The Girl in the Mirror(31)

Hope is a demon. It toys with you, it flirts, and then when you start to trust it, it vanishes. It dies. First Summer died, and now hope dies, too.

Summer stands in the cockpit in her little shorts and that big cap, frowning. She’s not worried about something, though. This is the look Summer wears when she’s pleased with herself. She’s planning a surprise.

The camera is level with the boat, not the horizon, so it’s hard to tell which way the boat heels as Summer hoists the main. The sea behind the cockpit appears to rise on the right and sink on the left of the screen. Since the camera’s pointing aft, that means the sea on the port side rose, or rather, the boat heeled to port.

Summer must have met a westerly wind as we came out of the zone. Why didn’t I tell her what to expect? Did she realize this was the wrong direction for the trades? This must have been a fluke, a local wind. It was never going to last.

But Summer doesn’t know this. She trims the sail and sits, looking as if sailing’s some new miracle that she has invented.

A few minutes go by. Summer jumps up and runs toward the camera. Her face looms large and then disappears out of view. She’s gone into the pilothouse.

She reappears holding the sat phone to her ear.

She faces the bow. Her face is right in front of the camera now, huge on the screen. Her eyes are swiveled toward the phone. She presses it closer against her cheek. Her expression is pure bliss. It must be Adam.

Why would he call? Has something happened to Tarquin?

Summer jumps onto the cockpit seat, standing tall so the phone is high. She’s speaking into it. I can tell she’s shouting. It must be a bad line.

Now there’s a wobble. Summer’s body jerks as if the boat has jolted her. I can guess what’s happening, but Summer doesn’t know.

The wind is shifting. She feels something is wrong, and she reacts in the worst possible way. She thinks the strange motion is caused by something ahead. She stands up on the aft deck to get a better look. She’s wearing no harness, no life jacket.

Thwack.

The footage is silent, but I hear the crash that kills her like an explosion in my skull. The wind flicks behind the mainsail. Bathsheba crash-jibes, and the boom smashes into Summer’s head. Her ragdoll body flies into the ocean.



She was killed instantly. She must have been. I say the words aloud to convince myself, but I know there’s a chance she wasn’t. She might have only been knocked unconscious.

She still wouldn’t have suffered. With no life jacket, she would drown before she could wake up.

But I still search. I search the whole next day. All day the same thought haunts me. Not only is there no chance of finding Summer alive, but there’s been no chance for a long time. I’m looking for a body, and I don’t even know whether bodies float at sea. I’m not searching because I have hope. I’m searching because the only alternative is not to search.

I search inside the yacht, even though I know Summer can’t be on board. I know every inch of Bathsheba, and I search everywhere, just for something to do. Back in the zone, when the wind fails, I haul the sails down and let Bathsheba come to a halt, and then, naked, holding a snorkeling mask, I jump into the turquoise void and swim right under the hull, as though my sister’s corpse might be trapped between keel and rudder. It would have terrified me once, the risk that Bathsheba might pick up speed while I was under here—a yacht can outpace a swimmer in the lightest wind, even with her sails down—but now it doesn’t seem to matter.

Let Bathsheba float away. Let me join Summer. It’s quiet down here under the boat. The water is mild and clean, and blood and sweat wash away into the blue.

But there’s nothing here. Even the remoras are gone. Bathsheba’s black hull stands in the immense clarity of the ocean. I can see forever into the deep. It’s so clear that my flailing feet seem to be dropping through sky, and I imagine my sister’s body on an endless journey down. I open my mouth and let water flood in, rich and salty. It would be so easy to fall.

The silence is a creature about to pounce. I am the only person in the world.

I swim to the other side of the hull. The sea’s surface seen from below is like a mirror. And I have come through the mirror into Summer’s world, the world of the deep. Beyond, high above me, the sun is a yellow blur.

I surface and clutch at the swimming ladder, desperate for air. Cool water has washed reason back into my brain. Against my closed eyelids, the sun burns a bloody pink, a shock after days of unending blue.

I’m a young woman, and life is long. I want to hear music again. I want to feel piano keys moving lightly beneath my fingertips. I want to stand in the desert or in the snow. I want to make love to someone.

I don’t want to die here.

I climb back on board.



Still the madness grips me. The sun burns hotter each day in the merciless sky. Bathsheba’s out of fuel, so I have to search under sail. Water is running low, but still I can’t point the bow toward Africa. Perhaps I’m overdue already. How many days have I been searching? Adam will be waiting in Thailand for news. Tarquin, too, a baby who’s already lost one mother. I must not think about them.

I comb Bathsheba again and come up with a few cans of Coke and two bottles of wine. They give me a couple more days to search.

I could pour all the water down the drain, all the Coke, all the wine. The thought sets my head buzzing. What if I do it in a moment of despair? Condemn myself to a slow, fatal agony?