Chapter Seven
The boat creaks and groans around us as we descend the wooden steps into the cabin. My gaze goes straight to Keith’s empty bedroom. He woke up in that bed this morning with no idea it was his last day on Earth. Or that he’d die at the hand of a vindictive dumbass.
I brace myself as I stagger through the kitchen, ducking to avoid a hanging mesh bag full of oranges swinging wildly above the counter. A smaller bag of onions and potatoes hangs beside it, but the potatoes have grown eyes that stick through the webbing like miniature tree roots.
Ben throws himself into the farthest seat on the pseudo sofa, back pressed against the bathroom wall.
Emmy sits across the aisle from him, sliding into the bench seat that wraps around the table.
I grab my bag, hugging it to my chest as if the familiar items will soothe me—even if it’s only sunscreen and my clothes.
I don’t even know what happened to my sunglasses.
I drag my jean shorts out of the bag and tug them on before I sit on the other side of the table, my back to the kitchen.
I fish out my water bottle and drink until the taste of salt clears from my mouth.
Jackson hovers in the aisle, adjusting his weight to compensate for the rocking of the boat. Everything about his body language says he’s on high alert, and I’m not sure if he’s more worried about the storm or the stranger in the cabin with us.
Wind howls through the open hatch. Emmy splays her hands across the table. “Can we please call a truce? Screaming at each other isn’t going to get us out of here any faster, and I think we can all agree that calling for help is more important at this point.”
“I can agree to that,” Jackson says. He glances at Ben. “Can you?”
Ben scowls, but he nods.
He doesn’t have much of a choice. He’ll have no future to salvage if we aren’t rescued.
I grab my phone out of my bag. It’s still in the clear waterproof case.
The time blinks at me from the home screen—it’s almost 6:00 p.m. We should have been back to the marina already.
I swipe at the screen, but as I suspected, I have no service.
A low battery notification pops up. I’m at nineteen percent.
Everyone else is on their phones too.
“Mine’s dead,” Emmy says, pressing hard on the screen protector like that’ll force it back on. I’m not exactly surprised. She’s been on her phone all day.
Jackson pockets his with a frown. “I’m at fifty percent, but I don’t have any service.”
“We’re too far from shore. We’re going to have to use the radio,” Ben says, flashing us his screen. It’s open to the compass app, but I don’t miss the red battery symbol in the upper-right corner. “We can use the coordinates on our phones to tell them where we are.”
“Will that be accurate when we don’t have service?” I ask, squinting at the little numbers at the bottom of the app. They shift as his phone moves.
He nods. “Yeah, the compass app uses different sensors. It doesn’t need service. I have our latitude and longitude right here. We just have to call them in, and someone will come get us.”
Something suspiciously like hope blooms in my chest. Once someone knows we’re in trouble it’ll be…what? An hour? Maybe two before we’re on another boat headed back to the safety of the mainland. We can hunker down and muscle through for that long. Worst case, we get a little seasick, right?
Jackson moves to the workspace and runs his fingers along the controls of the radio system.
He presses a few buttons, but nothing happens.
None of the screens are lit up. Even the basic radio beside the receiver is dark.
He presses various buttons, turns dials, and finally smacks the side of the system.
The lights flicker on for half a second, then go out again.
“What the hell is wrong with this thing?”
Ben leans forward in his seat to see what Jackson is doing, then reaches over to flip the light switch in the bathroom.
It blinks and turns off. He sits back down and puts his head in his hands.
“That Nickelback freak probably didn’t give the start battery a fresh charge before we left.
If that goes out, there’s no power to the entire boat.
He must not have expected us to be out long enough for it to run dry. ”
That explains why the music stopped.
I’m not convinced it’s as simple as forgetting to charge a battery though. I think of Captain Keith musing about his boat. With the cash I can make some much-needed repairs to my baby before our next adventure. She’s been a little neglected lately.
I wonder if the battery was one of those things he neglected.
Jackson laughs, and it’s a harsh, sarcastic sound. He drops the radio receiver. The cord springs against the wall with a clatter. “Perfect. Just perfect. I love that we’re all trapped because you and my sister don’t know the meaning of the word ‘no,’” he says, all but yelling the last part.
Emmy glares at him. “We had no way of knowing this would happen, Jackson. Obviously we wouldn’t have come if we knew—”
“If you knew what, Emmy? If you knew it would be dangerous to take a boat into a storm that closed an entire marina? Or that your vacation fling would attack our captain? Which brainless, lack-of-common-sense move are we talking about here?”
“Why is this all on me? What about the captain who promised to keep us safe? Isn’t this also his fault? He could have told us it was too dangerous instead of taking Ben’s money.”
“You know what, you’re totally right, Em,” Jackson says, tapping a finger on his chin with faux confusion. “And who was it that found the one boat captain in Puerto Vallarta desperate enough to overlook the obvious weather concerns once a bunch of money was waved in his face?”
Ben glares at him. “Go fuck yourself.”
“Why? You’ve already fucked us all so thoroughly. Any other captain, any other boat, and this never would have happened.”
Emmy jumps to her feet and jabs a finger at her brother. “Nobody made you come with us! You could have stayed at the marina if you were so worried.”
“Oh, sure. Mom and Dad would have loved that. How would that have gone, exactly? Sorry, the boat seemed sketch, so I bailed—but I let my little sister sail off onto the stormy seas with two random dudes after you explicitly asked me to keep her safe. Anyway, how was the fucking golf tour?’ That would have gone over like a ton of bricks. ”
For a moment, the only sound is the howling wind outside.
“I’m not going to apologize for living my life, Jackson,” Emmy says. “I’m sorry I don’t assume every stranger I meet is a threat and every boat is a safety hazard, but I’d rather hope for the best than worry about every single damn thing.”
“Plenty of people go on vacation and have a great fucking time without stranding everyone at sea!” Jackson shoots back.
“This isn’t my fault!” Emmy shrieks.
Jackson rolls his eyes so hard I’m surprised he doesn’t fall over. “Really? Because we’d be safe at the resort if it wasn’t for you and Sir Sails a Lot over there.”
Ben jumps to his feet like he’s about to charge at Jackson. I fling myself out of my seat and into the aisle to block his path. “Okay, enough! All of you, enough. We don’t have time for this!”
As if the ocean agrees, a wave slams into the side of the boat so hard that I’m thrown through the air.
Ben and Emmy crash against the portholes beside me in a tangle of elbows and knees.
Jackson almost becomes one with the kitchen stove.
The boat rolls until the porthole beside my face is completely submerged.
From the corner of my eye, the mesh bags of fruit and garlic dangle toward me instead of the counter, one almost kissing the ceiling.
The boat screams in protest. The very air around us groans and creaks until a splintering crack cuts through the air, and we’re all thrown back to the opposite side of the boat.
Emmy and I land in a heap on the floor. Ben ends up draped halfway across the sofa and halfway across my hip. Water rushes down the stairs. I scramble up off the floor and back on the dining bench to get away from it.
Ben grabs Emmy and hauls her onto the sofa.
Her panicked eyes race along the inside of the boat as she rubs the place where her head hit the bulkhead.
“What the hell just happened? Is the boat going to sink? How are we supposed to call for help without a radio? I saw a movie once where a boat got stuck in a hurricane, and a wave the size of a building hit them, and they flipped. Are we going to flip over? Will it sink us?”
She’s talking so fast, one thread of panic bleeds into the next.
Ben gently holds her face in his hands and presses his thumbs to her lips to make her stop. “Emmy, relax. Oxygen is good. Panic is bad. The waves have gotten big, but we’re not going to sink.”
“How do you know?” she demands.
“A sailboat is almost impossible to flip. It’s designed that way. The keel will always right the boat—like it did just now.”
“What’s a keel?” Emmy asks.
“It’s like a big metal fin stuck to the bottom of a boat.
It weighs down the hull and keeps the boat upright in strong winds.
Because of the keel, truly capsizing is rare, even in hurricane situations, and this isn’t a hurricane.
It’s just a little wind and waves. I promise you we’re not going to sink.
The storm will pass, and we’ll be fine… We just have to wait for help to get to us. ”
Wind and waves? Is he serious?
Emmy’s eyes are wide as portholes, but she seems to relax, so I don’t call him out on what a bunch of BS that is. This may not be a hurricane, but a little wind doesn’t toss a boat around that hard.
Ben runs a thumb across Emmy’s cheek, and she looks at him like he’s the only thing keeping this boat afloat.
Jackson shakes the water from his dark hair, his gaze laser focused on his sister.
I understand, because I don’t want Ben anywhere near Emmy either, but I’m grateful he knows what to say to keep her from having a high-seas panic attack.
I scoot around the table until the side of the boat is to my back—hoping for more leverage in case we roll again. Jackson watches me and moves in my direction.
“So that’s our plan, then?” Jackson asks, slumping into the seat I just vacated. He props his elbows on the table and hangs his head. He’s absolutely drenched. “Stay inside and wait?”
The boat tips again, in the opposite direction this time. I grab onto the table to keep from being thrown into Jackson, and when the boat rights itself, his hands are extended like he was braced to catch me.
“Unless that radio magically blinks on, I don’t think we have any other choice,” Ben says. “We have no way to reach the mainland, and I don’t feel comfortable trying to handle this boat in the storm. Not until the wind dies down.”
Alarm bells ring in my head. He was all confidence in his abilities when he was shouting at Captain Keith about being able to get us to shore, but now he doesn’t feel comfortable? He keeps changing his story.
I catch his eye. “But you can handle it when it passes, right? As soon as the winds die down, you can get us out of this?”
He pauses long enough to stress me out, but he nods. “I can. It’s a bigger boat than the ones I used at camp, but I can get us to shore. Or close enough to call for help. As soon as the storm dies down, I can do it.”
I frown. He sounds a lot like a guy trying to convince himself he’s not in over his head.
“We don’t have to worry about any of that,” Emmy says, staring out the porthole by her head.
“Search and rescue will find us long before that. Someone from the marina will remember seeing us go out, and they’ll notice when we don’t come back.
Besides, Mom and Dad will worry. Someone will come looking for us. Maybe they’re already on their way.”
That’s a big maybe.
I nod, because I’m a terrible liar, and I’m not about to send Emmy into another spiral, but I highly doubt Nickelback Keith told anyone where we were going.
It’s even more unlikely anyone from the marina will remember us.
The docks were practically deserted because of the weather.
And how would anyone know where to look if they did remember us? Where would they even start?
Another wave washes over the top of the boat, and we all share a worried look.
“Right?” Emmy says, when nobody responds to her. “Someone’s probably already coming to get us. Right?”
Ben reaches out and takes her hand, smiling far too wide. “I’m sure they are. It’ll be a couple hours at most.”
Jackson meets my eye and gives the briefest shake of his head.
Nobody’s coming for us.