The Girl in the Mirror(28)
The cockpit is empty.
I scan the foredeck, my face screwing into a scowl, ready to bawl her out for going up there on her own. Right after our big safety talk. But the scowl drops away half-formed, because she’s not there.
She’s nowhere.
Jagged shards of ice are stabbing at the back of my neck. It’s like something, some monstrous thing, is pulling me, pulling my head around. You know where you have to look.
So I look. I peer at the ocean behind me, as far as I can see, between the twin mounds of Bathsheba’s widening wake. The water is leaden, an unbroken poisonous gray.
“Summer!” I call. And then louder and louder. “Summer! SUMMER!”
The bathroom. Of course! A rush of relief. I almost skip down to the saloon. I rattle at the bathroom door, but it swings open at my touch. My ghostly face stares back at me from the double mirror. No Summer.
No Summer in the quarter berth. No Summer in Tarquin’s cage-like crib. No Summer anywhere down below.
“Summer! SUMMER!” I’m screaming her name.
I run back up on deck. Careless of the boom, of my lack of life jacket or harness, I jump onto the cabin top, desperate to see farther. I turn and turn and turn, ducking under the mainsail to see all around. I peer at every inch of ocean. Nothing.
What am I thinking? If Summer is out there, we’re sailing away from her right now. I rush to the pilothouse and press the red button. Alter course to port ten degrees. The autopilot strains the tiller sideways. Bathsheba swerves into the oncoming swell. I push again, again, as fast as I can, but I don’t forget to count. Eighteen times and Bathsheba is on a reciprocal course. Due north.
I run to the mast. There are folding rungs on each side of it that climbers can pull down as they ascend. I saw Dad do it once. He was berthed in a marina, with Annabeth doggedly hanging on to the other end of a safety line, but watching him still made me sick to my stomach.
No time for safety lines now. I bang the first few rungs down and start to climb, but the sail flaps in my face, obscuring my view. I must go higher.
Summer, Summer, where are you?
My palms are slick with sweat, my bare soles, too, slippery as oil. I glance between my feet. Bathsheba’s deck, now matchbox-small, seesaws below me. If I fall, I die. I’ll hit the deck and be killed instantly, or miss and land in the ocean, and watch Bathsheba sail blithely away.
Is this what happened to Summer?
I can’t think it. I can’t stop climbing. Delay might mean life or death for Summer. I reach up to knock down the next rung, and my hand slips on the sharp metal. I should climb down, find some gloves or shoes to protect my hands and feet from these nightmarish prongs, but I don’t have time. I have to get up. I have to find her.
One step. Another. My skin is clammy and cold. The mast is an endless ladder. And now I’m here, at the top. The masthead is a mess of pulleys, the LED light, the windvane, a bunch of paraphernalia bolted on. Everything jolts and bounces. The head of the sail slams from side to side. The sea’s motion is magnified by height, and the wind’s stronger up here. I cling to a random mass of ropes, and now they’re stained red. I’ve cut my hand open on something but I don’t know what—I didn’t feel it.
I look and look and look. Summer, her gold sarong, her yellow hair, her big white cap. I scan the ocean all the way to the horizon. I’m in front of the mast, facing aft. I twist my body around to see toward the bow. I feel as though I can see forever. Sea and sky are gray. I strain for a speck of color. Anything that could be Summer.
The sun comes out, painting everything blue, and the great oceanic swells roll on far beneath me, line after line after line. These waves have not stopped in millions of years. They will not stop for me. The mast sways like a tree in a storm and my belly is a nest of coiling snakes. Vomit pours out of my mouth and floats in suspended time before it splatters over both water and deck below. But still I look.
There is nothing. Nothing. Only blue and blue and blue.
The ocean has swallowed Summer whole.
A movement behind me. A flap. I turn. A white seabird is level with my eyes. As majestic as an albatross. Its head feathers glow a golden yellow like a crown. It’s a gannet, a bird of the south. I recognize it from home. It meets my gaze and peels off in a wide arc toward the horizon. Soon it’s a speck, a dark spot against the bright sun.
I’m in the Southern Hemisphere and I’m alone. My heart clamors like a living creature, racing and fighting, straining in my right breast. Without Summer it has no rhythm. It seems to know the truth already.
I’m no longer a twin. Summer is dead.
8
The Search
Yet I keep searching. I’m methodical, unwearying, wholehearted. I’ve never done anything so passionately. I search so hard it nearly kills me.
I can’t remember climbing down the mast. It seems like seconds later that I’m in the pilothouse, refining Bathsheba’s course. Plan, look up, look around, plan more. I smear the logbook with blood as I calculate drift due to current and alter Bathsheba’s course slightly east. As time goes by, Summer will have drifted farther. I must imagine a living sister, floating alive in tropical waters. I draw a search radius on the chart.
The empty phone cradle in the pilothouse is a sickening, unreal sight. Worse is when I look in the chart table drawer, the only other place the sat phone could realistically be. I check everywhere Summer might have left it, turning lockers inside out, creating chaos. Nothing.