully at all, thank god. A guy tearing up and down the beach, the spitting image of Ronan? That would have raised more than a few questions, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to handle the monumental task of explaining Ronan’s twin brother just yet. Connor kept asking if he could go and look at the wreckage of the Sea King that was still washing up in pieces on the beach. I was too scared to let him. Six men were still missing, presumed dead, and the last thing I needed was to take him down there, only to have a bloated, mangled corpse roll up onto the sand.

  “I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t come down to the dock,” Rose was saying. “I saw all the lights and the cars zipping down the road, but it was just so cold. I couldn’t face it. Everyone’s still talking about it. Most excitement we’ve had around here in a very long time.” Rose paused, shooting me a sidelong glance that I felt burning into me rather than saw. “I also may have heard that you were quite upset about you know who,” she said slyly. We were being careful not to mention Sully’s name in front of the children. “Any truth in that?”

  “Yeah, sure, I was definitely upset. He’d just risked his life out there in that tiny boat. He’d been in and out of the water so many times. I think everyone was worried about him.”

  “Hmm. That’s not how Michael Gilford said he saw it. He said you were hysterical. Started screaming at the EMTs to do their jobs. Running up and down the beach like a woman possessed. He said you looked like you were on the verge of picking up our belligerent friend and carrying him off home yourself.”

  “Psshh. Ridiculous.”

  Rose laughed softly under her breath, pinching salt out of her hand and dumping it into the bubbling vat in front of her on the stove. “Poor Michael. Every time a woman steps foot on the island, he takes a shine to her. And then she ends up falling in love with you know who, and that’s that.”

  “I am not in love with you know who.”

  Amie’s head snapped up, eyes shining, distracted from the piece of paper in front of her, where she had been diligently practicing copying the letters of the alphabet over and over again. “You’re in love?” she asked, mouth hanging open. “That’s really gross, y’know. That means you have to kiss a boy with your mouth open.”

  “You’re right, that does sound gross,” I agreed. “But don’t worry. Rose is wrong. I’m not in love.”

  “Good. Because I don’t think boys and girls should kiss. I think they shouldn’t even hold hands really. It’s not hygentics.”

  “Hygienic?”

  Amie shook her head. “Hygentics. Big germs grow all over boys. When you touch them, they get their germs all over you.”

  “I see.”

  Rose did her best not to laugh, while Connor rolled his eyes. “Girls have just as many germs as boys, Amie.”

  She ducked her head, went back to drawing the stalk of a very tall T. “I don’t think so. Mommy always smelled nice, like flowers. Felia and Rose, too. You smell like dog butts.”

  “You’ve never even smelled a dog butt.”

  “I have. I smelled you.”

  “All right, you two. Why don’t you concentrate on your school work, and then you can go play a game or something.”

  “Outside?” Connor looked way too hopeful. I knew as soon as I let him out the front door, he’d be running to the cliff face with his binoculars to scan the rocks below for debris from the Sea King.

  “It’s freezing outside, and it’s still raining. I’m sorry, sweetheart. Maybe tomorrow, if the weather’s a little better.” And they’ve cleared up the macabre evidence of the accident that took place last night.

  My response didn’t make him happy at all. “Whatever. I can’t wait until we can go to school properly. At least then we’ll get to be outside sometimes.”

  “Only two more weeks,” I agreed. If he wanted me to be offended that he’d rather go to school than stay at home with me, then he was going to be sorely disappointed. I loved teaching them their lessons, but it wasn’t good for them to be cooped up around adults all the time. Both of them needed to be around other children, like normal kids. This big old house with its empty bedrooms and winding hallways, though beautifully decorated and comfortable beyond measure, wasn’t an appropriate playground for children.

  “Will you go and see him?” Rose said out of the blue.

  “Who?”

  She quirked one eyebrow at me, sighing. “You know who.”

  “Oh, god. No. Why on earth would I do that?”

  “Because it might be nice for him to see a friendly, familiar face. I doubt anyone else on the island is going to be stopping by to check on him.”

  “I doubt he considers my face either friendly or familiar, Rose. We’ve spoken on a handful of occasions, and every single time he’s been an ass, and I’ve been angry. I’m probably the last person he’d want visiting h
im while he’s recuperating.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” she said, stirring the soup faster and faster, as though she wasn’t really paying attention to what she was doing. “I think people underestimate him. I think he can be capable of kindness. Then again, I think he also feeds on bickering with people, so he’d probably enjoy a good sniping session with you. It’d have him on his feet in no time.”

  “Are you going to visit him?”

  Rose stopped what she was doing and fully turned around to face me, horror on her face. “Hell no. That man’s as ornery as a bear with its head stuck in a trap, especially when he’s sick. You couldn’t pay me to step foot into that medical center.”

  ******

  Call me a glutton for punishment, but later that night I found myself pushing open the medical center doors, trying to figure out if I wanted to bolt and run, or if I really did want to ask the nurse at the reception desk which room Sully was in and pay him a visit.

  Rose had stayed with the kids. I was so glad Ronan hadn’t really fucked me over and left me to do this entirely on my own. Ronan had been a single father for a little over a year, but he’d had two nannies on rotation at all times, running them around to whatever class or recital they needed to be at, watching over them while he was working, making their meals for them and generally taking care of business. Without Rose’s help, I would have been drowning. There were plenty of people out there taking care of their kids all by themselves, and I was sure they were doing a fine job. I admired them, in fact, but I was a firm believer that it took a village to raise children, and I was willing to take all the help I could get.

  The medical center was a quiet, sterile place. Single story, the size of a typical outpatient clinic. The walls of the waiting area were plastered with such greats as, “Causeway General Medical Center is not equipped to deliver babies. At the first signs of labor, please head directly to the mainland to receive medical attention at a suitable facility,” and “Chest pains? Our out-of-hours service runs from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., Monday through Thursday. Please feel free to call for a consultation with a registered nurse.”