Or could he? I stopped dog paddling for a few seconds to listen, and the weight of my shoes and clothes pulled me down so that a wind wave broke over my head, and I went under. I pushed back up to the surface and sucked in a breath of air so violently that it hurt. It seemed to scrape the back of my throat and stretch the limits of my chest. I clawed at the surface of the water, thrashing, trying desperately to keep my head from going under again. Finally, I recognized what I was feeling: panic. I’d seen it in a hundred near drowning victims but had never expected to experience it myself. I kicked off my shoes while I blew some air into my buoyancy compensator, then I rolled onto my back and floated, slowing my breathing and my heart rate.
Too bad I couldn’t slow my mind as well. Thoughts kept tumbling in this chaotic montage. When people talked about that cliché of your life flash before your eyes, I always thought it would be like a feature film played on super-fast-forward, and you would watch yourself grow up and then old, like in time-lapse photography. But that wasn’t what I was seeing at all. One minute I was trying to calculate how long we had been traveling in Rusty’s boat, and at what speed, in order to figure out how far we’d made it across the current, and then, bam! My mind jumped to an image of my mother laughing and tickling Pit, and then, bam! An image of her cold and wet and blue on the beach, and then, bam! I’d see a seventeen-year-old girl I once pulled from the sea, her hair dry, still wearing her life jacket, no water in her lungs, dead from hypothermia three days after her family’s fishing boat sank out in the Gulf Stream.
Images flitted in and out of my brain as though I had lost control of my own mind. I saw Gil’s face again when the gun was pressed to his forehead, his eyes showing something that looked almost like relief. His body was here in the water with me, floating somewhere, possibly not far off, leaking blood and attracting . . . what? I lifted my arm out of the water and looked at the puckered white skin around the wound in my own arm. At least there was no more blood there. Straight beneath me, thousands of feet down, was an unexplored world. Humans had never walked down there, and no one really knew much about those depths or what lived down there. Sharks? I saw myself then from beneath, floating at the surface, as though I had stepped outside my body, swum underneath, and looked up, and then I realized I was just replaying a scene from the movie Jaws. My mind pictured whales and sea monsters, even Nemo’s giant squid. None of that frightened me.
Hypothermia. That was how I would die.
XXVIII
Swimming seemed pointless. The buoyancy compensator was inflated just enough so that I could float on my back. Which direction would I go? As far out into the Stream as I was, the current would be pushing me along no matter what I did.
My thoughts bumped around my brain so haphazardly that it occurred to me that “train of thought” was grossly inaccurate. It wasn’t a straight rail in my head, but more like a traffic jam, a major snarled-up mess in a place with no roads. The ocean is like that. A place to get lost.
I’d been dozing, floating on my back since daybreak, when the vibrations started up. I didn’t know what it was at first. I’d only heard the sound of outboards through the water before. When I realized it was an engine of some kind, I stopped floating on my back and searched the horizon. As I crested the top of the next swell, I saw a long white cruise ship three to four miles off and coming my way.
The damn thing passed me less than a mile off. I flailed my arms and screamed, but a lot of good that did me on that rainy, overcast day. I wished like hell that I had some of the flares that went down with Rusty’s boat. Why hadn’t I tucked one or two of those in my pockets? I was laughing out loud at that thought when the ship passed at its closest point. I could even see people leaning over the rail on the upper decks. Not many, just a few loners in rain slickers, out enjoying the dark, brooding afternoon. I thought about the dry beds and hot meals and long lives that awaited them. The ship disappeared over the horizon in a matter of minutes. That was when I cried for the first time that day.
At some point, a band of blue appeared at the horizon—I did not know whether it was east or west or whatever. The sky that had been this big gray dome slowly metamorphosed into individual clouds with depth and design and beauty. B.J. would have loved those clouds, and he would have started seeing shapes and pointing things out to me—animals, mountains, and faces, shapes that I never would have been able to see on my own. I tried to look at the clouds as B.J. would, tried to see the world and my predicament as he would see it, and thinking about him, trying to get at the essence of him like that, made me feel angry. I’m not ready to let go of him yet, I thought, not ready to say good-bye to that. . . what? What did I call what I felt for him?
How poor our language was with this one word: love. The Polynesians had dozens of words for coconut, the Eskimos had their variations to describe snow, but we had only this one word to communicate the most important aspect of life, the multitude of ways we can connect with other beings. What I felt for my parents, my brothers, Jeannie, my dog, B.J., and now Solange—all were variations of this emotion, yet all were so different. How could that one little four-letter word encompass all that range of pain and joy and sorrow?
I tried to focus, to slow my mind down. I felt that I was on the verge of some moment of enlightenment. Then a larger than normal wind wave slapped me on the side of my face, and I snorted seawater up my nose and swallowed a mouthful. Coughing and gagging, fighting against the burning sensation in my sinuses, I thought, I’m not ready to drown yet. I need more time, dammit.
Time. It appeared to lose all meaning out there. The day seemed to not want to end, yet I was not looking forward to the dark. When I became aware that I was cold, I realized that I had been cold for a very long time. I began kicking and rubbing my skin, trying to warm myself up. The wind had dropped down to almost nothing, and while there was still some swell, there were no longer the little wind waves that splashed me in the face.
Three times during the day I saw helicopters or planes pass overhead, and I waved and shouted as I had at the cruise ship, but I’d flown in an airplane over these same waters before. I knew how unlikely it was that anybody up there would be able to spot a person in the water. I wondered if all the air traffic had anything to do with me. Had Rusty reported his boat missing?
Two large clouds parted and a column of sunlight lit up a small circle of ocean not far from me. It reminded me of those paintings of angels or Jesus, where they stood in a shaft of celestial light. Maybe this was a sign, maybe a miracle was about to take place, another boat would appear, and I would be plucked from the sea. I waited, allowing myself a tiny bit of hope. The lovely shaft of light broadened as the clouds drifted apart, and soon the whole sky was flecked with spots of blue. No boat appeared, and I beat my hands against the surface of the sea, splashing my own face, angry at myself for wanting to believe.
When the sunlight finally reached my part of the ocean, I could feel the temperature change. I closed my eyes, pointed my face to the sun, and let the heat soak into my skin. I leaned the top of my head back, and my feet floated right to the surface. I began to feel some warmth, even in my legs.
For a time, I actually dozed off into real sleep. That bit of late afternoon sunny warmth reenergized me, and when I woke, I remembered that I had those candy bars in my pocket. The saltwater had not penetrated the vacuum foil wrapper, so when I tore it open with my teeth, the chocolate bar inside was squished but dry. I usually complained about the chalky taste of those health food store protein bars when B.J. offered me one, but this one tasted so good, I nearly gobbled down the second as well. I pulled it out of my pocket but then stuck it back, thinking that night was coming, and it would take every bit of energy I had to survive through those long dark hours.