The Great Wide Sea

by M. H. Herlong

  “Thirty-five degrees north-northeast.”

  “We have to make a one-eighty,” I said. I made sure the engine was in neutral and started it. The engine sputtered, then settled into its rhythm. Now we were wallowing in diesel fumes too.

  “Lower the jib?” Dylan asked.

  “No. Let’s see what it does on the new course.”

  He turned to handle the lines as we swung around. I reached for the mainsheet, pulling the sail in hard. The mechanical purr of the ratchet block tightening down sounded like normal life, like an afternoon sail on the lake. I snagged Chrysalis’s mainsheet in the cleat and shifted the engine to forward. With a little way on, I slowly eased her around to 215 degrees.

  We adjusted the sails to the whisper of wind and I killed the engine.

  Dylan looked past me to the ocean. Our wake still showed in the smooth rolling sea. “I’ll double-check the course,” he said, and backed into the dark below.

  I could hear Dylan searching the boat again. I heard him opening the lockers and the engine room and climbing around in Dad’s bunk. Then he was quiet, and I was sitting there alone in the middle of a huge, round ocean under a brilliant dome of sky. There was nothing, nothing in sight except the monotonous curve of the waves and the occasional blinding glint of sunlight on the water.

  We both knew it was impossible. Even if we could go back toward Spanish Cay at exactly the same angle as we had left it, we would be tracing a different line. We had no way of knowing how far east or west we were of our original path. And we didn’t know how long Dad had been overboard. How long had he been drifting in the current? How long had we been wallowing without wind?

  Then Dylan reappeared. He was holding a piece of paper and Dad’s poetry collection. His lips were almost white.

  “Ben,” he said. He held up the paper, and I saw it was a letter in Dad’s handwriting. “It’s a letter to Mom.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  DYLAN HANDED ME the letter. I didn’t want to read it, but I did. It wasn’t what I expected. It was a poem, but not from Dad’s collection. He started out with her name, just “Christine.” Then he wrote:

  We danced in the dark and called it our song.

  The sad, simple words you whispered low.

  “Lonely” and “time” and “hunger” and “home”

  Misunderstood then—now I know.

  I am the river. You are the sea.

  Open your arms, love—wait for me.

  I read it through twice, then crushed the paper into a tight ball. “It’s a suicide note,” I said.

  “It’s about a song,” Dylan answered. He took the paper from me and carefully began to pick open the ball.

  “But listen to the words,” I said. “He says she’s the sea. He says she should open her arms.”

  “They had the CD.” He flattened the paper against his thigh. “They listened to that song all the time.”

  “Rivers flow into the sea, Dylan. And he’s gone into the sea. In the middle of the night. He unhooked his harness. He—”

  Dylan bent slightly to look down at the note, held smooth against his thigh by his boy hands. When his hair fell forward slightly, I saw the smooth curve of his neck rising from his shoulder.

  “Dylan,” I started again.

  He looked up. “Shush,” he said, and tucked the letter back into the book.

  Gerry had appeared in the companionway. He was holding Blankie bunched up under his chin. He didn’t say anything. He stepped out, barefoot and wearing his Batman underwear. They were baggy in the seat—too big. Mom had planned a little too far ahead with them. Gerry sat by Dylan, then lay down on his side, curled around his stomach. He took a corner of Blankie and gently rubbed the silk against his cheek. He crossed his feet over each other. His breath came steady and even. His cheek was so smooth. His eyes staring across the deck were so quietly pale. I could have counted each rib, each vertebra. He couldn’t float because he had no body fat.

  Looking at Dylan and Gerry, I felt I could scream loud enough for Dad to hear me wherever he was. I felt I could climb to the top of the mast and yell at the sky. I felt I could terrify the depths of space with the scream inside me.

  Gerry was watching me watch him. “What’s wrong, Ben?” he asked.

  I looked away. I picked up the book with the stupid letter sticking out the top. I slammed it onto the seat cushion.

  “I hate him,” I said.

  “Don’t say that,” Dylan said.

  Gerry sat up straight, alert, looking at the book in my hands. “Where’s Dad?” he asked me.

  I bit my lip.

  “Dylan.” Gerry’s little voice was shaking. “Where’s Dad?”

  I stood up and headed down below. Dylan picked up a corner of Blankie and rubbed Gerry’s other cheek. Gerry was already crying when I laid myself out on Dad’s bunk with his pillow over my head and his book pressing a square hole in my chest.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I HAD GONE TO sleep again and was dreaming I was suffocating with that pillow over my head when Dylan shook my foot. “Wake up,” he said. “We need to talk.”

  I rolled over and remembered everything all at once.

  “Talk,” I said, and followed Dylan into the cabin. Gerry was on deck holding the tiller with one hand and Blankie with the other. Beside him sat a can of orange juice. Dylan had spread the charts out on the chart table.

  “We need to figure out where we are—or were—so we can figure out where we’re going.”

  I rubbed my face hard with the palms of my hands. “We’re lost,” I said. “The GPS is broken, and we’ve been drifting in the sea in an unknown direction at an unknown speed for an unknown period of time.”

  There were simply too many variables. When Dad went overboard, the boat sailed on alone for a while, the autopilot maintaining a perfect course. Then, at some point, the wind changed and the boat stopped moving forward. It just rolled and wallowed wherever the wind and waves took it. But when did Dad go over? What speed was the boat going then? When did the wind change? What direction had it come from since then? How strong? Did it change again? There were too many things we didn’t know.

  “We’re lost,” I repeated, and sat down.

  Dylan ignored me and sat at the chart table making dots with the pencil, drawing lines with the parallel rule, and calculating speed. Then he paused and glanced toward Gerry at the helm. “I told him we were going back to get Dad.”

  “In other words, you lied,” I said.

  Dylan’s mouth tightened. “What would you have said?”

  I kicked at a pencil that had dropped on the floor.

  “Besides,” Dylan went on, “Dad has the EPIRB. If we don’t find him, someone else will.”

  I stared at Dylan. “What makes you think a man trying to drown himself would turn on the EPIRB?”

  Dylan looked squarely back at me. “What makes you think he was trying to drown himself?”

  “For crying out loud, Dylan! You read the note. Why would he do any of the things he’s done? He’s crazy and selfish and scared. And by now, he’s probably dead. Just like he wanted to be.”

  “You’re wrong,” Dylan said quietly.

  “Did you hear anyone call?” I asked. “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think he would have yelled if he had wanted help?”

  “We were asleep.”

  “Grow up, Dylan,” I said, and bent to pick up the pencil I had kicked.

  When I sat up again, he was looking at the chart. “I made a note here last night,” he said, “at the end of my watch.” He carefully placed the pencil point on a dot well northeast of Spanish Cay. “We were going about four and a half knots on a heading of thirty-five degrees north-northeast. If the boat kept on for another two hours, it would have been about here”—another touch with the pencil—“when Dad went overboard.” He paused. “But we have to figure in current. The water is moving over the ground at about five knots. We were moving th
rough the water at four and a half knots.”

  Dylan’s pencil worked some more. He swung the dividers along a line he’d drawn. “Okay, so we’d have been about here when he went over.”

  Dylan made a new dot and erased the other one.

  “If he jumped at two o’clock,” I said.

  “Fell,” Dylan answered.

  I shrugged. “But what if it was twelve thirty? Or three o’clock? Or six o’clock?”

  Dylan’s boy fingers crunched around the pencil. “You want me to figure all those, too?”

  “No.”

  “I can.”

  “I know you can. You’re brilliant. But it doesn’t matter. Dad is still gone, and we still don’t know where we are.”

  “No.” Dylan drew a thin squiggly line along the margin of the chart. “We’re lost.”

  I flopped back against the settee. “We don’t know where we are. So we can’t know where we’re going. Depending on where we started from, we could land right smack in the harbor at Spanish Cay in seventy-two hours. Or we could slide right between Florida and Cuba and end up on the Yucatan Peninsula. Or I suppose we could be farther east than that and miss the Bahamas altogether and end up in Turks and Caicos or the Dominican Republic. All of them are lovely destinations. I leave it to you to choose.” I thumped the pencil against the cushion. “If he had just made a note of the time. If he had only kept up the log.”

  Dylan worked on his line.

  “He should have thought about us,” I continued quietly. “He should have—”

  “If it had been on purpose,” Dylan said, “he would have.”

  I looked up and saw Gerry standing at the helm. His hair was so blond it looked white in the sun. But the light around him seemed funny. I stood up to see the horizon. There wasn’t one. The line where sea and sky should meet had disappeared in a broad black swath. The edge of the black clouds billowed out toward us. They stretched all the way across the ocean. From end to end. Rolling over the water and filling up the sky.

  Dylan stood beside me. We looked at the storm coming.

  Gerry was watching us, his sun-browned hand and overgrown fingernails scratching at his thigh.

  Something stronger and colder than I’d ever felt was holding on to my insides. I felt the hair rise up on my neck and chills riding down my spine.

  “Dylan,” I asked, not daring to turn my eyes away, “do any of the books say what to do with this?”

  “What is this?” he asked very quietly.

  I held on to the companionway rail. “I think,” I said, “that it’s the end of the world.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  DYLAN AND I stood frozen for long enough to die and come back to life. I lost the feeling in my fingertips. Then thick fat raindrops began to drop on the boat, and the wind freshened. We’d done storm drill at anchor a thousand times, but never at sea. I didn’t know what to do.

  “We’ll just keep our course,” I told Dylan, “and ride it out.”

  “What about Dad?” Dylan asked.

  I didn’t answer. I shrugged on my foul weather gear and handed Dylan his.

  “I guess I know two things about storms,” I finally said. “The first thing is you want to go just the right speed. You don’t want to go so fast down into the trough of a wave that your bow plows into the ocean. It would be like putting on the brakes on your bike’s front wheel. You’d pitchpole—flip upside down, front first. And you don’t want to go so slow that a wave crashes on your stern and flips you over backwards.”

  Dylan nodded.

  “The second thing,” I said, “is that you want to stay pointed in the right direction. You don’t want to get sideways to the waves. You have no stability that way. The waves will broadside you, and you’ll broach—go over sideways.”

  Gerry was standing now, looking from us to the cloud behind him. The wind was beginning to whip his hair and twist his shirt against his chest. “Ben! Dylan! Look!”

  “Hold on. We’re coming, bud.”

  Behind Gerry the advancing wall of rain shattered the silvery surface of the water into a rolling layer of flat, pock-marked tin. I turned to Dylan. “I just thought of a third thing I know. You don’t want to hit any land.”

  “Or coral heads,” Dylan said, and we came out into the cockpit.

  I leaned close to Gerry and shouted, “Hold your course, buddy. A few more minutes. We’ve got to get the jib down. Then I’ll take over.”

  Dylan and I hooked our safety harnesses on the lifelines and started for the foredeck. The wall of rain struck. We fell to our knees and crawled. I popped the halyard off the cleat and kept the tension until Dylan was crouched at the foot of the sail. The forepeak rose off a wave, then slammed down. Dylan held on and looked back at me, his lips grim and tight. I released the halyard, but the jib only sagged. The wind held it up long enough for me to make my way to the forepeak too. Then the sail began to fall in great heavy folds, stiff and salty. Dylan took the clew and began pushing the sail into the sail bag. I wrestled with the hanks until the whole sail was unhooked and stuffed into the big orange bag. We shoved it through the forward hatch and turned to the dinghy, now twisting back and forth on the single line holding it on deck. We tied it down then crawled back to the cockpit.

  I felt my hand closing around the tiller. I saw Gerry’s eyes.

  “What about Dad?” he yelled. “How can we find Dad?”

  I didn’t answer him. He was soaked. His hair looked dark stuck to his head. He grabbed my arm.

  “What about Dad, Ben?”

  “Go below,” I yelled. “Get dry. Stay in your bunk.”

  He still held my arm. He was shivering.

  He turned his face up at me again, and I saw he was crying. His mouth was a wide, dark square and his eyes were big.

  I shook off his arm and pushed him. He stumbled and sat just in front of the companionway. “Go below!” I yelled.

  “But what about Dad!” he wailed.

  “Forget Dad!” My voice sounded high and shrill in the wind. Dylan’s hand reached out and pulled Gerry inside, then slotted in the boards to close off the hatch.

  I was alone on deck in the dark of the storm. The boat rode up the back of a wave and crashed down into the trough.

  I yanked the mainsheet loose and held it while I steered. I worked the sheet and the tiller together until I had the boat in a carefully balanced reach heading southeast. We would make it. We were under control. It would be hard, but we would make it.

  “Forget Dad,” I said again. Then louder. As loud as I could. Out to the storm, the wind, the rain. Over and over again as I held us together, Dylan and Gerry and me, safe on the boat and screaming toward home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  IT WAS GOOD sailing. The wind changed from northwest to north and I loosened up to a beam reach with the wind coming over our starboard rail. We climbed the backs of the waves at an angle then plowed down the fronts, cutting a deep wake across the sea. I sat high on the starboard side, wedging myself in so I couldn’t slide. We were heeled over with water frothing over the port rail and spray flying back from the bow to wash over the deck and splash into my face.

  It was like driving a car on a tight curve—fast. My focus narrowed to the feel of the vibrating tiller, the bounce of the white compass needle, and the tremble of the mainsail’s leech. The tiller was like my body, attached to the rudder and sensing the pull of the boat, the nudging way she wanted to turn and head into the wind—just the way a car wants to pull a little to the right. You feel it without feeling it. It’s part of the way you drive. It comes from your body, not your head. Either you can do it or you can’t.

  I could do it. And I could do it well. The wind tore past me, the waves rolled under me, the rain poured down on me, but I ignored them. There was only the pull, the bounce, and the tremble. I kept them in perfect balance. Sailing on the edge. Smiling.

  But control is an illusion, and in a storm it is a dangerous illusion. You might forget to keep
checking things. You might not notice the changes, and storms change. This one did, and I didn’t notice. I was too busy thinking it was a good thing, that we’d get home sooner this way. Then the wind got stronger. I was fighting the boat harder. The rail never came out of the water. I was standing with my feet braced on the side of the port seat, clinging to the starboard lifeline with my right arm and fighting the tiller with my left. We sliced through the tops of the waves and surfed down the far side.

  I felt an edge of fear start to blur my focus. “Think,” I told myself. “You’re going too fast. What do you do now? Think.” But I was telling myself to think rather than doing it because there was nothing I could do. It was too late. We had too much sail up. It was like having the accelerator jammed to the floor and a mountain road in front of you. We should have reefed the main or taken it down. I should have thought of that.

  Reefing the main was just a way of making the sail smaller. To reef the main in this old boat required first lifting the boom up so the bottom of the sail folded in a big loose flap. Then someone had to stand on the cabin roof and tie the bottom folds of the sail tightly to the boom. Meanwhile, of course, someone else was steering the boat. That would have been hard enough to do in this storm, but there was a worse problem. The first step in reefing was to center the boom over the cabin or at least pull it in close enough to reach it from the deck. That necessarily meant that the sail would also be centered over the boat—and taking the wind full into its belly. The boat would broach. Before we could even start tying the straps, the boat would be upside down in the ocean.

  So we could not reef the main. Nor could we lower it. To loosen the pressure on the sail enough to allow it to slide down, we had to turn the boat into the wind. If we tried that, at some point the boat would be sideways to the wind and waves. Again, before I could get a good hold on the main, we’d broach. Knockdown. Three drowned sailors.

  The speedometer was pegged at twelve knots. If we didn’t slow down, we were going to plow straight into the wave in front of us and pitchpole forward. The huge white triangle of sail stood out against the dim light that was not night but black day. The wind howled after us, but there was no place to hide. No key to take out. No dream to wake up from. I had made a mistake and we were stuck with it. All of us—together.