The small canoe was gone.
Estella
Connie freezes when she sees the space where the little canoe isn't, and I see the horror that crosses her face when she realizes what Carson has done. Only the clap of thunder releases her, and she looks to me, the way she did as a child, because I always know what to do, I always know how to fix it.
It makes me move.
I head to the water's edge and kick my shoes off, my muscles screaming and pulling at me to
get in the water!
âbut I make them wait. I wait and I watch as Connie clutches my arm and yells things I don't hear.
The lightning flashes again and now I am moving into the water, shaking Connie's hands off, scanning the storm-chopped waves.
Nothing.
Now thunder, and now lightning again, slamming almost directly behind us, and now I see it. It could be a trick of the rain, or my mind, or the stuttering white light of the lightning, but I don't wait to figure it out. I plunge into the Gulf and begin to stroke for the tiny thing I saw bobbing on the waves.
It is drifting more than halfway across the cut, and I can only hope to catch it before it is carried past the tip of Little Dune, before it is caught in the current that runs around the curve and out to the deeper Gulf. Before it moves beyond where I can go.
I can't see anything, but I aim as well as I can. For once I embrace the numbers that are racing inside my headâthey allow my muscles to forget that they are exhausted within moments of fighting against the currentâand plow on.
My mind is a machine in my damaged skull.
My body is a machine in the hostile waves.
I pause, just for a second, just for a breath, and when the lightning comes again I see it, and it is not a trick of the rain or my mind or the waves. It is the canoe, bobbing wildly. I can reach it; it won't get away from me. I am about to slam my battered body toward it again when I see something out of the corner of my eye.
Numbers split and crash back together like wild things in my head. And now I have to choose. Because while Carson is obviously in trouble in that canoe, there is worse trouble behind me.
Connie is in the water.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
God forgive me, I hesitated. I watched Estella disappear into the water to save my son and I waited. It was only a moment, but it will haunt me for the rest of my life.
I waited.
But I followed her as soon as I caught sight of that canoe, and I was in trouble the second I hit the water. My arms weren't right, my legs weren't right, my breath wasn't right. I was still gasping from our panicked run down the beach, and when I threw myself at the water in imitation of Estella, I slammed onto, rather than into, a wave. My cotton pajama bottoms tangled around my legs, and I wasted precious moments wrestling them off with my feet while trying to keep my head above the water.
The rain stung my face, the salt water stung my eyes, and I swallowed enough of them both to make me choke. I caught occasional flashes of Estella's arms pinwheeling toward the canoe, toward my son, and I willed her on, even as I struggled after her.
The undertow was stronger than I'd ever felt it, the stuff of my nightmares. It seemed impossible that Estella was moving through it as quickly as she was. She was superhuman; she was strength and speed and fierce will. I made progress, but my muscles were tiring so quickly that I knew I would not make it.
But Estella would. My Sun, my ruler of planets and protector, would make it to my boy. She took my father, but she would give me back my son, and it was a trade I was more than willing to make.
I couldn't go forward, and I couldn't go back, but I could still manage small snatches of air, and I continued to catch sight of her moving inexorably toward my child. I made feeble attempts to get closer to them, knowing it was useless, but once in a while the waves were on my side and I was buoyed toward them through no effort of my own.
I went down, once, twice. I came up a third time, and saw Estella looking toward me.
No! I wanted to scream at her.
No!
But then she moved back under the waves and, relieved that she must have somehow heard me, I tried to float, tried to remember how to stay alive, how to breathe.
But my relief was wasted, because she didn't hear me, we had no telepathy, she was not going to save my son, she was coming for me. She was coming to save me and sacrifice my child. I struggled again, wheeled my arms, churned my legs, and then she had me, and she was yelling, but I couldn't understand what she was saying because I was choking.
And then she flipped me over like a turtle, like I weighed nothing, and I couldn't fight her, and she was tugging me along, hauling herself and me through the waves with one arm. Her legs fought under me and I realized that I was tangling my own legs in them. She had my head completely out of the water, and I tried to fill my lungs, tried to will my body to float up and out of her way, and it suddenly started working.
She tugged and jerked me, allowing me to catch my breath, allowing me enough of a rest to scream out, “Let me go!”
Waves crashed over both of us, but for once it didn't happen as I was breathing in, and my throat was nearly clear of salt water. I barely heard her scream back, “No!”
I found the strength to struggle, and just as I fought my way out of her grasp she allowed me to go, slipping her arm from around my chest, and then she was off like a shot again, with me flailing behind her.
Her ruthless rescue had given me enough of a break that I could fight my way through the waves again. As lightning flared I saw the canoe, and then Estella plowing her way toward it. She would reach it in moments, but it didn't matter, because in that instant of light I saw what I'd been too far away to see before.
The canoe was empty. There was no Carson huddled on the seat, no oar splashing futilely at the waves. It might have made me weak, it should have made me give up, but as soon as I saw that empty canoe a surge of pure adrenaline came over me and I exploded through the water in my own clumsy way, screaming a refusal to the waves and the undertow and the storm.
I felt an arm, felt Estella hauling me in, while her other arm clutched the rim of the canoe, rocking it wildly as she pulled me to it. I grabbed on with both hands, nearly capsizing it as we both struggled to breathe, and as the canoe rocked toward me, I saw him.
Carson stared up at me from the bottom of the canoe, hunched over on the floor of it on his knees, clutching his backpack to him, water sloshing almost halfway up the inside.
“Mommy!” he screamed, lurching toward me. I screamed back at him, something inarticulate and wild, but overlying it I could hear Estella screaming louder.
“No, Carson! You'll flip over!”
Carson froze, his eyes locked on mine. “Stay down, stay down!” I yelled, suddenly realizing that we weren't out of danger. We were holding on to a canoe that was nearly full of water and that was moving swiftly past the point of Little Dune and out to the Gulf. Estella crowded in close to me and yelled directions in my ear.
“Stay on this side, get to the front, and we'll pull it to the island.”
I nodded, unable to speak. But she'd given me a chance, and now that I had something to help keep my head above water, I was going to be strong enough to save my son. She disappeared under the canoe and I walked my hands over each other and kicked hard against the current until I was at the front, where Estella was already waiting for me. She screamed “Swim!” at me, and together we swam, one arm clawing the water, the other hooked over the edge of the canoe, and finally we began to move toward the island.
All I could focus on was a palm tree curving up into the sky, its fronds dancing gracefully in the wind, as though it were a different wind than the one violently buffeting the Gulf. There was nothing graceful about the waves, but they seemed to recede as I concentrated on the fronds, and soon there was nothing else in the world but that palm tree. It filled the sky. It stayed where it was, and stayed where it was, and stayed where it wasâand then it was suddenly closer. I was roping it in, pulling and pulling and pulling through the water.
When Gib appeared before me I stopped swimming, and the bow of the canoe knocked me hard enough on the back of the head that I went under. I knew that he wasn't a mirage only when he hauled me back up, sputtering and gasping, and threw my arms over the edge of the canoe. He grabbed ahold of the bow and began pulling hard.
We made the shore in minutes, the canoe fairly flying through the water. Gib hit the sandy bottom first, scrambling to his feet and hauling the water-heavy canoe while I tried to get my footing and get to Carson all at once. But Tate, hauling the other side of the canoe without me even realizing it, got there first, scooping Carson into his arms and up to the beach with me straggling behind.
Carson struggled to get down. When Tate released him, he ran to me, hitting me hard. I couldn't keep my footing and we both went down, slamming into the wet sand. I pushed his head back so I could see his face, scraping the hair out of his eyes. He squinted up at me, his tears indistinguishable from the rain.
“Are you okay? Are you hurt?” I asked, just as Estella reached us.
He nodded hard, flinging his hair back in his face, and then shoved his head into my shoulder and sobbed as Estella fell to the sand beside us. I leaned into her, and the three of us huddled there on the beach in the storm, trying to catch our breath. Gib and Tate dragged the canoe past us and anchored it in the brushline before coming back.
“Come on,” Tate yelled over a low rumble of thunder, “we've got a fire going at the lighthouse. Gib, you bring up the back, make sure everyone stays together.”
We stumbled after Tate, Estella first, Carson and I clinging together, and Gib behind us. Lightning forked brilliantly over the Gulf and thunder continued to make us jump, but once we were under the dense spread of palms the rain became less of a nuisance. By the time we arrived at the lighthouse we were all shivering. I was torn between going straight to the sputtering fire and getting Carson into the lighthouse and out of his wet clothes.
The fire won, and the heat felt delicious as we caught our breath and leaned into each other.
“How did you know?” I asked, as Tate draped a towel around Carson and me.
He pointed toward Gib. “June called his cell phone. I knew which way the current would take the canoe, but I didn't expect to see the two of you. My God, Connie, you could have drowned.” At this last he looked over at Estella, who was curled over, her head resting on her knees, her shoulders shaking. He quickly put his own jacket around her and she clutched it, looking up at him gratefully.
“I almost did,” I admitted. “Gib, are you all right?” I asked my silent older son. His face was grave, his eyes alternating between Carson and me. He bit his lip and nodded, and I could see his chin quivering slightly. I held an arm out to him and he ducked into it. I held my two boys, Carson now the calmer of the two, while Tate led Estella into the lighthouse.
By the time they returned, Estella dressed in Tate's jacket and boxer shorts and Tate wrapped in a damp towel, the three of us were dry-eyed and silent, having run out of a rushed jumble of
sorry
s and
forgiven
s and declarations of love. Luke and his problems had never been farther from my mind.
We took our turns in the blissfully dry lighthouse, making use of whatever clothing we could scrounge together from Tate and Gib's backpacks. I wound up in one of Gib's oversized T-shirts, Carson in a sweatshirt and shorts that were still eight years away from fitting him. Gib wrapped his sleeping bag around himself.
We were a ragtag exhausted bunch that met around the fire again, and Gib gave me his phone to assure Mother that we were all alive, though we couldn't get back to Big Dune that night. The two police officers who patrolled Big Dune were already at the house, and I spent entirely too long convincing them that a full-scale helicopter and rescue boat operation was unnecessary.
Mother was more difficult to calm down, but she finally accepted the fact that we were stuck. Tate and Gib shared the remains of their dinners, and we spent nearly an hour going over the night, from when I found Carson missing to the shock of Gib rising from the waves. But it wasn't until Tate led Gib, carrying a sleeping Carson, into the lighthouse that Estella and I talked about what she'd done out there and what I hadn't been able to do.
The rain had stopped, but lightning still illuminated the clouds and low thunder rumbled through the trees. We were on opposite sides of the fire, and it was difficult to see her face. I scooted toward her, but she merely stared at the fire.
“Estella,” I said softly. “I don't know what to say.”
“Don't say anything.” She tilted her head to one side, and opened her mouth twice, as though about to speak, but the only things that escaped were small sighs.
“You saved my life,” I said, talking over her when she tried to interrupt. “You did, and you saved Carson's. My son, Estella, you saved my son's life. And I don't care about anything else. I don't care about Daddy, or the books, or the house, or the violins. You can have it all, justâjustâ”
My voice was shaking too much for me to get the rest of the words out, and I finally closed my eyes and gave in to the sobs I'd managed to hold back in front of Gib and Carson. I pleaded with Estella in my mind, silently entreating her to reach out and touch me, to put an arm around me or just place her hand on mine. But the touch didn't come, which made me sob harder. I finally lifted my head, sniffing at the tail end of my humiliating breakdown, to find Estella staring at me.
“Do you still want to know about Pretus?” she asked.