If the sails go, I’m screwed.
Ripping sails aren’t my only worry. On this new course, Cupid is positioned perpendicularly to the building waves. Swells crash over the rails every few seconds, dousing my shins. The cockpit is beginning to look like a bathtub. The boat — not designed to carry this much weight — rides low, bulldozing forward like a field-plow through mud. Forcing her way through the water instead of gliding atop it.
With my free hand, I grab the plastic emergency bailer from the storage cubby and start to scoop out bucketfuls manually — one after another after another, a Sisyphean task. It’s coming in faster than I can hope to expel it. Maybe if I had two hands to dedicate to bailing, maybe if someone else were here with me…
Maybes will not save me, now.
Minutes pass. Minutes of terror and breathlessness. Of shivers and shakes, born of cold and fear. I’m not sure if the wetness I’m wiping from my eyes is rain or tears. I’m not sure it matters, anymore. The islands are nearer, but so is the lightning. I count out heartbeats before each rumble of thunder. The crashes come closer and closer with every passing minute.
Six miles away.
Five.
Four.
Three.
By the time Cupid’s bow rounds the southernmost point of Little Misery, the storm is practically on top of us. The water in the cockpit is up to my knees. I accidentally drop the bailer and watch it float out of reach with a disembodied sort of denial. It wasn’t helping much, but letting it go tastes like accepting defeat. Like accepting the impossibility that I might actually…
Sink.
We are sinking.
The jib sail is the first to go; the material shreds into ribbons beneath the claws of a particularly strong gust as Cupid limps — waterlogged and graceless — toward the larger of the two islands. The main sail follows suit shortly thereafter, torn to useless flaps of canvas that whip around the mast in an ear-splitting racket. The tiller in my hands is now just a prop; I grip it more to keep myself aboard the flooded vessel than to attempt to steer. The waves are up to my waist, and rising.
With each swell, my pretty red sailboat — my most prized possession, the greatest source of material joy I have known in my lifetime — sinks a bit further beneath the surface. The thought of abandoning her, once an impossibility, is now an inevitability I cannot ignore. Not if I want to survive.
Surrendering the tiller, I tighten the straps of my life jacket around my abdomen. My flip flops, kicked loose in some undefined moment of chaos, drift away one after another. I watch them disappear over the stern, which is now fully swamped. Beneath the lifejacket, water splashes against my chest, seeps a cold path up my spine.
When the cockpit goes under completely, I half-swim, half-scramble my way up the deck, toward the mast. I wrap my arms around the metal beam as the ocean swallows Cupid beneath me in great gulps, praying a lightning bolt does not choose this moment to strike.
It doesn’t take long to sink. In a laughably short amount of time, the water has me fully in its clutches. I gasp at the cold as my body begins to float. My numb fingers scramble for purchase on the rigging as the mast is dragged downward with the rest of the vessel. The emergency beacon at my shoulder activates automatically — a strobe blasting my retinas in rhythmic bursts of light, white then red then white, a looping pattern of distress designed to be spotted from a distance.
Against the thrashing waves, I struggle to hold onto the top of the mast — the only part of Cupid that has not yet been swallowed up — while trying not to get tangled up in the mess of shredded sails and stays. Between each white-capped crest, I glimpse the far off shore of Great Misery.
So close… yet so very far.
I’m a strong swimmer. Under normal circumstances, I could probably make it. On a clear day, without raging winds or ripping tides, I’d close the football-field’s worth of distance between myself and solid ground with ease. I’d pass the hours sunning on the warm rocks, picking sea-glass fragments from the sand, watching glossy black cormorants dry their wings in the gentle breeze.
But it is not a normal day.
Directly overhead, lightning splits the sky. Less than an heartbeat later, booming thunder answers. I feel another few inches of the mast slip down into the depths, forever out of reach.
Now or never, Jo.
Even as I steel myself for the swim, even as I take a fortifying breath into my lungs and prepare to head for the island…
I know in my heart I’ll never make it.
* * *
Looking back, I was a fool to think I actually stood a chance.
As soon as I start for shore, I know I’m done for. My arms flail for purchase against the raging currents, my legs kick futilely at the undertow dragging me off course. There is no order to this tide, no pattern to this surge. The ocean is a churning washing machine, ebbing and flowing at random, tossing me to and fro like a lone sock caught in the industrial cycle.
My attempts at swimming falter as I’m knocked sideways under the force of a white-capped wave. All I can do is hold onto my life jacket, fingers digging into the shoulder pads, praying it’s enough to keep me afloat until help arrives.
Ifhelp arrives.