Adrift

by Paul Griffin

  “That’s right, Matt,” John said. “Nice and easy.”

  I twisted the knot until the blood flow stopped. If we didn’t get her to a hospital within a couple of hours she would lose the arm, I was pretty sure. At least that’s what my books said. I was supposed to write TK, shorthand for tourniquet, on her forehead in Sharpie ink, along with the time I’d tied off the blood flow to the injured limb. This way when the medics rushed her into the ER and handed her off to the nurses and then they handed her off to the doctors, who would hand her off to the surgeons, everybody at the hospital would know her arm didn’t have any blood circulating to it for a while. We had a better chance of finding another dead muskrat in the cabinets before we found a Sharpie. I went to mark the time on my phone, until I remembered I’d fed it to the dolphin. “John, mark the time,” I said.

  But he’d already done it. He showed me his phone display. The time was ticking down on his stopwatch, from sixty minutes to zero. I’d made him quiz me on this stuff the nights before I had a test. We were already into T-minus fifty-seven minutes. I looked to the shore. We were really far out now. I couldn’t see us getting from where we were to a hospital in less than fifty-seven minutes. The problem with a tourniquet is, once you apply it only a doctor can undo it. The surgeon closes the wound first and then eases the blood into the limb. If you turned the blood back on full blast, you might blow apart the damaged blood vessels or infect them or something like that—I couldn’t remember. My heart ached with all the things I didn’t know. All I knew was I couldn’t take off the tourniquet. I bandaged Stef’s head with strips of towel.

  “She’s okay, Matthew?” Dri said.

  I had no idea, but I said, “She’ll be okay until we get her to the hospital.”

  “Matt, you are my friend forever.” JoJo clapped my shoulder with even more enthusiasm this time. He almost knocked me over. He quick-stepped to the engine and revved the throttle. The boat jerked and threw us to the floor. The engine hiccupped and sputtered out, and all we heard was the wind.

  JoJo tried the ignition. Nothing. Then John tried and the engine screeched. John unscrewed the gas cap and looked in. “Yup,” he said. “We’re empty.”

  Dri, John, and JoJo took out their phones. Dri’s was wet and wouldn’t turn on. John frowned at his. JoJo shook his head.

  Dri flipped up the bench seat and reached into the cabinet. She lifted a gallon jug and sniffed the funnel top. “Beautiful,” she said. “I thought it was water when I saw it before.”

  “The giveaway was the funnel top,” John said.

  “John, can you not be snide for half a minute?” Dri’s eyes were glossy. She looked to JoJo for support, but he was comforting Stef, trying to. She was unconscious now, and I was relieved, a little bit anyway. I dreaded what she would do when she woke up to find her arm torn open and turning gray.

  John nodded at the gas jug. “Let me see if it’s still good,” he said.

  “Gas goes bad?” Dri said.

  “That muskrat was dead a while. When was the last time your neighbor got the boat out? Oh right, you have no idea. Awesome. Okay, then when was the last time you borrowed it?”

  “Last summer? No, the summer before, I think.”

  “With those flat tires on the trailer, you probably were the last one to use it too.” John sniffed the jug. He shrugged and poured gas into the tank. He tried the ignition. The engine shrieked. “There’s air in the line,” he said. He turned on his phone flashlight and lit up the engine housing.

  “Are you getting a signal now?” JoJo said, shaking his own phone like that would kick in a satellite connection.

  John either didn’t hear him or ignored him. “Get me that wrench kit from the cabinet,” he said to me. “I saw it in the bottom of the milk crate. Bring the hammer too.”

  I brought him the tools. “I should grab the surfboard,” I said. “For Stef. To stabilize her spine.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” John said.

  “I want to use it as a—”

  “I don’t care why, just get it done.”

  The ocean was warmer than the air, but I didn’t love swimming away from the boat in that dark water. I swam fast. A glittery shadow appeared to my left, just beneath the surface. The dolphin was swimming alongside me, not too close but way too close for comfort. I pulled myself onto the surfboard and paddled hard for the boat. The sail was heavy and dragged in the water, but JoJo plucked the rig from the sea—mast, surfboard, and all—like it weighed about as much as an inflatable pool toy.

  We broke the fin off the board and disconnected the mast, and then we lashed Stef to the board with the sail. She was a mummy except for her head and feet. I tied her head down to the board with another strip of towel. When she came to—if she came to—she would scream. Being pinned like that is scary. They made us do it to each other in the first responder class. There was one time before that too, when I was pinned down, but I couldn’t think about that now.

  “Matt?” Dri said. “I’m sorry.”

  I was too. I knew enough first aid to know I didn’t know enough. “She’ll be okay,” I said. Even then I knew I was lying. Stef had a concussion for sure. The doctors would need to drill her head to relieve the pressure building in her skull. We’d be lucky to get her to a hospital by morning.

  JoJo’s clothes were dry, but he shivered with Dri. My teeth chattered. John was the only one who wasn’t cold. His hands were steady as he took apart the engine. Dri and I stripped off our wet clothes to our underwear. We huddled Stef, one of us on each side, to share body heat. JoJo laid the tarp over us.

  “I need somebody to hold the light for me,” John said. JoJo helped him.

  The tarp kept the chill away a little bit. At least it kept the wind off our skin. I felt Dri’s fingertips on the left side of my rib cage. She traced the scalpel line that ran down my left side from my armpit to my hip. “What happened?” she said.

  I was thinking how I should respond, if I should respond. I stared into the sky, like maybe the stars would spell out a half-decent answer for me, or any answer at all. I still wasn’t sure what had happened myself, but the parts that I remembered … well, I didn’t want to remember them. Even in the moonlight the Milky Way stood out sharply. It stood on its end like it was about to tip over. Stef saved me when she moaned.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” Dri said.

  It wasn’t even close to okay. Stef began to scream. She wailed on and on in Portuguese.

  “She wants to know why we tied her up,” Dri said. “She says her arm is on fire.”

  Wednesday, August 18, midnight, day one …

  Stef’s screaming turned to gagging. She was going to choke on her vomit. JoJo and I rolled her onto her side, which wasn’t easy since she was tied to the windsurf board. JoJo balanced it on its edge while Stef vomited bile for what seemed too long a time. Dri used her wet shirt to clean up Stef’s face.

  John didn’t even look our way. He was breaking down the engine to its parts. A bolt rolled over the floor of the boat, back and forth with the waves.

  Seeing that bolt, I realized that all the rocking was making me dizzy. Between the waves and the wind we were getting batted around pretty good. I thought maybe I was going to throw up too. It was hitting me full force now: We were out in the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of the night, in choppy water, with a seriously injured woman. Even in that cramped boat with four other people, I’d never felt so alone.

  Dri huddled with Stef underneath the tarp. After a bit Stef stopped squirming. Her eyes fluttered and she seemed dazed.

  JoJo took off his shirt and gave it to me. “To keep you warm,” he said, but I knew he’d seen the long line that scarred my left side. He stared a little too hard into my eyes and forced a smile. I traded places with him and held the phone light for John. I’d wrung out my jeans but they were still too wet to wear, and I felt like an idiot without any pants on, in black underwear too. They might as well have said MADE IN NYC on
them. “She’ll die if we don’t get her to an emergency room,” I said.

  “She’ll die anyway,” John said. “Hand me the screwdriver, the flat head.”

  “You don’t think you’ll have it running by morning?” I said.

  “Matt, look at the horizon.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere. Do you see any land?”

  I didn’t. The wind hadn’t let up. It pushed us farther out to sea. “We still have to be in an area of recreational boat traffic,” I said. “We’ll cross paths with somebody.”

  “Sure,” John said. “Who wouldn’t want to be out on the ocean in a windstorm at two in the morning?”

  “I couldn’t help myself.”

  “What?”

  “She’s beautiful. She was holding my hand. How do you let go? You don’t. You can’t. John, I’m sorry.”

  “Save your apology for my mother.”

  “Then why’d you climb aboard?”

  “Shut up and hold the light steady.”

  By three a.m. the moon closed in on the horizon. Stef moaned between coughs. Dri whispered into Stef’s ear. She kissed her forehead and stroked her cheek.

  John disconnected a tube from the engine block. He sucked gas from the line and spit it overboard.

  “Fixed?” JoJo clapped John’s back.

  John definitely ignored him this time. He reattached the tube. We helped him reassemble the engine. Half an hour later he turned the ignition switch. The engine roared. We cheered, until John turned off the engine.

  “What are you doing?” Dri said.

  “We don’t have enough fuel to make it back,” John said.

  “How do you know?”

  “We have a gallon of gas. This kind of engine burns ten gallons an hour, I figure. That’s six minutes of drive time. At top speed we’ll get four miles before the engine conks out. That’s without a head wind. We’re at least fifteen miles offshore by now. Maybe twenty, maybe more.”

  “We have to try,” Dri said.

  “Which way do you want to go?” John said. “Where’s land?”

  “Why’d you bother to fix the engine if all we’re going to do is drift?” Dri said.

  “If we see a boat, it won’t see us,” John said. “Especially at night without any lights. Even in the daytime, we’ll be too low in the water. We’ll have to chase any ship we see and hope we get close enough that it spots us.”

  JoJo checked his phone again for a signal.

  “If you can’t see land, you won’t get a signal,” John said.

  “I was two hundred miles offshore last summer. I had a signal the whole time.”

  “You were on a yacht, right?” John said. “They have satellite uplinks. Once you’re a couple of miles offshore, a regular cell phone is useless.”

  “But Dri got off a call to the police right before we went out on the water,” I said. “Dri, you said they would be there in twenty minutes, right?”

  “We were too far offshore for them to see us by then,” John said.

  “Okay,” I said, “but the cops would have tried to talk to somebody before they left. They rang the front bell, and nobody answered. Then they probably tried Dri’s phone and got her voicemail.”

  “And figured it was a crank call,” John said.

  “But they’re going to check with the caretaker, to be sure,” I said.

  “They’re only there in the off-season,” Dri said.

  “They take care of your mansion for you all year and you get rid of them for the summer, huh?” John said. “Nice.”

  “It is, actually. They’re down in Brazil at my uncle’s for an extended ski vacation. The next person coming over is Antonia, to clean the house.”

  “In the morning, yes?” JoJo said.

  “Thursday morning, though.” That was about thirty hours away.

  “Brian will wonder why we didn’t bring his car back,” I said. “And our bosses. Neither of us was late for work all summer. When we don’t show up this morning, they’ll know something’s wrong. They’ll try to call us, then the hospitals, then the cops.”

  “None of them had any idea where we were headed last night, Matt. The earliest anybody will start looking for us is Thursday morning, and even that’s a long shot. Why would the maid or whoever think to call the cops? Are you home every time she’s there?”

  “No,” Dri said, “but I’d never leave the house a mess for her the way it is now, after the party. She’ll see a random car parked in the driveway. She’ll know something’s wrong. She’ll try to call me. She’ll call my dad. He’ll try to call me. When I don’t get back to him, he’ll call the police.”

  “After how long?” John said.

  “A day?”

  “Now we’re into Friday,” John said. “And then what? Why would anybody think we’re out on the water?”

  “We’ll run into another boat today,” JoJo said. “For sure.”

  “On our way over to your house, the radio kept saying it over and over,” John said. “The rough seas warning is being extended another forty-eight hours. You know, the warning that kept all the boaters off the water last night. At least the ones with any brains.”

  “This isn’t helping,” Dri said. “Being negative.”

  “I’m being realistic.”

  Stef moaned and JoJo comforted her. He spoke softly in Portuguese and made her hold his hand.

  “JoJo, you have the flashlight app too,” Dri said.

  “It won’t work,” John said. “You think you’re going to flag down a boat with a weak little phone light?”

  “If you’d let me finish, I was going to say that the flashlight app has a strobe effect. You can program it. My friend Kristie was using it when we were DJ-ing last night. We can program it with S-O-S.”

  “So you want to randomly flash S-O-S north, south, east, west and hope to get lucky?” John said. “That app will burn out the phone fast. We have to save the battery for when we need it. If we see a ship, and we get close enough where it has a shot of picking up the light, that’s when we activate the SOS.”

  “So, we’re just going to float around out here for the next few days and wait to die?” Dri said.

  “It’ll take more than a few days, unfortunately,” John said.

  Dri moved closer to John, out of Stef’s hearing range. “But what about Stef?”

  “Nobody told her to get on that Windsurfer,” John said.

  “Why do you have to be like this?” Dri said. “You don’t think she feels bad about this?”

  “She feels bad all right, but not about this,” John said.

  “My uncle adopted her, John. From a rough part of the favela. The slum.”

  “That gives her a free pass to act like an idiot?”

  “You know about the Rio slums?”

  “Do you?” John said.

  “John, be cool,” I said, except he was. His words and face didn’t match. He looked perfectly relaxed.

  “Her mother was gunned down in front of her,” Dri said. “A drug deal went bad and Stef’s mom was hit in the cross fire.”

  “So what?” John said.

  “Are you serious? Stef was holding her when she bled out. She was five years old, and she remembers it like it was yesterday.”

  “Spare me, okay? So she’s a head case. If she had a death wish, going out into the deep water at night, that’s her business. But now she’s pulling down the four of us with her. You yourself called her selfish.”

  “You didn’t have to get on the boat, John,” Dri said.

  “Yes, I did.” John looked my way, and then he looked away.

  Sunrise …

  Stef’s arm was a prop from a zombie movie. The skin was green and purple and gray where it had ripped. She wet herself with dark urine. I remembered reading about this, how it could happen after a major trauma. I couldn’t remember specifically what the dark color meant. Something with the kidneys or liver or both or neither. Whatever was happening inside her body, I was
sure I couldn’t fix it. I felt like a fraud, acting as the ship’s doctor, but I was the closest thing we had to medically trained personnel.

  I swore I’d get some actual hands-on training when we got back to land. Supervised training, with people who’d gotten their hands bloody more than once. This disaster with Stef was too much of a crash course. It was like the Spanish I learned in junior high: I memorized enough to get good grades on the exams, and then I knew nothing out on the street, until I just threw myself into real live conversations and made tons of mistakes and braved a lot of laughter. We didn’t have room for any more mistakes out here in the Atlantic, and I couldn’t imagine any of us would be laughing anytime soon. I palmed Stef’s forehead. Her skin was hot, and she shivered nonstop. Dri huddled up next to Stef in the front of the boat and caressed Stef’s cheek.

  JoJo took the lookout post on the right side of the boat. I took the left side, and John looked off the back. Real sailors would describe the positions as starboard, port, and stern. I picked up the terms when Mr. Owen made us read an abridged version of Moby-Dick in ninth grade. Beyond that, I didn’t know anything about boating. None of us did. We didn’t know anything about one another either. Not really, not yet. We were from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Copacabana district of Rio de Janeiro, and Woodhull, Queens. And here we were facing death together in a hundred square feet of boat. Even John was a stranger to me. I was used to his coolness, but he was all-cold now. I’d seen him this way only once before, when his father’s blood spattered my face. He was a stranger to me that time too.

  “We’ll run into someone soon,” Dri said.

  “We will,” JoJo said. “The universe provides.”

  John frowned, and I read his mind. For some people, the universe provides. The rest of us scramble.

  By now we’d been out on the water for eight hours. That’s a long time in a stalled boat. The water was desolate, the sky was cloudless, deep blue, and the wind was steady, strong, and dry. Rain was not on the way. I’d gotten my wish. I was in the desert. By midmorning the glare blinded us, and I felt like somebody had drilled two-inch screws into my eyes.