Marcia Talley: Sing It to Her Bones

Hal caught the life jacket in his bloody hands. The hook in his neck flashed and sparkled. Blood dripped from the yellow feathers at its tail, drenching his shirt. He looked so pale and weak that I wondered if I had severed his carotid artery.

Connie grabbed a couple of small floating cushions, handed one to me, and we stood together on the seats in the cockpit, waiting. When Connie judged the time was right, we jumped. Hal was on his own.

Connie and I swam a good one hundred yards from the boat, then turned around, treading water. Silhouetted against the gray night sky, we could see Sea Song ’s regal mast and her sails flapping like wet sheets on a clothesline. Then she tilted, nose down, and sank beneath the water. Connie moaned. “It’s like losing Craig all over again,” she sobbed.

I felt rotten. I was a curse. A jinx. “Oh, Connie, I’m so sorry. But I couldn’t think what else to do. He was going to leave us out here to drown!” I gasped. My lungs burned, as if they would never get enough oxygen.

“It was the right thing.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Absolutely the right thing.”

As I bawled and made well-intentioned promises to God if He’d just help me out of this mess, a cloud bank slid across the sky and the moon, nearly full, laid a silver path on the water. I had my answer. I couldn’t wish anybody dead. I expected to see Hal’s head bobbing nearby, but although I scanned the water for several minutes, I didn’t spot him.

“Where’s Hal? I thought sure he’d get out.”

“Maybe he’s on the other side, treading water like we are.”

“Hal! Hal!” I called, but the only answer was the sound of my own labored breathing and the clang of the bell on a nearby buoy. I gasped, choking back tears. “I didn’t want him to die, Connie. I never wanted him to die!”

Connie grabbed my life vest by the straps and pulled me toward her until we were so close that our foreheads nearly touched. “Of course you didn’t, sweetheart.” Waves licked at my chin as I sobbed. “C’mon. We’re only in about twenty feet of water.”

“I’m not that tall,” I wailed.

“What I mean, silly, is that if we’re lucky, Sea Song ’s mast will still be visible.”

I looked all around me. Miles away I could see lights glimmering onshore. A pair moving in tandem must be a car, its driver heading home after a late day at the office. One thing I knew for sure: It was too far to swim.

“Do you think the coast guard heard your call before the radio died?”

“I hope so.” She tugged on my vest. “There she is!” I looked where she pointed and saw the top twenty feet of Sea Song ’s mast, jutting out at a sharp angle from the moon-spangled waves.

We swam, arm over arm, and grabbed on, exhausted. My arm and side ached as if I’d spent twenty minutes on the inside of an industrial clothes dryer. I wondered what had happened to Hal. I wondered if he’d focused on those beckoning lights and tried to swim for shore. In spite of all that had happened, I found myself praying that he’d make it.

Lights can be deceptive on the water at night.While I clung to the mast, I scanned the horizon for approaching lights that might signal a rescue was at hand. Behind me green and red flashing buoys marked the shipping lanes. I thanked my lucky stars we hadn’t sunk out there where we could easily have been run over by a freighter on its way up to Baltimore with a cargo hold full of new Toyotas. To my right I stared long and hard at a bright white light. Connie and I argued about it, thinking it might be the mast light of a sailboat under power, one near enough to rescue us, but when it hadn’t moved for a while, we decided it must be Venus, always the brightest star in the early-evening sky. Ahead and to my left, scattered lights flashed green or white at two- or four-second intervals, marking the channel into the Truxton, or so Connie said.

The drone of a high-speed motorboat raised our hopes. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” We gripped our flotation cushions by their straps and waved them in the air as the boat passed, unseeing, within two hundred feet of us, swamping us in its wake as it went rooster-tailing by. I inhaled water and coughed, wiping water out of my eyes with a free hand. “See why I hate powerboats?” Connie delivered a rude gesture toward the back of the disappearing boater.

I shivered. “I’m getting cold. How warm is the water?”

“About seventy degrees.”

“That’s okay, then. It’s room temperature. We should be okay.”

“We’ll be fine for a couple of hours, but I don’t want to stay out here too long, if we have a choice. I wish we had something to stand on. Water pulls heat from your body very quickly.”

I hugged myself, tucking one hand under my armpit. “How long do you think it will take them to find us?”

“I don’t know. Soon, I imagine.”

I went back to my original harebrained plan. “Can we swim to shore?”

“No. Two reasons that’s a bad idea. One, it’s a hell of a lot farther than it looks, and two, it’s easier to spot the boat than it is to find a lone swimmer, particularly at night.”

My teeth began to chatter. Connie explained that this was natural, the body’s way of staying warm. For once I wished I had more insulating body fat, but I hadn’t gained back the weight I’d lost during chemo.

“Shivering and chattering’s normal, Hannah. I once took a survival course. They say what you have to watch for are the umbles-mumbles, stumbles, fumbles, and grumbles.”

“Well, I’m certainly not going to stumble out here, but I might grumble.”

Connie, whom I trusted to be experienced with such things, said we should huddle for warmth. She instructed me to wrap my clothes as tightly around myself as possible, then embraced me in a bear hug with our legs twined together.

“That was really brilliant what you did back there,” Connie said after a moment.

“Thanks. I figured if the cancer was going to do me in anyway, I might as well go out in a blaze of glory! Sorry about taking you and the boat along with me.”

Something brushed against my leg, and I freaked, breaking away from Connie with a shriek. “It’s only a fish, silly! I felt it, too.” She grabbed my life jacket by the straps and pulled me back. We floated there, bobbing in the waves.

“Tell me something, Connie. If we’re going to die out here, I’d like to know. What’s really going on between you and Dennis?”

“I think we’re falling in love.”

“But why keep it such a deep, dark secret?”

I felt Connie shrug. “It was too soon after his wife’s death. And in addition to her other problems, his daughter, Maggie, is still grieving. She’s made it very difficult for us to see each other.”

I looked into my sister-in-law’s eyes, just inches from my own. “Why didn’t you tell me this before? What is there to be ashamed about?”

“I don’t know exactly. Perhaps I was feeling disloyal to Craig. Dennis and he had been such pals.”

“I still don’t understand why you wouldn’t share your feelings about Dennis with me, particularly when they were so obvious.”

“It’s silly, now that I think about it. But I thought I was protecting you.”

I was incredulous. “Protecting me? From what?”

When Connie spoke again, her voice was husky with emotion. “I didn’t tell you that Dennis lost his wife to cancer. I knew you weren’t out of the woods yet, medically speaking, and I was afraid you’d think that the first thing a husband widowed by cancer did was to dash off into the arms of the nearest available lover.”

“And you thought, because of Jennifer Goodall…” I squeezed Connie tightly and laughed. “And you think I’m wacky!”