A Crack in the Sea

by H. M. Bouwman

  “He was a handful. I think he almost drove his parents crazy, the number of times he did dangerous things without thinking about consequences. Wildness was his big flaw, your grandfather once said.” Uncle Truc grinned. “But it wasn’t really a flaw. Probably it’s what made him a great pilot.”

  “I can see that,” yawned Mai, curled nearby. “Guts.”

  Thanh nodded, deep in thought.

  8

  THE LITTLE boat drifted through a day of nothing: no rain, boats, or land, nothing to save the six passengers. Part of the time, Mai sat with Uncle Hung, and part of the time, she sat beside Thanh, holding his hand. Sang often sat beside him, too. No one spoke.

  Thanh thought about how the world would keep going after they died, and death didn’t sound as bad anymore now that he was so, so tired and thirsty, and the sun was beating down so hard, and the undrinkable water flashed and winked around them. His father had been Christian and his mother Buddhist; he himself wasn’t sure what would happen to him after he died, but he thought there was a good possibility that it would be better than what was happening to him right now.

  And maybe in the afterlife he’d get another hug from his mother. And he’d see his father again, somehow. His father, who’d also messed up as a kid. And maybe Thanh would have a chance to forgive his father—“Forgotten,” he’d say, just as Uncle Truc had—for the hard words his father had spoken. His own regrets still fresh, Thanh understood that his father must have felt terrible about leaving him with I’m disappointed in you hanging between them.

  Maybe, Thanh realized, he didn’t need to wait until after he died to forgive his father. Maybe it was enough to think Forgotten now. Maybe it was important that he forgive his father in this world—so that in the next, they could meet with nothing standing between them.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT the sea settled to a deep calm, and all the young people slept, exhausted. Uncle Truc periodically scooped water; but mostly he sat with his brother, holding his hand and watching the stars. Thanh, waking up off and on through the night, saw Uncle Truc’s lean body folded next to his stocky older brother, head tipped back against the boat’s side; and then Thanh would watch the stars, too, until he fell asleep again.

  In the early morning, Sang woke up and bailed while Uncle Truc dozed. Thanh got up then, too, careful to let Mai and The Turtle keep sleeping. The water was calm as calm could be. Maybe Mai should sleep a long time.

  “We’re on some kind of current. It’s moving us,” Uncle Truc said.

  “How can you tell?” Sang asked.

  “Hung saw it. He said either we’re moving or the stars are out of alignment. I think it’s us.”

  “You think the current will bring us to land?” Thanh asked. He could barely get out the words, his mouth was so dry.

  Uncle Truc shook his head. “I don’t know anything about ocean currents, and neither does Hung. But he can read stars a bit. And he thinks we’re going in a great big circle.”

  • • •

  AS IT turned out, they weren’t drifting in a circle. Not exactly.

  After Mai and The Turtle woke up (and the water grew choppier again, though no one mentioned it), Uncle Truc took a nap. By the time he woke up again, the day had turned warm and sunny—a perfect day if you weren’t aboard a little boat with no food and water and very little shade. They did feel a breeze, however: the boat skimmed over the water, the wind blowing on their faces as they cut through the waves.

  Uncle Hung, who’d been napping off and on all morning, waved his brother over. “I don’t have proof,” he said, “but I feel like our circle is getting smaller.”

  Uncle Truc stood tall in the boat and looked all around, shading his eyes and weaving a little with the waves. “You’re right,” he said. “We’re spiraling inward.”

  “How can you tell?” Sang asked, cuddling The Turtle, who wanted her father.

  Uncle Truc picked up his daughter, kissing her forehead and murmuring to her. “Tuyet, my sweet turtle.” He looked at Sang, but spoke loud enough for all to hear. “I can see the center.” His long face had never looked so grim.

  • • •

  UNCLE HUNG had heard of such a thing: it was called a maelstrom, and it pulled things into it. He didn’t sound hopeful. There was no joke in his voice.

  Now, when Thanh stood up, he too could see the center. They were spiraling in, steadily drawing closer, like soap bubbles swirling around a sink drain.

  “What happens when—when we get to the middle?” Mai asked. Her face was calm, but her body coiled ready to spring, just as when the pirates came. Thanh knew this meant she was scared.

  He took her hand and squeezed it. She squeezed back.

  “I don’t know what happens,” said Uncle Hung. “I’ve never heard about maelstroms from anyone who survived one—never firsthand.” He paused and placed his hand on his injured side. “I think we go down.” Then he reached up and tousled his adopted niece’s fuzzy head with his free hand. “It’s a bit discouraging to go down now—I was just starting to feel better.”

  Mai smiled at Uncle Hung, that slow burning of light across her face. She squeezed Thanh’s hand again. Thanh decided not to let go, ever, for as long as she needed him.

  “Well,” Uncle Truc said. “If nothing else, it will be an adventure.”

  “And I could not think of better people to have such an adventure with,” said Uncle Hung.

  Thanh hoped that Sang would say something brave, too, to represent their family. He knew that he could not come up with anything.

  “When we—reach the center . . . ,” she said. And she couldn’t speak. Sang, who always said and did the right thing, couldn’t speak.

  “It’ll be an adventure, like Uncle Truc said.” Thanh realized he could be in charge this once, for Sang. “It’ll be a great story,” he added. With his free hand he reached for his sister’s and took it, gently.

  “A great story.” She smiled at Thanh, her chin wobbling.

  Mai stood up, suddenly, as if she’d made a decision. She held her hands out to Uncle Truc. “Give me The Turtle.” Said in her slow, caramel voice, the words were nonetheless an order.

  Uncle Truc frowned a question at her.

  “I can’t explain.” Her face, calm as always, but her hands outstretched, shaking. “I need to hold Tuyet. It’s important.”

  Uncle Truc gaped at Mai. She sounded like herself, still the slow, low-voiced drawl, but more commanding than usual.

  The Turtle batted at her father’s chest and reached for the spiky-haired girl. “Mai-Mai!”

  Though two years old, The Turtle spoke only rarely, only a few words. It was the first time she’d said Mai’s name. Slowly Uncle Truc handed his daughter to Mai, Sang handed her the wrap, and Mai tied the baby securely to her own hip. The Turtle took a fistful of Mai’s oversize red T-shirt and sighed as if she were exactly where she wanted to be.

  “Now,” Mai said, taking Thanh’s hand again. “We should all hold hands.”

  It wasn’t a suggestion.

  “Right away, people,” she said. “Make a circle.”

  “Okay. But why?” Sang asked. She took her brother’s hand on one side and Uncle Hung’s on the other.

  “I just know,” Mai said. “In my gut. That we should hold hands. Whatever happens to us—live or die—we live or die together.”

  “That’s a good plan,” Uncle Hung said, reaching for his brother.

  Uncle Truc slowly nodded.

  Mai reached out her free hand for Uncle Truc. “Circle up.”

  And they did, all of them.

  • • •

  WHEN THEY arrived at the heart of the maelstrom, the center of the draining sink, the boat was sucked downward and immediately cracked to pieces. To scraps: the force of the maelstrom broke it into shards that arrowed down into the depths of the o
cean and disappeared. The six people—all holding hands except the baby, who was tied to Mai’s hip—might also have flown into shards, but the handholding was so strong, so fierce, that it was as if they’d fused together, as if they moved and thought as one.

  However.

  No one could breathe.

  The water sucked them down and pressed them together, yanking them under. No air. Tiny chips of wood splintered against them, leaving trails of scratches on their legs, as if they’d run through brambles.

  Thanh closed his eyes when he was sucked under, so his first seconds were pure sensation: cold water, a crushing need to breathe, slivers and scrapes, a powerful tugging downward, strong hands holding hands.

  He opened his eyes. If he were drowning, he might as well see it as not.

  He peered downward, through all their flailing legs toward the bottom, to see what was pulling at the water and at them.

  The vortex seemed to head straight down to nothing, to empty sand. What was causing it wasn’t clear.

  But on either side of the vortex, just outside the swirling water and debris, two . . . things. He must be already dead—or on the way to dead and hallucinating. Because these weren’t things from this world.

  One was a monster. Enormous.

  He could see it through the water, murky but real, almost glowing in the green light that filtered down toward them. It sat on a sandbar on the bottom of the ocean, not far below them, near the swirling maelstrom that had no beginning point. The monster was something like a squid, but flatter on top. And so, so much larger than a squid, with massive tentacles and one visible eye, closed as if sleeping. It was a squid the way a skyscraper was a shack. The way Saigon was a village. The way the North Vietnamese army was a little boy with a toy gun.

  It was not a squid, in other words. It was a sea monster.

  The other thing—across the vortex—was . . . a portal? A doorway? A lighted strip of sea that opened to somewhere else, like a gate into a garden. Thanh could tell that the water through it was different somehow. A shade bluer than their own ocean.

  A doorway couldn’t exist under the water. But neither could a sea monster.

  And neither could they. No air. The need to breathe was crushing him. His head was going to explode.

  All these thoughts flashed through Thanh’s mind as he was sinking, as he was holding hands with Mai on one side and Sang on the other, part of the circle of six dying souls, as they all were sucked down into the maelstrom. There was no air. There was no air.

  And then the monster shifted. A giant eye flicked open, big as a house, and stared at them. Thanh gasped like a fish thrown into the sky, and the very last of his breath left his body. He wanted to scream, but there was nothing left for screaming. His lungs burned. And all he could think was help help help help. As if the monster could or would.

  The monster blinked.

  Then it turned away from them, rotating quickly for such a mountain-like creature. One minute it was blinking at the humans, and the next minute it was spinning away. Through the burning of not breathing, Thanh tasted a bitter disappointment to know that he’d perish without looking the monster in the face again. It was turning its back on them as they died.

  And then.

  Then the monster shot a powerful jet of water in their direction. The pulse blasted the people out of the vortex, away from the monster, toward the doorway, and up. Through the doorway. They catapulted into the sky. One minute they were drowning and the next they were the high arc of a fountain. All still holding hands.

  9

  THE SIX whipped through the air as if cannon-shot. It was like flying except for the gravity part. Soon they were arcing down toward the ocean, very fast.

  But when they came down again—that was the strangest part of all, more astonishing even than being shot into the air by a sea monster.

  When they came down again, they landed on their feet, on the water.

  Not in the water, on the water. The water caught them, and it held them, and they stood on it.

  The five survivors (plus The Turtle) alighted on the surface. And then: they walked. They walked on the water.

  • • •

  THE WATER was wet; it was soft to their feet; it was sun-warmed; it flapped gently under them as if it were breathing. It was water. There was nothing magical about it, as far as they could tell.

  Except that they were walking on it.

  The Turtle vomited up salty ocean and cried and then snuggled into Mai’s chest for a nap, overwhelmed by thirst and hunger and almost dying. The others coughed and hacked, looking around them. Uncle Hung let go of his brother’s hand to grip his wounded side, and now instead of a circle they made an arc, still holding hands.

  “Well,” said Uncle Truc. “Any theories about this?”

  “Are we dead?” asked Mai. She didn’t sound worried. “I don’t feel dead.”

  “I think if I were dead my side wouldn’t hurt so darned much,” Uncle Hung wheezed, and the two of them smiled.

  “I don’t think I’m dead, either,” said Sang. “I feel very alive.” She lifted her thin, exhausted face to the breeze.

  “I vote for alive, too,” said Uncle Truc.

  “Me, too. What do you think?” asked Mai, squeezing Thanh’s hand.

  “I don’t think we’re dead,” said Thanh slowly. “I think—I think we’re in another world.”

  • • •

  THE OTHERS had seen the monster, too, but they hadn’t understood it as a monster. They hadn’t put together the giant eye and the tentacles and the mountainous body and come up with sea monster, as Thanh had. And no one except Thanh had seen the not-exactly-a-doorway across from the creature or the monster’s blink or its turning and shooting them back through the doorway and into life. They had all been too busy dying. So when he told them that story, they were in awe.

  “You’re an observant kid,” Uncle Truc said.

  “So you think we ended up . . .” Mai trailed off.

  “I think the maelstrom opened up a doorway—or maybe the maelstrom appeared with the doorway or maybe they’re not related at all—but the doorway was there, and the monster shot us through it. I don’t think we’re in our own world anymore.”

  “That would explain the walking on water,” Uncle Hung said dryly. “It is too bad, though, that we couldn’t have been spit into a world that had some land.”

  “Or a boat full of water and food,” said Mai.

  It was true. The new world (if that’s what it was) looked just like their old world: a seemingly endless ocean, a wide blue sky. Nothing to eat or drink.

  “I don’t think we need to hold hands anymore,” said Uncle Hung, one hand on his wounded side, the other still holding Sang’s hand. “It was a good idea, though, Mai. We all ended up together, just like you said. Live or die together—though I’m somewhat glad it ended up to be live. Now we should pick a direction and start walking.” He shaded his eyes with his free hand, looking around for a likely direction. And he hunched with pain.

  “Let me help you,” said Sang. And she released Thanh’s hand to turn to him.

  At the same moment, Uncle Truc, on the other end of the line, said, “I’ll help you,” and he let go of Mai’s hand.

  And—and—

  And all three of them, disconnected, sank. Sang, Uncle Hung, and Uncle Truc.

  Thanh and Mai (with The Turtle) stood on the water, holding hands.

  Everyone else slipped into the sea and disappeared.

  And then came up, kicking and sputtering.

  Thanh, in surprise, reached to grab his sister’s hand as she treaded water next to him. In doing so, he let go of Mai’s—and he also sank.

  When he surfaced, kicking to stay up in the water, Sang was helping Uncle Hung to float. Uncle Truc was paddling toward Uncle Hung. Mai alone stood on the wate
r, frozen as if in thought. Then she shook herself, walked over to Uncle Hung, squatted, and reached for his hand. As she rose, she pulled him out of the water. She drew him up gently.

  When Uncle Hung, holding Mai’s hand, stood again on the water, Mai reached her other hand down for Sang, who emerged and in turn reached for Uncle Truc.

  Mai’s face unfolded into that slow smile. “Want to come up, too, Thanh?” The line of people walked back to him. Uncle Truc reached down, and when Thanh took his hand he immediately felt the water gel around his feet—or rather, though the water didn’t change at all, his feet were suddenly able to climb in it. He ascended.

  Mai whooped. “You were right, Thanh! It’s a new world!”

  Thanh shook his dripping head, laughing, and the water flew into Mai’s face. Mai whooped again. As the drops ran down her face, she licked her cracked lips and broke into a giant grin.

  All on the surface again, they formed a circle long enough to rearrange without letting go of hands: Uncle Truc on one end, then Uncle Hung, Sang, Mai (with The Turtle), and, lastly, Thanh. Uncle Truc experimented with slinging his brother’s arm over his shoulder, and this kept everyone afloat as well as handholding did. They faced inward, almost a circle again.

  Uncle Hung said weakly, “That was . . . interesting. I didn’t know my niece had magical powers.” His voice was smiling as he looked at Mai.

  “Walking on top of the water,” Uncle Truc said.

  “But I can’t!” Mai said. “I mean, I never did in Vietnam. I’ve been in the rivers a million times, and I never walked on the water. I always swam, just like everyone else.” Drips of water slid down her face, and she licked her lips again.

  “When you slept on the boat, the storms got quiet. Every time.” Thanh didn’t understand why Mai could walk on water; but that didn’t make her walking less true. And it was a great story. “Maybe that was your magic back then, and this is your magic now.”

  Deep in thought, Mai licked her lips a third time.

  “But calming the water isn’t the same as being able to walk on it,” Sang said.