A Change of Plans (12 page)

“They shot it,” Braedon said and then swore as he steered into another wave.

Once it passed, I located life vests in a seat box and helped Braedon put one on. Once I had mine fastened, I grabbed two more and staggered in search of Jimmy and Maria.

I found them on the other side of the settee. Jimmy lay on his back. Maria knelt beside him, pressing on his chest. Her shoulders shook with sobs. In the dim light, I didn’t comprehend at first that his white T-shirt was pink and red.

“No, no,” I cried, dropping beside her, heedless of my shin.

A swell peaked and crashed over us, and Maria bent to shield him. Jimmy, his face pale, coughed as he choked on the water.

“I called and you wouldn’t come,” she cried.

I pressed my hand against his forehead, my eyes burning. I swallowed the bile that rose to the back of my throat. Not Jimmy.

His lips moved, but I couldn’t make out his words. I put my ear by his mouth.

“Sorry”—he coughed, his face contorting, body tensing— “I didn’t move ... fast enough.”

“Oh, Jimmy.” I touched his cheek, wishing I could tease him back, but his pale skin and shallow breathing filled me with dread. I had to get help. I jumped to my feet. “I’ll get Braedon.” Jimmy nodded weakly.

“Hurry!” Maria shrieked, almost baring her teeth. “Oh, God! Don’t let him die.”

I stared back at her. She shouldn’t talk about dying when Jimmy could hear. I darted a glance at him, but his eyes were
closed. I stumbled to Braedon and shouted, “Jimmy’s been shot in the chest. He’s bleeding a lot!”

His jaw tightened, and he took my hands, wrapping my fingers around the wheel. “Keep it turned into the waves.” He ripped open a cupboard with a red cross on it. Snatching the kit inside, he clung to a main mast as another wave hit us before lurching to Jimmy.

I clenched the wheel, straining to keep it in place. Hands trembling, my mind filled with the memory of the captain’s blood on the deck overlaid with the image of Jimmy.

Had it been less than twenty-four hours since he had been in his glory? As I spun the wheel to meet another wave, I screamed out my frustration, the sound lost in the gusting wind.

While I fought my personal battle with the sea, all my angst of the past week drained away, trivial and petty in the face of Jimmy’s fight for life.

The need to fight the waves and the wind forced me to focus on the moment. I lost count of the time or how many waves battered us before Braedon was back, freeing my cramped fingers and taking the wheel from me. I rubbed my hands to get the circulation flowing again. “Is Jimmy ...?”

Braedon, his face grim, shook his head and shouted, “He didn’t make it. We’re taking on too much water. You and Maria need to bail it out.”

I stumbled to the side, only part of it from a swell. Choking back a lump in my throat, I turned. Maria sat, a dark shape huddled on the bench, shaking with sobs. Resisting a sudden sense of weakness that threatened to overwhelm me, I focused my thoughts on the moment. I located two buckets in a closed cupboard nearby and staggered to her. Still weeping, Maria
came with me when I showed her the pail. We went to work, tossing out bucket loads of water.

For an eternity, we fought the ocean, bailing water that was replaced with another wave. Thoughts of Jimmy and Elle— and all the horrible things I kept imagining those men doing to her—continued to nag at me, but I forced the burning pain in my back and arms to be my only reality. I came to think each bucketful of water would be the last; I simply could not continue. But there was always more water at my feet. I kept telling myself I could do one more, just one more.

I was a robot, not noticing when the rain had slackened or that the amount of water coming over the side had diminished. When I sensed the cool water depth on my legs had dropped to my ankles, I came back to a physical presence and straightened to relieve my muscles, rubbing at the painful cramps. Maria did the same.

Braedon’s hunched form at the wheel was a silhouette against the nearly full moon, the stars in the dark sky patchworked with drifting clouds. We had survived.

What was happening to Elle? I shook my head. I had to deal with what I could control. “Maria, I need to check on Braedon.”

“Of course.” Her tone had a sharp, accusatory edge to it.

Braedon sat with his fingers still clenched around the wheel, his forehead resting on his hands. When I touched his shoulder, he sat up. He looked beyond exhausted. I peeled his fingers free, massaging the cramps from them.

He stared at me as I worked on his fingers. I wanted to say something about Jimmy, but when I tried to speak, my throat closed up. I blinked burning eyes and finally squeaked, “Rest.”

The engine sputtered and died. With a cry, I reached for the ignition key. Braedon put his shaking hand on mine. “It’s out
of gas. We’re lucky the captain did so much sailing during the excursion, or we’d have run out during the storm.”

I turned to find Maria behind us, her knees curled under her bedraggled form, her muscles tense. When I reached out to her, she pushed my hand away.

“Maria, you should lie down.” Braedon staggered a little as he tried to take her hand.

She jerked it from him, her eyes blazing, and let loose a stream of words in Spanish. I couldn’t make them out, but her rigid posture and the venom in her tone said plenty. When she was done, she returned to Jimmy’s body.

I looked at Braedon. He shrugged and sat in the captain’s seat, his eyes bloodshot and red-rimmed. He looked like I felt. I dropped to the bench and buried my face in my hands, rubbing my aching temples, and fighting the lump in my throat. At the sound of a clang, I looked up. Braedon had pulled a bucket from a bin.

I went over to him. “What’s that?”

“Hopefully an emergency kit.” He got the lid up on one corner, and I reached to hold it in place as he eased the rest of it off. Lifting two plastic containers from inside, he handed one to me.

I peered at a package of green tubes.

Braedon tapped one. “Glow sticks.” He unzipped the bright orange bag on his lap and removed a first-aid kit, also handing it to me. “Well, that’s something.” He held a mirror and a white plastic package with the words ‘SOS flag’ printed on it.

Balancing the two packages, I craned my neck to see inside the pack, the bright light of the moon casting eerie shadows inside. “Are there any flares?”

Using his foot, he slid the larger plastic container toward
me, making a little ripple in the water. I set my items aside, reached inside the bucket, and pulled out a long yellow tube. “There are three more of these.”

His expression lightened, and he stuffed everything back in the orange bag and handed it to me while he took the tube. “Anything else?”

I removed a package with four yellow and silver tubes and held them for him to see.

Still sniffing, Maria came over to look at them. “What’s the difference between them?”

Braedon acted as though her little explosion hadn’t happened and held up the sickly yellow—distorted in the bright moonlight—and silver tube. “This is a regular flare. Sometimes they have locators built in that are activated when lit. None of these do. This larger one is a rocket parachute flare.”

As I unscrewed the red cap of the regular flare, I asked, “How long do they last?”

“Only a few minutes, so we won’t use it unless we spot a ship or a plane.” He touched a little string that came out of the now exposed end. “Pull on this when we’re ready to use it.” While Maria picked up the mirror, I screwed the cap back on the flare and handed it to Braedon. “How do you know all this?”

“My mother was into sailing and insisted Aislinn and I knew the basics.” He returned them to the plastic bin. “We’ll need to take turns standing watch. The first twenty-four hours are critical. Our chances of being found go way down after that.”

Maria handed me the mirror, and we watched in silence as she opened a bin and dug around, finally pulling out a tarp. She took it and covered Jimmy’s body with it, then sat down. I
wished I knew what to say to her to offer comfort. I did, after all, know exactly how she was feeling, but I wasn’t Elle who always knew what to say.

My stomach growled. How absurd—with us adrift at sea, Jimmy dead, Elle and Jori who knew where—for my stomach to need something as mundane as food. I bit back a laugh at the ludicrousness of the situation but then had to choke back a sob.

I had to think of something else. My stomach gurgled again, and I remembered we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I scouted out our uneaten box lunches and found them in a galley fridge stocked with cold water bottles.

“Braedon, can you come here?”

“What is it?”

I handed him one of the bottles.

His eyebrows shot up. “That’s the first bit of good news we’ve had.” He frowned at the refrigerator. “Where’s it drawing its power from? A battery?” He knelt and tried to examine the wiring but straightened when a cloud covered the moon, hiding most of the light. “Too dark. At least the food will last longer.”

I took Maria a bottle and a box, but she barely looked at me before resting her head against her knees. The light breeze shifted the tarp around Jimmy’s foot, exposing the water shoe that covered it, the partial light from the moon making it a sickly green color. We were all so fragile. Life could be taken from us in a moment. I set the box and bottle beside her.

Returning to the food, I gathered boxes for Braedon and me. He had returned most of the emergency items to the bin and took my offering with a soft “Thanks.” He riffled through the lunch, settling on the large chocolate chip cookie, his expression contemplative.

“Lyn, what was it you were telling me before Hawaii?”

“What?” I blinked, confused.

“About the stars and navigating on this side of the equator.”

My eyes darted to the controls. “Isn’t there a GPS?”

He finished his cookie and moved on to the sandwich. “They shot it along with the radio.”

“No compass?”

“Not that I can find.”

I sighed. “We can’t see the North Star here and there isn’t a South Star.” My tired brain still understood what he was really asking. “We have no way to guess where we are, do we?”

He shook his head and took a bite of his sandwich, mumbling, “Doesn’t appear so.”

I held my unopened box. “How long before they come looking for us?”

Braedon eyed me over his food. “Which ones?”

A chill ran up my spine. I hadn’t thought about the pirates finding us before the authorities did. My stomach twisted, hunger gone.

“Eat.” Braedon stood, squeezing my shoulder, the warmth of his fingers comforting. He remained there until I finally opened the box and took out the cookie. “We’ll need our energy.” He went over to Maria and knelt beside her.

I sniffed the tuna in the sandwich. It didn’t smell spoiled, so I took a bite, watching the two. Braedon kept his voice low, so I couldn’t make out what he said, but it wasn’t working considering how tense Maria looked while she waved her arms. I wondered if I had been like that a year ago. I didn’t think so. Not quite the same, anyway.

Poor Braedon. I didn’t know how he did it. Did they teach classes like Calm Demeanor 101 in medical school?

I was closing up my box when he returned and dug out a tarp from a cupboard. “I’ll take the first watch.”

Maria, who had followed him, held out her hand for the tarp. “I’ll do it. I won’t be able to sleep anyway.”

When she started to walk away, he grabbed her arm. “Don’t forget these.” He handed her large, heavy looking binoculars and two kinds of flares. With a nod, the tarp over her shoulder, she stepped on a chest and climbed on top of the canopy.

“Hey, there’s a solar panel up here,” she called from above.

Braedon jumped on the chest and looked over the top of the canopy. “That explains the fridge.” His finger appeared through a hole. “We’re lucky they missed it.” He touched Maria’s shoe. “Wake us if you see anything—ship or plane.”

She jerked her foot back. “I get it, Braedon.”

He held up his hands and stepped off the chest, turning toward me. The odd shadows gave his face an almost skeletal look, accented by the fatigue that radiated from him.

I took out the only remaining tarp and held it up. “We’ll have to share.”

He hesitated. “Only if you’re okay with that.”

We stretched out as best we could on the netting. The captain’s blood had washed away in the rain, for which I was grateful. I doubt I could have lain there otherwise. With nothing but rope underneath us, I hoped the ocean stayed calm or we would get splashed from below.

Staring at Maria’s shadow, outlined by the night sky, I worried about Elle and Jori. What had the cruise people thought when our excursion hadn’t come back? How long before they notified my family back in the States? What would Aislinn, who had just lost her mother, do when she was told her brother was missing?

I rolled away from Braedon, trying to cover my mouth so my crying wouldn’t wake him. Then he was next to me, his body molding around mine, and his arm around my waist. I felt his body behind me shudder with a sob he tried to swallow. I moved to turn over, but his arm held me in place. “No,” he whispered, his voice ragged. “Just let me hold you.”

We clung to hope and each other. I covered his arm with my own and offered what comfort I could.