Marcia Talley: Sing It to Her Bones

We floated quietly for a while, still wrapped around each other, taking turns holding on to the mast. “You know, I was thinking back there, if we got shot or if we drowned out here, I’d never get to say good-bye to Paul. I’d never be able to tell him how much I really love him.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’ve decided that one benefit of dying of cancer is that you usually have time to get your affairs in order. You can prepare your spouse for the time when you won’t be around anymore. It’s like saying a long good-bye.” Connie didn’t say anything, but I thought I saw tears on her cheeks.

I was resting my head on Connie’s shoulder and vice versa, trying to separate navigational markers and lights onshore from the lights of would-be rescuers or a tug towing a barge or another hot-dogging power-boater hightailing it back from dinner on the Eastern Shore. After a while it all seemed a kaleidoscopic blur.

I was cold, and I was tired, so very tired. The next thing I remember was Connie’s voice, spiraling down to me from the end of a long tunnel. “Sing!” it was saying. “Sing!”

“What?” My eyes snapped open, and my head lolled back against the neck roll of my life jacket.

“Sing!” Connie threw her head back, eyes closed, and launched into song, her voice off key, but hearty.

Do your ears hang low

Do they wobble to and fro

Can you tie ’em in a knot

Can you tie ’em in a bow

Can you sling ’em over your shoulder

Like a Continental soldier,

Do your ears hang looooow!

Just before she got to the last line, she punched me playfully on the arm and I joined in, a loooow in perfect two-part harmony that would sound to anybody hearing it from the distant shore like the mating call of a pair of lovesick cows.

“I haven’t sung that song since Girl Scout camp in California!” I sputtered.

“I thought singing would help keep our spirits up.”

In the next hour we warbled our way through every camp song known to God and man-“John Jacob Jingle Heimer Schmidt,” “White Coral Bells”-with a few nursery school songs, like “Eensy Weensy Spider” thrown in for good measure.

I was trying to remember all the words to “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” when a cool breeze fanned my cheek. Connie had raised her head. “I think they’re coming!”

Keeping one hand on the mast, I turned to look. When I first clapped eyes on those flashing blue lights, I did the nautical equivalent of jumping up and down for joy, kicking my feet and bobbing like a Halloween apple. Connie and I screamed, “Help! Help!” and waved our cushions again, hoping they’d be picked up by the rescuers as flashes of white against the dark sky.

The beam of a powerful searchlight pierced the darkness, swept across the water, and passed over us. My throat was raw from screaming and the salt water I’d swallowed. “They missed us! They passed right over us!” Tears of despair ran down my cheeks. Suddenly the beam stopped, shuddered and swept back, focusing on the cushion that Connie held aloft. I kissed Connie on the cheek. “Thank God, thank God!”

The vessel approached at a high rate of speed, the roar of its engine the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. And to think I’d so recently consigned all motor-powered boats to low places in hell. The engine throttled down, and the boat slowed, circling, but the searchlight never left our bodies. As it drew within fifteen feet of where we clung to Sea Song ’s mast, I could see that it was an inflatable inner tube-like boat about twenty feet long. The dark outlines of several crewmen moved about on board.

“Ahoy!” one of the crewmen called, and I thought what a quaint, old-fashioned thing to say , but every bit as effective, I supposed, as “Hey there!” “Sit tight. We’ll get a line to you in a minute.”

The boat crept fractionally closer, then stopped, its engine idling. “We can’t get too close to your boat, ma’am. If we get tangled up in it, we might all be in trouble.” Now I could see that the men wore uniforms and life jackets. One of them began to wind up like a softball player delivering a slow pitch. A line uncoiled from his hand, whooshing to our left. I heard a gentle plop as an orange, softball-size float landed not five feet from my head.

“You first, Hannah. Swim to it.”

“How about you?”

“They’ll throw one for me in a minute.”

I dog-paddled to the orange ball and grabbed it with one hand, then wrapped the fingers of both hands gratefully around the plastic rope. Almost immediately a crewman began to pull me through the water, but I was in such a hurry to get aboard that although it hurt my chest like crazy, I hauled myself, hand over hand, along the rope until I reached safety. Panting and almost insane with relief, I grabbed one of a dozen or so white lines looped along the side of the rescue craft. My arms and legs trembled with exhaustion, and it was all I could do to hold on until someone’s strong arms reached over and gently pulled me aboard. I flopped in the bottom of the boat like a stranded dolphin and tried to catch my breath.

“Thank goodness we found you!” said a familiar voice.

“Dennis! How’d you-”

“I’ll explain in a minute.” A towel appeared from somewhere; then I was wrapped in a blanket and hustled out of the wind. In less time than it took for me to sit down, Connie’s white-clad legs appeared on deck. Dennis himself had pulled her aboard. Almost before her feet hit the deck, he had gathered her up in a fierce embrace.

“Oh, Connie, Connie! Thank God. Let me take a look at you.” He held her at arm’s length as if checking to see if anything was missing or broken, then cradled her face in both his hands and stared into it for a long minute. “I don’t know what I would have done if I’d lost you.” I saw Connie’s arms lift from where they hung, dripping, at her sides, and wrap themselves around his neck. She kissed him then, long and hard, his arms snaked around her waist, and he lifted her feet nearly off the deck. Everyone but me was busily looking elsewhere.

“Where are the others?” a female crewman asked. I could see the beam of the searchlight she held sweeping the water around the mast in ever-broadening circles.

“He was on the boat,” I cried. “We threw him a life jacket. But I didn’t see him come up after the boat went down.”

“You radioed a man overboard.”

“That was Liz Dunbar,” Connie said matter-of-factly, as she, too, was cocooned in a blanket. “She got clobbered by the boom and went over about two miles from here.”

Dennis settled Connie next to me, then turned to consult one of the crew. I snuggled deeper into my blanket, figuring we’d be stuck out there for hours while the coast guard searched the bay for Liz and Hal. I found myself nodding, unable to keep my eyes open. Might even have dozed off for a bit.

Suddenly I was aroused by a flurry of activity-motors, flashing lights, crew shouting back and forth-as another boat, this one from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, pulled up alongside.

Once again Dennis seemed to take charge. “Call SMC,” he told the crewman at the wheel. “Make sure they’ve got some divers on the way. Then let’s get these women ashore.”

This time when Dennis said we’d go to the hospital, I didn’t argue. As we waited in separate cubicles under the bright lights of the emergency room with only a thin curtain between us, Connie and I learned that Frank Chase had been found and airlifted to University Shock-Trauma in Baltimore. No one could tell us how he was doing. Eventually we were examined, our temperatures taken, and an earnest young doctor from Poland, whose nametag had no vowels in it, pronounced we were suffering from mild hypothermia. Several hundred dollars later he sent us home with instructions to keep warm and drink plenty of hot liquids. Some thoughtful person even produced hospital scrubs for us to wear and returned our wet clothes, neatly folded, in a plastic garbage bag.