At the sound of my voice, Abaco got to her feet and padded over. She jumped up and saw the girl over the top of the bulwark and began to bark. The girl’s eyes snapped open, fear causing her to use what little energy she had. I grabbed the dog’s collar, dragged her into the wheelhouse and down to the head.
“Sorry, girl,” I said as I closed the door and locked it. “Let me get her aboard first. Then you can meet her.”
Gorda
was up current, to the south of the swamped boat. The relentless Gulf Stream would eventually close the gap between us, but I might need the girl to help me, to take a line. If necessary, I’d go in the water myself, but that would be a last resort.
“Hey, what’s your name?”
She lifted her head and opened her mouth, but no sound came out—at least nothing that I could hear over the sound of
Gorda
's idling engine. She was clearly in bad shape, and the exposure to heat and salt and no fresh water had robbed her of her voice.
From
Gorda
's foredeck I picked up the fifty-foot length of nylon line I had been preparing to toss to
Outta the Blue
and tied a quick bowline in the end, then pulled a loop of line through, fashioning a lasso of sorts. I’m no cowboy, though, so I used the boat hook, and as the gap between the boats had closed to about ten feet, it was easy to reach over with the looped line hanging off the end of the pole.
“Sit up, will you? Get away from that wood post.”
She didn’t move.
“Hey, kid.” I motioned with my free hand. “Move. Move over. Sit up. I want to tie your boat to mine.”
Finally, she seemed to understand what I wanted her to do, but she looked from me to the body in the back of the boat and then back at me. Her expression did not change, but she scooted closer to that misshapen thing.
The line dropped neatly over the four-by-four post, and I pulled it tight. Keeping the tension on the line, I rigged my aluminum ladder over the gunwale, down into the water, then began to pull the water-logged fishing boat over to
Gorda
. It was not easy, not like pulling a boat sitting on top of the water that glides smoothly across the surface. This one had to push aside the displaced water, but slowly I brought in the line. The submerged hull came alongside and thumped against
Gorda
's aluminum hull.
After tying off the line, I lay on my belly across the gunwale and reached out to the child. “Here, take my hand.”
She didn’t need to understand my words; my outstretched hand had a universal meaning. She stretched her arm out slowly, and I realized for the first time just how thin she was. I saw the bones of her wrist and elbow protruding beneath the dark skin. There was no return grip in that small hand, but I pulled her up and toward the boat. She reached out with her other hand and attempted to grasp the side of the aluminum ladder, but she didn’t have enough strength in her fingers.
It wasn’t a pretty rescue. When it became clear that her legs could not support her and the ladder was useless, I dragged her light frame out of the water and across the ladder. She landed on the deck like a boated fish, dripping and breathing hard, wide-eyed and twitching.
I grabbed a towel off the bunk in the back of the wheel- house and approached her slowly. “It’s okay. I won’t hurt you. Let’s get this towel around you.”
"
Gorda
,
Gorda
, this is
Outta the Blue
, over.” The radio sounded much louder with the engine down to an idle. The girl’s deep-sunk eyes barely registered my presence, and she didn’t resist when I wrapped the towel around her shoulders. “It’s okay. I’ll be right back.”
In the wheelhouse, I grabbed the mike and we switched to a working channel. I stood in the doorway where I could keep an eye on the girl.
“Listen, Mike, I’ve got a little problem.”
“Hey, Seychelle, we wondered what was going on. We been watching you through the binoculars, and it looks like you’re stopped dead. You got engine trouble?”
“No, it’s not that.” For some reason that wasn’t fully formed in my mind, I was not yet ready to announce over the airwaves to all the bored fishermen and yachtsmen who were eavesdropping on our conversation exactly what was now tied alongside
Gorda
. “I’ve found something here. It’s a partially sunk boat and a hazard to navigation. I think I’d better tow it in first.”
“Break, break.
Gorda
,
Gorda
, this is
Little Bitt
.”
I blew a lung full of air out through rounded lips and tapped the radio microphone against my forehead. Damn. I keyed the mike and said, “Hey, Perry, should’ve known you wouldn’t have anything better to do than sit around drinking and listening in on my frequency.”
Perry Greene was the owner of
Little Bitt
, a twenty-eight-foot open tow boat that looked like a floating junkyard, piled high with gas cans, rusting engine parts, and greasy fenders, but she had an engine that ran like a watch. I had to grant that Perry was a hell of a mechanic, but I just wished he’d keep his chewing-tobacco-stained teeth and greasy fingernails as far from me as possible. Since the big corporate giants like SEATOW had come into town in the last couple of years and begun eating up the pleasure-boat-towing market, Perry and I were just about the only two independent operators left in the towing business in Fort Lauderdale, and he had taken to visiting me, perched on
Gorda'
s bulwarks, Bud in hand. To make matters worse, he always wore these cut-off jeans that were cut way too short, and he apparently did not own any underwear. I had seen way more of Perry Greene than I ever wanted to.
“Matter of fact, Seychelle, I just dropped a boat off at Lighthouse Point Marina, and I was on my way out to see how you was doing with that sunk Haitian boat, and it turns out you ain’t even there.”
Much as I hated to ask, I didn’t see that I had any other choice. “Perry, I was on my way out to tow in
Outta the Blue
, but something’s come up. Could you go pick Mike up for me? He’s on this same frequency,” I said, as if Perry didn’t know. “Mike, you there?” I called.
“I’m here.” I could hear in his voice how he felt about this. Mike had about as much fondness for Perry as I did, and in just those two words I could tell that he was furious at my handing him off like this.
“Okay, you guys work out the details, and this is
Gorda
clear and going back to one six.”
I felt bad about it, but I had a problem that was going to take most of the rest of my afternoon. I’d be lucky to make it back to Hillsboro Inlet in time. After I set my radio back to the emergency frequency, my hand paused as I was about to hang the mike on the side of the receiver. By law, I was required to call the Coast Guard right about now. I looked at the skinny kid collapsed on my deck. I watched her chest rising and falling under the white cotton as she took short, shallow breaths. Reading the papers about boatloads of immigrants getting sent back home via Coast Guard cutter had always irked me, but never enough to do anything about it. But this was different. This was personal. I’d found her, and somehow that made her my responsibility.
I grabbed a bottle of water out of the ice chest on the wheelhouse floor.
She appeared to be closer to ten years old when I examined her up close. I offered her the sport bottle. She looked at the top but didn’t move to accept it. I leaned my head back and squirted the water into my mouth, showing her how, and the first little light appeared in her eyes. She took the bottle and drank eagerly, the water dribbling out the sides of her mouth as she gulped at the stream. Her arms gave out after about five seconds of holding the bottle aloft. The plastic bottle bounced to the deck, and I grabbed it and righted it before too much spilled.
“That’s okay,” I said. It didn’t matter if she couldn’t understand what I was saying. I was talking mostly just to soothe her. “You’re not supposed to drink too much anyway. You have to go slow. We’ll see if you keep it down.”
During my seven years as a Fort Lauderdale lifeguard, I had treated many drowning victims, but never an exposure victim as severe as this child. I had been trained as an EMT, and I knew the victim needed to rehydrate slowly. The girl’s large brown eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, and the skin on her forearms was a dark reddish mahogany. Her upper arms showed a distinct tan line, with the skin peeking out from under her sleeves a much lighter shade of brown. She probably had second-degree bums over a good twenty percent of her body and was suffering from heat exhaustion. I couldn’t see any blistering. Her legs were shriveled and bleached-looking from the long-term immersion in salt water, and that might have contributed to keeping her overall body temperature down.
I tried to remember some phrases from my two years of high school French. “
Comment tu t'appelles
? You know, your name?
Ton nom
. What’s your name?”
She pointed to the water bottle, and I squeezed another squirt into her mouth. After she swallowed, she licked her lips and whispered something. I couldn’t understand her at first.
“What was that?”
“Solange.” Her voice was a little stronger and, from the name and the pronunciation, I’d clearly guessed right in trying French first.
“Solange?” I asked with my voice if I had pronounced it correctly, and she nodded, again that faint smile flickering in her eyes.
I patted my own chest. “
Seychelle. Je m’appelle Seychelle
.”
Her lips moved, shaping the word, but no sound came out.
At that point I’d about exhausted what little I could remember from two years with Mademoiselle Goldberg. I pointed at her. “You, Solange, Haiti?”
She nodded and said, “Haiti,” her voice louder now and pronouncing the name Hi-yee-tee, as though correcting me.
The next question was awkward, but I had to know. I had been about her age when I saw my mother’s body on the beach after she had drowned, and I had only recently started to come to terms with that event in my life. And I hadn’t had to spend days in a boat with the body. But I had to know. I pointed to the woman in the boat. “
Ta maman
? "
She shook her head and reached for the water bottle. I let her drink a little more but stopped her after a couple of mouthfuls.
The dress she wore had been hand-hemmed with tiny little stitches, and the lace around the collar had been added by hand as well. But either she had lost weight during her time at sea, or the dress had been made for a much larger child. I wondered if it had been her First Communion dress. The thin fabric fell in folds off her shoulders and the skirt nearly ripped as I began to wring out the dirty water. The waistline of the dress could have enclosed two little bodies her size.
She licked her lips, swallowed and pointed toward the swamped boat. “Name Erzulie.” She closed her eyes after she spoke, as though the effort had depleted the last of her energy.
“The woman? That’s her name? Er-zoo-ly?” I tried to pronounce the name as she had with that musical rhythm.
She nodded. “Yes.”
I reached for her arm. “Oh my God. You speak English?”
She nodded, every movement an effort. “
Papa Americain
.”
A white American, I guessed. That explained the light skin.
Her thin arm reached toward me, and I thought she wanted another drink, but she wrapped her small hand around my fingers. “You help me.” The effort of saying those three words completely did her in; her eyelids drooped again, her mouth opened, her breathing came fast and shallow.
I entwined my big fingers with her tiny brown ones and squeezed softly. “Yes,” I said, my throat constricting so this time I could barely croak out the words. “I’ll help you.”
I saw a small twitch at the corner of her mouth. It was almost a smile.
III
Holding her arm, I helped Solange to her feet, but her little legs collapsed beneath her. I scooped her up and carried her toward the pilothouse. She was tiny, couldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds. I could feel her eyes watching my face, and then she rested her head against my shoulder. Her salty braids brushed against my neck, and I touched the top of her head with my chin, cradling her tight to my chest as we passed through the door. I felt as though a fist had grabbed hold of all the organs in my chest and was holding them tight. I didn’t want to let her go.
When I got to the bunk that ran along the rear of the small compartment, I set her down and straightened her dress around her scrawny knees.
“Stay here,” I said, motioning with my hand because I wasn’t certain how much she understood. She curled up on her side and closed her eyes. I covered her with an old beach towel.
Out on deck, I fired up one of the gas pumps and drained most of the water out of the fishing dory. The hose kept picking up floating debris and clogging the filter, but I soon got out enough water that I could climb down into the boat to tie a good towline on her.
I hadn’t been able to smell anything when I’d been up on
Gorda
's deck, but once I was down in the boat, with the water now pumped out, the stench from the corpse struck me. It was a thick, cloying smell, almost palpable. I felt it would permeate my hair and clothes the way cigarette smoke does. The woman’s skin was discolored, turned an ashy green, and though I tried not to look at her, I found myself drawn back again and again for a quick glance at the form that had once been a woman. She wore a bright tropical-print dress with parrots and palm fronds. In other circumstances, it might have looked cheerful. I imagined this woman must have thought so when she chose it, and I envisioned her in an outdoor market in Port-au-Prince, carefully selecting the dress she would wear to America, not knowing it would be the dress she would die in.
Nothing from my lifeguard training told me how long it takes a body to swell. Had she drowned? I couldn’t tell without a closer examination, nor could I tell whether the skin on the side of her head had been broken by some blow or simply ravaged by the gulls that had been feeding on her. And I wasn’t about to roll her over. I would deliver her to the authorities as I had found her.