Chapter Seven
Storey jumped back as if bitten, and she crawled out slowly. Jess pulled the throttle back and risked the binnacle light, and in its glow she stared from one to the other. She was not crying. Her face was tearstained but dry, her mouth compressed. She wore lion pajamas with tail and claw feet and a hoodie with mane and ears.
“Where’s Crystal?” is all she said.
“Who’s Crystal,” Jess said.
“My dog.”
“I don’t know,” Jess said. Her pressed lips quivered. Jess was stricken. He had no idea what to say. Storey crouched so that they were level, eye to eye. She would not look at him.
“Was Crystal with you on the boat? Before?”
She shook her head, wouldn’t look at him.
“No?” Storey said gently.
She shook her head. “Crystal was with Mom and Papa.” Her mouth quivered.
“Those weren’t your parents?” Storey said. “Hey,” he said gently. “Was that your mom and dad with you on the boat?”
Now a tear leaked and ran. She shook her mane.
“Where are your mom and dad?” he said.
The tears spilled from both eyes now, her lips pressed again. She refused to sob. “I’m a lion,” she said. “A brave, brave lion.”
“You certainly are,” Storey said. “Hey,” he urged gently, “are your parents back in Beryl? Back home? Back in the town with the lighthouse?”
“Crystal,” she said again, almost as if calling her. “Crystal is my dog.”
Storey glanced at Jess. Who had cut the engine back to near idle. He said as softly as he could over the puttering motor, “What’s your name?”
She didn’t hear him, or wouldn’t. “She will come back,” she said.
“She’s a good dog.”
“She’s the best. She is just sleeping now. What Mom said.” The little girl’s face crumpled and she fell against Storey and he put his arms around her and her mane, and she sobbed so hard he thought she might drown.
He let her cry and cry and he patted her back and repeated again and again, “She’s just sleeping, Crystal is sleeping, she’s the best dog…” and after a while he stood and held her in one arm and she passed out over his shoulder.
“Now what?” Jess said.
Storey shrugged against the sleeping girl. “She said clearly that the people on the boat weren’t her parents. Maybe friends of the family, who knows.” He hitched her higher against his chin. “We’ve gotta go back, don’t we?”
“We do?”
“We’ve gotta search the town for her parents. For anyone.”
“Like I said, the last time we tried that it didn’t go so well.”
“You have a better idea?”
“No.”
For the first time that evening a cold breeze pressed over the aft quarter and rocked the boat, and reminded them that it was late September and they were soaking wet. A northeast wind that might bring weather. They’d been lucky the last few days. Or maybe, Jess thought, “lucky” was not the right way of putting it.
“Well,” he said. “We’ve gotta make a fire, find food. So…I guess we do. Go back. All of our stuff is sitting right across there, on the hill.”
“Right.”
“I guess we could search for her people in the morning.”
“Okay,” Storey said, as if it was Jess’s idea.
They did not run in to the town dock. They had learned their lesson. They got within half a mile of shore and cut the engine way back, until they were barely moving and the motor was a low chortle, and they eased their way into what seemed a coast under blackout. They could see by starlight and the light of a rising, dusky quarter-moon the white-painted lighthouse standing vigil over the harbor. They could see the rough shapes of the clustered houses climbing the hill toward what they knew was the blown bridge, and they could see the pale curve of dirt road ascending the hayfields into the black woods. Jess edged Newsboy over to the south and they came into a small clearing a mile from town. Looked to be a dock there, and there was, and a little boathouse still standing. Good. There would be some kind of track or drive that intersected the dirt road they’d walked in on and that they must have missed in their hurry that morning.
Could it have been that morning? Again the dizzying sense of time compressed. Or expanded—Jess didn’t know. He knew that, standing at the wheel, wet-through and shivering now, and piloting a miniature of the boat he had worked on as a teenager, and motoring toward a spurious coastline carrying his best friend and a child in a lion suit—he knew he was moving in dream territory. It would not have surprised him to wake with a start and find his pillow wet.
He didn’t wake. He cut the engine and let the boat slide into the dock without power and, with just enough headway, he turned the wheel and offered the log piling the starboard rail, and Storey reached into the forward cubby and yanked out a wool blanket and with one hand twisted it and piled it and set the girl down still asleep. Storey hopped to the foredeck and fended the dock off with one boot and jumped across with a line. Jess dropped the starboard bumpers and reached up and cleated the stern line himself. This time you’re coming with me, he thought, and he grabbed the key on its buoy key chain. He picked up the girl as gently as he could and handed her up, and he climbed after. “Let’s go,” Jess said. “I’m frigging freezing.” And they went through the boathouse and found a good track, recently mowed.