The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud (19 page)

THIRTY

THEY WERE SMACK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ISLES OF SHOALS,
between Smuttynose and Star Islands. Charlie reached for the searchlight and hit the switch. The beam sliced the darkness, and its white point glanced off the water. He swung it around in a big circle. A flying fish skittered across the surface.

A night of desperate searching stretched ahead.

He and Tink took turns at the wheel, trolling the ocean, sweeping the emptiness with the light, calling out until their voices were hoarse. Joe woke up around 3:00
A
.
M
. and pitched in for an hour, steering while Charlie and Tink stood watch. With each brush of the searchlight, with every advancing second, his heart sank even further. Was he wrong about the clues? Was this all a creation of his grief? “Give me a sign, Tess,” he prayed. “Show me the way.”

There was only silence.

As dawn came at 6:43
A
.
M
., the east began to glow with stripes of orange and yellow. But the arrival of this new day meant only the worst for Charlie. He had risked everything and he had lost. Sam would be gone. All that was left was a job in the cemetery mowing the lawn and burying the dead. He had turned something into nothing, and he had only himself to blame.

His back ached from standing watch. His stomach growled from lack of food. His head hurt from a night of crying out into the gloom. What should he do next? He searched for a sign from Sam and wondered if his little brother was okay.

Then he heard Joe down below, grumbling and grunting as he climbed the ladder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I must’ve nodded off.” His voice was raspy from sleep. “Any luck?”

“None.”

“Well, you did your best,” he said, reaching for the wheel and elbowing Charlie aside. “I’m the captain of this boat and I say we go home.”

“It’s just getting light,” Charlie protested. “Maybe we missed her last night.” He turned to Tink. “What do you say? Where should we look now?”

Joe interrupted: “Face it, Charlie. I know you had to get this out of your system, but she’s gone.”

“No! She’s alive.” He felt crazed inside. His frantic brain searched for examples. “There was that sailor who was unconscious for nine days in the Bering Sea. Remember him? He was on the news. A Japanese whaler picked him up and he survived.”

“Right.” Joe had turned the boat around.

“Cold water slows your metabolism.” Charlie barely recognized his own voice. “It’s the mammalian dive reflex. Your body knows how to shut down everything except for essential functions and organs.” It was the only thing left to hold on to. “Remember those climbers on Everest a few years ago? They were above twenty-seven thousand feet in the death zone. They were lost, frostbitten, and slipped into comas. But they managed to survive.”

“You crazy or something?” Joe said. “Those climbers were lucky, that’s all.”

“It wasn’t luck. It was a miracle.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? There’s no such thing.”

Joe pushed forward on the throttle, and the boat leaped for home. Charlie knew it was over. Numbly, he made his way down the ladder to the stern, where he plunked down on one of the benches and drowned his thoughts in the drone of the engine.

As he stared at the wake spreading out behind him, the sun climbed the sky, bathing the ocean in a soft glow. But Charlie felt an aching cold inside. His fingers trembled, his body shivered, and he wondered if he would ever be warm again.

THIRTY-ONE

S
AM WAS WIND.

He whooshed across the Atlantic, skimming the wave tops, reveling in the most amazing feeling. He was liberated from the in between, and the parameters of his new playground were dazzlingly infinite—the universe with its forty billion galaxies and all the other dimensions beyond consciousness or imagination. His quietus had finally brought freedom. No longer constricted by his promise, he had moved on to the next level, where he could morph into any shape.

Sam was now a free spirit.

But there was one more thing he had to do on earth. He swept over the bow of the
Horny Toad
and swirled around his brother, trying to get his attention, but to no avail. Another loop around the boat and another breezy pass, with a good gust whipping the American flag on its pole, flipping Charlie’s hair, and filling his jacket, but again he had no luck. Then he twanged the guy wires of the boat, making an eerie, wailing song, but Charlie didn’t hear a single note.

Last night, Sam had felt annoyed and betrayed by Charlie’s abrupt departure from the cemetery. At sundown, he had hung around the Forest of Shadows, waiting and waiting. Loneliness had overwhelmed him as the purple light vanished from the sky, and the hidden playground had grown dark. Soon anger began to creep in as he realized his big brother had ditched him for a girl and had broken their promise.

Then Sam was struck with an amazing notion. He had never really thought about moving on before. Life in between—making mischief in Marblehead and playing catch at sundown—had always suited him and Oscar just fine. But Charlie knew best—“Trust me,” he liked to say—and if his big brother was willing to risk everything to venture out into the world, then maybe Sam should do the same.

And so, without trumpets or fanfare—without a blinding flash of light or chorus of angels—he had simply crossed over to the next level. The transition was as smooth and effortless as his fastball.

His granddad Pop-Pop was there to greet him, along with Barnaby Sweetland, the old caretaker of Waterside, and Florio Ferrente, who delivered a powerful hug and profound apologies for not having saved him in the first place. “Whom the gods love die young,” he had said. “
Muor giovane coluiche al cielo è caro
.”

From that moment forward, everything had changed for Sam. Gone were a twelve-year-old’s preoccupations with kissing girls and playing video games. Vanished were the hurts and pains of a stolen adolescence. Instead, he was filled with the wisdom of the ages and all the knowledge and experience that had eluded him when his life was cut short. With this new perspective, more than ever, Sam wanted to comfort his brother and make sure that everything would be okay.

So he morphed again, this time turning into the giant nimbus formation above the boat. If Charlie had bothered to look up, he would have recognized his brother’s face as it emerged in the puffs and curls of the cloud.

Sam could see that his brother was drowned in grief. How could he get him to steer in a new direction? Joe and Tink? Nope, they, too, were locked away—Joe in a wild orgy of spending from a fantasy lottery win, Tink struggling to figure out what he would say to Tess’s mother. Sad souls, all of them, Sam thought.

Somehow, someway, Sam knew he had to make Charlie take notice. So he mustered all his strength and shifted shapes once more.

Out of nowhere, a northeasterly wind tousled his bangs, flopping them in his eyes, then back over his head. Abruptly, the air suddenly changed to the southwest, pushing the whitecaps in a new direction. Gulls began to caw. Absorbed in his thoughts, Charlie paid no heed, until a bracing splash of spindrift hit him in the face.

Through stinging eyes, he recognized the sea was in turmoil and the wind was gusting. He jumped to his feet and sprang up the ladder into the tower, where Joe was struggling to stay on course and Tink was studying the charts.

“Need some help?” Charlie offered eagerly.

“Sure,” Joe said, “how about driving while I take a leak?”

“No problem.”

Charlie seized the wheel and fastened his sight on the white tufts of the waves and their spray, adjusting his steering to every subtle change in the wind’s direction. Soon a jagged shape, small and shrouded in gray fog, began to take form in the distance. What was it? A boat? An island?

Suddenly it became clear.

It was an outcropping in the water. Charlie checked the charts. Four hundred yards southeast of Duck Island was Mingo Rock. Through binoculars, he could see its eroded slopes and surface spotted with seaweed and guano. The boat was bouncing now, and he fought to keep his focus on the crag. For an instant, before the boat careened off a wave, he thought he spotted a fleck of color. Doggedly, he repositioned the lenses.

Then he saw something truly extraordinary: a glimpse of orange, the unmistakable color of an ocean survival suit. His heart leaped.

“Look!” he shouted, handing over the binoculars.

“No way,” Tink said.

“Holy Mother of God,” said Joe, who had just returned to the bridge.

Then Charlie opened the throttle to full speed, the boat roared toward the rock, and three words came to his mouth.

“Don’t let go. . . .”

The howling rotors from the Coast Guard Jayhawk blasted Mingo Rock with wind and spray. An aviation survivalman dropped down in a sling on a cable to the ledge where Charlie cradled Tess’s head in his lap, her face covered with his jacket to protect her from the downwash. She was still bundled in her survival suit and lashed with a rope to a banged-up watertight aluminum storage container. Her makeshift raft, he guessed: She had probably floated on it until she had found this crag and somehow pulled herself onto it.

His exhilaration had been eviscerated immediately by the reality of her condition. Her skin was almost blue. Her pupils were pinpoint. She had a contusion on the back of her head. She had no detectable pulse.

He had gotten there too late.

His heart was filled with alarm as the survivalman unpacked his emergency kit. The guy didn’t waste a word, moving with urgency and efficiency. In this barren spot of gray and cold, Charlie noticed the man’s clear blue eyes and pink cheeks. He knew the type. He had trained with them as a paramedic. They were known as airedales, an elite breed. Charlie had always dreamed of joining them and dropping into danger to save lives.

“She’s hypothermic,” Charlie said. “I’ve been doing CPR for twenty minutes.”

“Good,” he said. “We’ll take it from here.” Deftly, gently, he began to cut Tess from the rope, and Charlie admired his skill. Any sudden movement of the arms and legs of severe hypothermia patients could flood the heart with cold venous blood from the extremities and induce cardiac arrest.

Then the survivalman radioed the helicopter that he was ready, and a rescue hoist litter dropped from the air.

“Where you taking her?” Charlie asked, praying the answer would be a hospital and not the morgue.

“North Shore Emergency. Best hypothermia unit around.”

Charlie watched the survivalman lift Tess into the stretcher harness and strap her in. He hooked his belt to the cable, gave the thumbs-up sign to the winch operator, and they lifted off from the rock. Charlie stared straight up into the pounding rotor wake as the basket swayed and was finally pulled inside the helicopter. Then the Jayhawk tilted forward and climbed into the west.

The waves crashed into the rock, and the spray stung his eyes. He watched the orange and white helicopter fade away, and his vision blurred. He was all alone on a rock in the Atlantic, but now he had a shred of hope. He folded his freezing hands, closed his eyes, and prayed to St. Jude.

THIRTY-TWO

C
HARLIE HATED THE EMERGENCY ROOM.
I
T WASN’T
looking at these ill and anxious people that unnerved him. He was uncomfortable because of what he couldn’t see but had always sensed. His gift had never extended beyond the cemetery gates, but he knew the spirits were there in the hospital, hovering near their families or patrolling the long halls. In the land of the living, the ER was the way station, the earthly equivalent of the in between.

Was Tess’s spirit here now? he wondered, as he sat on the hard Formica chair and listened to the fish tank bubbling across from him. Was she floating in the fluorescent haze of the waiting room? He closed his eyes to rest, but his mind would not stop going. He had spent the last two hours in a frantic, careening race to the hospital, desperate to get to Tess and find out her medical status. But no news. The doctors weren’t out of the OR yet, and even his old friends on the nursing staff didn’t know a thing. Tink sat on the other side of the room. Big fingers poking at his little cell phone, he was dialing numbers all over Marblehead, letting folks know Tess was in the hospital.

Charlie tried to calm himself, but his thoughts kept circling back to the Rule of Three, which had been a fixture of his paramedic training. In desperate situations, people could live for three minutes without oxygen, three hours without warmth, three days without water, three weeks without food. So Tess still had a fighting chance.

He also knew that folks with severe hypothermia often tended to look dead. He reviewed the crucial indicators: hearts slowed, reflexes ceased, bodies stiffened, pulses undetectable, pupils unresponsive. Doctors called this a state of suspended animation or hibernation, the physiological place between life and death. And that was why ER physicians never gave up on exposure victims until they tried to heat the body, blood, and lungs. “You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead,” they liked to say.

In the best-case scenario, Tess was still in between and could be brought back to life, just the way Florio had resuscitated Charlie in the ambulance. The first step was to deliver heated oxygen at a temperature of 107 degrees. The Coast Guard rescuers had surely pumped warm air into her to stabilize heart, lung, and brain temperatures. Next, they would have applied thermo-pads to her head, neck, trunk, and groin to defend her core temperature. Then they would have administered warm fluids through an IV to deal with her severe dehydration.

Once they got her to the hospital, they would have started the delicate job of heating her body to prevent cell damage by adding saline to the stomach, bladder, and lungs or by using a heart-and-lung machine that removed blood from the body, warmed it, and then pumped it back in.

But why were they taking so long in the OR? Maybe it wasn’t just hypothermia. Perhaps her head injury was more serious than he imagined. Charlie’s thoughts were snapped when the revolving doors spun around and a homeless man lurched through. His shirt was bloody from what Charlie guessed was a gunshot or stab wound in the shoulder.

Then the doors turned again, and Charlie saw Tess’s mother enter. He recognized her immediately from the oval shape of her face and the angle of her nose. Charlie jumped up. “Mrs. Carroll,” he said, “I’m so sorry I didn’t get to Tess sooner.”

She shook her head. “Bless you for finding her,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm. “Please call me Grace.”

“I’m Charlie,” he said. “Charlie St. Cloud.”

“St. Cloud. Like an angel from the sky,” she said. Tink approached and put a burly arm around her.

“Have the doctors told you anything about Tess yet?” Charlie asked.

“No, I got here ten minutes after the helicopter landed, and the Coast Guard wouldn’t tell me anything.” She stared into Charlie’s eyes. “How’d she look when you found her? Was she injured? Did she say anything?”

In that instant, Charlie realized Grace had no idea of the gravity of the situation. He was suddenly thrust back onto Mingo Rock with Tess lying limp in his arms. He had called her name again and again and implored her to wake up. He had told her everyone was waiting in Marblehead for her to come home. But she couldn’t hear him. She was gone. No flicker of eyelids, no tremor of lips, no squeeze of the hand.

“I bet Tessie is still talking about sailing around the world this week,” Grace was saying through a forced smile.

Before Charlie could answer, the ER doors opened and a nurse came out. It was Sonia Banerji, an old friend from the high-school band. She wore a light blue RN’s uniform and her black hair was braided in a long ponytail.

“Mrs. Carroll?” she said. “Please come with me. The doctors are waiting to see you in the back.”

“Oh good,” Grace said.

Charlie, however, was completely crushed. His stomach clenched. Over the years he had learned to read the signs in the ER. First and foremost, doctors always showed up with good tidings but dispatched the nurses to bring families in when things had gone wrong. Second, families got to see their relatives right away when all was well. They met with the doctors behind closed doors when the news was bad.

“How is Tess?” Grace said. “Please tell me.”

“This way please,” Sonia said. “The doctors have all the information.”

Grace turned to Charlie and said, “Come on, let’s go. You, too, Tink. I’m not setting foot in there by myself.” The three marched forward into the ER, and Sonia showed them to a private consultation room.

Two young doctors were waiting for them. The first physician began with a few banal pleasantries and introductions. Charlie watched her carefully for clues. Her face expressed compassion, but the muscles in her neck were taut. Her eyes focused intently, but there was a distance to her stare. He recognized the pattern. She was trying to stay detached. That was the way it always was. Doctors and medics couldn’t afford to get emotionally involved.

The other M.D. dived into the facts. Her speech was staccato. “Tess suffered acute head trauma and extreme hypothermia. She’s in critical condition. She’s unable to breathe on her own. We have her on a respirator now.”

Grace put her hand to her mouth.

“I can assure you that she isn’t in any pain,” the doctor said. “She’s in a deep coma. She’s not responsive in any way. We measure these things on something called the Glasgow Scale. Fifteen is normal. Tess is at level five. It’s a very grave situation.”

Grace was shaking now, and Tink put his arm around her. “What’s going to happen?” he asked. “Will she wake up?”

“No one knows the answer to that question,” the doctor said. “She’s in God’s hands. The only thing we can do is wait.”

“Wait for what?” Grace said. “Why can’t you do anything?”

“She’s a very strong and healthy woman,” the doctor said, “and it’s quite extraordinary she survived this long. But the cranial trauma was severe, and her exposure to the elements was prolonged.” The doctor paused and glanced at her colleague. “There is a theoretical chance her injuries will heal themselves. There are coma cases in the literature that defy explanation. But we believe it’s important to be realistic.” Her voice lowered. “The likelihood of a reversal is remote.”

There was a long silence as the words registered. Charlie felt solid ground collapse beneath him. Then the doctor said, “If you want to have a moment with her, now would be a good time.”