Zeke
Zeke
We stay there, naked, together. The boat rolls us like we’re coins in a jar. Lexi’s body starts to chill against mine. At some point in the darkness, our flagpole snaps, and the noise of the sail going flying is terrifying enough to get us up off the floor. What we see brings a sound from Lexi I’ve not heard before and never want to hear again.
There’s no way we’ll make it through the night. Dim moonlight leaks through the broken windows and lights long pools of water across the floor, staining the sofa cushions in streaks, and the bathroom floor’s slick with water coming up the shower drain. The crack in the roof’s running like a tap. You can smell the sea everywhere—it’s on us now.
“We’re lower,” Lexi says, voice raised over the rain and the wind. “We’re lower and rocking…we’re going to sink.”
I can’t even reassure her. Usually, we take it in turns to freak out, but there’s nothing else to be done in the face of the facts.
“Get a bowl,” Lexi calls, already scrabbling for her clothes in the darkness. “And start bailing.”
I pull a muscle in my shoulder and break a nail, which sounds like nothing, but is actually bloody and excruciating. Lexi’s sick. Eventually, I am, too. Every so often in the madness and darkness we find each other and press our shaking bodies together, her chin tucked to my chest, her bun bouncing against my jaw, and then we break apart again to try to stay alive.
Then the boat starts to list, nose rising, bedroom dragging backward into the deep. I grab for Lexi in the darkness, my feet slipping on the drenched planks.
“I love you,” I shout, holding her as tightly as I can.
“I love you,” she says. “I love you, Zeke.”
Only this time she doesn’t spin away to keep bailing and scrambling and fixing what’s broken. She sags into me. As if she’s the thing that’s breaking.
“Don’t give up,” I say, but my voice is so hoarse I don’t know if she can catch it.
“I can’t keep going,” she sobs. “I’m just—I’m out. I can’t keep going.”
“You can. You can .”
“What’s the point? We’re sinking, we’re…”
I grip her arms. “What’s the point? Are you serious right now?” My fingers tighten. “Are you telling me you don’t think we’re worth fighting for?”
Her head drops, her shoulders shaking. We stumble together, hit a wall, right ourselves. Something smashes somewhere. I am so profoundly scared I can’t believe I’m still able to function.
“This, us…” I begin, but she’s shaking her head.
“This is how it has to end, maybe,” she says, still sobbing. “Me and you. It’s been so beautiful. I’ve loved you so much. But I don’t want to go down apart, fighting the sea like we’ve got a fucking chance of winning, when we could be holding each other.” She looks up at me, her eyes desperate, and lays both her palms on my cheeks. “I think this is it, Zeke. This is it.”
“No,” I say, voice ragged, but I’m sagging, too. If Lexi’s out of hope, I don’t stand a chance.
I start to cry. She kisses me, desperate, tear-drenched. I know she’s right. I can feel it, smell it, hear it in the roar of the waves. We’ve lost. What we’re fighting, it’s just too big. And all of a sudden I get what Lexi means when she says, This is how it has to end , because what we’ve gone through’s been so wild, and this is how wild things go. Brutal and sudden. Swept under by something too strong to fight off.
So I just hold her. Feel every ounce of the love I have for her. Let myself sink in it, and the pain of knowing it’s over, and the abject searing torture of knowing that if I go, it means she’s going, too, and all I want is for Lexi to live the happiest, safest, fullest life.
But this is it. This is it for us.
The end.
And then.
Voices.
Voices.
A great bulk blocking the moonlight for a pitch-black instant, then—
The glare of searchlights blazing through our shattered windows.
The soaring sensation of hope surging back.
“Is anyone alive in there?”
A male voice. Loud and clear above the waves and the wind. I’ve not heard a single voice but Lexi’s for almost twelve days. A face appears in the window for a split second as the lifeboat manages to get alongside us, and the sea sends us tipping. It’s a man, but it might as well be an alien. I cannot comprehend it. Everything’s disjointed, snapshots caught in the lifeboat’s beams.
“Help!” Lexi screams, pulling away from my arms and scrabbling to the window.
The lights flood through our broken boat. Shards of glass, pools of water, our abandoned bailing bowls sliding toward the bedroom.
“Can you reach the aft deck?” the man shouts over the wind.
“Yes! Yes!”
Lexi whirls around to grab me and we scramble our way there, stumbling against the strange tilt of the boards beneath us, yanking at the makeshift barriers we fixed in front of the door to keep out the storm.
Outside, silver shows on the waves like the whites of an animal’s eyes in the dark. The lifeboat seems huge, blocking out half the sky. I think I’m dreaming, a drowning man’s dream, maybe, but then I see the figures on the lifeboat deck and they look so real .
We cling to the railing, wind snatching at our clothes. I hear Lexi let out a wild, high-pitched laugh as the lifeboat swings in beside us like the storm’s nothing at all. And then arms are reaching across the broken railings and pulling us—“ Lexi first ,” I scream, “ Lexi first ”—and suddenly the ground is so steady beneath us I think for a second we must’ve been pulled to land.
“You’re safe now,” someone says, their voice close and warm.
But I don’t feel it, not until I turn and feel Lexi collide with me. Sobbing, grasping, soaked. She smells of salt and sweat, and of Lexi , my person, not torn from my arms and swept to sea, but here .
I grip her shoulders, check her over, kiss her tear-soaked face and taste sea salt. For a moment, after all that terror, after being so sure it was over…I feel completely awed. We survived . I can’t believe it.
“Look,” she whispers, eyes on the sea behind me.
I turn. The Merry Dormouse is sinking. As we watch, a wave sweeps over the deck, where the railing hangs half off, jagged and wrong-looking, like a broken bone. Our bedroom’s already under the water. As I watch, something goes tumbling past one of the shattered windows, and it feels completely surreal to be standing out here, looking in. It would’ve been us tumbling backward into the depths in there.
She fights—she rears against the force pulling her down, but there’s no saving her now. For a few short breaths, she disappears, reappears, disappears, her nose breaking through the waves. Then she’s gone.
My eyes sting. I turn back to Lexi and press my forehead hard to hers.
“She was amazing,” Lexi says, choked through her tears. “That boat. She was our lifeline.”
“I know. I know.”
“She saved us.”
“ We saved us,” I correct her, but I’m crying for the houseboat, crying to see her gone. “We did this. OK? All right, Lexi? It doesn’t end for us.” My voice is so hoarse I don’t know if she can hear me, so I say it again, my skin clammy and cold against hers. “It doesn’t end for us. Not like this, not ever. Do you understand me?”
She nods, forehead still pressed to mine. She gets it. We faced the storm and we’ve survived it. I know she understands. Because if we’ve got through this…what the hell could ever tear us apart?