Blue Moon (38 page)

“On the porch,” Cass said, realizing she’d lost track for a moment. Josie would be freezing, she’d been so intent playing in her snow pile. “Will you get her to come in, honey?”

“Sure,” Belinda said.

Bonnie just stared at Cass, as if she were waiting for something. She had the most terrible expression of fear in her eyes. “What’s wrong?” Cass asked.

“The time,” Bonnie said gently, stepping closer. “It’s getting dark out. It’s sunset.”

Cass went to the window. Do it, Billy, she said to herself. You went down on the boat you named after me. I can’t live with that. I need you back so I can tell you I love you. Cass clenched her fists, closed her eyes, concentrated with all her might. Do it, she thought. Send a flare. Send it now. Now. Now.

“It’s over,” Sid said. The sun’s last rays lit the western sky, settling across the water in silvery lilac ripples. “They’re quitting.”

The plane’s engine chopped overhead, louder and louder, as it beat a path homeward. T.J. watched it come, its lights unbelievably bright. He’d been watching the plane all day. First he’d hear it, then it would appear, then it would be gone. But it always came back.
It had comforted and excited T.J., both at the same time. Once it had flown in circles, and all the boats had driven over.

All the boats but John’s. John knew where he was going.

“Whatever they’re spotting, it isn’t Billy,” John had said. “Billy’s in the current by now.”

“The current?” T.J. had asked.

“The Gulf Stream. Good thing we have such a big motherfucking diesel, because he’s drifting fast.”

John had said the planes were looking in the wrong place, but T.J. didn’t care. At least they were looking.

“Shit,” Sid said, watching the plane.

“Now’s when they’d do some good,” John said, peering up through the wheelhouse window. “Now’s when they’d spot a flare.”

“They can’t quit,” T.J. said. They needed the planes: John, Sid, and T.J., the other guys on the other boats, and the pilots were part of a team, out to save his father.

“They have orders to quit,” John said.

“So what? They can keep looking if they want to,” T.J. said, positive they would want to.

Sid made a gross laughing snort. “Son, the name of the game is moola. Costs a fortune to run a rescue operation. Fifty, a hundred grand, who the hell knows?” Now he made a disgusted snort. “Men’s lives are at stake, and the Coast Guard worries about its bottom line.”

T.J. couldn’t believe it. The plane flew overhead and didn’t turn around. It just kept flying.

“He can’t quit!” T.J. yelled.

“Come on, Billy,” John said. “Come on, man.”

“What?” Sid asked.

“One flare, Billy,” John said. “It’s dark now.”

T.J. ran out of the wheelhouse. “Poor kid,” he heard Sid say softly. T.J. tore across the deck, to the life raft. John had shown it to him the day before, when it looked as if the weather was getting really bad. “Just in case,” John had said. At the time, all T.J. had been able to do was stare, thinking, My dad’s in this storm in one of those?

He dove into the raft, rummaged around, found the flare gun. It weighed a ton, much more than the pistol Josie had thrown in the suds hole. What an asshole he’d been, pointing it at his own head. Alison seemed like a million years ago.

He lifted the flare gun, pointed it straight up. Except for Venus and the plane’s lights, moving away fast, the sky was totally dark. T.J. shot off the flare.

It zipped through the sky, a red dot. Then it exploded into a fireball, red sparkles flying everywhere. He shot again.

“
What the fuck?
” John yelled, racing across the deck. He yanked the flare gun out of T.J.’s hand. T.J. glanced at the wheelhouse, saw Sid frowning at the helm. He felt the engines slow.

“If they see flares they have to keep searching,” T.J. said, shoving John back.

“You little shit, you don’t know anything. It’s already gone, T.J. The plane is gone. Messing with my flares, you could have set my fucking boat on fire.”

But T.J. had his eyes on the sky. Here it came. The plane had turned around, was coming this way.

“I’ll be damned,” John said.

T.J. just watched the lights getting bigger, drawing nearer.

“This is the wrong place,” John said. “They’re going to be searching the wrong place.”

“At least they’re still searching,” T.J. said, watching the horizon.

With the sun gone, the cold came back. The man arched his back. He tried to touch the other man, but he couldn’t reach. He knew there was something he should remember. He knew there was something he should do. Shoot, he told himself. Shoot. He heard himself laugh, and he wondered what was so funny. Then it came to him: how was he supposed to shoot when he couldn’t even move? But the word locked in his mind, so he could hear the sound, like a whistle, and see the letters.
Shoot.
Then it was gone.

After the sun had been down for an hour and the phone hadn’t rung, Cass lowered her head to the table and started to cry. Belinda,
Josie, and Bonnie stood there watching her, but Cass felt she was alone. She heard her own sobs ringing in her ears, and she couldn’t stop.

“They’re going to stop looking now, aren’t they?” Belinda asked, her voice high and thin. “They said they’d look till the sun set, and now it’s set. Are they going to stop?”

“Yes, dear,” Bonnie said.

Belinda burst into tears.

“Bob?” Josie asked, her voice anxious, tapping Cass’s hand. “Bob?”

When Cass didn’t look up, Josie began to fret. “Eh, eh, eh,” she started. But Cass no longer heard her own daughters. She no longer heard Bonnie, trying to calm Josie, trying to comfort Belinda. She didn’t hear Bonnie, her own sister, whisper in her ear, “Cass, don’t give up. John’s still looking. Other boats are, too.”

Cass didn’t hear, and she didn’t care that the Coast Guard had stopped looking. She didn’t care whether the planes had flown home. She wouldn’t have cared if someone had told her John and T.J. had turned around, abandoning the search.

Cass didn’t hear her own daughters crying, and she didn’t care that the search had been called off. She only cared about one thing, and it wasn’t there. Cass could no longer feel Billy.

Sheila held on tight to her locket. She sensed Eddie’s presence as strongly as she had on their wedding day. The sun had gone down, and streetlights smoothed all the room’s edges into gentle shadows. The grandfather clock ticked along, its pendulum flashing as it caught the light. She could hear Mary and Jimmy talking in their bedroom, their low tones interrupted by Mary’s sudden sobs. A cold wind knifed past a loose windowpane, moving the white curtain. Sheila’s pulse raced with alarm and excitement.

“Eddie, are you there?” she asked.

One of the shadows stirred. “I’m here,” he said.

“I’m so scared for Cass,” Sheila said. “When I lost you, I thought I’d lost everything. Cass and Billy have every bit as much as we did. I can’t bear to think of her.”

Sheila sat still, her heart pounding, waiting for Eddie to come
toward her. She peered at every shadow. Her room held an army of shadows, crouched by her night table, the armchair, the tall clock, her bureau.

“Eddie,” she pleaded, “are you there? I need to know you’re waiting for me.”

But all Sheila heard was a branch scraping her window.

The morning after he’d shot the flares, the third day of the search, T.J. heard John call his name. T.J. had been asleep for two hours, and he felt good. The sun was just coming up, but the air felt warm, like springtime. He grabbed his jacket, from habit, but he didn’t need it. When he stepped outside, his mouth dropped open. He couldn’t believe his eyes.

T.J. stepped into a cloud of parrots. Thousands of bright-green parrots, the kind you’d see in a pet store, fluttered overhead, landing on every surface. They perched in John’s rigging, on the cabin top, on Sid’s head. They crapped all over. First thing T.J. did was yank his Red Sox cap out of his pocket, jam it on his head. He wondered if he was still dreaming.

“What the hell’s going on?” he asked John.

“We’re in the Gulf Stream,” John said, his shirt unbuttoned. “And we have company.”

“Uh, does this happen all the time out here?” T.J. asked, watching the parrots.

“Not to me,” John said.

It felt unbelievably warm. John had an even more serious air about him than T.J. had seen so far on this trip. He squinted right into the sun, unsmiling, like a gunfighter.

“Are the planes still searching?” T.J. asked.

John gestured over his shoulder. “They’re back there. We left them behind a while ago.”

“Oh,” T.J. said, wondering if they should stay with the planes.

“Start looking,” John said, “and don’t even blink. This is where we’ll find your father.”

“How do you know?” T.J. asked, already scanning.

“Like I said, I know where your dad fishes, and I know how tides and currents work. They’re not magical. You just need to factor in
the wind. You use your math.” John craned his neck, looking overhead. “I need you up high. You can scope out a bigger field that way. Can you shinny up the mast?”

“Yeah, I can,” T.J. said.

“Get yourself secure in the rigging.” He handed T.J. a pair of massive binoculars and a red web strap to hold them around his neck.

T.J. waved his arms to scatter the parrots. They didn’t scare easy; they hopped along the yardarm, shifted their claw holds, flapped their wings. T.J. climbed the mast, hanging tight with his left arm. He braced his feet against the nylon lines John had coiled on hooks.

T.J. felt like a whaler in a crow’s-nest. You could see forever from up here, twice as far as from the deck. He wasn’t more than twelve feet up; he imagined how far the planes could see, and he wished one would fly over. That would make him more secure about John’s determination to search the Gulf Stream. It felt so warm, he thought they could be in Florida by now.

The parrots were squawking. T.J. tried to shoo them, but they only moved closer to him. He didn’t want to be distracted from his lookout. Mainly he roved with his naked eyes, from nine o’clock to twelve o’clock, from twelve o’clock to three o’clock, then back again. Tick, tock. He felt like the black-cat clock in Dr. Malone’s office, whose eyes and tail clicked back and forth every second.

He wished he’d see something besides water. A log, some fish jumping, another boat: anything to interrupt the endless stretch of sea. He began to believe there
was
nothing else. He turned his cap around, peak to the back, so it wouldn’t interfere with the binoculars. Not that anything needed a closer look. At least when the planes were around you knew you were going to see something else. You knew that within a few minutes there’d be something other than water. It might not be the raft yet, but it gave you hope.

Sunlight glared, skittering off the water’s surface. Every so often it caught his eye—at ten o’clock, say, when his eyes had ticked over to one. He’d look back fast, afraid he’d missed something. But it would only be sparkles dancing on a wave in the east.

As the sun moved higher, closer to noon, the sparkles spread out. They were everywhere. T.J. couldn’t keep up his rhythm. Over
there! He’d jerk his head, but it would just be sparkles. There! More sparkles. They began to seem alive and mischievous. The sparkles started to scare him; they gave him a headache and made him think he was seeing things. He worried that one would distract him in the single split second his father’s raft was visible. With John and Sid in the wheelhouse, T.J. began to feel like he was the only person onboard. He began to appreciate the parrots.

Their squawks sounded like words, kind of nasal, like Josie. That thought made him laugh a little, picturing a little tiny Josie-bird, all green and serious, sitting on his shoulder. Then he worried he was going crazy. Weren’t there a million sea legends about guys going crazy on voyages?

Old salts who lusted after walruses, thinking they were hot babe mermaids? Sailors who heard their mothers calling their name, only their mothers had been dead twenty years, and it was just the wind? Peg-leg dudes who chased whales around the world. You saw it in the movies all the time. But most of the guys were old, T.J. told himself. Not teenagers.

The sun burned his face. Sparkles covered every surface of the sea, three-hundred-sixty degrees of them. T.J. couldn’t shake this sick feeling that the sun sparkles were evil. They reminded him of devils dancing on white-hot coals. There: one of them burned up.

A devil on fire. Or dying in a pool of blood. T.J. stared at the little red patch. He lifted the glasses, tried to fit the lenses to his eyes as the boat pitched. The bloody sparkle danced in and out of his sight; the other sparkles wanted to hide it, bury it before T.J. could see.

T.J. adjusted the binoculars, fiddling with the wheel. John was steaming ahead too fast. T.J. had to curve his body around the mast to get a better look. He craned, held his body rigid, so he could focus. Hidden in the waves’ trough, then a flash, and finally a wave held it up, like an offering, just long enough for T.J. to get one clear look.

“The raft!” T.J. shouted. “John, my father’s raft! Eight o’clock!”

John brought the boat around. He opened the throttle as far as it would go, but it took forever to cross the water. T.J. stayed in the rigging, the binoculars pressed to his eyes. Now that he’d seen
the raft, had it in his sight, it wasn’t enough. He wanted to see his father. He wanted to see his father jumping up and down, waving like crazy, yelling for help. He didn’t see anyone.

Just the raft, a big red rubber circle, high and rounded; at first T.J. couldn’t tell if it was right-side up or upside down. But as they got closer he saw small dark shadows defining the center hollow, and now T.J. felt glad for the sun, because the shadows meant the raft hadn’t flipped over.

They were close enough so that T.J. didn’t need the binoculars. He stayed on the mast, watching for someone to move. Surely his dad would hear the engine by now. Even if he’d been asleep, he’d hear the noisy pulse and wake up. Or one of the other guys. His father had a crew of four; T.J. didn’t see how they could all fit on that little raft, much less stay so still. T.J. didn’t know what he was thinking, but suddenly his heart felt like it would pound out of his chest.