T. Boyle: When the Killing's Done

In the sequel she was on the bridge, trying to make Till and Warren understand about the water in the cabin, water that didn’t belong there, water that was coming in through a breach in the forward hatch that was underwater itself before it shook free of the weight of the waves and sank back down again. But Till wasn’t listening. Till, her rock, the man who’d survived the mangling of his arm and the fiery blast of shrapnel that was lodged still in his legs and secreted beneath the constellation of scars on the broad firmament of his back, sat slumped over the controls, distracted and drawn and punching desperately at the starter as Warren, wrapped in a yellow slicker and cursing with every breath, fought his way out the door to the stern while the wind sang through the cabin and all the visible world lost its substantiality.

Disbelieving, outraged, Till jerked at the wheel, but the wheel wouldn’t respond. The boat lolled, staggered, a wave rising up out of nowhere to hit them broadside and drive down the hull till she was sure they were going to capsize. She might have screamed. Might have cried out uselessly, her breath coming hard and fast. It was all she could do to hold on, her jaws clamped, the spray taking flight up and over the cabin as Warren pried open the hatch to the engine compartment, some sort of tool clutched in one hand — Warren, Warren out there on the deck to save the day, but what could he hope to do? How could anybody fix anything in this chaos?

He was a blotch of yellow in a world stripped of color, there one moment and gone the next, a big breaching wave flinging him back against the cabin door and pouring half an ocean into the rictus of the engine well. Till snatched a look at her then, his face drained and hopeless. Warren, the figure of Warren, flailing limbs and gasping mouth, slammed at the window and rose impossibly out of the foam, the slicker twisted back from his shoulders — inadequate, ridiculous, a child’s jacket, a doll’s — and then he was down again and awash. In the next instant Till sprang to his feet, twisting up and away from the controls, the wheel swinging wildly, lights blinking across the console, the scuppers inundated, the bilge pump choking on its own infirmity. He took hold of her wrist, jerking her up out of her seat, and suddenly they were through the door and into the fury of the weather, the wind tearing the breath out of her lungs, the next wave rearing up to knock her to her knees with a fierce icy slap, and she wasn’t sick anymore and she wasn’t tired or worn or dulled. Everything in her, everything she was, howled at its highest pitch. They were going to drown, all three of them, she could see that now. Drown and die and wash up for the crabs.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Warren, unsteady, hair painted to his face, made to seize Till’s arms as if he meant to dance with him, even as Till shrugged him off and bent to release the skiff.

“It’s our only chance!” Till roared into the wind, his legs tangled and rotating out of sync like a drunken man’s. He flailed at the shell of the skiff, jerked the lines in a fury.

“You’re nuts!” Warren shouted. “Out of your fucking mind!” He was staggering too, fighting for balance, and so was she, helpless, the waves driving at her. The boat heaved, dead beneath their feet. “We won’t last five minutes in this sea!”

But here was the skiff, released and free and riding high, and they were in it, Warren leaping to the oars, no thought of the life jackets because the life jackets, for all their newness and viability and their promise to keep men and women and children afloat indefinitely even in the biggest seas, were tucked neatly beneath that bench in the stern of the Beverly B. and the Beverly B. was swamped. Stalled. Going down.

Heavily, like a waterlogged post in a swollen river, the boat shifted away from them. They’d painted her hull white to contrast with the natural wood of the cabin — a cold pure unblemished white, the white of sheets and carnations — and that whiteness shone now like the ghost image on a negative of a photograph that would never be developed. Unimpeded, the waves crashed at the windows of the cabin and then the glass was gone and the Beverly B. shifted wearily and dropped down and came back up again. The decks were below water now, only the cabin’s top showing pale against the dimness of the early morning and the spray that rode the wind like a shroud.

Beverly was there to witness it, huddled wet and shivering in the bow of the skiff, Till beside her, but she wasn’t clinging to him, not clinging at all because she was too rigid with the need to get out of this, to get away, to get to land. No regrets. Let the sea have the boat and all the time and money they’d lavished on her, so long as it spared them, so long as the island was out there in the gloom and it came to them in a rush of foam and black bleeding rock. They rode up over two waves, three, and they were on a wild ride now, wilder than anything the amusement park would ever dare offer, and all at once they were in a deep pit lined with walls of aquamarine glass, everything held suspended for a single shimmering moment before the walls collapsed on them. She felt the plunge, the force of it, and all of a sudden she was swimming free, the chill riveting her, and it was instinct that drove her away from the skiff and back to the Beverly B. for something to hold fast to — and there, there it was, rising up and plunging down, and she with it. The wind tore at her eyes. The salt blistered her throat.

She didn’t see Warren, didn’t see where he was, but then she’d got turned around and he could be anywhere. And Till — she remembered him coming toward her, his good arm cutting the black sheet of the water, until he wasn’t coming anymore. Where was he? The waves threw up ramparts and she couldn’t see. He was calling her, she was sure of it, in the thinnest distant echo of a cracked and winnowed voice, Till’s voice, sucked away on the wind until it was gone. “Where are you?” she called. “Till? Till?”

The waves took her breath away. Her bones ached. Her teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. A period of time elapsed — she couldn’t have said how long — and nothing changed. She clung to the heaving corpse of the Beverly B. because the Beverly B. was the only thing there was. At some point, because they were binding her feet, she ducked her head beneath the surface to tear off her tennis sneakers and release them into the void. Then she loosed her blue jeans, the cuffs as heavy as lead weights.

When finally the Beverly B. cocked herself up on a wave as big as a continent and then sank down out of sight, she fought away from the vortex it left in its wake and found herself treading water. The waves lifted and released her, lifted and released her. She was alone. Deserted. The ship gone, Till gone, Warren. She could feel something flapping inside her like a set of wings, her own panic, the panic that whipped her into a sudden slashing breaststroke and as quickly subsided, and then she was treading water again and she went on treading water for some portion of eternity until there was nothing left in her arms. Till’s sweater dragged at her. It was too much, too heavy, and it gave her nothing, not warmth, not comfort, not Till or the feel or smell of him. She shrugged out of it, snatched a breath, and let it drift down and away from her like the exoskeleton of a creature new-made, born of water and salt and the penetrant chill.

She tried floating on her back but the wind drove the sea up her nose and into her mouth so that she came up coughing and spewing. Had she drifted off? Was she drowning? Giving up? She fought the rising fear with her spent arms and the feeble wash of her spent legs. After a time, she lost all feeling in her limbs and she went down with a lungful of air and the air brought her back up, once, twice, again. She thrashed for a handhold, for anything, for substance, but there was no solid thing in all that transient medium where the dolphins grinned and the flying fish flew and the sharks came and went as they pleased.