She looked to the sky for signal of morning. It seemed she had lived for days in the mansion, hiding, searching, alternately afraid and fearsome. It had been but hours. The sky to the east changed from unpolished silver to pearl gray as she watched it. By the time the sun rose, she would be deep into the Gulf of Mexico. Soon after, the motor would run out of gas. She'd drift, carried by ocean current, past the shipping lanes, and into the vast open empty sea.
There, when she had worked up her nerve, she would slip over the side of the boat and let the sea take her down. She knew by then the Coastguard would have been called to either capture or rescue her, but all they'd find was the empty vessel floating aimlessly over the waves.
She settled back against the ribs of the boat and guided the handle of the motor so that her course would not be altered.
The wake trailed behind her, picked at by flashing divers, seagulls hunting breakfast. She saw a sleek gray dolphin leaping. It came alongside for a time, pacing the boat, accompanying her to sea.
When the sun was just over the horizon, she had cleared Galveston Island and was leaving it too behind. She saw a shrimp boat ahead of her, but too far for the men on board to notice, and she trailed it. Far to the right was a freighter that looked as small as a toy boat in a bathtub. Isolated, it steamed toward a foreign destination.
When the sun had fully moved up the eastern horizon and she could no longer see the Seabrook or Galveston shorelines, when there was no land at all in sight and deep cobalt waters surrounded her. When the shrimp boat and freighter were lost in dawn mist in another part of the Gulf, she waited for the little motor to splutter and die. It obliged her minutes afterward while she spent her last moments immersed in pleasant reverie of her time with Mitch, loving him as she had loved no other man, even Scott.
When she came to herself and realized the motor was dead and that the bow of the boat was turning, drifting on its own, she looked once at the sun, once at the shadows racing across the water. Shadows fell from fat, blue-bottomed clouds hanging low overhead. She crawled to the side, and lowered herself into the cold, rippling body of blue, hoping, hoping sincerely, that God lived, and that He safely held the souls of all little children in the palm of His hand.
Even her.
THE END
Thank You For Reading!
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