CHAPTER ELEVEN
HAZEL
The Miss Ada is smaller than I hoped and tougher than I feared.
She’s a forty-foot service launch with a workboat’s flat face and a cabin that smells of diesel and decades of fish, patched along her port side with fresh fiberglass that hasn’t been painted.
Bo, her skipper, is a weathered man of sixty with forearms like mooring lines and a way of looking at the sea that I’ve only ever seen in one other person.
Respect without romance. My husband has the same look.
I didn’t expect to find it here, and I don’t know what to do with finding it.
“Thirty souls,” Bo says, by way of greeting, standing on the mangrove dock while his boat noses at her lines. “Twenty-five if any of them need lying down. I don’t care what the manifest says, that’s the boat’s answer.”
“Then we build the list around the boat’s answer,” I say.
The list is the hardest thing I’ve ever made.
I do it at a table in the dive shop with Doyle’s manifest and Soryn’s notes and a pencil, because pencils feel right for this, erasable until they aren’t.
The categories come first, cold and clean, because categories don’t cry.
Medical within twenty-four hours. Infants under one year.
Over seventy-five with mobility issues. Then I start writing names into the categories and the categories turn into faces, and that’s when it gets hard.
Every name has a person attached. Every person has a story I’ve heard on a corridor floor at 3 a.m. The dialysis man who showed me pictures of his boat.
The ninety-year-old who beat me at gin with a deck of water-warped cards.
Dana finds me there. She knows what the table is. She’s been doing the math too, everyone has, but she’s the only one who comes and puts a hand on my shoulder while I do it.
“Oscar and I should be second run,” she says.
“You’re infants. First run.”
“Oscar’s seven months and fat as a prince.
Poppy needs the clinic, the cardiac men need the clinic, Ruth can’t survive another week of this.
We can wait one tide.” She sits down across from me and takes the eraser end of things, steady as a loan officer.
“Don’t spend us early because you love us, Hazel.
Spend us where the need is. That’s the rule you taught this island all week. ”
I want to fight her. The list says she’s right. I write her name in the second run and hate the pencil, hate the rule, love her.
“Besides,” she says, “if I’m here, you’re not doing the second-run loading alone.”
I look up. “I wasn’t planning to go first run.”
“I know,” she says. “That’s why I’m telling you the rule.”
It starts with Soryn, because triage is her profession and her handwriting.
Medical cases first: Poppy and Anna, Poppy stable but needing a real hospital within the day, an oxygen tank strapped beside her.
A man with a dialysis schedule already blown.
Two cardiac patients. Then infants, because heat and no refrigeration makes them the most fragile cargo after the sick: Maren, Oscar, three other babies whose parents I now know by name.
Then the oldest of the elderly, Ruth and her husband among them, Ruth’s hip strapped with a diving weight belt and Soryn’s ingenuity. Twenty-six names, plus crew.
Every name I write down, I write twenty names I’m leaving.
The resort finds out, because two hundred people in a wedding barn cannot keep a secret. Doyle comes to the mangrove cut at midday with his radio and his ruined posture, and I brace for the insurance speech, the liability speech, the you-can’t speech.
“I can’t authorize it,” he says instead. “Officially. You understand.”
“Officially,” I agree.
“Unofficially.” He looks at the Miss Ada, at Bo, at the sea beyond the cut, which has finally, finally lain down to a heavy gray roll.
“The sea state at the crossing is within her capability. South Bimini’s been notified there’s traffic coming, by a man I know at their dock, who I called for unrelated reasons.
The resort’s remaining satellite time will be donated by a clerical error to tracking the crossing.
” He pauses. “If anyone asks, Mrs. Morse, I tried to talk you out of it.”
“Did you?”
“I’m about to. It’s risky. The swell’s still running, that boat has never carried babies, and if the weather turns mid-crossing there’s no rescue asset in range that isn’t already working.” He says it all flat, a man reading his own liability waiver. “There’s my attempt. For the record.”
“Noted, and refused. Doyle. You held two hundred people together through the worst week this island has ever had, and you did it on crackers and honesty. The next ones go smoother because you held.” I put my hand on his arm, briefly.
“When this is over, your report will say the guests organized their own supplemental evacuation with local resources. Because it’s true. ”
He studies me a moment, this broad, sun-creased man who has been apologizing with his posture for four days, and something in him unknots. “Safe crossing, Mrs. Morse.”
Loading takes an hour, and it’s controlled heartbreak.
People help, mostly. That’s the thing I’d tell the reports.
The ones staying carry bags for the ones going.
The teenage runner loads water and won’t meet anyone’s eyes.
Marlon wades alongside handing down the babies one at a time in their carriers, the ladder lesson of The Sovereign now standard practice, every adult in the chain with two hands out and their whole attention on the small weight passing between them.
A crew member from the resort, one of Doyle’s senior people, tries to bring me forward out of the loading order. “Mrs. Morse, you and the baby are first.”
“The baby is first because she’s a baby. I am not first because of my surname.” I’m holding Maren, and I hand her down to Bo’s wife, who’s crewing, and turn back to the dock. “I go when my name comes up in the medical-and-infant order, same as anyone.”
It comes up in the second run, and I stay for the first.
The first run leaves at slack tide, twenty-six souls, Bo at the helm, and the Miss Ada clears the mangrove cut and noses into the open sea and gets small, and smaller, and the whole crowd on the dock watches her until the swell takes her, and then there’s nothing to do but wait to learn whether I just organized a rescue or a tragedy.
A woman beside me, one of the mothers whose baby went in the first run, who stayed because her toddler can wait another tide, stares at the empty horizon and says what everyone’s thinking: “What if the boat doesn’t come back?”
“Then we solve that problem when it becomes ours,” I say.
She laughs, a cracked little sound. “You’re his wife, right? The chairman’s. You’re really calm about this.”
I watch the horizon where my child’s boat disappeared. “I have a five-month-old on a forty-foot launch in open water. I’m not calm. I’m occupied.” I turn from the sea, because watching won’t move it. “Come help me repack the formula. Occupied is contagious.”
Four hours is a geological era. We fill it with work, because work is the only currency the dock accepts.
Dana and I repack the formula into waterproof bins by name and dosage.
The runner organizes a rope-assisted boarding line for the second run, rehearsing grandmothers.
Someone produces a chalkboard from the resort’s kids’ club and we write the boat’s return time estimate on it, then watch it become wrong, then right.
The crowd surges at shapes on the horizon that turn out to be wave-shadows or gulls.
I stop looking. Looking doesn’t move boats.
I repack bins that are already packed, and Marlon gently takes the formula scoop out of my hand and tells me the bins are perfect, and I believe him for almost a minute at a time.
The Miss Ada returns four hours later.
The shout goes up from the dock before I see her, and then she’s in the cut, wallowing heavy and riding low and hers, and Bo’s wife stands in the bow with her fist raised, and the dock makes a sound I’ll hear in my head at random moments for the rest of my life.
First run delivered. South Bimini has them.
Clinic’s real, airstrip’s real, and the sea is falling.
The second run boards at dusk. I go down the mangrove dock with Maren in her carrier and the diaper bag and nothing else, and I look back at Morse Cay, the wounded resort lit up in its half-power orange, Doyle’s people still holding their two hundred together, and I feel no triumph about leaving it.
Only the pull of the next thing, the way the sea pulls at the cut.
The crossing is the worst ride of my life, and I’ve now had several to compare.
The swell is down but not out, six-foot rollers with a cross-chop on top, and the Miss Ada takes them on her shoulder and rolls and rolls and rolls.
Below deck, babies scream in shifts. A cardiac patient prays the rosary without moving his lips.
I wedge myself in the cabin corner with Maren braced in the carrier against my chest, my back taking the bulkhead on every roll, and I am terrified, comprehensively, in a way the ship never managed, because this time there is no one to be angry at. I chose this boat. Every roll is mine.
I’m sick into a bucket, neatly, without moving Maren, a small motherhood merit badge I award myself in the dark.
Halfway across, Bo’s wife comes down the companionway and squats beside me, shouting over the engine. “Bo says to tell you the radio’s up! South Bimini knows our count, and the clinic’s waiting!”
“Tell Bo,” I shout back, “that my husband would have loved this boat!”
She grins, gap-toothed, delighted. “Tell him yourself!”
I don’t answer that. There isn’t an answer yet.
South Bimini rises out of the dark at full dark, low lights and a real harbor, and the Miss Ada comes alongside a working dock with tires nailed to it, the most beautiful dock I have ever seen, and hands reach down, and I pass Maren up into the chain of them, and climb after her into noise.
Cell signal. Actual bars, multiple. Lights that don’t flicker.
A clinic van idling at the dock with its doors open, Soryn already there from the first run, directing traffic in her element.
Someone wraps a blanket around my shoulders.
Someone else presses a paper cup of sweet tea into my hand.
Maren is checked by a real pediatric nurse under real light and pronounced perfect, and I stand on solid ground in a functioning world, holding my daughter, and I start to shake and can’t stop.
Not fear. That’s done. The shaking is something else, something that’s been building since the generator died, and it takes me a minute in the island night to name it.
I am safe, and my husband had nothing to do with it. The boat was a stranger’s, the list was mine, the sea was crossed by a dive instructor’s cousin and twenty-six people’s nerve. Every link in the chain that got my daughter to this dock was forged by someone whose name wasn’t Morse.
The clinic takes Poppy and the medical cases.
The rest of us are walked to a guesthouse above the harbor, donated, lit, dry, with a shower I will remember on my deathbed.
I put Maren down in a borrowed crib in a quiet room, and she sleeps instantly, completely, a baby who has survived a hurricane and four evacuations and finds the whole business overrated.
I sit on the bed’s edge in my clean borrowed T-shirt, and my phone, my real phone, dead for days, plugged into a real outlet, begins to buzz.
And buzz. And buzz.
Forty-one missed calls. Voicemails stacking. The screen lights with a name I have loved for fifteen years, and it keeps lighting, over and over, the most persistent thing he’s managed all week.
I watch it ring. I let it.