The Great Wide Sea

by M. H. Herlong

  His wound looked good. It was red, of course, and it would have looked a whole lot better if somebody could have stitched it. But it wasn’t all horrible and swollen. It wasn’t oozing pus. I felt good being the nurse. I felt we had the routine down. I knew what to do every day. Breakfast. Boil water. Clean wound. Feed Dylan. Set him in the water. Go fish. At night, build fire. Cook fish. Lie on beach. Tell stories. I could do this. Dylan seemed better every day. We were going to get past even this.

  But something changed. I couldn’t tell what it was at first. It just seemed as if the color of the air had shifted somehow. Then I realized that Dylan had stopped smiling. His mouth was set in a straight line, and when he thought we weren’t looking at him, his eyes were vague and worried. I realized he was hurting, not just when I moved him, but all the time.

  So when Gerry was off hunting up some shells to show Dylan, I sat down beside him instead of heading for the reef.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “I mean, what’s wrong?”

  “My leg is broken.”

  “Yeah, I noticed.” I looked him straight in the eye, and he looked away. I took his chin in my hand and turned it back to me. “Seriously, Dylan. Something new is wrong. What is it?”

  Tears stood suddenly along the bottom curve of his eyes. A finger of ice pierced me.

  He took in a deep breath and let it go quickly. Then again. I knew it was a way to keep his voice level when he talked.

  “I think, Ben, that something inside is infected. It hurts in a different way. And now, when I touch it with my fingertips, just the touching hurts.”

  “Infected?”

  He nodded.

  “But there’s no pus. It’s not all red. We’ve kept it clean.”

  “I know.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “Touch here, Ben. Gently. With the flat of your hand.”

  I did. “It’s hot.”

  He nodded. “That’s infection.”

  “Bodies get over infection all the time,” I said. “That’s what white blood cells are for.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s just that it hurts.”

  I nodded. I patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of you.” And then I left to swim the reef.

  Dylan didn’t eat as well that night. I was fussing at Gerry about wasting food when I noticed Dylan hadn’t eaten his. “What’s the matter? You’re not hungry?” He barely shook his head. “It’s okay,” I said. “You need more rest.”

  In the tent that night, I could hear Dylan twisting and occasionally sniffing. I felt fear again. What do you do without medicine? When just cleaning it isn’t enough? Was there a plant we didn’t know about? Some tree bark? A special seaweed? I would dive for it. All the way down. I would push away the fire coral to reach it. I would rip it out from under a starving shark. Whatever it takes, I said to myself. Whatever it takes. Then I waited through a long night and a silent breakfast and a flat good-bye to Gerry as he headed for his beach before I went to ask Dylan what it would take to make him well.

  He was lying still in the tent, his hands resting on his chest, his eyes looking up. The tent smelled bad and I thought I ought to clean it.

  “Hey, Dylan.”

  He shifted slightly.

  “You’re not better.”

  He shook his head.

  “You need to get your white blood cells busy, man.”

  He didn’t smile.

  I picked up a little stick and snapped it in two. “You’re even worse, aren’t you.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Touch me,” he said.

  I touched his arm. It was too warm. “You have fever,” I said.

  “Look at my leg—under the sticks.”

  I looked. The sticks had been disguising it, but now it was clear. An ugly blotch of red discolored his calf. His ankle was swollen. The delicate edges of his kneecap were disappearing into the swelling at his knee.

  I looked away.

  “Do you know of something?” I asked. “Some plant? A weird cactus, a seaweed?”

  He was quiet.

  “Do you, Dylan? I’ll go get it. Whatever it is. I can—”

  “I don’t know of anything.”

  “Some book you’ve read—something of Dad’s. Surely they said something.”

  “I don’t know of anything.”

  “Think harder, Dylan.”

  “Ben. What do you think I’ve been doing lying here all this time?”

  I paused. “You mean there’s nothing?”

  “There’s nothing. That I know of. That will help.”

  “So?”

  “So my body either gets better by itself—or I die.”

  That was a word that sucked all the other words out of me. There were no soft edges to it. There was no way to pretend it meant something else. I had to let the reverberations slowly ring out of my head before I could think again.

  “We’ll take you to a doctor,” I said.

  Dylan sniffed. “Yeah, right. Why don’t you call for an appointment.”

  “I’m serious, Dylan. I’ll take you to a doctor. Whatever it takes, I’ll do it.”

  “What doctor? Where? In what vehicle?” Now he was tired.

  “I don’t know. We’ll go in the dinghy. Surely there’s another island nearby. We’ve just never tried.”

  Dylan was looking away now. “Yes. I think you’re right about another island. Probably not all that far in a real boat. But in the dinghy? Never. And we don’t even know what direction to go in.”

  “West. We’d go west. I’ve seen clouds—cumulus—low on the horizon. They say that’s a sign of an island.”

  “Ben. We don’t know how far. And we can’t all fit in the dinghy.”

  “We can do it. If we try hard enough, I’m sure—”

  “Ben. Go away. I’m tired.” He turned his head and covered his face with his arm.

  I crawled outside the tent and turned to head for the dinghy. And there was Gerry, sitting just on the other side of the tent canvas from where Dylan lay. He didn’t look at me. He stabbed a stick in the sand over and over. Blankie lay on the ground beside him. I took his arm gently and pulled him to stand. I handed him Blankie and led him away down the beach. I sat with my back propped against the dinghy and pulled Gerry into my lap. He was stiff at first, then he slowly relaxed. He put his head against my chest. I wrapped him with my arms and pulled him close. He was small and sandy. He was trembling. We listened to the water slap. A few pelicans floated on a quiet corner of our bay. The terns plunged for the kill and the seagulls called out their single word, “Die! Die! Die!”

  By afternoon, Dylan was clearly worse. Mom used to say she knew we were sick by our eyes. Dylan’s eyes looked worse than sick. Sometimes, it seemed he was looking somewhere else—as if there were a play going on in front of him that we couldn’t see. Sometimes his face was too pink and sometimes it had no color at all. He was restless and breathing too fast. But he was talking clearly. And giving us instructions.

  “Be sure not to cut too much of one prickly pear at a time,” he said to me.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t want to kill the plant. Think of it like pruning.”

  “Right, Dylan.”

  “Gerry knows how to work the water-maker. The theory is condensation. You put the plants in the bottom of the pit and the water evaporates out of them and condenses on the garbage bag stretched over it. Then the condensation drips into the cup.”

  “Right, Dylan.”

  “Did you know Gerry has a loose tooth?”

  “What?”

  “Take care of it when it comes out. It will be useful some way.”

  I couldn’t take it anymore. “Let’s go, Gerry,” I said. “Let’s put him in the dinghy. We’re going to a doctor.”

  “No!” Dylan shouted. “Don’t move me. It would hurt! In a dinghy, on the waves. No. I�
��m sorry. I couldn’t.”

  “You’re jabbering, Dylan,” I said. “You’ll do fine.”

  “We can’t all fit in the dinghy, Ben,” Gerry said quietly. “With the sail, there isn’t enough room.”

  “He needs a doctor,” I said.

  “Then you go get one,” Gerry said, and pulled Blankie slowly over his head.

  That evening when I touched Dylan’s forehead, it was blazing hot. He was moaning slightly. I filled a pot with seawater and bathed Dylan’s face and hands. I lifted his shirt and bathed his chest. “Don’t,” he said. “That hurts.”

  “We need to get your fever down.”

  He twisted away from the cloth when I touched his face.

  “Come on, Dylan,” I begged. “You’ve got to get better.”

  “Leave me alone,” he muttered.

  So I lifted him and took him down to the edge of the water. The moon was clear tonight—not a full moon, but a lovely rocking crescent sitting above the eastern rise of our island. It reflected in long, liquid squiggles on the ripples in the water’s edge. I waded with Dylan into the water and then sat down, holding him in my arms.

  “Once upon a time,” I said, “there was a guy who had two little brothers. And when one of them was sick, this guy wanted to make him well, but he didn’t know how.”

  Dylan’s eyes were open in the darkness. I could see the shimmer of moon reflecting in them. He was not looking at me.

  “This guy said he would do anything—whatever it took—to make his brother well. But it seemed there was nothing he could do. Until one day, the littlest brother said, ‘You go,’ and then the guy knew that the only thing he could do was the hardest thing of all.”

  Dylan’s gaze had shifted and now he was looking at me.

  “Because to go alone meant to leave both of them—the one who was hurt and the one who was too little to take care of himself. If the biggest brother could get help, they would all be okay in the end. But if he was gone too long or if he was lost at sea, then both the little brothers—alone on the island—who could tell?”

  Dylan closed his eyes. I brushed some water on his forehead. It seemed cooler. Some drops rolled over his face, and I smoothed them off his eyes. He opened his eyes again, blinking. “Don’t go,” he said. “Don’t leave Gerry alone.”

  “We’ll ask him,” I said. “We’ll leave it up to him.”

  I carried Dylan carefully back to the tent and laid him down. The heat radiated off of him like a banked fire. The stench was strong in the tent and I realized at last that it was Dylan’s leg. I took Gerry outside and asked him what I should do. He didn’t answer right away. He held Blankie over his mouth and looked out at the dark ocean and then at the dinghy.

  “You would come right back?” he asked.

  “As soon as I could—if I could.”

  “You’re a good sailor,” he said.

  “I try.”

  “You wouldn’t fall off the boat?”

  “No. I wouldn’t do that.”

  He clutched Blankie tighter. “Do you want me to help you pack?”

  I took one jar of water, a few strips of dried fish, some prickly-pear pads already scraped clean, and a hook and line. It all fit easily into an old shirt tied up in a knot. I threw an extra line in the bottom of the dinghy for good measure. It seemed a sailorly thing to do. The boat would be ready to leave when morning came again.

  Dylan lay in the soft bed we had scooped out for him. Gerry stood on the beach, dragging a stick around in the sand. I stood by Dylan, watching the moon set. The crescent lay on its back, open to the stars above it. It sank slowly down behind our little island until all I could see were the two tips of the crescent, almost like horns standing above the tops of the trees. Then one horn disappeared behind a higher rock. Then the second horn went and the sky was dark. I heard Gerry dragging the stick behind him as he walked slowly up and down the beach in the dark.

  “I don’t know how to do this, Dylan,” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “I don’t know how to leave you,” I said to the silence. Then Gerry’s outline appeared beside me and the gentle heat of his body warmed my arm as he, too, stood beside Dylan.

  Gerry picked up his stick and broke it in half. “I’m scared, Ben.”

  “Me too, Gerry.” I stooped down to look him level in the eye and rubbed his head. “You need a haircut, buddy.”

  He nodded stiffly. “You too.”

  “Take care of Dylan.”

  “Okay.”

  Then I hugged him. I wrapped him up in my arms and picked him up and pressed his head against my shoulder. I felt his little skinny arms go around my neck and his hair stick in my face. I felt the bones in his butt where my arm held him up. Then he wrapped his sandy legs around my waist and shuddered, and I knew that was a sob he didn’t want me to see.

  So I held Gerry and looked at Dylan and the night closed over us and they slept. I knew that in the morning I would be strong enough. In the morning I would be able to go because I loved them and I had no other choice.

  “I love you,” I said to their sleeping heads. “I love you. I need you. I couldn’t leave you if it wasn’t so.”

  HOME

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  I DON’T REMEMBER MUCH of this part. I only remember holding Gerry before I left and pressing his head into my shoulder. I remember pushing the dinghy out through the waves and the way the mast I’d rigged looked like it would fall over. I remember some prayers without words and some crying. The sun was shining too brightly and I told Gerry to stay out of it as much as he could. I saw the sand on his toes. I saw his toenails needing trimming. I touched him again, and then I pushed the dinghy out to sea.

  If I say he looked so small there on the beach watching me leave, somebody would say, “Oh, that’s been said a million times before.” But for me, it was the first time I had left him like that and it was my whole heart that said it. “He’s so small. He’s too small. This shouldn’t be. God, this shouldn’t be.”

  Behind him was the clump of trees and the tent where Dylan was lying—Dylan so brave and smart. His leg was turning red and blue, and he was the one telling me what to do. I had to leave Dylan lying there and knowing—in a way that Gerry was too little to know—what this good-bye and this waving and then this turning out to sea could mean. What it probably meant.

  All I can really remember after that is my own sobs and the sound of the shirttail sail luffing while I steered a course due west. I cried when I took my sip of water. I cried when I ate the fish. I cried when the sun set. I hated myself for crying and I hated myself for leaving and I hated myself for being afraid to leave. When it was dark, I lay down in the dinghy. The water in the bottom sloshed around me. There was still a faint smell of gas from the lost engine. I closed my eyes against the sight of that ridiculous mast and sail. Then I opened them and saw a sea of foreign stars.

  This was a sky Dylan had never explained to me. Even so, lying in the dinghy with the whole night sky curving from horizon to horizon over me, I felt sturdied by the stars. For a second I was lifted into space. I was shining there with them, suspended and floating free. I looked back, and there rocking on the ocean, alone and huddled down in the hard dinghy bottom, was a boy who used to be me. And just beyond the curve of the velvet, star-studded horizon was an island with waves lapping the shore and lizards feeding in the dark and two boys nesting in the sand under a rotting tent of sail. The beauty of it all—the stars, the velvet, the lapping waves, the boys—it stung me. My mind reached out to grab something, something I needed to hold. But I missed. And it was gone.

  I tumbled away from space, knocking my knee against the dinghy’s rough side and pinned down by a vision of Gerry, screaming square-mouthed and terrified beside Dylan’s cold body while the Earth turned and they slipped away, slipped away, and disappeared. “Ben!” Gerry’s voice was crying. “Ben. Come back!”

  I reached for the tiller. I pulled in the sail. The bow swung slo
wly through the wind. I eased out the sail until I was heading east. Due east. Back to the island. I had to go home to my brothers.

  Then I closed my eyes. I squeezed them hard.

  “No!” I said to myself, and turned the boat back around. West. Due west. Until I was sailing away again, leaving my brothers behind once more.

  The sky grew light. The gentle pearl of a dawn at sea touched the horizon, and the sky went from flat gray to mauve to aqua to transparent blue. The sun inched in a burning arc overhead. I kept the dinghy pointed straight along its path. As the sun set in a torrid orange glow, the dinghy was headed directly toward its center, creeping across the tranquil sea.

  I lost the sun. I found the Pole Star. I kept it hard to starboard. I pressed down on the pictures springing up in my head. I slept. I dreamed. I woke. I slept. I lost myself in my life. I was five, licking a lemon sucker and watching Mom fold clothes. I was old, looking at my gnarled hand pick at an edge of cloth and listening to someone say, “Dad? Dad?” Then I was awake and running and falling. Only I was asleep and the voice was out on the ocean.

  Then I was really awake with the call echoing in my ears.

  I sat up in the dinghy, banging my elbows on the seat. “Dad!” I yelled back at the sea. “Dad! Where are you?”

  I knelt and leaned as far out as I could.

  “Dad!” My voice cracked. “Mom!” There was no answer. “For God’s sake,” I sobbed. “Where are you?”

  I reached deep into the ocean, desperately paddling toward the lost voice. Then I remembered and I sat back and held my face in my dripping hands. Slowly the sun rose on a wide, empty sea.

  Then suddenly, around noon, I saw the boat. She was so near. How could I not have seen her before? She was a deep-sea fishing boat, and she was coming toward me.

  I stood up in the dinghy. I screamed. I waved my arms. I was thinking about Dylan and Gerry. I was praying they were still alive. So I stood up in the dinghy and screamed and waved my arms.

  I can see it now like it was a movie in super-sharp focus. I see the bow gently pushing through the waves. I see the captain at the helm looking out at me and then his face changing.