Darkness(9)

Even with the sea spitting foam and the wind whistling around her ears and conditions growing worse every second, leaving him was not an option she was prepared to consider.

His head was up and he was looking at her as he dog-paddled clumsily toward her. He was shouting something, she saw, and strained to hear.

“. . . rope.”

The only word she caught of those he screamed at her was the last one, but it was also the most important: she understood instantly that he wanted her to throw him a rope.

“No rope.” Screaming back, she shook her head vigorously so that he would understand. There was no rope on board.

He was swimming now as she maneuvered the boat as close to him as possible, but his strokes seemed jerkier and his body rode lower in the water than before. She knew his arms and legs must be numb, and would soon be completely immobilized by cold. When that happened, he would be gone.

He could die within her view, sink beneath the waves within feet of the boat, and there wouldn’t be anything she could do to save him.

Gina felt sick at the thought.

She had just reluctantly reached the conclusion that she was going to have to risk leaning out and trying to grab him when it hit her—she could use her coat. If she were to take it off and throw him one end of it—say, a sleeve, while she held on to the other sleeve—maybe she could pull him on board. But that came with its own set of problems. To begin with, her coat would inevitably get soaked, which meant that she would no longer be able to wear it, leaving her dangerously exposed to the elements. In any rescue situation, the number one rule was, don’t endanger yourself.

And then suddenly her coat didn’t matter, because she remembered the emergency paddles that were affixed to the interior of the stern just above the place where her backpack was stashed, covered by a rubber flap designed to keep them safe and dry and out of the way.

The moment she thought of them, she throttled down into neutral. She was afraid to turn the motor all the way off in case she should have trouble getting it started again; the boat was notoriously tricky like that, and if the boat’s engine went out they were both dead. Even as she swung her legs around and dropped to her knees because trying to stand up would be insane given the conditions, the boat was caught up on the shoulder of a wave. Crawling unsteadily to the stern, an exercise that was rendered way trickier than she’d expected by the pitching of the boat, she yanked the flap free of the Velcro that secured it and grabbed the uppermost paddle.

It obviously had not left the brackets that held it for a long time: she had to wrestle it free. Succeeding at last, holding it triumphantly as she sank back on her heels, she saw that it was lightweight molded plastic, about six feet long. If they were both lucky, she might be able to use it to get him into the boat. Scrambling back to her seat, she scanned the heavy swells. He was nowhere in sight. Just as fear tightened her throat, she spotted him bobbing amid the debris farther out into the bay and waved.

He did not wave back.

Was he already too weak?

Galvanized by the thought, she went after him. As the boat drew near, he rolled onto his back, his arms moving just enough to keep him afloat. Either he was resting, or, as she feared, the frigid water was taking its inexorable toll.

His head turned toward the boat as it reached him. She could feel his eyes on her, sense his desperation.

“Get ready,” she yelled. Throttling down into neutral again as the prow slid past him so that he was mere inches away, she scrambled off the seat and plopped down flat on her butt on the deck. Crooking one hand around the back edge of the seat to anchor herself, she thrust the paddle toward him. The water was already catching the boat up, pulling it away. The distance between them increased at a shocking rate with every passing second.

“Grab hold,” she encouraged him. The wind was louder now. She wasn’t sure he’d heard her. But he definitely saw the paddle: she watched the life come back into his face, watched the muscles around his mouth and eyes tighten, watched his jaw clench as he spotted it. Grim resolve showed in every line of his face. Rolling onto his stomach, he stroked laboriously toward her. It was obvious that he was finding it harder to move. It was also obvious that he meant to fight to the last to survive.

“Hurry,” she screamed, one eye on the next line of waves rushing toward them.

He did, abandoning swimming to launch himself out of the water and latch onto the paddle in a desperate lunge. With his dead weight suddenly attached to one end, it was all she could do to retain her grip on the other. She thanked God for the nonslip material of her waterproof gloves, and for the doughnutlike design of the end of the paddle, which created a hole into which she managed to hook her fingers. Icy spray broke over them both as the waves hit, and the boat was caught up again and hurled skyward.

“Hang on,” she yelled as a haze of blowing seawater obscured everything except the wave that rose like a mountain beneath them. It was the biggest one yet, a roaring monster, and with the motor in neutral they were no more than a scrap of debris caught up by it. Gina’s face was so wet and cold by this time that she could feel it freezing in the wind, and her fingers started to cramp from the force of her grip on the paddle. She felt as if her arms and shoulders were being wrenched apart as she held grimly on to both the paddle and the seat. Her mouth went dry with fear for him, but he managed to hang on while the boat climbed and plunged with the wave.

“Now,” she screamed when the boat leveled out.