The Girl in the Mirror(30)

I have to find her.



The sun has burned its way across the sky. It’s sinking toward a bed of clouds, and the sea’s colors are softening.

I’m still at the masthead. My water bottle is empty. I tried to eat the chocolate, but it was ashes in my mouth. My limbs barely respond to my brain’s signals to move. I’ve tried all possible postures, shifting my weight from one leg to the other, to my arms, letting myself droop in the safety harness. They’re all excruciating.

I hate the ocean. I hate the color blue. I hate the sun. But I don’t want it to set. I will it to stay high and bright in the sky.

I’ve always been here at the masthead. I will always be here. The clink of the rigging is the clink of the chains of dead men. The sails are shrouds.

But still I stare at the sea. Summer. Her shining hair. I can see it in my mind, but it’s not here.

I don’t need the sunglasses anymore. The sea is mauve, lavender, indigo. It gleams rose-gold. The sky is soft as a dove.

And now I’m staring into blackness.

Climbing down is death. It’s not only that my arms and legs are cadaver-stiff, that my skin throbs with sunburn, that my wounded hand is searing, that my throat is parched from crying, from screaming for my sister. What’s worse is that when I touch the deck, when I crumple in a heap at the foot of the mast, I have to face the fact that it’s over.

I’ve lost Summer.



There’s a voice in my head telling me to go on. It’s a cold, hateful voice, and it tells me things I don’t want to know.

You have to get sleep, it says. Don’t lie there and mope on the deck. You can’t search in the dark. Go and lie in a soft bed. You need to be refreshed. The search starts again at dawn.

Maybe Summer stayed warm somehow. Maybe she was wearing warm clothes when she fell. Maybe something fell in with her and she could pull herself partly out of the water, although I’ve already checked, and nothing is missing except the sat phone. Solomon is still hoisted on the davits. The life raft is still lashed to the foredeck.

Maybe the water here is warmer than I thought. Maybe Summer is especially good at keeping herself warm.

You must keep searching.

I obey the voice. I drag myself to the pilothouse and turn on the navigation lights. The needle of the fuel gauge hovers on empty, but the engine runs on. I shut it off. You have to save fuel for tomorrow.

I hate tomorrow. I stumble down to the saloon as Bathsheba, drifting with wind and current now, begins to wallow in the disturbed seas.

Not here, says the voice as I lurch toward the couch. Sleep in the nice big bed. Get your rest.

I must trust that, if we do cross paths with another vessel overnight, the helmsman will spot Bathsheba’s dim nav lights and steer clear of her. Dad taught us that not keeping watch was unforgivable, a sacrilege, but I have no choice. I have to sleep. In any case, we haven’t seen a ship since Thailand. I’ve called on the VHF all day. And right now, we’re in the middle of the world’s emptiest ocean, days from the shipping lanes. Nobody’s coming.

In the stateroom, I flick on the light. I glimpse my dark reflection in the TV screen.

The TV. Blood rushes to my head. I feel as if I’ve been struck across the chest. The CCTV! What did Summer say? Is it a live feed, or does it record? She wasn’t even sure if it worked.

The remote. She said the remote was in the locked drawer with her wedding ring. Dad would never tell us where he kept the key, and Summer didn’t say, either. I pull out my sailor’s knife and jab at the desk drawer. It’s eighteen hours since Summer disappeared. Don’t those tapes wipe every twenty-four hours? I don’t know much about the technology when Dad installed it all those years ago. Did they use discs?

Jab, jab. I’m stabbing at the drawer like an assassin. It moves a little, and I grab the handle and wrench it. The drawer hits the floor, its contents scattering. I snatch Summer’s wedding band and engagement ring as they roll away. I push them onto my bloodied right hand for safekeeping.

The remote. I scramble at the remote, point it at the TV, jam my finger against the on button. Nothing.

Batteries. The batteries are dead. I rip them out and they clatter to the floor. I run to the pilothouse. Under the chart table, there’s a colony of batteries of all sizes.

Here they are, two new-looking double A batteries. I rush back to the stateroom, fumbling them into place as I go. This time the TV screen flickers.

I scroll through channels. Nothing but static.

And now blackness. But there’s a time and date at the bottom of the screen. Seven p.m., twenty-ninth of March. A live feed.

How do I rewind? I press all the buttons on the remote. How do I make this work? The system must have a brain somewhere.

I pull the TV out from the wall. Plugged in behind it is an old laptop. I run my finger over the trackpad and the screen lights up. Inside an application called Home CCTV I find the same live feed that is playing on the TV screen, and, in another window, seven files, each with a different date. I click on the most recent one, dated yesterday.

I start watching at eleven p.m., March 28. I cue forward in short bursts. All is dark.

At fifteen minutes to midnight, the cockpit light comes on, and Summer appears.

“Yes!” I shout. She looks so familiar and so very alive that I sink onto the bed with a sigh, as if everything is okay, as if I’ve found her. Then I remember what I’m about to witness. My sister’s death.