But who would comfort her?
Gently, she pulled out a clean blanket and laid it over Holly’s face. “You’re a good egg, Aunt Holly,” she whispered. “You’re a good egg. You believed in heaven, and if . . . if my mom is there, you’ll find her right away, in those plaid shorts. And you’ll be able to hang out together. And I’ll do the same things for Ev and Ian that you did for me. I’ll teach them how to get the girls, but not too soon. I’ll teach them how they don’t have to be hurt because someone picks on them . . .”
Olivia peeked in, rattling the door.
“She’s dead,” Olivia said dully.
“Go away,” Cammie warned her without turning around. “Go away before I do worse than my mother would have done to you.”
“Is she dead?”
“Go to hell,” Cammie said.
“Is she dead? It’s bad luck for us to be on a boat with a dead body. Remember what they said?”
“Olivia, you asshole. We’ve been dragging a dead man’s bones all over creation. Don’t you want to pray for Holly? If she’s dead, she’s in heaven. Don’t you want to cry? Why am I asking you? You’re a stone.”
“I’m not,” Olivia said, her eyes welling. She still had tears, Cammie noted bitterly. “I’m afraid, Camille.”
“Well, so am I. But you’re afraid for you! I’m not afraid enough to steal food and water. I hope Mario or whoever it was who got it on with you and made me was a halfway decent person, so I have at least a chance of being normal. For your information, my mother—my real mother—left yesterday in a rubber boat, a rubber boat that could already have been cut by coral or chewed in two by a shark, to try to save Holly and me, and even you, you skanky bitch. Stay away from me, or you’ll wish you had.”
“I know that. I saw her.”
“That’s because she’s a person, and you’re a thing.”
“Cammie, I know what I said was wrong. I’m as desperate as you are. Holly was, too. But I am the person who gave you life.”
“Thank you,” Cammie said. “Go put makeup on, Olivia. You’ll make a better-looking corpse. You know, think about it. You took away stuff that might have kept Holly alive long enough for someone to find us. And she was a nurse. She knew things that we don’t. You might have killed yourself with your selfishness, you fucker. So, you’ll be the last one alive on this boat. You’ll die alone, of thirst. That’s a really horrible death. If I start to get sick or weak, I won’t show you how to work the water machine. I’ll rip up the directions.”
“Forgive me, Cammie.”
“Oh, I do. Holly asked me to. I forgive you because you are so nothing. Now, I want to be alone and think about the person who saved my life and the one who would give her life up for me.”
So Olivia retreated, her concession to all she knew of love made and spurned.
Cammie tried not to think of dying. You felt nothing. She knew that. She looked down at her belly, her chest and legs. She could not have imagined a person so dark and dry and wizened, like a mummy with patches of skin peeled and parched. She lay on her side and tried not to be afraid. There was no reason to be afraid. It would all end soon.
She thought the voice that woke her was God.
It was huge and from the sky.
Cammie squinted and saw a tall man in a military uniform, standing on the deck of a big white boat. No, it wasn’t a uniform, more like a blue jumpsuit. He had no face. Goggles covered his eyes, and his head was hidden in a helmet. He might have been God. He was speaking through a megaphone. Was God American? Or did everyone simply hear God in her own language? Cammie closed her eyes. She was hallucinating. She knew that was part of the end, too.
“Can you stand, miss?” the hallucination called. “Ma’am . . . can you stand?” God was very annoying. Cammie pushed herself onto all fours, then stood. “Are you uninjured? May we come aboard?”
“Who are you?” Cammie cried.
The man seemed not to hear. Cammie walked down to the cabin where Aunt Holly lay and got Lenny’s gun. She came back out and pointed it at God.
“Whoa, miss! Is that loaded?”
“Yes!” Cammie shouted.
“I’m Captain David Hodges of the United States Coast Guard, Miss . . . Kyle? Are you Tracy Kyle?” Cammie hesitated. “Please lay down your gun, Miss Kyle.”
Cammie dropped the gun. What did it matter, in any case? He was probably not real. She hadn’t had any water in what seemed like forever, though it had been only . . . hours? A day and a night? The man and another man threw out a large metal hook and pulled Opus toward them, then a metal bridge unfurled mechanically. Gingerly, God-in-blue stepped across to Cammie and gave a thumbs-up sign to the others on the boat, who all were his twins or triplets. Possibly archangels.
“Good. Now, we’ll secure you and over we go,” said the trooper, the guardsman, the savior. He used a wide webbed belt to secure Cammie to his side and walked her into the arms of another goggled God.
“Am I hallucinating?” Cammie asked the second man. She clung to his arm.
“No, you’re alive. This is real.”
Beneath the grime, he saw she was a real dazzler. She had gone through hell, by the look of her. Poor kid.
“If you’re hallucinating, we both are,” said the man. “You gave us a scare.”
On the boat, Cammie accepted the packet of liquid yogurt already torn open for her and asked, “Where are we?”
“You’re off the coast of Honduras, ma’am.”
“How far is that from St. Thomas, Virgin Islands?”
“Maybe twelve hundred, fifteen hundred miles.”
“We drifted that far?”
“You’re here,” he said.
“There are two other women over there. My godmother Holly and another woman. My godmother died last night. My mother was with us, too. . . .” The man’s face fell.
She looked over and saw Olivia already on the deck, waving a zipped carryall in one hand. Once Olivia was brought over—carried, Cammie noticed—and settled into a seat, she sucked on a slender packet of Gatorade. Then two of the men in uniforms spoke quietly to the captain. Cammie heard them say that they needed a bag and a sling. The sling was the hammock into which they gently placed Holly, after zipping a white cloth covering around her.
That sight was so unbearably definite.
All of it had really happened. She could never wake up from Michel and Lenny and Holly and her mother and the smugglers. Cammie began to flail and shriek, and one of the officers removed the headgear. It was a woman, who sat beside Cammie and held her arms in a hug both tender and forceful.
“Don’t you want her to be laid to rest at home?” she asked Cammie. “Don’t you want to be able to know that, at least, she came home? You were very brave. You set a fire; you sent a signal. You managed to save your mother.”
“My mother is out there!” Cammie shouted, trying to free her hands to point out into the distance.
“Wait!” the female officer said to one of the others, who had begun to wheel away. “She says there’s another passenger.”
“She’s not on the boat. She took the lifeboat and went for the land, a little island we saw, before our boat . . . stopped. Why did the boat stop?”
“It’s hung up on a sandbar.”
“Well, she rowed. She’s strong. I’m not leaving here without my mother.”
“Be still,” Olivia said.
“You be still! Push her over! Let her drown! I’m not leaving here before I find out where my mother is. I know my mother is alive. Listen, you have to listen. She had a radio. She would have called to someone. Please, my mother is lost out there! This woman is not my mother!”
“We need to get you to the hospital,” said the young guardsman who had helped Cammie onto the cutter. “Our orders are to get you to the hospital on Honduras immediately. Your condition is good. But you need fluids and observation. Your mother here needs fluids and observation. Please understand.”
“This is not my mother
! My mother is Tracy Kyle. My mother is Tracy Kyle, and she’s in a rubber boat!”
The cutter roared toward the marina in Honduras, and Opus, with its sad remnants and burdens, undulated gently in the immense waters that bled toward the sky.
Day Twenty-one
Janis sat drumming her nails on the table in the saloon on Big Spender. As she heard Sharon approach, she tried to fake a rally, if only out of a semblance of politeness. She didn’t want to appear ungrateful. She owed Sharon a debt: Sharon and Reginald had trusted her, a stranger, to accompany them. They had helped her—for reasons of their own, but also out of simple compassion. If nothing else, she could tell Cammie and Ted and Jim that she had tried. She could tell Tracy’s mom and dad that she had tried. What she would tell her own husband, she could not imagine. Dave must know by now that she wasn’t waiting sweetly by the telephone in a safe room at the Golden Iguana. Well, the man knew whom he’d married.
Sharon finally asked, “Do you want to know what happened?”
Janis said, “Yes,” and Sharon shared with her the mixed tidings of the Coast Guard rescue and the fact that, within hours, her young niece and her friend Olivia had been evaluated for injuries and then flown to a hospital in Texas. Holly’s sister, Berit, was on the way to help Holly begin her last journey home. Tracy was nowhere to be found. She had taken the inflatable and, unaccountably, left Cammie aboard Opus.
What Janis understood as real was ripped forcibly into before and after when she tried to comprehend that she would never again see Holly, listen to Holly cuss, or roar with laughter at her own dirty jokes, or rag on her boys. No. This was not permitted now. There would be a time to mourn. She had to focus on the hope of some sort of collective redemption, some aperture of fortune through which a blessing, in exchange for this human sacrifice, might slip. Her mouth filled with saliva, as it had when she was newly pregnant.
“Put your head down on your lap,” Sharon Gleeman said gently. “You look peaky.” Janis did.
“You’ll go back now?” Janis asked when she had gathered herself. Her question skated an edge of anxiety that she hoped Sharon could not quite detect.
“I don’t think that I will quite yet,” Sharon said. “What do you think, Regin?”
“I think we should go and bring Lenny’s boat home. He would have done the same for us, Sharon,” Regin said. “Meherio might be able to collect on the insurance, or even repair and sell her.”
“No one will want to sail on Opus again, Regin, do you think? People will think it’s cursed after what’s happened, or might have happened. Of course, that’s foolishness, but there’s so much superstition that surrounds anything having to do with the sea.”
Regin answered from the cockpit, “Don’t you be so sure. I’ve heard the house where Lizzie Borden took an ax—”
“Spare me,” Sharon said dryly.
“Well, it’s a bed-and-breakfast inn now. Some people could have a yen for a boat with a bit of history, even if it’s the grim kind.” He stopped and turned toward Janis. “Y’all please forgive my manners. I realize I’m talking about your family here.”
“And your good friend,” Janis said. “No apology necessary.”
“Well then. People move into houses they think have haunts all the time. My grandmother did. She said she never sat down at her dressing table but she saw a woman in white walk past the door behind her. Saw her in the mirror, plain as I see you. Never felt any harm coming from her.”
“Why are they always women in white?” Sharon asked of no one in particular. “Why don’t they choose a nice navy or a red cloak? It makes the whole business of being a ghost a bit tedious.”
“Sharon, people used to be buried in shrouds,” Regin said. “Shrouds were white. That house was more than a hundred and fifty years old. Couldn’t expect a lady in a striped Chanel suit and high heels—”
“Well, this is all extremely titillating. But let’s get to the business at hand. Now, by my reading, we should be close to the coordinates I’ve worked out. This is nearby to where the electronic signal came from. We should be there within the hour. Do you think we can tow Opus, Regin, if we find her?”
“We’ll need to put in for more fuel. On the way back.”
“But she won’t swamp us.”
“Not us.”
“Well, that’s what I’d prefer to do, then,” Sharon said. “Do you mind if we do this errand for our friends?”
“You mentioned the radio transmission,” Janis pointed out. “Do you think that . . . Are you hoping to find my cousin, too?”
“It’s not out of the question,” Sharon said. “Of course, we’ll have a look around. I didn’t want to bring it up. But you didn’t think we wouldn’t try, did you?”
“I thought you’d give up. It’s only sensible. After the cutter failed to find her . . . the chances are almost nonexistent.”
“They found the others. Just because the cutter failed to find her doesn’t mean that we will. And it doesn’t mean that we won’t fail. Nothing ventured, Janis.”
Surely, carefully, Sharon Gleeman made her approach to what seemed to Janis an impossible dot of needlepoint on her maps. How did people do this? Find an impossibly indistinguishable handkerchief in a voluminous and shifting sea on which a boat might have rocked hours earlier, using a series of graphs and lines on a paper and dots on a screen? Janis knew from going camping how quickly currents could carry craft away. But though this made their quest seem even more foolish, she grew more alert and avid as Sharon neared the place where the Coast Guard cutter had rescued Cammie. She picked up Sharon’s binoculars and sat on the stern of the boat, in the hammock Tracy had described, which felt more to Janis like a trampoline. She scanned the seamless sea, back and forth, back and forth, as the day turned to its gloaming.
That was the moment in which she saw the light.
Two bright bursts and then, in a moment, a third. Two bright bursts and then again, in a moment, a third.
She rose slowly. She did not want to fall.
“Sharon,” she said when she reached the cockpit, “look at that.”
“Mmm,” Sharon said. “I’ve been watching it for some minutes. Trying to figure out what it is. The Honduran officer said they call that Bone Island.”
“Are there cannibals there?” Janis asked, thinking, Now they know you are a complete fool.
“No, legend says it belonged to a recluse with the unfortunate name of Mister Bone. His home is still there, that much I do know. I believe that I heard, and, oh, this is all lore, there was a son, who didn’t want the house but didn’t want to give it up. And gradually, this huge house, built with bricks shipped over from England, and with formal English gardens that were maintained by Spanish servants, fell to ruins. . . .”
“Someone is there. That light.”
“Yes.”
“Are you going in?”
“I’m not sure who it is,” said Sharon. “I’m going to circle back behind it and see if there’s any kind of natural mooring. It’s less than a mile across.” She motored away from the light, at right angles to it; and Janis saw it begin to blink furiously, on, off. On, off. On, off. “Well, it appears that the only place to put in is right about where that light is. There’s a sort of indentation, Janis. What we’d have to do is for you and me to take the tender over and moor to one of those big trees. At least one, and bring the lines fast. I suppose it’s best to try calling. . . .
“This is the sailing vessel Big Spender,” Sharon spoke into her radio. “Who is there? Who is that?”
No answer came.
“The batteries could be dead,” Janis said.
“Or someone could be trying to lure us into a world of trouble,” Regin commented.
“The likelihood of that happening twice in a week is the likelihood of your growing a full head of hair by the time we get back to Charlotte Amalie,” Sharon said. “Don’t be so bleak.” She paused and said, “Ah. Now I see her.”
“You do?” Janis crie
d. “You see her? I don’t see her!” She thought that Sharon meant Tracy.
“I see Opus, a mile or so to starboard,” Sharon said. She picked up the binoculars. “Christ, she’s a mess. There are wires and rags hanging all over. And a bunch of burnt lumber. On the other hand . . . I’ve seen worse. That ship was partially burned when Lenny bought it.”
“Seems to me more like a couple of miles, Sharon. Visibility is fine out here.”
Another report came. The fatality on board was a woman called, according to survivors, Holly Solvig. There had been no evidence of the violence the younger woman described and no sign of the crew, lifeboat, or tender.
“Len left his boat,” Sharon mused.
“He wouldn’t have,” said Regin. “Maybe in a crisis.”
“Funny how she stayed. She must be hung up on something below the surface. Do you think we can float her off if the tides . . .”
“Maybe. Depends on what’s got her. It’ll be a chore.”
Janis thought that thirty years of living in a twenty-foot-square space together had given Sharon and Regin a kind of telepathy.
“So let’s motor on over there, and try to avoid whatever she’s on. . . . Maybe it’s only a sandbar, Regin.”
“Sharon, Sharon, wait! Look at the light,” Janis pleaded.
“I am looking. It’s impossible to see behind the light,” Sharon explained. “It could be a beacon of some sort.”
Then the radio crackled. A harsh voice rasped, “Help me.” The words were indistinct and garbled, the voice thick. “Help. Tracy Kyle, of Westbuh, Illinois. I am on . . . with a—”
“Tracy!” Janis screamed. “That’s my cousin. Sharon, that’s my cousin, oh, that’s my cousin!”
And within fifteen minutes, tall Tracy was limp in the arms of Janis, eight inches shorter and seemingly so caffeinated with elation that she might have been able to lift Tracy and carry her back to Chicago. Tracy’s face was a welter of infected bug bites, bruises, and peeling skin. Her shirt was missing a sleeve, and her short hair was matted flat, like a wicked small boy’s. She cradled one wrist, the left one, on which her hand hung limp. Burns had gone deep. To Janis, Tracy’s nose looked as though it had been held to a grill instead of exposed to the sun. Her legs were scored with deep scratches and were swollen, purpling below the knees. She was the most fantastic sight Janis had ever seen.