2

Vastness, sparkling. Faces seem to float in the glare, edged in light, spectral. Gabriel, gone. Kathy, alive, laughing.

Treading water for too many years in each spinning moment.

The Boy who barely shook his head when Sam asked his name, beyond exhaustion now. Bleeding from a lip cracked by dryness. Sun dappling from water into motionless eyes.

The light shifts, brightening. Heat deepening. Failing of limbs that continue anyway, pushing at the water to keep his nose and mouth above. All there is to measure these hours in the endless tormenting day.

Once he reached to keep from sinking, clinging to the Boy’s cushion for just the blessed sweet second of it, and then he let go to tread again.

A new sting of salt in one eye. Wiping it away, making it worse. Blinking blindly, the edges of light blurring. The fire in his lungs from gasping as fear grips his chest. The fear that fear will exhaust him, muscle failure from the tensing, heart racing beyond its rhythm.

Easy, calm now. Nothing but waiting. Smallest motions to float. Easy, so very calm.

−−−

The bonds are still fast and tight on the buoyant cushion and around the Boy’s thin back and chest, hollow and bony through his soaked tee.

A lapping of warm saltwater fills Sam’s nose and he coughs, the pain in his arms of ceaseless use a shearing beneath the skin. He reaches to cling to the cushion again, to rest for only a briefest moment, but it bobs lower and the water sloshes up into the Boy’s face, and Sam pulls his hand back and coughs again with a weak gasping shudder.

No thinking, no choices, just shutting the mind to all else but the moment arrived with its simple undeniable truth. “Well, it seems like . . . two’s a crowd. But they’ll find you. They’ll . . . find the boat and track the current and the wind back to you. Just hang on tight. I promise, they’re coming.”

The Boy only stares dimly, lost in the hours of dehydration, the insensate daze of dying.

“You can’t save everyone.” Sam touches his shoulder, gives his weary smile. “See you in my dreams, Admiral.”

Sam treads water and lets the Boy drift on.

−−−

Is it hours? The steadfast glare of the sun, the sound of it like static now. The small darkness of the Boy’s head lost in the fire of the horizon.

He thinks of Gabriel, backing away out his door, turning, fleeing. His unappeasable fear of the dreamtime coming through a hole in the world, of the malignant blooming of the seed of a notion.

Click your heels together. Wish upon a star. The innocent adage of empowerment: believe and it will happen. Was there ever a more truly horrifying idea?

The longing comes now like a hollowness for something to blame instead of each other: bird flu, Lyme’s disease. Subsonics from shifting ocean currents. The blue color temperature of the new lights along the lanes. Hashtags, destroyers of truth and lies, of despots and democracies. Or the very screens we live by, the billions of synapses of our brains finally become like the binary bits of all we listened to and looked at, on/off, awake or dead, no in between.

The small, choked sounds he hears are only his own weak, weary laughter, because what was that, any of that? Every thought the thought of someone sleepless, every Sleepless made so by another, spreading each to each as sure and simply as belief, as laughter or fear.

He blinks again from the sting of salt, and in that brief unseeing conjures the ferry’s stern growing smaller across the bay, fading into sunlit haze. How many brought sleeplessness home, a souvenir from their summer idyll? Would it spread in the larger world or dissipate with time and distance? Will it end, only to happen again, somewhere else, and be misnamed or forgotten?

Only children believe in answers to everything, and here is childhood’s end.

But not the Boy’s, please, please, if only a prayer can rise high enough, whispered as it is, weak, ragged, the single word again and again, faint from bleeding lips.

−−−

Some echo of Sam’s voice, or the memory or a dream of it, nearly turns Kathy’s head as if to look behind her, but there is only the Coffee Spot’s warm hard door she leans against, sitting in that doorway waiting for her life to begin again.

She remembers another door, ajar, from her childhood bedroom to the hallway, that welcoming rectangle of soft light, and she imagines for a moment that nothing can harm her as long as that light shines, and that no fear and no regret can ever reach her.

She knows it to be true: Sam and the Boy are safely away from the howling vengeful creatures so desperate to blame, well on their way off the island to some other shore. And in her waking dream, she dreams she, too, will find her way home again.

−−−

The salt stinging Sam’s burned skin and blinding his swollen eyes makes him wince and flinch in smaller motions as he tries to lie floating with his face to the empty sky.

Where there has been only the rasp of his breathing and the slosh and splash of his fingers just breaking the surface, like tiny fish as his hands waver and float, another sound reaches Sam now—like the truest reason to submit, finally, to all that has been weighing so long, the unendurable sun, the inescapable water.

The distant thwok thwok thwok of a helicopter.

Hovering at the edge of everything, lower, lower, the black angelic machine bringing mercy.

The ocean rises around him, even as it pulls him downward.

A cough, and his arms push helplessly for purchase where there is none. His mouth, filled as if drinking, as if breathing in air, but there is none. A stab and spasm of pain in his chest. The shuddering clutch of terror but then the pain is further, fainter. Fainter, until it’s gone.

Why struggle? The world is right without him now. We let go, as we must, in these last living seconds of volition. Smiling with tears of awe and gratitude up at the sky, through the blur and coolness of the water closing over it.

The last faces returning behind his eyes, a lovely woman’s, a rescued boy’s.

Falling slowly in his cathedral of light and silence.

−−−

Up, up in the rescue basket, from the circle of blown spray, the Boy ascends. Eyes unblinking, focused so very far away, far from the roar of the massive blades of the search helicopter beating at the air.

Thwok thwok thwok.

The soundless shouting of his rescuers.

The water below, shining away beyond him, finally.