“Are there sharks out here?”
“It’s the ocean, racer boy. There are four hundred kinds of sharks.”
“Do they all bite?”
Dante had splashed down twenty feet from the boat without dying instantly. The return swim was effortless, bringing back images of his sunset adventures in his island dreams. The splintered boat refused to sink, although only the canvas sunscreen, windshield, and top half of the control panel remained above water.
Ophelia grabbed for the radio microphone, but the electrical system had shorted out from the impact or the deluge of salt water. Next she fumbled for the emergency kit strapped to the base of her pilot’s seat—now under three feet of water. She set the box on top of the instrument console and popped the latch. Inside were two dye packs, a signaling mirror, six hand launch flares, and a twelve-gauge flare gun with a single parachute flare already chambered.
Ophelia slammed the lid closed and turned to the hatches stuffed with life preservers.
“You okay?” Dante had swum right into the boat, barking his left shin on the submerged fiberglass side.
“We’re in big trouble.” Ophelia tossed him one of the bright orange life preservers, which he put on. He was standing in waist deep water with the floor of the boat slowly undulating beneath his feet. Ophelia clipped into her own life preserver and then lumbered onto the bow to find and jettison the anchor.
“Do you have food or water in your backpacks?” Ophelia grabbed two more life preservers and climbed back to the pilot’s chair.
“A bag of granola and three packs of Oreos.” Dante turned to retrieve the submerged bags from a compartment under the rear seat cushions, which began floating away. “And two jugs of Gatorade. The other bag just has clothes and a bunch of cash.”
“Here, tie them both to this.” Ophelia flipped him one of the life preservers. “Then clip it to the railing. If the boat starts going down, try to grab them. We’ll need the Gatorade.”
“You think the boat will go under?”
“It’s a matter of when, not if, racer boy.”
“I’m sorry I made you bring me out here.” Dante scanned the horizon. No sign of land and the water looked like it might be a hundred miles deep.
“You didn’t make me do anything.” Ophelia looked around the boat as if to figure out what was left to do. “The radio’s dead, but we have some flares.”
“What about the boat that crashed into us? He knows we’re here.”
“He doesn’t give a shit about us,” Ophelia said. “A speed boat this far out is probably a drug runner.”
“Did you see him? He didn’t look like a drug runner. He looked like a crazy headhunter.”
“Then he was a headhunter in a sixty-thousand dollar boat blasting dance music.”
“I thought I heard music. Do you know how far the island is?” Dante asked. It didn’t take an epiphany to make him realize his life was completely in the Raro cop’s hands. In the past year, his life had pretty much been handed from person to person—from doctors to nurses, and then to therapists. Even before that, he’d relied on downhill coaches to convince him to take their line through blind spots in courses where bad decisions meant piling into trees at sixty miles per hour. If not for Ophelia, Dante knew he would just crawl up above the console and take a nap until being rescued or accepting whatever other outcome presented itself. He would see if he could sleep his way through this pickle.
“If I’d known we were going to get run over, I’d have checked our position more closely. The island can’t be more than a few kilometers away.”
“So we can swim?”
“The current is strong, maybe five kilometers per hour to the south. It would be like trying to swim across a rip tide.” Ophelia gazed longingly to the east, to where she could almost see a bump on the horizon that would be land.
“So we’re drifting away from land?”
“Yeah, well, that’s relative, isn’t it?”
“So what’s to the south of us?” Dante asked. “Where are we headed?”
“I’m pretty sure the next land would be Antarctica.”
“You mean the South Pole?”
“Uh, sort of, yeah.” Ophelia got busy again, lashing empty gas cans together.
“Oh, Christ, polar bears.”
“I’m pretty sure they’re just at the North Pole.”
“I guess that’s good.”
“Yes, if we end up drifting six thousand kilometers, we won’t have polar bears to worry about,” Ophelia said.
“Are you going to shoot a flare?”
“We should wait a little, let the sun drop. Unless we start going under,” Ophelia added ominously. “It’ll be easier to spot. And maybe we’ll be able to see some ship lights.”
“I wasn’t really looking forward to it getting dark.” Dante sloshed forward to balance against the co-pilot’s seat. Ophelia sat against the console and faced him. The air was still hot, but the water had taken on a chill. “Do people get hypothermia in this kind of water?”
“Not for a couple of days, maybe longer. We found survivors ten days after their boat capsized twenty kilometers out. It all came down to a two liter jug of water they’d grabbed from the store at the last minute. It ended up saving their lives.”
“Wow, ten days and they were fine?” Dante looked around at all that water and tried to imagine what ten long nights would be like. All those hungry things swimming in the dark right under you.
“The jellyfish are the biggest worry.” Ophelia reached over the side of the boat and ran her hand through the same water that had risen up to her hips. It was the first time Dante sensed her fear. She’d finished doing everything there was to do but didn’t seem to believe it. “Their faces were swollen badly. They didn’t look like human faces. Both were blind from the stings.”
“Blind?”
“Infections, I guess. But they lived.” Ophelia kept stirring the water with one hand. “They lived, but they weren’t fine.”
As the sun made its final descent, the boat was slowly rotating counter-clockwise, according to the few puffs of clouds. They looked at each other, then out at the endless expanse of ocean. Having sunk at least three feet gave a new, almost overwhelming perspective. The ocean was rising around them, coming up to greet them, and maybe swallow them.
“I’ve never seen snow,” Ophelia said, staring out into the distance beyond Dante. “I mean, except on television and in movies. You don’t remember what snow is like, do you?”
Dante shook his head.
“You said your heart stopped after your accident?”
“That’s what I was told.”
“I helped resuscitated a drowning victim who’d been under for a good seven or eight minutes,” Ophelia said. “A teenage boy. When we got his heart started, it was like a switch came on. He started coughing really hard and we couldn’t hold him down. He was yelling something at us, but we couldn’t understand because he still had water in his lungs and was gagging, literally foaming at the mouth. It was what you’d imagine someone with rabies would look like. And he started acting like it, too.”
“This was on the beach?”
“Yeah, there were maybe a half dozen lifeguards and even more cops.” Ophelia continued looking off into the darkening horizon. “He was a big, strong kid, and when he got to his feet, he was just throwing people off him, shouting the same thing over and over. One of the lifeguards jumped on his back, trying to bring him down. Amazing, since the kid had just basically been dead.”
“Where was he trying to go?”
“He was headed straight back into the water. I was in front of him at one point, and his eyes were huge and desperate. We were in his way and he just had to get past us and nothing was going to stop him. That’s when I finally understood what he was saying.”
“Which was?”
“He kept screaming, ‘I have to get back,’ over and over. I’m sure it sounds like he was just traumatized and it didn’t mean anything. Like a drunk gets it into his head to do something. But I know what I felt when we were trying to get him under control. And I talked to a few of the other cops later on and they all thought the same thing.”
“That he liked being dead?” Dante asked, the cool water sloshing at their hips.
“You don’t remember being dead, do you?”
“I remember feeling cold.” Dante closed his eyes and rubbed his stubbly face. “As if having your memories erased removed the things that kept you warm. I didn’t walk toward a bright white light or anything. I just remember lying there on my back, feeling everything I knew washing away from me, leaving a sense of emptiness and cold. Nothing I’d want to fight to get back to.”
After a few minutes of silence, Ophelia cleared her throat. “I think it’s dark enough.”
The tall, blond Rarotonga cop opened the emergency kit on top of the boat’s control panel and removed the twelve-gauge flare gun. Holding the small orange firearm out away from her with both hands, she discharged the parachute flare in the direction of East Pukapuka, just as the boat began to sink under their feet.