The She (31 page)

"No Gulf Stream. Put your hand over."

She meant we would feel water that was about seventy degrees instead of forty-five if we were in a rush from the Gulf Stream. But those rushes never came out past the shelf, if I remembered things right. While they were busy arguing, I let my internal rhythm fall into in the heave and sway of the boat, realizing there was something weird about the rhythm. It would bob up, then bob way down, bob up, then bob way down. The down bobs were always stronger than the up ones, and that was a sensation I could not pull out of my childhood memory.

"What direction are we facing?" Emmett asked.

"West." I backed up to the helm, staring off the stern, trying to see anything but black and little whitecaps.

"How do you know?" Emmett asked. "Are you watching the stars?"

I shook my head. I just knew. My heart revved up a little as I tried to bring my hands up to stare at them. It took a bit of effort. They felt clumsy, like I was holding two-pound weights in each hand. I wiggled my fingers, trying to decide if this was my imagination. I looked at Grey.

"Do you feel that?" I asked.

She rolled her shoulders around a couple of times, staring over the stern. "Like a ... like something's standing on your shoulders. Not bad, but ... definitely weird."

I nodded. From the corner of my eye I could see Emmett looking back and forth from her to me.

"Don't let's get carried away with ourselves," he said patiently. "But I think I'll start the engines."

I didn't think that was such a bad idea, so I let him do it, then touched him in the chest. I made a thumbs-down sign while my eyes Were glued to the stern. He kept the throttle in neutral, leaving a hum, so that we could still hear each other pretty well.

"We're moving," I insisted.

He jerked his head back to the dash and shook his head. "Not enough to notice, here. What direction are you,
et,
sensing?"

"Downward."

He looked at me, and I heard his gloved fingers beat on the dash. "Don't do this to me, Evan," he said. "It's unfair."

"I'm just telling you what my body is telling me."

"Listen to me." He pulled me up to him by the shoulders. "If you think I don't remember every last moment of what happened the night Mom and Dad disappeared, you are sadly mistaken. It is a torturous memory. Horrible. Don't pull me back there, no matter how badly your psyche wants to create a drama. It is totally cruel—"

"Do you remember running back up to the widow's walk? The second time?"

"Of course I do."

I stared at him, stared into his tortured eyes. I saw everything there. Embarrassment, pain, horror shame, regret, even terror.

"Please," he said. "Let's not engage in any sort of psychodrama that could take either of us back. It was harder for me to get where I am than you would ever imagine."

I shut my eyes and tried to get rid of the rhythm of the boat in my mind.
Down, rock. Down, rock. Down, rock.
For the love of your family, you can come a lot further away from the truth than you normally could.

"Okay. Maybe we're not moving downward, Emmett. If we're not then ... Can you just relax a minute more?"

"I'm not exacdy relaxed!"

"Just a minute more."

I moved back to Grey, who was staring over the stern. "Black-bean soup?" She repeated my earlier description.

I could see the whitecaps appearing and disappearing without seeming to move. I nodded, wanting so badly to draw Emmett back here and ask him to look more closely. But I was so sure we were losing water underneath us, which made no sense, and I set my mind instead to figure out what that meant. Water has to be somewhere. If it's not under you, then it has to be somewhere else—beside you, behind you.... I spun around in a little paranoid frenzy, searching over the bow and then the stern again. The stars were brighter over the stern. No immense, waterlogged creature was rising anywhere.

Grey climbed up onto the bridge, looking all around. She hadn't heard my whole conversation with Emmett, I don't think, because she was indiscreet enough to say, "Definitely. It feels like we're falling."

"Well, that's goddamn impossible," Emmett snapped.

"Then why are you so nervous?" I snapped back. My own nerves were snapping.

"I don't know," he said. "I think it's the two of you giving me the creeps."

"Can you hear that?" Grey jumped down from the bridge, and her feet hit the deck with a bang. "
Shh...
listen."

Against the downward sway that was dominant in our rocking, I started to hear a little gurgling on the side of the boat.
Rock, down, gurgle ... Rock, down, gurgle, gurgle.

"We're being sucked," she told us.

"Let's go," Emmett said, and reached for the throttle. But Grey jumped in front of him.

"No! Don't you want to see?"

"Not particularly!"

"How are you going to feel tomorrow if you say you ran tonight? From something you don't even believe in?"

Their stare-off was lost on me. I moved back to the stern, listening to Emmett finally agree, persuaded by her combination of logic and dashboard readings, that we had somehow lost about three hundred yards of water. Any great intellectual would want to figure that out, she told him. Three hundred yards of depth. Where in the hell does it go?
The Hole?

And I felt every hair on my body standing straight up as I gazed off the stern, though I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing yet. I only got the idea the water
could
rise. And just keep rising.

The sucking and gurgling was unmistakable now, and water smacked as if the stern were unhappy and fighting it. Grey punched me in the arm and I looked at her. She was pointing off the port stern—not straight out and not straight up.

If she were a clock, her body and her arm would have made about 10:30. I know, because I've seen it in my head five hundred times since, her halfway point between the horizon and straight up in the sky. When she found her voice, it was too loud.

"Guys, why are the stars disappearing?"

She was absolutely telling the truth. Emmett came back and gripped both of our shoulders, saying, "It's in the sky. It's a cloud!"

I thought the line was too thick, crawling slowly upward, without showing any stars behind it. "It's water" I breathed.

"It's a cloud!"

"It's her" Grey said. "Oh, my God, what have I done?"

I had about two seconds to realize I had no idea how far away this black thing was rising, because there was nothing to help me gauge distance. It could have been twenty yards off the stern or ten miles away.

I screamed. "It's a wave! I just know it!"

Emmett's eyes grew immense, and I had a flash of a second to enjoy the fact that he finally believed me. He all but threw himself at the throttle, but before the engines filled my ears, I heard one short line screaming out of him.

It was the first line of my dad's captain's prayer.

The engines cut in at the same time as the shrieking, which dropped me to the deck in a moment of sheer pain and utter heaviness. We were flying west, away from the impending black at top speed, but it was too late.

Almost right over our heads, but way up, I saw a telltale white line rip across the black, a line any petrified sailor might have taken as a couple of long eyebrows. They got thicker and I shut my eyes, knowing I would be seeing a wall of white behind me any second.

"Emmett, drive! It's a fucking wave!"

He was still shaking his head in denial, though his mouth was moving. I didn't need to hear: I couldn't hear anything except that shrieking, and then Grey shrieking just as loud. It was as if the water quit shrieking long enough to inhale. Then a rumbling, crashing boom split my head, like the sound barrier was breaking.

"Drive, Emmett, drive! It's a fucking tower man—"

I lurched to my feet, jerked my back to the thing. The throttle was all the way forward, but this boat wasn't moving fast enough. We were heavy, paralyzed mice trying to crawl away from an angry Hon. I couldn't look anywhere but straight ahead, but I felt a huge breath blowing my hair forward, and the picture drilled through my head of a huge avalanche devouring a small cabin in the dark. Spray followed the hurricane breath, pouring onto us, forcing my eyes shut.

A blast of water shot me in the back, and I smashed into the cabin door. I grabbed the helm from Emmett, slamming the wheel all the way to the right.

"You'll kill us all, goddamn it! We're gonna die, we're gonna die!" He kept screeching. But I'd just had time to cast one glance over my shoulder which showed me nothing but white as high up as I could see. Call it intuition, or just an eye for detail, but my sight caught one black streak off to the far right, and I drove sideways into it, falling, falling. It was a spot where the wave hadn't broken yet, and I was flying into some spot between a giant thumb and a giant finger that could squash us like a fly.

Grey threw herself down and grabbed the bridge ladder waiting for the boat to roll in this little piece I caught near the far end of the wave. We were falling sideways, bouncing, managing on the last little thread of my driving power to keep from spinning over and rolling. The flood in the stern forced the boat to list into the wave, into starboard, and I knew we needed to straighten before it washed back the other way. Mercifully, we were straightening. The boat trembled in seizures, in violent attempts to obey me, finally pulling up, up, sideways into the black.

I could not conceive of the height we were reaching in this endless climb, up over a hunched, black shoulder and the white, shapeless face screaming in outrage.

Emmett had fallen and just laid at my feet, so I screamed, "Grab something!"

Finally hitting the crest was no consolation prize, because this mountain had a backside that made the headlights of the boat seem like we were looking straight down to the canyon floor; to the hole. I tried to slide us down it sideways, but that screeching started in again, and I could barely hear Emmett screeching back as we spun downward. There were twenty times we could have rolled; we were like a little peanut rolling down the front of an unconcerned, heaving chest. I could finally feel the force with which the
Goliath
would have struck the surface as it fell. It would not have made it this far; could never have hit the backside of this wave, or it would have crashed into the deep and split into four or five pieces. The water was a solid wall to port, and I hugged it, half driving and half bumping, down, down, until I couldn't resist the urge. The only way to keep sanity enough to stay at the helm was to screech back.

"
Get away from us! What in hell did we ever do to you?
" I stopped short of name-calling, some idea in my gut cutting off my air; as if to remind me to show some respect.

The wave moved out faster as I yelled, with the shrieking turning to a deep
OoooOOOOooooooooooo
that got less and less overpowering until it finally bottomed into little more than an echo. We were rocking finally, moving, but not dropping anymore. Somehow I had lowered the speed to nothing to look at the white line disappearing toward the shore. Almost at the horizon, it evaporated to nothingness. I knew what had been out in front of that white line could easily have toppled Opa's house.

Emmett was sitting in water up to his waist while Grey clamored to her feet beside him. My own screeching having stopped and the wave having been silenced, I realized he was still yelling.

I dropped to my knees and shook him, as he screamed in my face without seeing me, "
You fucking whore! I'm gonna kill you!
"

"Emmett! It was a wave, buddy. Calm down ... It was a wave." I looked through the black and added, "I think..."

I couldn't stop Emmett from freaking out, even after I got him to his feet. We were up to our knees in water; but he just swayed there, pointing where the thing had disappeared close to the horizon

"It's going to hit Opa's house! It'll level Opa's house!"

"Emmett, they never make it to shore."

"You don't know that!"

"Yeah, I do."

"Evan!" He hugged on me. "It was just a wave, right? It didn't ... come after us. Right?"

Grey was behind me sending a Mayday, saying we'd flooded one of the engines and had been hit by a rogue wave, and she was spitting out lorans. I could feel Emmett trembling violently and couldn't decide how much was from being half soaked in the cold wind, and how much was from being out of his tree. Grey was turning up the ballast pumps, and I decided the best thing to do was get Emmett moving. A bait bucket floated past, and I grabbed it, stuck it in his hands.

"Bail, my man! I'll get us moving on one engine, but you've got to get some weight off the top or we're going in the water! Do you understand?"

He started bailing, but like a zombie. I turned to Grey.

"The Coast Guard has a cutter about twenty minutes from here," she said. "They're ripping this way. They'll give us a tow. We ought to be okay. Unless you think she's coming back."

She ... she ... she.
All the theories were mixed and mashed together making my brain split into quarters.

"I don't think she's coming back that fast." My voice came out like metal on metal. "It was a wave, Grey! Right?"

"Uh,
yeah.
" She looked at me like I was nuts. "It was a wave. What a killer bitch! It put me in my place ... I'm going to have to be nice now, just from knowing I'll never match the competition—"

"Um..." I took her by the shoulders and moved her in front of the helm. "Just drive toward that cutter: And don't talk about that thing in front of Emmett as if it were alive. Okay?"

I found a hand pump in the galley, and under the anemic sound of one engine, I figured I'd better try to calm him as we bailed. He was muttering under his breath, like a crazy person. It was part reality about we could have been killed, part captain's prayer part seizure breathing because he was cold and wet.

"Okay, bro. Let's figure this out while we bail, okay?"

He threw a bucket of water over the side, and I started in. "There's a fault in the canyon floor right?"