Red Sea

by Diane Tullson

  I hear Mom take a breath. When she speaks, her voice is shrill. “I told you and Duncan told you that we were leaving today. It’s all we’ve been talking about. You knew damn well...”

  Duncan puts his hand on Mom’s arm. “Get in and stow your pack, Lib. We’re casting off.” He spins and goes below.

  Mom flings another volley in my direction, “We planned this Red Sea flotilla for weeks and now we’ll be alone.”

  With a shrug I climb onto the stern of the boat, careful to scuff my sneaker on the painted letters of the name, Mistaya, then slip through the open transom into the cockpit. I squeeze past Mom without looking at her and into the companionway.

  Below, Duncan is at the chart table bent over his electronic course plotter, transferring a coordinate onto a traditional paper chart. The main cabin never looks better than before a passage. The table and counter are clear, everything is put away behind locker doors, even the books on the shelves are held tight with bungee cord. At sea, nothing can be left loose to fly around. I set my pack on the counter.

  Last night they stood at my closed door, talking at me until my silence forced them to give up. Now, Duncan is trying very hard to pretend everything is normal. So he looks at my pack and makes a fake “uh-hem.”

  “I’ll stow it. I just need a snack.”

  I rummage in the fridge for some juice. Mom has the fridge layered with plastic containers of the pre-made meals. Not that anyone will feel like eating, anyway. I shove aside the containers and pull out a carton of juice.

  “The lid.”

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Save power. I let the lid slam closed. Duncan’s glare prickles the back of my neck. I pull out a glass and pour the juice, then stand drinking it while I stare at Duncan. He’s ignoring me now, penciling a line on his chart. His glasses are pulled down to the end of his nose. His gray hair is creased from the cap he wore today. Very attractive. Emma’s right, he is fit, I have to give him that. He doesn’t have the old guy gut my grandfather has, and Duncan is almost as old. Duncan is wearing jeans, an ancient T-shirt and his standard footwear for inside the boat: house slippers. I don’t know how my mother keeps her hands off of him. I finish the juice and leave the glass on the counter. As I close myself into my cabin, I hear Duncan putting the glass away.

  WHEN WE’RE SAILING, even though I’m stuck on the boat with them, I get more time and space to myself. Either Mom or Duncan is always in the cockpit keeping watch, and the other is often in their cabin, resting. They leave me alone. All that first night I stayed in my cabin, but today I made an appearance while Duncan was on watch. He asked me how I was doing, if I needed something to eat. He said that he was watching for the Zubair Islands, that he was glad we were passing them in the daylight, that sometimes the lighthouses don’t work and a sailor can run right onto the rocks. Then he told me about a book he was reading, a biography about a woman pilot in Africa before there were airfields. He said that back then pilots only flew in the daylight so they could see to land. This pilot, though, got caught out after dark, but her servant, who knew nothing about flying but did know the depth of African night, lit fires along the landing strip so she could land. Then he told me about one of the Apollo 13 astronauts who as a young pilot training in night flying from an unlit aircraft carrier, shorted out all his instrumentation and radio. He only found his ship from the phosphorescent trail of its propeller. Duncan started on another story, but I said thanks, that I got it, that lights are important if you’re a screw-up pilot or astronaut. Fascinating, I said, that they lived to tell the tale. Yawn, I said, suddenly I’m ready for a nap.

  Actually, I wouldn’t mind reading that book about the woman pilot in Africa.

  I’m hungry, so I make supper: soda crackers for Mom, warmed-up lasagna for Duncan and me. We eat in the cockpit so that Duncan can keep his watch. We always stand watch when we’re sailing, especially at night. Freighters and fishing boats can’t always see sailboats. We need lots of time to get out of their way; a sailboat doesn’t outrun anything. On passage, I usually stand one three-hour watch each afternoon, although no one called me from my cabin today so I didn’t have to do it. Duncan and Mom do all the rest.

  A white-winged bird buzzes the boat so close that I duck my head. The sea is still narrow here, and birds pass easily from Africa to Saudi Arabia. The bird dive-bombs again, narrowly missing the wire shrouds that hold up the mast. “Crazy bird!” Duncan follows my gaze to the circling flock overhead. The birds’ movements seem tumbled and erratic, like socks in a dryer. Only Mom doesn’t seem concerned that the birds have lost their minds.

  The islands Duncan mentioned this afternoon are pale purple humps behind us now, or I assume it is those islands. It’s not like the sea has signposts with arrows and mile markers. In sight of land we compare lighthouses and landmarks with those indicated on the chart to figure out where we are and check the GPS, an electronic positioning device, for our latitude and longitude. Even with the GPS, I’m always a little surprised that we find exactly the right entrance to a harbor. It’s like finding a house address when none of the houses are numbered or the street signs are missing.

  The faded islands are the only land I can see. Ahead of us, there’s just water, the edge of everywhere and nowhere and only a pencil dot on the chart tells me we’re anywhere at all.

  As we eat, Mom’s gaze never leaves the sea. I resist, I try, and then I ask her, “Watching for pirates?”

  Duncan shoots me a warning look. Mom turns the color of toothpaste. “That’s not funny, Lib.”

  Duncan unclips his tether from his harness and passes it to Mom. “Lib and I will wash the dishes. You stay up here.” He gathers our plates and forks, and with a determined nod, motions me down the companionway.

  Duncan washes, I dry. Apparently, I use too much fresh water when I rinse. He hands me a glass to dry. “I’d like you to stand watch with your mother tonight.”

  “Why? What did I do?”

  That tiny muscle in his cheek clenches. “It’s not a punishment, Lib. Your mother’s stomach is upset from being at sea, she’s not getting her rest when she’s off-watch, and she’s nervous. She could use the company.”

  I dry the glass. It has a label, the letter “J” for Janine. Duncan labels everything on this boat. I put away the glass. “You want me to fight off the pirates?”

  Duncan sighs. “Your mother is entitled to be nervous.” He takes a long time cleaning a plastic lasagna tub. “She has you to think about.”

  I barely hold in a snort. If Mom were thinking about me, I’d be home with Dad right now, watching big-screen TV and burning every light in the house. If Mom were thinking about me, she’d have let me stay at home too. But Mom isn’t thinking about me. I say to Duncan, “Maybe you should stay up with her.”

  His hands pause in the sink. “I can’t be awake all night, Lib.”

  I shrug. “Yeah, well, I was going to catch up on my novel study.”

  Clench. Unclench. Clench. If I’d tried that line on my mother, she would have launched a very long argument about how I should have used my time in port to get the assignment done, that I’m not managing my correspondence courses, that if I want to repeat ninth grade when we get back, then that’s fine with her. When he speaks, Duncan is firm. “Just while we’re in the southern Red Sea, Lib, I expect you on deck with your mother.” He wrings out the sponge and leans on the sink. “Tomorrow or the next day, hopefully, we’ll catch up with Emma and Mac and the others, and that will make your mother feel better. Right now we’re not even in radio range.” He looks at me, hard. “I don’t expect any problems, but if you see anything, and I mean anything, out of the ordinary, you’re to come and wake me.”

  FOUR

  I POUR A CUP OF TEA from the Thermos in the cockpit, choosing the warmth of the drink over the real threat of having to pee while wearing nineteen layers of foul weather gear. Night watches are always cold, even in warm climates. I offer Mom the Thermos. She’s standing at the wheel, nibbling a cracker with
one gloved hand. The wind is light, and we’re motoring with the mainsail. The engine is revved about as high as Duncan will allow for fuel conservation. Mom isn’t wasting any time. She’s tethered to the wheel post. I’m clipped on at the companionway, which means I can huddle on the cockpit seat under the canvas spray hood and stay out of the worst of the weather. Mom waves away the tea with a “no thanks.”

  “Of all of us,” she says, “you’re the one best suited to sailing. You never get seasick.”

  I slurp my tea and tip my face to the night sky. “I can’t think of a place I’d rather be.” In the dim light of the compass binnacle I watch my mother’s face grow hopeful. The furrows in her forehead smooth out, a strand of brownish gold hair wafts against her cheek. When she was young, her hair was red, like mine. Her eyes brighten, hazel eyes that change from green to gray. My eyes. Mom smiles at me, and it reminds me of when I was younger, before Duncan, when it was just us. I start to smile back. But she should never have agreed to this trip. I say, “Unless that place was with my friends. Or my father. Or in an orphanage, if it meant I wasn’t here.”

  Her smile disappears and she shakes her head. “You’re not giving this trip a chance, Lib. When I was fourteen I would have done anything for this opportunity: a trip to Australia, then a one-year sailing journey to the Mediterranean.”

  “Through some of the most pirate-infested waters on the planet.” I look pointedly at the handheld two-way radio dangling from her wrist and the arsenal of distress flares beside her in the cockpit.

  She seems to ignore my comment, but I see her shoulders tighten and she scans the blackness behind the boat. “If you just let yourself, I think you’d enjoy this trip. You could learn so much. You could pick up your marks...”

  “Don’t start.”

  That stops her, briefly. “What I meant was, you’re a good student, and without as many distractions...”

  “If by ‘distractions’ you mean friends, then you’re right. I don’t have any friends.”

  “We have our sailing friends on the other boats.” She extends her hand out into the night. “They’re out there, Emma and Mac, the others. They’d do anything for us.”

  “They didn’t wait for us.”

  “Emma and Mac hung back as long as they thought they could. You were too late getting back to the boat.”

  “Are you going to rant again about me being late?”

  “You brought it up.”

  I hurl what’s left in my mug overboard. “You like to think that this trip is such a good thing for me. But it’s not about me, this trip. Not the smallest bit of it. This trip is all about you. Everything is about you. You and Duncan.”

  Her voice is quiet. “This trip is for us, Lib. I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to get us back on track. I don’t ever want to feel like I could have done more. But I don’t want to hear anything about Duncan.” She takes a breath, pauses, then says, “You are so angry. For five years, you’ve been angry, ever since I married Duncan. You’ve made him into some kind of a monster, and he only wants what is best for you.” I release one small guffaw. She says, “Duncan and I wanted to make this trip—”

  I cut her off. “No. Duncan wanted the trip. You want what Duncan wants, so you went along. Thanks for dragging me with you.”

  “Let me finish. We wanted to make this trip with you, while we could, while there was still time to get your marks back up for university applications.”

  “Ha. You’ll be happy if I finish high school. You took me because you don’t trust me. You need to control my every waking moment and what better place than a floating bleach bottle half a world away from anything and anyone that’s important to me.”

  She recoils after that last comment. Then she says, “You’re important to me, to both of us.”

  “Both of us. You and Duncan. Duncan and you. Duncan who can do no wrong.”

  “Duncan isn’t perfect, Lib, but you know he would never hurt you.”

  “And that makes me, what, the liar? Couldn’t he be lying? Couldn’t you be lying, just to protect him?”

  This silences her, briefly. “Lib, Duncan is my heaven-on-earth, but I wouldn’t protect him, not if he was harming you.” She doesn’t even blink. She pauses, breathes in, then says, “It’s not that I don’t believe you.”

  “How can you make those two statements? Don’t they cancel each other out?”

  Mom chooses her words as if she were picking up broken glass. “I think that you’re confused.”

  “Oh, thanks very much. It’s nice to know you have such faith in my mental capacity. Nice that my tea mug comes without a sippy lid.”

  “It won’t hurt for you to be away a while.”

  “Away from what?”

  “I’ve talked to you about Ty. You just don’t want to hear me.”

  I make my voice mimic hers, “He’s so much older than you, Lib.” Then I say, “You marry a dinosaur, but Ty is too old for me.”

  She’s losing her patience; her voice is clipped. “It’s not just that Ty is nineteen, although I hate that he trolls for girls in the ninth grade.”

  “Trolls? You make him sound like a predator.”

  “It’s not just me who thinks so. Lindsay told Denise that Ty is bad news.”

  Lindsay is my old best friend Vanessa’s sister, in grade twelve now. Denise is her mother.

  “How would Lindsay know?”

  “Because she went out with him too when she was fourteen.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “She did. For two weeks, then he threw her back and picked someone else. Apparently, he said she was ‘too reserved,’ although that might be Denise’s euphemism.”

  Understatement, more like. Lindsay probably still covers her eyes in movies when people kiss.

  I say, “Oh, so you’re basing your opinion of Ty on Lindsay’s two-week relationship?”

  She inhales, her hands rest on the wheel as if it were a lectern or pulpit. “Nothing I’ve seen makes me think any differently.”

  Ty came to the door the first time we went out. After that, he said to watch for him and just come out to the car. He never comes in if they’re home. I say, “You don’t even know Ty. He’d do anything for me.”

  I can see Mom wringing her hands on the wheel. Her voice is tight when she says, “Oh, I know Ty. I know him from that going-away party he threw for you at our house.”

  I say, “It was just a little party.”

  “We arrived home to police cars, Lib. We had to hire a drywall crew, and if that was the worst of it, then I’d be happy.” Her voice starts to break. “You were so out of it.”

  I hardly remember that party. I change the subject. “You yanked me from all my friends. They’ll ditch me, and you like the idea that I won’t have any friends, any distractions.” I turn so that she’s looking at my back.

  After a long time she says, “I just want us to be together, Lib.”

  “You should have thought of that five years ago when you left Dad.”

  Her voice softens and she says, “Lib, I really need for us to get along. I feel like I hardly know you anymore.”

  I get to my feet. “It isn’t going to happen. Get used to that.” I reach down to unsnap my tether. “I’m going to bed.”

  FIVE

  I’M NOT SURE WHAT WAKES ME. Through my cabin window I can see that it is just dawn, still Mom’s watch. Weather must be changing; a thin line of red indicates the rising sun. Mom has throttled up the engine, and the sound rattles the inside of the boat. Duncan won’t be happy about her revving the engine. I close my eyes. Then, over the din of the engine, I hear my mother’s voice on the two-way vhf radio at the chart table. She must be using the handheld radio in the cockpit.

  “Mayday, mayday, mayday.”

  My feet find the cold floor of my cabin. I toss on my sailing jacket over my pajamas and bolt from the cabin. Duncan’s door is still closed, and I bang on it as I scramble up the companionway steps.

  There�
�s a thudding crunch on one side of the hull that almost shakes me off the steps. Then another. Duncan’s door crashes open and he emerges, his hair all rucked up and his eyes still doped with sleep. I can hear another boat engine. Duncan pushes past me on the steps.

  Over his head I see a flare streak low. Mom’s fired a distress flare. She’s screaming for Duncan.

  “Get below!” Duncan shoves me down the steps.

  I follow him back up. At the top of the steps he stops, and I peer out into the cockpit from under his elbow. I can see a dhow, an open wooden boat motoring alongside, thudding into our hull. The three men in the boat are shouting at my mother. Ski masks cover their faces. From the edge of the sun, another boat hurtles toward us.

  I sense the gunfire more than hear it. It’s like the sound is inside my head, and I swear I can feel my eardrums vibrate as if they are making the sound. I duck my head lower into the companionway. Duncan is yelling at Mom, “Those are warning shots. Cut the engine. They won’t hurt us if we cooperate.”

  I push up onto the last step so I’m standing beside Duncan. Mom’s eyes are crazed with fear. Maybe she doesn’t hear him over the sound of the engines. Maybe she’s hearing Jimmy’s voice in her head. She levels a flare right at the oncoming boat. I lose her for a moment in the smoke of the flare. The flare rockets toward the boat and explodes on their bow.

  I know why moviemakers sometimes film action sequences in slow motion. It’s because that’s the way we see it in real life. It’s like a strobe light catches the horror in flashes so that the images can burn into our brains. So that we can’t hope to ever forget it.

  The second boat is so much closer now that I can see the gunman. He too is wearing a ski mask, as are the other men in his boat. He’s standing at the bow of his boat, a large rifle aimed our way. His whole body shakes with the force of the weapon. Tiny bursts of fire erupt from the barrel followed by the blat-blat-blat sound of automatic gunfire.

  A spray rips across the mainsail. A cockpit cushion explodes in shards of foam. Then the Thermos of tea disintegrates. Maybe I imagine it, but I think I see tea droplets hang in the air. The noise is enormous but even so, I can hear Duncan, beside me, screaming at my mother. I think he’s telling her to drop. He’s scrambling out into the cockpit, running toward my mother. But nothing is faster than the bullets. Not his words. Not me thinking, Oh good, they’re going to miss her.