Chapter 5
Neri
The storm doesn’t just arrive. Ambushes have arrivals. This is a door slamming in our faces.
One minute the Belle is shouldering through pewter chop with the island still forty minutes out while I’m at the stern pretending to read slide nine.
The next, the wind comes across the water in a visible line, a dark ruffled wall dragging rain behind it like a net, and it hits the boat with a sound I have never heard before.
It’s an angry sound. The sound of something ancient and wrathful.
The Belle heels. My laptop goes skating off the locker and I catch it by reflex. The rain lands on the windowpane, horizontal, cold as a slap and without mercy.
So much for the evening system.
So much for forty years of selkie wisdom.
“Inside!” Fergus’s roar comes down the deck, shredded by wind. “Both of you, in! It’s just a squall line, she’ll punch through!”
We lurch for the wheelhouse. Rafe gets there first and holds the door against the wind, one arm out, herding me through, and Carl Sagan flails against his lashings beside the doorway with his cardboard smile unchanged.
I guess a man who spent his life watching the cosmos isn’t fazed by a high sea storm.
Inside is diesel-warm and pipe-smoke close, wipers slamming back and forth on full and losing. Fergus stands wide-legged at the wheel, and I’ll grant the old seal this: his hands are good. He takes the boat up each swell on the angle, easing her, forty years of sea life alive in his wrists.
It’s not going to matter.
I know that the way I know my own name. The way I knew when listening to the waves that something wasn’t adding up. It’s a knowledge I can’t explain, but it’s as much a part of me as my hair and my bones.
The water told me and I was too foolish to listen to its warning.
I wedge myself into the corner of the wraparound bench and hug my ridiculous garment bag and my closed laptop like it’s a flotation device, which it’s not.
My mind races and I remember where the life vests are.
I checked the moment I boarded. All six of them are under this very bench, neatly stacked.
A small part of me whispers that I should pull them out and put one on, but I’m too paralyzed with fear to do so. It’s like wearing it makes the situation more real.
Stupid, I know. But I’m terrified and fear makes me stupid.
The boat drops off a swell into a trough. The hull booms. Spray sheets the windshield with sea-water green.
“Squall line!” Fergus bellows again, to himself this time, stubborn as a mule. “Punch through in ten minutes!”
And the ocean says, clear as a voice, low in my body where I stopped listening five years ago: no.
Here’s what nobody understands about it, what I stopped trying to explain around the same time I stopped letting anyone close enough to ask.
When the water speaks, I’m not really hearing.
I’m not really feeling, either, not the way a headache is feeling.
It’s the difference between watching a graph of a heartbeat and having one.
The sea has a pulse and my body was built with its rhythm in it.
Thing is, for five years I have kept that channel shut with both hands and my whole weight. The last time I tuned in to the water, my mother was alive, and the channel and her voice come from the same place inside my chest. I haven’t opened that door since.
I’m in the room now. That storm kicked the door in.
And the pulse out there is enormous. It’s long and deep and organized, arriving from a fetch of open ocean as wild and untamed as the heart of the sea.
Under the wind-chaos there’s a rhythm with intent in it, waves stacking, periods syncing, and beneath the boat the water has started doing the thing it does over ledges and shoals when big swell finds shallow bottom, standing up. Getting steep. Getting tall.
We are not going to punch through.
We are going down.
The knowing lands in me whole, complete, delivered, the way a proof lands when the last line resolves and you see the whole shape at once.
There’s no unseeing it, and my body goes very quiet and very cold.
My slides, my speech, the ceremony and my entire meticulous life shrink to the size of a thumbnail image at the bottom of a page.
“We’re going down.” My voice comes out strange. Level. Loud enough to be heard and no louder. “This boat is going down.”
“It’s a squall, girl.” Fergus doesn’t turn, but I see a tendon stretch on his neck underneath his fur. “I have run this crossing in worse weather.”
“No, you haven’t.” I have no idea how I find the strength to speak so evenly, but I do. It rips out of me, his own contempt turned around and thrown back. “I’m right and you know it. Listen to me. I am telling you what the ocean is saying, and it is saying we go down.”
Silence fills the space between the three of us, if a howling wheelhouse can hold one. Fergus stares at the windshield, jaw working, seal-stubborn, and I can see it happen when he decides to doom us all.
“Squall line,” he says. “We’re punching through.”
A voice beside me says, “What do you need us to do?”
I turn. Rafe is braced in the corner with one hand on the overhead rail, glasses rain-spotted, face pale, and he is looking directly at me, only at me, and there is not one atom of doubt anywhere on his face.
“You believe me.” I just state it, because it’s not really a question.
“You said the boat is going down,” he says. “So the boat is going down. What do we do?”
Guilt shoots through me like a harpoon, biting at my vital organs.
He doesn’t even look angry at me. I’m the one who refused to turn around in the end.
Any reasonable person would spend this moment telling me it’s-your-fault, but not him.
Instead, he moved straight to what do we do, and something in my chest breaks open along a seam.
Maybe it’s guilt, maybe it’s the abject terror that sends shards of ice through my veins.
There is no time, absolutely no time, to find out which one it is.
“Life jackets.” I’m already hauling up the bench seat. “Under here. Everyone, including captain forty years of experience over there.”
The jackets are stiff orange and smell like rubber and mildew, but they seem in good enough shape. I shove one at Rafe, throw one across at Fergus, who catches it one-handed and does not put it on, because of course he doesn’t. Seals swim, don’t they?
I have no idea if a selkie can swim in this type of weather, but I have no time or inclination to ask.
I’m buckling mine when Rafe, working his second strap, says, “You too?”
“Me too,” I say. “Long story. Buckle.”
The Belle climbs a swell that keeps going like an elevator lift that turns my stomach, and from the top, in the flogging wipers’ one clear pass, I see it.
The sea to the northeast stands up like the hands of a forgotten God.
Rows of waves come our way, gray-shouldered, long as freight, wearing white at the crests where the wind is tearing them, and past them a lower dark line that is not cloud. This means underneath us the bottom is already rising, which means these waves are about to tip us over.
“Fergus!” I scream it. “LEE! NOW!”
The old selkie captain doesn’t argue with me this time.
He spins the wheel, opens the throttle, the diesel bellows, the Belle digs in her shoulder and starts to come around, and for three full seconds I think we might thread it. That’s the cruelest part. Those three whole seconds of hope.
Then the engine dies.
No cough. No warning light drama. Just gone, mid-roar, the thrum that has lived in the deck planks, and the sudden quiet underneath the storm is the loudest thing I have ever heard.
The boat, mid-turn, broadside, floating without power.
“Fuel’s fouled, she’s swamped a vent.” Fergus is already moving, shoving past, wrenching open the deck hatch, and he’s shouting something about the pickup line.
Then he ducks out the wheelhouse door onto the open back deck with a wrench in his fist, fur slicked black with rain, one hand for the boat.
“CAPTAIN, NO!”
The wave that takes him isn’t even one of the giants.
That’s what I notice in my terror-addled brain.
It’s an ordinary storm wave, gray and quick, it climbs the low side rail as the Belle wallows, sweeps the open deck hip-deep in one motion.
Where there was a furred barrel of a man with a wrench a moment ago, there is now only rushing white water and a cartwheeling orange life jacket, unworn, and then the sea, blank as a wiped board.
“FERGUS!” Rafe’s at the door. I have two fists in his jacket before I know I’ve moved, hauling him back. He’s strong, but I hold on to him with all I have.
I win that fight, barely.
“He’s a seal!” I’m screaming it into the wind, into Rafe’s face, and I don’t know which of us I’m convincing. “He has a better chance than both of us.”
That’s when the big ones arrive.
The first breaks a boat-length short and buries the deck to my knees in white.
Cold walks straight through me like a stabbing knife.
The Belle rolls and tries to right herself.
The vessel is tired, old and brave, but I feel the next one coming through the soles of my feet, through the pulse of the sea.
The ocean is inhaling, the particular gathering hush of water standing up to its full height over shoaling ground.
“Hold on to me,” Rafe says.
His arms come around me and he turns his back to the wave. Somewhere in the last two seconds of the world I take notice of it. That protective gesture, even against a foe as formidable as the mighty Atlantic Ocean.
The wave breaks on us.
The window goes white. The floor becomes a wall.
The Saltford Belle turns over, and the ocean I have refused for five years opens its arms and takes us both.