Twenty-Seven

This new school of sharks wasn’t bumping the boat like the other ones did, so at least there was that.

They hadn’t yet, anyway. Maybe they just weren’t hungry enough.

Yet.

While they were a real concern, what ultimately began to worry Edgar was the southern storm coming up on him. He just couldn’t seem to outrun it, and it was a fully-formed storm now, a real rager, swirling above like a monster just due south, still many miles away, but getting closer all the time. Although he paddled furiously, he knew it was useless; it was indeed coming his way, and there would be nothing he could do about it.

Even still, as always, he rowed.

Capsizing now had become his greatest fear. Checking on the sharks, he rested the oars on the side walls and leaned across the boat, looking down at them.

They were still lurking. Always lurking.

And when the storm finally caught up to him, he tossed the remaining supplies evenly across the raft’s bottom, for balance.

“This is called ‘ballast,’ son,” said his father, who floated in an imaginary raft, just behind him.

“What?” asked Edgar. “Oh, yeah. I know what it’s called. You’ve already told me like two times already.”

He quickly realized he was hallucinating. He counted backward from one hundred as he prepared the raft bottom, hoping to make the hallucination disappear. When the apparition asked how many days he’d been adrift on the sea, Edgar inadvertently answered it.

“It’s been, hmm . . . ten days I think,” he said, figuring. “No, two weeks maybe?”

Of those days, however many there were, with the sharks pursuing him and the sun beating down, he’d probably slept a total of twelve hours. And that’s why he knew he was having hallucinations.

Watching the storm take over the sky, he took a break from the useless rowing and stirred in the supplies, withdrawing a can of Vienna Sausages. Greedily, he wolfed them right down, then ate an entire MRE, as well as two king-sized candy bars.

But on the jug of water, he sipped lightly—even though the storm promised to bring him more. Using caution with his supply, he made himself stop just as the last of the caramel’s saltiness was washed away.

“Who knows?” Edgar said to his dad, answering the previous question. “Who knows how long I’ve been floating in this boat?”

He bobbed gently up and down and lifted his nose to the air, beginning to feel the cool, electric vibe of the storm. He picked his teeth and watched the angry skies organizing overhead.

Death from above, death from below.

And then, like a bulldozer, the winds came surging in, and with them the rising swells. Like a rollercoaster, his tiny raft began to climb the multi-storied waves, as high as hills, and then plummeted down the other side. It was enough to make him instantly seasick.

As he clung to the raft’s sides, his fear ramping up with each lightening stike, he tried to remember to stay in the middle of the raft, to keep it balanced. As the rain came spattering in, and then in torrents, he opened his mouth wide and campaigned for a free drink of water.

It was getting darker by the minute. He glanced over the side and used the lightning to see, and when it flashed, he saw clearly the entire school of evil sharks lurking underneath like a photo shoot—a virtual army of them.

Whimpering, he reached into his pile of supplies and yanked out the big yellow raincoat. There, in the center of the boat, he grabbed the plastic handles on the raft and zipped up the coat, laying back to stare at the swirling skies.

Soon, when he saw the power of the storm and the state of the angry sea, he wondered how he would ever survive the night.

When the swells got to thirty feet—far higher waters than he’d ever seen before—he finally relented and screamed to the clouds.

“PLEASE! LEAVE ME ALONE! PLEASE!”

But his voice was nothing to the chaos building around him. And, as if an answer from God, a bolt of lightning popped the ocean just yards from his vessel, lifting the hairs on his neck, like static. Immediately following was a loud, soul shrinking crash of thunder, making Edgar jerk his head away and scowl. 

As if things weren’t bad enough, terribly, his raft began to take on water. In moments the water was rising up the sides, so he scrambled to his knees and swept the water out frantically, using an empty water jug that he’d cut at the top with his Swiss Army knife.

He knew the raft wouldn’t last the night: who was he kidding? A three-hundred-dollar raft from Walmart that was only meant for lakes and pools? The plaything was already overburdened to its limit, and now it was taking on too much water, and enduring far too many violent waves.

Regardless, all night he clung to the feeble thing, riding each wave up and down in the center of a merciless ocean, praying aloud often, twisting his body against the swirling sea to prevent the waves from toppling him. The ocean was pitch black from the stormy night, so much that he was unable to see his hand in front of him. It was darker than the center of the Earth. Leaning over the edge, he shined his flashlight on the sea, but in all the driving, sideways rain, he could not even see below the top of the surface.

It made him wonder if the sharks were still following him with all the calamity on the surface.

Yeah, probably.

__________

All night he fought the storm and somehow stayed afloat.

The next morning, inexplicably, impossibly, the storm finally died down. Off in the gray distance there was a smudge of sunlight trying to break through the thick, black clouds, and as the rain slacked, so did the wind.

For once, Edgar began to believe that he might have just skirted death one more time. But just as he thought it, the terrible tempest unleashed one last, remaining blow, mercilessly launching him into a dire fight for his own survival.

A gargantuan wave—no less than forty feet high—came rolling like a bowling ball over the disrupted seas. Edgar, worn and beaten, watched it almost indifferently from the side of the raft as it came barreling forth. He knew he was in huge trouble because of the way the wave was cresting.

Suddenly, as if waking from a dream, he snapped to and fell to the raft floor, spreading out across the raft, distributing his weight, gripping the sides tightly and holding his breath, preparing for the blow.

It was going to be rough. This one was dangerous.

And then, as he looked up, it reached into the sky above him—like the watery hand of God Himself, then crashed down with the finality of a judge’s gavel. Suddenly the wave was on him and like nothing the tiny raft was flipped headlong into the sea, casting Edgar and all his supplies into the cold, dark, shark-infested Indian Ocean.

As he hit the water, he screamed bloody murder as the wave plunged him into the deep, bracing himself for the shark teeth he knew would be upon him any second. With eyes tightly shut and arms flailing all around, he fought for the surface of the sea. Each stroke he made for the top, he expected to be his last—expected at any moment the bites to come furiously and all over, but for some strange, wonderful reason, none came.

Finally, he opened his eyes as he continued to fight for the surface, and took a good look around in the freshly brightening dawn, slowly straining to see.

The sharks were gone. They were gone!

The storm had dispersed them.

He was energized and felt gleeful his whole body over, making for the surface like an Olympian, bursting into the wet, open air and gasping for breath. Then, drifting atop the bouncy sea, he paddled around in a circle in search for his raft.

But he didn’t see it anywhere. Where was his raft?! Had it sunk? Suddenly he began to think he’d come this far—surviving the whirlpool, the first group of sharks, the second group of sharks, the storm—just to drown. It didn’t seem fair.

But then, through the mist of the storm, there was a bright speck of orange drifting aimlessly beyond another huge wave. It was there!

Mustering all his strength to make a break for it, he lost sight of it immediately as it summited another wave, then retreated down the backside. Again he spotted it as it climbed a wave again, and again it was gone. Gulping mouthfuls of splashing seawater, knowing that soon this might be it if he didn’t make it to the raft and reel it in with muscles burning and chapped lips stinging—with all the feelings of futility swirling inside of him, like all his struggling had been for nothing, he fought.

When, suddenly, miraculously, a wonderful thing happened: from the opposite direction, out of nowhere, a counter-wave came spilling forth big as a tow boat, smashing against the wave currently lifting his raft twenty feet in the air, shifting the raft gloriously in his direction and, just for the moment, almost brought it within arm’s reach.

“PLEASE!” he screamed, with all his might disregarding the burn in his muscles and lungs and blistery hands, and Edgar swam like he’d never swam before.

“This is called the breaststroke!” shouted his father over the churning waters, swimming beside him in the sea. “This is the reason why the Olympians do it this way, because it’s the smartest way. It’s aerodynamic.”

“I know!” gurgled Edgar, as yet another wave plowed into him. And just when he thought he could swim no more, pausing to look up from the sea, there it was: his raft, only ten feet away now.

Kicking frantically in one final, frantic lunge, he somehow caught hold of the plastic and in his wrinkled, outstretched fingers. And, before another wave could take it from him, he desperately climbed aboard and hugged the side walls like a bear.

“Thank you, God,” he panted.

Without a doubt, the raft had taken a grand beating. All its contents were long gone, tossed away into the sea: the water, the food, everything. Even the oars.

Once he’d caught his breath, he rose to his knees and scanned the ocean for any signs of them, and just a few feet away, he noticed the flash of something shiny on the surface.

It was one of the water bottles—its plastic was partially afloat, upheld by a small pocket of air at the top.

He scrambled for it, using his hands for paddles. It took a while to get himself there, fighting the still-raging sea, but finally he was there, leaning out over the choppy waters with a trembling hand. He stared down below the bottle as he reached for it, trying to see if the sharks were there, but it was just too murky and stirred up to see below. Finally, his trembling fingers touched the precious water bottle, but it slipped away, bouncing on the choppy waves. He tried again, this time straining even harder, reaching out as far as he possibly could, until finally, he snatched it by the handle, scooping it toward him, bringing it quickly to his chest, cradling it.

“Thank you, God,” he murmured again.

__________

All day, as the storm sputtered and spat and then died, he sat with the water bottle in his lap and tried to recover.

As weary as he felt, for some reason, he was still unable to sleep.

Later that afternoon, when the ocean had calmed and evened out to a slick sheen, he fell into a delirious sleep and awoke hours later, in the middle of the night, to a million, bright, twinkling stars that hung high in the sky above.

“The best skies are always after a storm,” his father who floated just off the raft, right on top of the water, explained. “Remember the sky right after hurricane Katrina? Remember that night?” he prodded. “The lights were off in the city because the power was out, remember? That sky was like a real planetarium.”

“Yeah,” admitted Edgar. “That was definitely a good sky.”

“Yes, sir,” corrected his father.

“Yes, sir,” said Edgar. “But this sky is better.”

__________

The hard sun returned the next morning beating down on him mercilessly, and soon his stomach began to growl, but what could he do?

“You can’t get blood from a turnip,” his floating dad informed.

Scanning all the horizons with wild, bloodshot eyes, he finally admitted to himself that if someone didn’t come along pretty soon . . .

He sat in the center of his tattered little boat, continuing to cradle the water bottle like it was life itself. Taking stock of his situation, he admitted to himself that he had no oar and no compass, no radio, no food, and no nothing. He was undeniably, miserably, and dangerously lost at sea.

Without a doubt, he was dead in the water.

Even still, it would be days before the real, deep hunger set in—the most troubling, profound hunger that he’d ever known before—to which he could only respond with fretting, searching the water for anything edible, and then, with sleep.

Starving became an acute sort of all-encompassing sensation that made his jellyfish sting seem like an unpleasant, long ago dream.

Sleeping all he could, sometimes, when he awoke with puffy eyes and blistered lips, he would measure out a tiny capful of water and bring it to his lips, sucking out every drop. After the sip, food would become his hourly preoccupation as he dreamed of his mother’s spaghetti, double bacon cheese burgers, steaks, potatoes—even the English peas and carrots and yams he’d turned his nose up to back in the pantry.

I’d tear a yam up, he admitted wearily, trying to be funny and light in his thoughts. But it didn’t help a bit.

In the daytime, as the unrelenting sun punished his overly tanned skin, Edgar, with no way to block it, could only resign to sitting there and taking it.

After all, there was no way he was jumping underneath the raft for a bit of a shady reprieve; there was no way he was jumping in for any reason.

He’d swum in this sea for the absolute last time.

__________

One afternoon he heard a sound and listened intently. “Thunder?” he uttered hoarsely. “Is that another storm?”

Weakly, he rose to his knees and scanned the billowy clouds, hoping that it might actually be rain. If so, he could fill his almost-empty water bottle a little. But when he saw it, he realized it was far better than rain. It was the most wonderful sight he’d ever seen.

Gazing out over the sea with his empty, almost pupil-less eyes, he discovered that just below the line of cloud cover, there circled a small, passenger-style airplane. Edgar watched it descend and fly very low to the sea, as if it were searching for someone.

As if it were searching for him.

“HEY!” he screamed wildly, leaping to his feet, bouncing up and down in the beaten raft and waving his arms like a lunatic.

“I’m HERE!” he screamed at the sky, but to his absolute heartbreak and interior deterioration, suddenly, mercilessly, the plane veered west. When it dawned on him that he had not been seen and he would not be saved, his eyes filled with demoralized, painful tears, and he was left only to watch as the plane flew away, toward the horizon, the hum of its engines silencing with the growing distance.

When it was finally gone, he collapsed onto the hot vessel and wept harder than he’d ever wept before.

__________

By the end of the next day, his last sip of water was gone.

He tapped the last of the drops from it and then began to bite and claw through the top of the plastic, to make a container of it—just in case it rained again.

If it rained again, maybe he could catch some rainwater—if it rained again. He knew that the awful sea he battled and its propensity to give him exactly the opposite of what he actually needed would make water a rare commodity.

His new pastime became scanning the skies for signs of clouds around the clock—and, for airplanes. But there was always nothing at all in the brutal, continuous blue—nothing but relentless drought, same as it was back in Mount Lanier.

One merciless drought replaced by another.

When his tongue began to swell from thirst and heat, without saliva, his cracked lips split open and bled. Around the clock, he began to hallucinate now, making him gaze out to sea several times and witness a spattering of oil rigs across in the Indian Ocean, and oil spills, and always, oily, dead animals.

“Have I ever told you,” confessed his father, “that I’m so sorry about the oil spill? I know that must have been tough on you, son.” Edgar was resting his head against the side wall and woozily waved it off, shaking his head forgivingly.

“Nah, Dad, it’s not a problem,” he whispered. “I got through it—I got here, didn’t I?”

“Well,” said his father, “I am sorry. I just wanted you to know. And another thing. You should know your mom is fine. Just know she misses you a lot.”

“Man. I miss her too,” he said, a big lump rising in his throat.

__________

One day he woke with a strange sense of clarity. After so many days of deliriousness and fuzziness in his head, it felt weird to be so sober and alert—weird, but good.

He glanced to the back of the boat and expected to see his dad back there, but no. Which was good. It meant he wasn’t loony for the moment.

Stirring from the bottom of the raft, he took advantage of his apparent second wind and began to paddle furiously with stinging, blistered hands toward the east—still ever-pressing for the French Southern and Antarctic Lands.

He paddled for hours—at first vigorously, then tiring out over time, until, eventually, he slumped to the side wall of the raft and collapsed. With bloodshot eyes and a thoroughly broken spirit, he leaned over the edge and vomited into the sea, but nothing came out. Through hot, straining tears, he stared deeply into the waters and horrorstruck, it occurred to him that he was floating once again on a sea of black oil.

Belly-up carcasses of so many animals of the deep bobbed around him, their dead eyes glazed over with rot.

“Help!” a voice screamed from nearby, and Edgar rose up to see who had said it

He just couldn’t believe it. It was Flounder.

“Flounder?” whispered Edgar. “What are you doing here?”

“Edgar!” Flounder screamed again, from the back of a small boat just yards beyond Edgar’s bow. In the boat with Flounder was Chris Weedy, who, obviously, like a pirate, was holding Flounder hostage.

Weedy beamed at Edgar as he manned the motor, drifting around Edgar’s beaten raft.

“My boat has a motor,” he bragged. “Isn’t that fantastic? I bet you wish you had a motor, huh?”

“Weedy?” asked Edgar. “Don’t you ever just stop?”

“Edgar,” Weedy answered, a broad smile on his face. “Why did you always fight with me? You always felt like you had to put me down, didn’t you? Like crashing me in Nitro Streak, or making me look like a fool in Van Rossum’s class. You should have never come to Mount Lanier! You should have asked to stay in Bon Secour! Remember when your grandmother offered to take you in so you could finish high school back home? Where everything was familiar and you could have gone to that private high school where all your friends were, and joined the high school fraternity there, and you could have gone to college—and in all of that you could have played it safe, and had a normal life. You could have stuck with the familiar.” Weedy beamed at him. “You wouldn’t be where you are right now.”

“What do you want with Flounder?” demanded Edgar, his voice weakening.

“Well,” explained Weedy, “you see, Flounder cheap-shotted me, back at the cabin. So now, I’m going to sink him to the bottom of the ocean. I’m gonna make him walk the plank!” He giggled at his clever plan. “See? Edgar? Isn’t it great, Edgar? Nobody knows we’re out here, and I will never get caught actually killing a kid. Man, seafaring is so much fun.”

Weedy then lifted a cinder block from his small boat so that Edgar could see, and on one end was tied a rope, and on the other end, Flounder’s bound hands.

“Oh no,” muttered Edgar. “Don’t do that.”

Weedy cackled as Edgar took a wobbly step toward the front of the raft and fell, paddling himself over.

“No use, redneck,” taunted Weedy. “You’re done. And Flounder’s crab meat now.”

“No!” pleaded Edgar. “Please stop, Weedy! I’ll give you anything you want! You win! What is it you want? What is it you want?”

But Weedy still lifted the cinder block into the air anyway, dangling it threateningly over the side, for Edgar to see.

“There’s nothing I want but this,” he growled, lowering the weight into the sea. “I want to see you beg. I want to see you miserable. That makes me happy.”

“OK,” said Edgar. “Well, you got me. I’m miserable, see? You win. I’m very sorry I crossed you, Weedy.”

Just as Flounder was about to be drowned, Edgar noticed something horrible. There, from the bottom of Weedy’s boat, emerged Shay. She stood, her own wrists bound with cord, and her mouth bound with a tight gag.

She wept profusely and fearfully, staring at Edgar.

“Shay!” he shouted, then reached over into the sea and began paddling with all the fury that remained in him. But, even as he did, Weedy cackled delightedly, touching the gas on the motor, backing easily away from his raft.

“I thought they had oars in Alabama, you hick.” Weedy giggled at this, then turned and commanded Shay, “Get up front with Flounder.”

Edgar watched them helplessly as Weedy took hold of her hair and yanked it violently, urging her along.

“You!” shouted Edgar, pointing at Weedy. “You’re dead!”

“How?” laughed Weedy, yanking Shay’s head side to side again, to demonstrate his power over the situation.

In a fit, Edgar tried to stand on his wobbly legs but his knees gave way and he flopped back to the raft again, which made Weedy howl even louder.

“Ha! Ha!” the bully cried. “What are you going to do, Edgar?” Are you gonna blow me up with some fake dynamite or pretend to fall down a fake hole? You’ve got nothing, Edgar! As usual, nothing!!”

Edgar rested his chin helplessly on the side wall of the raft and watched Weedy lord over his friends.

“What else do you have, Edgar, besides a bunch of little tricks? Besides a bunch of little lies?” Weedy puffed out his chest in victorious triumph. “Lies are all you got, Edgar! You’re like a skunk—all stink, no claw. And man, all that lying won’t help you out here in the sea—in a sea like this? A sea like this brings out the truth in people. It demands the truth.”

“Wait,” said Edgar, shaking his head, holding a hand up at Chris Weedy. “This is just a dream.” Suddenly he realized this, lifting his chin off the raft, staring out to the sea as a profound peace overtook him and then, magnificently, he was lucid. It was all just a byproduct of his being sun-crazed, food-crazed, and thirst-crazed, and nothing more.

“Now you’re using your brain!” said his father, who drifted along behind him. “This is a dream, Edgar. And in your dreams, you can do anything you want.” His father nodded over at Edgar’s hands, who looked down and noticed that they were glowing, like a sort of power was suddenly dancing through his blistered fingertips—like electricity. He smiled at it, because it was really cool, turning them over and watching the electrodes dance. With this newfound power, he rose in the raft and glared across the waters at Chris Weedy.

Weedy, Edgar noticed, immediately saw Edgar’s strangely glowing hands and just as quickly, he stopped smiling.

“Let them go,” Edgar warned him, “because I have the power now.”

“OK! OK!” Chris shouted, surrendering immediately as he lifted his hands in obvious defeat. “You got me, Edgar.”

Then, just as soon as he surrendered, he turned and kicked Flounder overboard, tossing the cinder block behind him into the sea, then cackled like a loon.

“NOOOO!” screamed Edgar, as Flounder flopped overboard like dead weight, sinking helplessly down into the depths, the cinder block yanking him under toward the ocean floor like an anvil. Weedy turned and grinned at Edgar, chuckling evilly, a look of furious triumph in his eyes.

“Now she goes!” he cried, snatching Shay by the shoulders, who, not going easily, fought and clawed at his face. But he soon fought off her resistance and was able to reach around her body, placing her in a headlock. Then, once he’d restrained her, he flung her overboard into the sea, like a cast net. She crashed into the water but, with one hand, she reached up and snagged the side of the boat, refusing to go down. When he saw this, Weedy cursed violently and stepped toward her, kicking at her hand.

“LEAVE HER ALONE!” screamed Edgar, who, even as he screamed it, knew that words would no longer suffice. Weedy’s evil ran marrow deep. He was simply no good, and he was no good to the core.

As some sort of strange, alien knowledge began to stir inside of him, he looked down at his now furiously glowing hands and lifted them up to the sky. From where the power emerged he did not know, but in some strange tongue—maybe Somalian, or maybe the language written on the bricks of the hole back home—he began to speak over his hands that had burst into white-hot mittens of flames.

As the clouds were apparently subservient to his glowing hands, they began to swirl like a whirlpool in the sky: rains and furious winds began churning tempestuously, obeying his direction, ramping higher and higher and higher as Edgar swirled his hands apart and then together, guiding the sea world all around, focusing every bit of pointed energy at the terrible and murderous Chris Weedy.

Then, with a fury, he cast the flames at Weedy’s boat and glared with his own evil, delicious grin, shooting his hands, unleashing on Weedy’s tiny vessel the horrible storm and all its power. In an instant, Weedy was swept from his feet and flung headlong into the air like a tiny piece of litter in a sandstorm.

“HA!” screamed Edgar, a wild grin emerging, as he began to move Chris Weedy around in the air. As he screamed and pled for mercy, Weedy was bolted across the sky, like a ragdoll kite, as Edgar flopped him around, basking in the sound of his misery. In fact, the more Weedy screamed, the more he tossed him about, because that’s what he’d do, wouldn’t he, Weedy, the awful, terrible, merciless punk that he was?

Suddenly, from the depths of his trance, Edgar began to hear other screams.

This time it was his father. And it was Shay. And it was even Flounder’s voice—all of them were yanked up from the sea by his conjured winds and tossed all about, same as Weedy was. Horrified as they streaked across the sky, right alongside the bully, all upheld by his newfound power, he relented. Flounder’s leg was still wrapped in the rope tied to the cinder block and he squealed particularly torturously as it swung him around in the air. Edgar tried to bring Flounder down to the sea with his hands, but suddenly, he couldn’t seem to get the controls right. No matter how hard he tried he just couldn’t slow down Flounder’s erratic sweeping across the sky—nor Shay’s, nor his father’s. They all spun helplessly in the sky now, like erratic birds, somehow hovering on their own and not coming down. Apparently, there was nothing more Edgar could do. He had lost the power. His hands no longer glowed.

He had lost everything.

“Please!” he asked the sky. “Please let them down! Please let them go!” But the skies refused to listen, as always. Relentlessly, his friends had been flipped and somersaulted in the air, up and down, side to side, and there simply was nothing he could do about it. Apparently he’d created a hurricane now, using only his fury and revenge—a storm even fiercer than any one he’d ever known—one that would doom them all. Soon, he knew, it would even toss him like dead weight into the sea and drown him, and all of them, once and for all.

That’s when he realized he was being lifted into the air alongside his friends, the vicious storm carrying them all over the waters now, like leaflets, as they screamed themselves hoarse, jerking in the wind. Finally, without warning, Edgar was cast down by a vast power above and dumped viciously into the swirling sea, and as he plunged deep down, he could feel the pressure suddenly squeezing his temples, and depleting his lungs.

Drowning and choking violently now, he tried fighting for the surface with everything he had in him. It was all such a fight—everything was—from the hospital room to this very moment: everything resisting him, still, with his last breath, he continued to muster every last bit of strength to put up a fight—to press on. To survive the horrible ocean. Clawing to the surface, just as a merciless gale blew down on him from the sky, he finally opened his eyes and woke up, and saw the cause of the gale.

There, hovering just above his raft, was a helicopter, stilled in midair.

A medical stretcher dangled just above him, too, hanging by a rope and lowered from the helicopter. Edgar turned his head to see a masked diver appearing from one side of the raft. The black-eyed man blinked at Edgar, and Edgar blinked wearily back.

“No,” whispered Edgar, trying to sit up, but unable to. “Get out of the water, man! There’s sharks down there. Sharks.”

“He’s alive!” the man reported on a headset. Then, reaching into a small satchel, he uncapped a small bottle of water and offered it to Edgar, who allowed the man to place it on his blistered lips and pour. Then, as Edgar took a small, painful sip, the water burned his parched throat like acid.

Greedily, Edgar sat up in the raft and strained for another sip, and then grabbed the bottle with his own hands and downed the whole thing.

“Thank you, sir,” he mouthed beneath the thundering helicopter blades. The man nodded back and buckled him into the stretcher.

“You’re welcome,” he shouted over the noise, “but you can thank them!” He pointed up at the large aircraft.

As the diver gave the order, he and Edgar were lifted upward to safety, leaving the raft and its half-empty water bottle floating in the sea. He continued to stare at it between his dangling legs as the helicopter lifted him even higher above the waters. As the raft got tinier and tinier by the second, tears filled his sore and bloodshot eyes, and profound waves of thankfulness and relief spread throughout his entire body, like water to desert sands, stretching to each and every last inch of his being.

Somehow, some way, he survived.

When the two finally arrived at the helicopter doors, he was corralled and yanked inside and there, shrieking, was his wonderful mother’s face.

She’d come to rescue him herself!

“THANK YOU, GOD!” she screamed, grabbing him greedily, snatching him up like he was nothing, smothering his sunburned head with her teary face. Even though it was painful, he didn’t care. He laughed and hugged her back with all his strength, which was not much, as his weak arms grasped for her best they could.

“Are you . . . real?” he asked in her ear.

“Of course I’m real!” she cried, rocking him back and forth, weeping over him. Squeezing tighter, she suddenly seemed to laugh and cry all at once, and when she finally parted from him, she held him at arms’ length so she could study him. He gazed deep into her eyes and his smile faded.

“What about Dad?” he asked. “Did it work? Did I make it rain in Mount Lanier?”

“Oh, Edgar,” she said, her eyes filling up with more tears as she burst into a weepy laugh. “Yes!” she exclaimed, nodding crazily. “You did! You made it rain! You put out the fire, you crazy kid!”

He could feel his insides melting with relief. “And Dad?” he asked cautiously. “Is he . . .?”

“He’s safe and sound, Edgar, in the hospital recovering, waiting for you! He is alive and in one piece—and has you to thank for it!”

With a wild smile, she grabbed him by the back of the head again and pulled him in, cackling joyfully, squeezing him ‘til it hurt—but he didn’t care. He buried his face in her hair, which smelled like home, and closed his eyes. And when he finally opened them again, he noticed Shay Sinclair was sitting in the back seat, beaming with a smile warm as the sun. She waved at him and smiled, and he lifted five blistered fingers to her in return.

“I was just saving your life,” he said to her, “in a dream. I had electric fingers. There was a hurricane.” Shay shrugged questioningly, then tapped a big green headset she wore on her ears. Carefully, Milly placed a headset around Edgar’s blistered ears so she could hear him.

“What did you say?” came Shay’s voice through the headset. It was so good to hear her voice.

“Nothing,” he smiled. “I guess you got my letter. Thanks for coming to get me.”

“You’re welcome,” she nodded back. “And you have terrible handwriting.”

He grinned and looked beyond at a big man who sat beside her.

“Hello Edgar,” he said. “My name is David Sinclair—I’m Shay’s dad. I just wanted you to know, the whole town of Mount Lanier will owe you a great debt of gratitude, son.”

Edgar’s Mom leaned over to him. “Shay’s father is one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met,” she explained. “He really helped save your life, Edgar.”

Edgar nodded respectfully at the man. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “It’s very nice to meet you.”

Mr. Sinclair nodded back, his eyes lowered in respect.

“One more thing,” said his mother, taking him gently by the cheeks. “You are so grounded.”

Edgar surrendered a big, toothy smile, then burst into laughter.

Soon he was sipping on water, wearing an I.V., and wolfing down a ham sandwich. It was the best sandwich he’d ever had in his life. As he ate, he and the crew began their long trip back to America, and as the chopper veered and dipped with the oceanic wind currents, his mom pointed at the skilled co-pilot and asked if Edgar recognized him.

“He’s a friend of yours,” she smiled.

Through the rearview mirror Edgar studied the faces of the pilot and co-pilot, and though he didn’t recognize the pilot, there, staring back at him, was the navigator—the same man he’d saved back on the island, the drowning man, the one from the storm, the one from Somalia. 

“Oh, wow,” said Edgar. “Look at you! I guess you made it out of town, huh?” he chewed. The man, far more robust now than the day they’d met on the island, whose blisters had healed and now seemed much clearer and calmer, nodded.

“I lost your gun,” Edgar admitted to him, and the pilot, who looked like a fellow countryman of the navigator, interpreted for Edgar. When he was finished speaking, the navigator nodded at Edgar through the rearview, answering in another tongue.

“My friend say, ‘How it shoot?’” interpreted the pilot.

“Ah! Well! It shot fantastically!” said Edgar, the food hitting his stomach and sending ecstatic waves throughout his body.

That’s when the man said something else to Edgar, never taking his eyes off him.

“My friend say to you,” interpreted the pilot, once more, “‘ye smart to catch tha current East, headed for French Islands, was you doin’ that?”

Edgar nodded at him.

“Well,” marveled the man, “Cali say to me, ye’ near ya’ coordinates you left ya’ ma’, which means you a natural sail-ah.”

Edgar’s mother squeezed his shoulder tight, and smiled down at him with pride.

“Cali also say,” continued the man, a seriousness taking over his voice, “you two now even.”

“Yeah,” said Edgar in mid-chew. “Yes, sir. We’re definitely even.” He nodded a respectful nod at Captain Cali through the rearview.

After that, as everyone watched him, he finally closed his eyes.