She flipped through them and found Dean’s, Lena’s, and her own. The rest she laid back onto the cot. Someone would find them and speak for these people, but it wasn’t going to be her. She didn’t know what would happen on Isla Clarence, what lines she might irretrievably cross before she was done.
And when she put these shores in her wake, she aimed to leave them there.
* * *
Later, after she’d done the final check of Freefall, she sat in the helm seat in the cold pilothouse and switched on the chart plotter. She was glad David hadn’t stolen it or the radar. While the plotter searched for satellites, she leaned to the ignition key and started the engine. The engine block had been sitting cold and would need to idle a while before she brought it up to running speed.
Using her notepad and David’s paper charts, she began to lay her course. The narrow pass from Deception Island to the open sea was marked on the charts as Neptune’s Bellows. When she exited the bellows, she’d still be in the relatively calm waters in the lee of other islands in the South Shetland chain. After sailing twenty miles to the northwest and skirting the western flank of Snow Island, she’d be in the Drake Channel proper, and then the real pounding would begin. To reach Isla Clarence from Snow Island, she’d have to sail over seven hundred nautical miles to the northwest, forty-five degrees off dead windward. If she could maintain thirteen knots, it would be a hard, bashing two and a half days. But if storms drove her off course or if she couldn’t keep up the pace for any reason, it would be longer.
There was no more time to waste. She punched the waypoints into the chart plotter one after another, a string of small goals to lead her up to La Araña. When she was done, she checked the engine gauges and then went below to talk to Dean. He wouldn’t be able to tell her anything. But maybe if she sat near him and spoke to him in a quiet way, she’d understand what to do.
She sat on the edge of the mattress, held his hand, and looked at him.
“We’re ready now, Dean. I could pull the anchor and we could just go.”
She fastened the lee cloth along the edge of the pilot berth so he wouldn’t spill out like a sack of laundry the first time the boat rolled. But the lee cloth alone wouldn’t be enough. Not where they were going. She used a pair of thick webbing straps and fastened him to the bunk at his chest and thighs. When the chest strap was buckled and cinched, she put her finger beneath it to be sure it wasn’t too tight. Dean was having a hard enough time breathing without a strap compressing him. But it seemed to be all right.
She crouched next to him, smoothing the blankets over his chest.
“We could just go. That’s what I want to do. I want to leave him in the cage to starve and die,” she said. “I want him to hear us pulling out and to get so desperate he starts banging rocks together to make a spark. To light himself on fire so he doesn’t have to take it anymore. And I want that not to work. So he has to just ride it out for days until he dies.”
She checked his catch bag and checked the IV drip. It was time for the second round of antibiotics, and she took them from the little shelf and prepped the syringe.
“But, Dean, something tells me that’s not what you’d have us do. You’d say he may not deserve a second chance but that we’ve no right to kill him. I know I can’t let him out. And I don’t fucking want to bring him on this boat, Dean.”
She slipped the needle into the catheter’s port and gave him the second dose of amoxicillin. Then she took the empty syringe and put it in the trash can in the galley. She came back and took Dean’s hand.
“So tell me what to do, Dean,” she whispered. “Please, just tell me what to do.”
She got on her knees and put her head on his chest lightly so that she could listen to his heart. For a long time she just knelt there, listening to him. The beat of his heart. His painful fight to suck air into his lungs. She listened until she was sure. She stood up and kissed him, tenderly biting his bottom lip as she pulled away.
“All right, Dean,” she said. “Goddamit. All right. I’ll do this for you.”
David hadn’t hanged himself. He hadn’t self-immolated.
He was curled on his side under the blanket, but he rose when Kelly pushed the wheelbarrow into the building. She stopped it next to the cage and looked down at him. There was a fresh blanket from one of the cots in the wheelbarrow, and she showed it to him.
“Pass yours out, through the slot,” she said. “I’ll give you a fresh one after you clean up.”
She pulled out the cedar bucket of steaming salt water and dropped a wet bar of soap through the top of the cage. He stared at the soap but didn’t touch it.
“Give me the blanket, David. And then lather up. Don’t waste my time.”
David fed the corner of his blanket into the slot in the wall of the trap. She grabbed it and yanked it through, then tossed it aside. David took the bar of soap and worked it in his left hand. His right hand was a swollen, bloody claw that he held close to his shivering chest. Diesel glistened in his hair and on his face, and he rubbed the soap into it, working it into his puffed red eyes and into his ears.
“Crawl into the corner. I’ll pour water on you. It’s hot, but it’s not boiling anymore.”
She hadn’t gotten the hot water from the crack in the flensing house. She didn’t want to go in there again or lower anything into that ground. Instead, she’d tied a rope to the bucket and tossed it down another crack she found outside the building.
When he was in the corner, she poured half the bucket of water on him and let him lather up again. Then she poured the second half, and he scrubbed at himself while he crouched in the corner. Steam rose off his red skin.
“Stay there. I’ll put a towel through the slot.”
She did, and he took it and dried himself. When he was done, he put the towel in the slot and she took it, passing back a clean blanket.
“Understand I’m only doing this because I don’t want you to stink up my boat.”
He looked up at her, the surprise clear on his swollen face.
“That’s right,” she said. “We’re going hunting. If La Araña isn’t where you said she’ll be, you die. Anything happens to Dean or Lena, same deal.”
He tried to answer, but his throat was too choked. She cut him off before he said anything.
“You don’t have to answer. I really don’t give a shit what you think about it.”
David swallowed and turned his face from her.
The last things in the wheelbarrow were a block and tackle and a long length of rope, both taken from Freefall’s equipment room. One thing about owning a sailboat, Kelly thought as she tossed the rope over the rafter, was that you never ran out of pulleys and lines. Or things to do with them.
With the mechanical advantage of the pulleys, it wasn’t hard to lift David three feet off the floor. She tied off the rope to the same post they’d used for Dean, then put the wheelbarrow under the cage. She lowered David’s trap onto the wheelbarrow, took down her lifting gear, and tied the cage to the handles of the wheelbarrow so it wouldn’t slide off the front when she lifted the skids to start rolling.
When she got him to the Zodiac, she upended the cage. It flipped and crashed into the bow of the boat. David cried out when he landed with his back on one of the crab funnels. Before boarding the Zodiac the last time, she walked back up the slope to the bunkhouse. She’d left the flensing knife there, and she wanted it. David watched her load it into the Zodiac, its handle wedged under the cage.
“You’ll want to get in the middle, try to balance,” Kelly said. She pushed the Zodiac into deeper water and hopped in as it began to float out. “You go overboard in deep water, there’d be nothing I could do. Assuming I even tried.”
She started the engine, jammed it into forward, and opened the throttle, spinning the boat in a tight U-turn toward Freefall. David fell onto his stomach, flattening himself across the bottom of the cage as the boat heeled with the turn. The trap slid and wobbled at the edge but d
idn’t tip off. Again Kelly marveled at the delicate balance underlying everything. She could have drowned him in four feet of water, but he’d been saved by a bit of friction between rusty metal and the inflated rubber. And that was it. If she kept intentionally rolling dice for his life, she might as well just push him off the side, because they’d come to the same thing in her conscience. She throttled back and put her shaking hand on the corner of the trap to steady it.
* * *
Hoisting the trap aboard Freefall was easy. She was far beyond caring about scratching the hull. She tied the spinnaker halyard to the top of the cage, winched David up until he was swinging against the lifelines, and then brought the trap around to the stern on the ambit of the halyard. She lowered him until the cage sat in the cockpit, ahead of the main wheel and behind the protection of the pilothouse. It would not be a warm spot, nor would it be dry when they got into real weather, where spray and green water would come over the rail. But that didn’t concern her. A wool blanket could still give some insulation when it was wet. She’d learned this firsthand with Lena and had David to thank for it.
The only precaution she was willing to take was to run webbing straps from the corners of the cage to tie-down points in the cockpit so the metal box wouldn’t fall off the side in a knockdown or skid into the pilothouse and break something. When the cage was strapped down, she scanned the area for anything that might roll within his reach. Some tool he could use to escape.
When she was done, she knelt in front of him.
“I’m doing this for Dean. Letting you come. But if you complain once or cry, that’s it. If you ask for anything more than what I’ve given you so far, you’re done. I’ll let you stay on the boat. But you’ll make the crossing to Chile the way you carried Jim. Hanging by your feet off the bow. You only get to say one thing on this trip, and that’s whether you changed your mind about Isla Clarence.”
“I’m not changing my mind.”
“We get there and I don’t see La Araña parked out front, you know it’s over, right?”
He looked at her, his eyes swollen and red from the diesel.
“It’s Isla Clarence. There’s a branch off a fjord on the southwest side. That’s where the cabin is.”
“It’ll happen there, in the cabin?”
He nodded.
“You have doctors coming in?”
“They’re already there. Prepping the Colonel.”
“All right,” she said. “Now shut the fuck up. Try to stay warm. We might need to talk in three days.”
She stood and went to the side deck to untie the Zodiac, tossing the painter line into it so it wouldn’t foul Freefall’s propeller. The little orange boat drifted slowly away. Maybe it would just lodge on the near shore; maybe it would bob on a current through Neptune’s Bellows into the broader sea to circle the Southern Ocean like an albatross. It didn’t matter much to Kelly. Freefall had a Zodiac of her own stored in the dinghy garage beneath the cockpit. When she needed to go ashore, when she found the Colonel and his cabin, it would be there for her.
As she knelt at the bow to pull the anchor, she prayed for Lena. That she wouldn’t be too late to help her. She knew that La Araña’s lead was significant, that unless she could gain ground on it crossing the Drake Passage, it might reach the island a full day ahead of her. And if that was too late, she prayed that Lena wouldn’t suffer. That she didn’t know what was coming, didn’t know how they planned to swap her life for the Colonel’s. She fed the anchor chain into the windlass’s wildcat, hit the control button, and watched the chain feed into its hawser pipe. When the anchor broke the surface and came up, she shut off the windlass, knocked the purple starfish off the shank, and locked the anchor into its chocks.
Back in the pilothouse, she put the drive in gear and throttled to 2,500 rpm. As Freefall gathered momentum, Kelly brought her about, pointing at Neptune’s Bellows. She watched the spray rise from the base of the cliffs and from the battered pinnacles offshore, watched the storm petrels swirl and dive from their high-ledged roosts. The barometer’s mercury was down another millimeter, and she noted it in her log along with the time. She’d brought the flensing knife aboard and had strapped it to the overhead grab rail in the pilothouse, where it would be out of the way yet close at hand. She held on to it as she steered out of the island and into the colder sea, the whale knife’s hardwood handle solid beneath her gloved grip.
There’d be a use for it yet if she wasn’t too late.
When they were into deeper water half a mile from the cliffs, Kelly set the autopilot to steer to the first waypoint. She went below and sat with Dean for a few minutes, weighing the risk of giving him more codeine. In the end she decided not to: he needed to wake and start coughing to clear his chest. It would be painful for him and hard for her to watch, but it needed to be done.
There was spare foul weather gear in one of the hanging lockers. She suited up, tightening a chest harness over the jacket and tossing its tether over her shoulder. In the galley, she made a thermos of tea and put it into her jacket pocket. Then she climbed back into the pilothouse and looked at the instruments. Freefall was slicing through disorganized seas. Eight-foot swells rolled out of the west and clashed with bigger ones filtering down from the north. But waves like this were nothing. Freefall was moving at a stately nine knots, and that was without the sails.
David was sitting with his back to her, as close as he could get to the protection of the pilothouse, watching his island recede in the wake. A few hours ago she’d been throwing rocks at him when he turned his back on her and didn’t see her coming. Now there was no need. The only thing holding him together was the blanket. Without it, he’d fall to pieces.
Kelly clipped her harness tether to the jackline on the side deck and went forward, past the pilothouse. She stepped onto the cabin top to the base of the mast. She stood facing the west wind to feel its strength. For now it wasn’t blowing hard. Twenty knots, maybe. When the sail was ready, she went back into the pilothouse, disengaged the autopilot, and hand steered into the wind. She used the electric winch to raise the mainsail to its full height. Then she fell off the wind toward the northeast and reset the autopilot. The cold air cut across the wing of the sail, giving it shape; Freefall heeled to starboard, and Kelly watched the speed tick up on the knotmeter.
Eleven knots, then fourteen after she trimmed the sail by loosening the topping lift and tightening the mainsheet.
Freefall picked up another four knots when she unfurled the genoa. Now they were heeling steeply, putting the starboard toe rail into the water with the gusts. Spray started coming over the weather rail, white-blue foam that hit the pilothouse windows. She looked back at the cage and saw David bracing himself with his feet against the lower wall. He clung to the side of the cage with his good hand, his fingers clenched into the chain link, white as carved marble. He’d clearly never been on a sailboat. This was a day sail on a calm lake compared with what lay ahead.
Kelly went below to check on Dean. He was on the downwind side of the boat, but the straps were holding him in well. He opened his eyes and focused on her.
“You’re—”
The coughing stopped him, a long spasm of it. He fought it, wanting to speak to her.
“Let it come, Dean. Just cough.”
She used her palm to slap his chest on either side of his heart. She worked with him a long moment, helping him bring it up. At the end there was no air in his lungs at all, and his face was dark purple.
“Don’t fight it. That’s it. Just let it out.”
She walked to the galley, an upslope climb on this angle of heel, and came back with a roll of paper towels. She wiped the phlegm and blood from his lips and chin. He breathed again shallowly, and then he looked at her.
“You’re sailing?”
“Just getting started. We’ve got a long way to go. It’ll be mostly upwind. Rough for at least two days. If you’re not up to it, I can turn us around. We’ll anchor until you’re st
ronger and then we’ll go.”
He shook his head.
“Doesn’t matter if I’m up to it. Lena—she can’t wait on me.”
She nodded. It was wrong for her to have given him this choice. She was the doctor, and he was too sick to make any decisions at all. He’d told her what to do because he knew they had to do it at any cost, and he wanted to take from her the burden of making choices as his caretaker. Or as his wife and his lover.
That was Dean.
But it hurt all the same. The sailing was fine now, but it might not be in six hours. She’d seen the barometer falling, the dark band of clouds in the northwest casting their shadows on the sea like a shoal of black rock. There was no way to know what they were sailing into, what waited ahead, or how Dean would take it.
“You should go up, keep watch.”
“But—”
“You’re doing everything you can—and you can only do so much. The boat … then Lena … then me. That’s your order of priority.”
She squeezed his hand and nodded. She knew he was right, and it hurt.
“Go,” he said. “Keep watch.”
“All right,” she said. She kissed his forehead. “I’m sorry for all this.”
“Don’t be. I’m not.”
She stood then and went to the medical supply cabinet. It held things that would keep her awake and alert. There would be no breaks on this watch. With the barometer falling, with the sky swelling shut like a punched eye, and with David behind her, caged with his dark thoughts, there could be no rest. As she climbed back into the pilothouse, she heard Dean explode into a fit of coughing, harder than anything she’d heard before. She paused on the companionway steps, the cold air rushing into the cabin. She started to go back to him, but then she stopped. There were growlers and icebergs out there. Inside, there nothing she could do for Dean. He’d told her as much.
Close Reach Page 16
