Sail

  But he doesn’t have to say a word to either of us. It’s obvious, it’s right there at our feet. Water! Everywhere I look. It’s covering the entire cabin, four to five inches deep and rising quickly.

  “Where’s it coming from?”

  “The only place it can,” answers Jake. “Down below. Has to be, Kat. I’m going.”

  He pushes past Mark, trudging over to the galley and the small, square hatch in the floor that leads to the engine room. The Atlantic Ocean is literally forcing its way up through the hinges as Jake reaches down and pops the handle. He’s about to open the hatch, and God only knows what he’ll find when he does. My heart is in my throat again.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” asks Mark.

  “It’s either that or we sink, buddy,” says Jake matter-of-factly. “I choose taking a look.”

  Mark’s Adam’s apple literally disappears beneath the collar of his Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt. “What can I do?” he asks quickly.

  “I’ll tell you in a minute.”

  It’s more like a split second. Pulling up the hatch door, he takes one look at the situation beneath our feet and starts giving emergency orders.

  Chapter 13

  “KATHERINE, I need a mask and a snorkel from the Hail Mary box!”

  “The what?” I ask.

  “It’s a red box under the boom with anything and everything for emergency situations,” he explains quickly. “Like now.”

  Oh, I get it—unfortunately. The Hail Mary box.

  Jake turns to Mark, pointing at him. “And Mark, you go grab anything and everything that looks like a bucket.”

  Mark nods hesitantly but doesn’t move. I haven’t moved either. What are we waiting for?

  “GO!” shouts Jake. “GO!”

  That does the trick pretty well. Mark and I bolt from the main cabin as if we’re on fire.

  “What’s going on down there?” asks Ernie.

  Mark beats me to the punch. “The boat’s gonna fuckin’ sink!” he blurts out.

  While it’s not exactly the way I would’ve phrased it, I’m not about to quibble. Not right now. “Ernie, help your brother find some buckets,” I say. “We’re not going to sink.” Please, God, don’t let us go down.

  “What about Carrie?” Ernie asks.

  We all look at her at once. She’s curled up on the deck, her head buried in her hands.

  Again Mark beats me to the punch. “Don’t worry—we all may be jumping ship soon!”

  Ernie stares at me, his eyes wide as Frisbees with stress and fear. The little boy who’s always acted older than his age is suddenly like any other ten-year-old. He can barely get the next couple of words out. “Is . . . that . . . really true, Mom?”

  “It’s going to be okay,” I tell him. I hope. “Just help your brother, okay? No, no. You keep an eye on Carrie.”

  I’m about to turn around to dash for the snorkel gear when I catch a glimpse of the only good thing to come out of this latest drama.

  Carrie.

  Slowly she’s climbing to her feet, wiping away her tears. “I’ll help,” she says softly.

  Maybe she doesn’t want to die today after all. So this flood down below is a good thing?

  I take one step to hug her—to be the mother to her that I so desperately want to be—when I hear Jake’s voice from below. What he yells puts all hugs on hold.

  “Let’s hurry, folks! In ten minutes or less, The Family Dunne is going down!”

  Chapter 14

  I FEEL LIKE I’m back in the hospital emergency room, or a badly equipped operating theater. I raid the Hail Mary box, rifling past a first-aid kit, an inflatable raft, and God knows what else until I come upon the desperately needed snorkel and mask. Racing back belowdecks, I toss them over to Jake.

  He’s already assembled the hand pump and is feeding a hose down the hatch. The electric pump in the engine room, he tells me, will be too flooded to work.

  I look down at my bare legs. The water level’s really climbing. The four inches in the cabin are now at least six. It’s cold, too. My ankles feel as if they’re frozen in blocks of ice.

  “You think the boat hit something?” I ask.

  “I certainly didn’t feel anything if we did,” answers Jake, quickly slipping the mask over his head.

  It dawns on me. “Maybe when you were in the water with Carrie. Maybe we were all so caught up in watching you that we didn’t feel it.”

  “I doubt it,” says Jake, straddling the hatch. “If something ripped this hull, you’d feel it, all right. We didn’t hit anything.”

  “Then what do you think it is?”

  “I’m about to find out,” he says. “Just in case, though, do you remember how to work the radio, the emergency channel?”

  “I remember,” I answer. “In case of what, though?”

  “Nothing. I’m just making sure,” he says with an unconvincing smile. “You never know. Here goes nothing.”

  Jake shoves the mouthpiece of the snorkel between his teeth and eases into the flooded engine room. As he disappears like some kind of Navy SEAL, I stand almost comatose for a moment before realizing I’ve got work to do. I grab the hand pump and get busy pumping, even though I sense it’s a losing battle.

  The only way we stay afloat is if Jake finds the leak in an awful hurry.

  And can fix it.

  Otherwise the Dunnes will officially be listed in the Guinness Book of Records: “The World’s Shortest Family Vacation.”

  Chapter 15

  “WHERE’S UNCLE JAKE?” asks Carrie, the first of the bucket brigade to descend the stairs into the main cabin. Mark and Ernie follow right behind her. I haven’t seen this kind of togetherness among them in a long while.

  “He’s down there, hopefully saving us,” I say, pointing at the hatch. “In the meantime, you need to start bailing while I pump.”

  I get the kids to form a line heading up to the deck. It’s the best way, I explain. Carrie will scoop the water, hand a bucket off to Ernie, who’ll hand it off to Mark, who’ll dump it over the side.

  Simple as that. A definite NB, as I like to say in the operating room. No-brainer.

  Ha!

  We’ve barely started before the complaining begins. So much for family harmony.

  “Ernie, hold the bucket steady when you pass it! Can you concentrate on one single thought? You keep spilling the water!” gripes Carrie.

  “Yeah, well, Carrie, you’ve got to move faster!” says Mark. “Get with the game.”

  “Look who’s talking, Stoner Boy!” she counters.

  “At least I don’t have a death wish!”

  “Hey, why don’t you shut up, Mark?” says Ernie.

  “Make me, you little shit!”

  The next thing I know, Ernie flings a full bucket of freezing water right into Mark’s face. “Whoops, there I go spilling the water again,” cracks Ernie.

  He starts to laugh at his own joke when wham!

  Mark leaps from the steps of the cabin, his body slamming Ernie and his arms grabbing him in a headlock. As Ernie tries to break free, the two spin around and around, officially turning my no-brainer assembly line into a free-for-all wrestling match.

  “Stop it!” I yell, moving in to break them up. “Stop it right now!” But all I do is get knocked down for my efforts. The boys are too rough for me—they’re really fighting.

  Where’s Jake now?

  Wait a second!

  Where’s Jake, period?

  Chapter 16

  I TURN BACK TO THE HATCH, staring at nothing but rising cold water. I’ve lost track of the time, but he’s been down there for at least a few minutes. How long can he hold his breath with just a snorkel? I don’t really know the answer to that.

  Not this long, I’m thinking.

  I grab a mop from the storage closet by the refrigerator and start jabbing the end of the handle through the water, banging hard on the floor of the galley. The noise immediately gets Mark and Ernie’s attention
and they both stop to see what I’m doing.

  What about Jake? Did I get his attention?

  “He’s been down there a long time, hasn’t he?” says Carrie. At least her head is clear now.

  I nod as we all stare at the open hatch. There’s no sign of Jake coming up for air. Meanwhile, for the first time I feel the weight of the gathering water’s drag on the boat. It’s as if the ocean is slowly but surely sucking us down.

  From the corner of my eye I glimpse the radio and remember Jake’s words about using the emergency channel. You never know, he said.

  And I don’t want to.

  C’mon, Jake, where are you? Come up for some air. Please.

  Suddenly we see a rush of water surging up from the hatch. A hand appears and then a head.

  Jake hoists himself up to the galley and stands before us in his mask and snorkel. And nothing else.

  “What happened? Where are your clothes?” I ask.

  “Plugging the through-hull fitting,” he answers.

  I shake my head. The what?

  “It’s the hose that takes on water from the outside to cool the engine,” he explains. “Don’t ask me how it ruptured, but it did, and it took everything I had on to plug the leak. As soon as we bail ourselves out I’ll rig a more permanent fix.”

  It’s good news. No, it’s great news. Still, all I can say is one thing. “Uh, Jake . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re naked.”

  He looks down. “Oh, yeah, you’re right,” he says with a sheepish grin. “Then again, it’s nothing a doctor hasn’t seen before, right?”

  “I was thinking about the kids.”

  “Nothing I haven’t seen before either,” says Carrie with her first half-smile of the trip.

  “Oh, really?” I say back with a half-smile of my own. “Then there’s no reason you should be staring at it so much!”

  Carries blushes a healthy red, Ernie and Mark start cracking up, and Jake grabs the bucket out of my hands and covers himself.

  “On that note, I think I’ll go put some clothes on,” he announces.

  Chapter 17

  IT TURNS OUT there’s no quick way to rid a boat of more than a thousand gallons of freezing cold, sloshing seawater. Nor, for that matter, is there a pain-free way.

  For the remainder of the afternoon and deep into the evening, Jake and the rest of us unload bucketful after bucketful back into the ocean. We keep waiting for the electric bilge pump to kick in and help us, but it never does. Jake’s guess is that the motor’s too flooded to recover. We discuss returning to Newport or calling SeaTow to pull us back to shore but agree to keep on. If the boat has more problems after we’ve pumped it out, we’ll reconsider.

  Head to toe and all parts in between, we’re completely exhausted. So much so that by the time The Family Dunne is finally dry again, Carrie, Mark, and Ernie have only one word for me: goodnight.

  Too tired even to eat dinner, they trudge to their bunks and probably conk out before their heads ever hit the pillow.

  I’d be doing the same if not for the fact that Jake is still slaving away down in the engine room. There’s got to be a better fix for a ruptured cooling hose than stuffing it with clothes, right? I hope so.

  We’ve all had an impossible day, but with Jake’s having to save Carrie and then the boat, he is definitely our hero. The least I can do is stay up until he finishes.

  Besides, it’s an absolutely beautiful night out on the deck. So many stars. The heavens peaceful and calm. I’m reminded of my days as a churchgoer, and I say a few prayers of thanks.

  Then I lean back on the cushioned bench behind the helm, wrapped warmly in a fleece blanket, my eyes tracing one constellation after another. Orion, Lyra, Cassiopeia. When I come across the Big Dipper, I can’t help a bittersweet smile. “You know, sweetheart, technically the Big Dipper is not a constellation,” my father told me over and over when I was around eight or nine. He either didn’t know he was repeating himself or was worried that I’d forget. “It’s an asterism,” he’d explain, practically sounding out the word for me every time. “That means it’s only part of a larger constellation.”

  My father was the consummate backyard astronomer, and also a great talker and storyteller, and he was the one who took us to church every Sunday, not my mom, who was an ER nurse. On summer nights, with the cool grass beneath my bare feet, I would stand with him for hours as we took turns looking through his telescope. One of the legs on the tripod was broken at the hinge, and I remember how my father held it together with thick black tape from his basement workroom.

  “In a way,” he’d continue, “we’re all Big Dippers, part of something much bigger than ourselves. At least I hope that’s how you come to see yourself.”

  I think that’s why he liked looking at the stars so much. My father believed there was something out there, a higher power. Something much bigger than we are. Maybe I’m starting to believe that again myself.

  To this day, I still miss him so much, all the time. When people ask me why I became a cardiac surgeon, a field dominated by men, I always give the same answer. It’s one sentence that never needs further explanation.

  When I was sixteen, my father died of a heart attack.

  Chapter 18

  “THERE YOU ARE,” Jake says, almost sounding as if he’s back to normal.

  I’m so wrapped up in my father and the stars that I don’t hear his footsteps coming up from belowdecks. He’s standing behind the railing of the helm, smiling at me.

  “How’s it going?” I ask. “Any luck?”

  “Yes, finally. I was able to trim some of the hose from the fuel line and insert it where the cooling hose had ruptured. It was kind of like one of your bypass surgeries.”

  “A sailor and a surgeon. I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be, Kat. At least, not yet. We’ll have to see if it holds. They’re radically different sizes.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Plan B.”

  “What’s that?”

  “SeaTow, Coast Guard, chopper? I was hoping you knew. You usually have a backup for everything.”

  “In the operating room, yes. Out here in the real world, sometimes no.”

  We both laugh as he walks around the helm to join me. In his hands are two glasses and a bottle of white wine. What a good idea that is.

  “I thought we could both use some of this,” he says. “For medicinal purposes.”

  “That’s the understatement of the year.”

  Jake sits on the bench opposite mine and removes a corkscrew from his pocket. He’s changed into some warmer clothes, a red crewneck sweater and a pair of faded jeans with some rips and a splattering of white paint that remind me of the kind you see back in Manhattan selling at some SoHo boutique for five hundred bucks.

  Of course, his pair is the real deal. Authentic. Just like Jake.

  As he opens the bottle and pours I catch a glimpse of the all-black label and immediately recognize the wine. It’s a La Scolca Gavi di Gavi, one of our favorites.

  “I haven’t had that in a while,” I say. “In fact, the last time was probably with you.”

  The words leave my mouth and are followed by an awkward silence. It’s as if we both remembered at exactly the same moment, which is probably true.

  The last time we shared a bottle of La Scolca Gavi di Gavi was the last time we made love.

  Chapter 19

  JAKE CHANGES THE SUBJECT, or should I say ignores it. He hands me my glass, proposing a toast. “Here’s to smoother sailing ahead, and to a really good vacation. This is going to work out, Kat.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I say.

  We clink glasses and sip, the wine tasting crisp and delicious as it rolls over my tongue. I’ve never been much of a wine aficionado and probably wouldn’t know a Bordeaux from a Burgundy, but I think I know good when I taste it. And this is good. Very, very good.

  “Hey, do you hear that?” asks Jake.

&
nbsp; I sit perfectly still and listen. “No, I don’t hear anything.”

  He grins. “That’s just it. Not anything. Nothing. Just peace and quiet.”

  He’s right and it’s wonderful. Only instead of enjoying it, all I can think about is how it won’t last. The minute the kids wake up tomorrow morning, it’s over. Or rather, it all starts again. The insanity that has taken over my family.

  Mark’s serial pot-smoking is one thing. But a suicidal daughter?

  “Jake, what am I going to do about Carrie? There were signs, but I didn’t believe she was this bad.”

  He thinks for a moment before letting go with a slight shrug of his broad shoulders.

  “One of two things,” he says. “We can turn the boat around and drag her to a psychiatric hospital, where they’ll observe her for a few days while making sure to keep her away from all sharp objects and any clothing that can be turned into a noose. After that, they’ll either dope her up and commit her or dope her up and send her home to you. Either way, you’ll never really know if she’ll try to kill herself again. Or if she would have gone all the way through with it. Remember, Carrie is a terrific swimmer.”

  “Gee, you make it sound so appealing,” I say.

  “That’s because it isn’t.”

  “What’s the other option?” I ask. It can’t be any worse!

  He leans toward me, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “We keep sailing for the summer and show her that her life is worth living.”

  “Do you think we can do that?”

  “Honestly, I can’t say for sure. The only thing I know is that if we don’t try—if you don’t give it everything you’ve got—you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. As for Carrie, I think she’ll come around. Right at the end out there, she stopped fighting me. She saved herself.”

  Jake takes another sip of his Gavi di Gavi as his words settle into my head and take root there. It’s amazing, really. I know a lot of men who have more money, more possessions, certainly more prestigious jobs than Jake, but none who have more of his good old-fashioned common sense.