Chapter Twenty-Four
Present: Day Five at Sea
The companionway door rattles before Emma manages to yank it open. Water spills down the steps as she climbs onto the deck.
“Gigi!” she calls.
Beth and I hurry up the stairs behind her. When I step outside, faint daylight filters through the clouds on the horizon, allowing us to see without a flashlight.
“Gigi,” Emma hollers again, moving toward the stern. “Where is she?” Her voice is panicked.
My heart catches in my throat. There’s no sign of Gigi. Above us, the cockpit cover is ripped in two. One of the poles hangs loose from where it had been attached to the top of the bench seats, which are all missing their cushions.
Water comes up to my ankles when I take a step back to make room for Beth and Adam to come on deck.
“Gigi!” I call, turning around. “Emma.” I stretch my arm behind me toward the helm, looking at the mast, which is surprisingly still upright. “Give me the flashlight.”
She places the light in my palm, and I sweep its beam across the foredeck. Miraculously, our dinghy is still secured upside down near the bow. The storm jib is a tangled mess around one of the shrouds. But there’s no sign of Gigi.
I stare at the foredeck beneath the mast where Gigi had argued with Adam before the wave hit us. She must’ve confronted him about whatever she’d found in his room.
Beth and Adam call out her name.
I scan the surrounding waters with the flashlight but see only the dark, rolling swells.
“Check the tethers,” I tell Beth.
She drops to her knees beside me, and I shine my light on her hands as she tries to untangle the mess of lines.
I squat beside her. As Beth separates the ropes, I try to recall where Gigi was when I went below. When Beth’s leg got caught, Gigi was right here at the back of the cockpit. I’m sure of it. I thought she came below after she’d helped Beth free her leg from the tether line.
Keeping my light on Beth’s hands, I glance at the companionway door. It’s only a few feet away. How could she not have made it inside?
A shudder travels down my spine. Was it possible? Is Courtney somehow alive? Here, on this boat?
I shake the thought away and return my gaze to the deck floor. I hold the light still on one of the tether lines, which is pulled taut and extends back toward the helm. “Check that one.”
Beth grips it and pulls. “It’s tight, I can’t pull it.”
“Emma,” I call, shining the flashlight on the deck beside her. “Check the tether line by your feet.”
Hope builds in my chest as Emma lifts the line.
“It’s in the water,” she exclaims, lifting the tether with both hands. She lets out a grunt. “Someone help me pull. It’s heavy!”
Thank God, I think.
Adam rushes past me to Emma’s aid, grabbing the line behind her and pulling it in from the water. Beth comes to my side as I keep the light on the tether as steady as possible while the boat rocks.
“Be careful,” I call out, realizing none of us have tethers on. I turn to Beth. “Get tethers for them. We should all have one on.”
Beth turns and gathers the tethers without a word.
“I see her,” Emma shouts. “Keep pulling.”
I direct the light over the side. The hope that had surfaced in my chest sinks when I spot Gigi bobbing—lifeless—in the water. Her long blond hair swirls around her unmoving form, face down, kept afloat by her inflated life preserver.
Beth clips a tether onto Adam and Emma as they pull Gigi’s tether to the side of the boat. I take Adam’s place, holding tension on the rope, as he leans under the lifeline and drags her onto the deck.
“Roll her onto her back,” I instruct him as Beth clips a tether to my life vest.
“Here.” I tuck the flashlight into my armpit and grab Gigi’s arms. “Help me drag her into the cockpit so she doesn’t roll off the boat.”
Adam lifts Gigi’s feet as I tug her by the arms and pull her inside the cockpit, which feels instantly cramped with Gigi’s long form lying on the floor. I extend the flashlight to Beth, who gasps after shining the light on Gigi while I feel her neck for a pulse.
A deep gash runs across the middle of Gigi’s forehead to her temple, which is swollen to the size of a golf ball.
“She must’ve hit her head,” Emma says as I continue to wait for a pulsation beneath Gigi’s skin.
Or someone struck her, I think. She’s deathly pale, her mottled skin nearly the same color of the white fiberglass beneath her, only her pallor has more of a blueish-gray hue.
“Dear God.” Beth shakes her leg. “Gigi, can you hear me?”
“She doesn’t have a pulse,” I announce, withdrawing my hand from her neck and placing my palms, one on top of the other, on the middle of Gigi’s breastbone. “Someone check the time.”
I inch my knees closer to her torso, cursing the tight space as I press my weight into her chest, feeling the cartilage of her sternum crack beneath my palms. I count aloud as I compress, finding it nearly impossible to be effective while we roll over a swell.
My knees slide to Gigi’s legs, and her limp body slips toward the helm.
“Hold her steady,” I order the others, a calm authoritative assertiveness in my tone from my years of working at a hospital. “Beth, move around and get ready to give her two breaths when I get to fifteen.”
A moment later, I pause to allow Beth to blow into Gigi’s mouth after pinching her nose. After the second breath, I immediately resume compressions. The early morning sun spills over the horizon as Gigi remains unbreathing and unmoving beneath my hands.
“How long has it been?” I ask when I notice I’m out of breath and the depth of my compressions has decreased.
“Eight minutes,” Emma says.
“I’ll take over.”
Out of breath, I allow Adam to take my place at Gigi’s side after I check again for a pulse.
“No pulse,” I tell him. “Continue compressions.”
Beth continues to give Gigi breaths in between Adam’s rounds of compressions.
I sit back on my knees, thinking of the survival statistics for going into cardiac arrest outside of a hospital.
It’s less than 6 percent. And even if we do get Gigi’s pulse back, we have nothing to stabilize her with: no ventilator, IV fluids, or medications.
Nothing aside from a first aid kit. There’s no way to assess the extent of her head injury without diagnostic imaging.
The bow lifts over a swell. I grip Gigi’s ankles, struggling to keep her from sliding atop the angled boat. Emma moves to the helm.
“I need to make sure we don’t get hit sideways by one of these,” she hollers.
Adam counts as he continues compressions, but I can see that he’s tiring.
“Emma,” I call over my shoulder. “How long have we been doing CPR?”
From behind the steering wheel, she glances at her watch. “Fifteen minutes.”
I turn back to Gigi, her lifeless form jerking beneath Adam’s compressions.
“Stop,” I say, crawling past him to feel Gigi’s neck for a pulse.
Still nothing. I withdraw my hand, assessing the woman I’ve known since I was a girl.
Normally, it’s recommended to do at least twenty minutes of CPR before calling a time of death.
But there’s nothing we can do to save her.
I run my gaze up and down her limp, pale form. She’s already gone.
Beth rocks back on her heels beside Gigi’s head, looking defeated as a whimper escapes her throat. “Gigi,” she mutters, wiping a tear from her cheek.
Adam leans forward, returning his interlaced hands to Gigi’s chest.
I lay my palm on his forearm. “She’s beyond our help.”
A violent clamoring overhead makes me tear my gaze from Gigi’s body. A metallic groan emits from the boom as it swings over the side, its end lifting away from the boat. Above the boom, the exposed mainsail that Gigi and Adam didn’t manage to furl flaps violently in the wind.
Emma steps into the cockpit, hovering over Gigi’s feet. “Is she breathing? Did you get a pulse?”
I shake my head. “There’s nothing we can do to save her.”
We all go silent as I stare in disbelief at Gigi’s lifeless body while the mainsail continues to flap from the raging wind. When my gaze travels to Gigi’s wet hair splayed across the deck, my mind flashes to Courtney’s long red waves the last time I saw her, soaking wet from the river.
“Shit.” Emma slams her fist onto the table beside us, making Beth jump.
“We need to conserve our energy,” I add, lifting my gaze to the source of the metallic clamoring. The weather vane’s gone, and the Starlink satellite dish hangs by a cord above the middle of the mast, smacking against the metal pole.
So we can try to save ourselves.