Gasp (Visions) (12 page)

So now Trey and Rowan say hey to Kate like it’s no big deal to see her again. But I get all nervous. I guess . . . I guess since I’ll never talk to Sawyer’s parents, I want her to like me. To have someone in Sawyer’s family approve of me.

“Hey,” I say. “Thanks for the bags of stuff after the fire. We all really appreciated it.”

“No sweat,” she says, and she gives me a hug. “Nice to see you.”

I think I’m in supercrush mode with this girl. Not really, but yeah.

Sawyer introduces Ben to her, and then she’s out the door, yelling behind her, “Don’t eat the prosciutto or salami, I need them for a charcuterie plate!”

And that does it. Because nobody should get between a girl and her pork. I’m in love.

But there is a time for crushes, and that time is not now. And maybe not ever, if we don’t figure out how to survive this sinking ferry.

I bring out the sketches
from Tori, and we take turns discussing our findings so far.

Trey starts. “The good news is that the sinking ferry isn’t going to happen this week.”

I look over from the well-stocked refrigerator, skeptical. “Because?”

“Because the ferry service hasn’t started for the season yet. It starts a week from today, and there are only two ferry departure times per day. Six in the morning and twelve thirty. Since Tori sees a dim spot of light low in the sky, and the sun rises in Milwaukee ten to twenty minutes before six over the next few weeks, I deduce that this disaster happens on the early morning ferry. No idea
what day, but I think this narrows down the time of day pretty nicely.” Trey looks up from his notes.

“What about the Muskegon departures?” I ask, checking the fridge for snacks.

“Too late in the day to line up with the sun’s position.”

“Wow,” I say. “Have we ever known the time of something this early on? This is huge. Good work, Trey.”

Trey leans back in his chair, looking smug. “I know,” he says.

I slice some chorizo and two apples and assemble a little Kate-inspired charcuterie plate of my own, adding cheese, crackers, and some walnuts I find in a cupboard, and bring it to the table for everybody to share. “What else do we have?”

My little rookie Rowan raises her hand, which is kind of adorable. “I checked the ten-day forecast and there are small chances of thunderstorms next Monday through Wednesday. That’s all I can get so far. I’ll keep an eye on it, though.”

Ben adds, “I’ve done some more Lake Michigan and ferry research. There’s definitely an issue with riptides in the lake, especially in relationship to breakwalls, which is what I’m guessing the ferry hits and what eventually causes it to sink. The riptides might pull down individuals in the water. Added to that, water temps are still in the forties this time of year, and anybody who doesn’t make it into a lifeboat is in serious trouble.”

He continues. “As for the ferry, I think it would have to hit that breakwall with quite a bit of force to damage it enough to eventually sink it. With the waves that high and visibility low, I could see it happening, but my guess is that Tori’s vision isn’t showing something. No little bump or glitch, as she said, would be enough to have that kind of effect.”

“She said there were people on the floor of the ferry before the bump,” Rowan says. “Maybe it hits more than once, and hard enough that people would be injured.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Ben says. “Speaking of lifeboats, the ferry has plenty of them, with more than enough room for a full-capacity voyage. But something must go wrong for one to be floating away empty. Could be the ferry’s tilting—that would make it hard to exit from one side.”

I glance at Sawyer, who is quiet at the stove, sautéing onions and garlic and chopping up several Roma tomatoes.

“Okay,” I say. “I just have to tell you that it’s such a relief not to have to do all of this myself. Thanks to all of you for putting so much work into this. We’re making a lot of progress here.”

“Sure,” Ben says.

“You’re welcome,” says Rowan.

Sawyer turns around, agitation clear on his face. “Yeah, it’s all really helpful, but what I’d like to know is how the
hell we stop a ferry from hitting a breakwall and sinking during high seas.” He rips his fingers through his hair, which he does when he’s frustrated—I know that well enough by now.

“We’re working on that,” I say coolly. “In fact, that’s what I’d like to talk about next.”

He doesn’t reply, so I go on. “Ben, do you have access to a boat that you’d feel comfortable driving—or sailing, I mean—in weather like that?”

Ben knits his brows. “I have access to boats, yes. But I’m not qualified to sail safely in those conditions.”

“Okay, that’s what I figured. No problem, it was just a thought. Next, I don’t think we try to stop the ferry from hitting the breakwall. That’s impossible. We can try to stop the ferry from sailing, but that kind of action never seems to work for us, right? Making strange claims of future disasters will only get us in trouble. I mean, I couldn’t stop the snowplow driver from driving. We couldn’t stop the shooters from attacking. So I’m assuming rather than wasting time trying to get the captain to stop the voyage, our job is to keep people from dying in the confusion that follows the impact.” I pause and look at the solemn faces looking back at me. “Right? That’s been our job all along. We do our best to stop people from dying.” I glance at Sawyer, who is half turned, listening.

“Okay,” he says. “And?”

“And so we need to be on that ferry.”

The only sound is a wooden spoon scraping the bottom of a stew pot. I smell fresh basil.

After a moment, Sawyer says, “How do we save twenty or thirty people from drowning when we’re on a sinking ferry?”

“By organizing the passengers and keeping them calm. Handing out life vests and helping the crew with the lifeboats. Taking charge of the situation and trying to make sure that the runaway lifeboat doesn’t get detached from the ferry until it’s full of people.”

“And when the ship sinks?”

“We . . .” For the first time I falter. “We get into a lifeboat too.”

“And then?”

“We get rescued,” I say. I look down at the table, staring at the remains of the charcuterie plate, no longer hungry.

Sawyer pulls an electric hand blender from a cupboard and pulverizes the contents of his stewpan into soup while the rest of us imagine ourselves in lifeboats, crashing into breakwalls and splitting our heads open on rocks.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I stay at Sawyer’s when
everybody else leaves.

“The soup smells delicious,” I say, trying to get a peek at it over Sawyer’s shoulder. “Looks great too.” I wrap my arms around his waist and he pours a splash of cream into the pot. I can feel his muscles tense as he stirs.

“Almost ready,” he says. He takes a clean spoon and dips it in. “Wanna test it?”

“Of course,” I say. I blow on it and take a sip, closing my eyes to savor it. “This tastes like a cold fall day,” I say. “I forgot it was April.
Delizioso
.”

He turns off the burner and faces me. I put my arms around his neck and he slides his around my waist, and he looks into my eyes, not smiling.

I look into his eyes, and I don’t smile either. “Talk to me,” I say softly. “What happened to you?”

His eyes narrow a fraction. “Nothing,” he says.

I tip my head slightly. “So what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

Our faces are inches apart.

“What is it about the water?”

He breaks his gaze. “Oh. That. It’s no big deal.”

I stare at him. “Come on.”

He loosens his grasp on my waist and turns to look at the soup. “Okaaay,” he says. “When I was ten I was kayaking on a lake with my brother. There were two guys on Sea-Doos screwing around nearby, doing stupid stunts. One of them fell off and his Sea-Doo kept going for a ways after the motor cut, and the guy wasn’t wearing a life vest or anything.”

Sawyer stirs and shrugs his shoulders. “He was trying to swim to the craft but he was starting to struggle, so my brother and I glided over to try to give him a hand. I took off my life vest and threw it to him while my brother tried to reach out to him. The guy was starting to freak out, and he grabbed the side of the kayak. With my brother leaning out in that direction, the kayak flipped.”

“Oh no,” I whisper.

“Oh yeah. So basically I wasn’t prepared. I panicked. My mind went blank. I was underwater, and when I finally
had enough sense to realize the kayak wasn’t flipping all the way around, I tried to get out. My leg got stuck. And the Sea-Doo guy was holding on to the bottom of the kayak, so I couldn’t flip it upright again.”

He pulls two bowls from the cupboard. “I sucked in some water and started to black out. And you know what’s so scary about starting to drown? You stop moving. You can’t struggle, because you go into shock, and you have no oxygen, so you can’t make noise. You just go limp.”

I can hardly breathe, listening to him. “What happened?”

“My brother got me out, and I coughed and puked and started breathing on my own again. And I was fine. But I never went in any body of water over my head again.”

He gets spoons for us and ladles the soup into the bowls. “I’m not a strong swimmer, either. So.” He shrugs and pulls a chair out for me, and we sit and eat our soup, even though I can hardly get it down after hearing that.

“You don’t have to do this, you know. You can stay back on shore and help from there.”

He smiles and draws his finger over the back of my hand. “And that’s why I didn’t tell you this before.”

“I’m just saying—”

“I know. And I’m going with you, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I’m dealing with it, okay? And this time I’m keeping my damn life vest to myself.”

Tori calls every day. Things
were better for a day or two after we met at her house, she says, but as the week progresses the vision is growing stronger and more intense. By Thursday afternoon she can’t watch TV because it’s just the vision on a loop, and on Friday it’s reflected in all the windows in her house.

“Are you sure there’s nothing more?” I ask. I’m getting impatient. We really need to figure out what day this will happen.

“Nothing,” Tori says. There’s an edge to her voice now, and I know she’s suffering. “I’m looking at everything. I promise.”

“I know.” I don’t know what else to say. “Be sure to tell me if . . . well, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“And e-mail me a detailed list of what all the drowning people look like and what they’re wearing.”

“Got it.”

We hang up. I dig the heels of my hands into my eye sockets and yell out my frustration.

Rowan comes running into the bedroom holding a dish towel. “What? Did something happen?”

“No. I’m just frustrated.” I fall back on my bed, and Rowan sits next to me. She checks her phone.

“I’ve been watching the weather. There’s still a small chance of thunderstorms pretty much every day next week, but the highest chance is Monday.”

“How big is the chance on Monday?”

“Forty percent, and windy. Ten to twenty percent on the other days.”

I stare at the ceiling. “My gut says this is coming soon. It’s getting really bad for Tori. And that’s always been an indicator that we’re either doing something wrong or the tragedy is imminent. And after doing this a few times, I’m feeling relatively confident that we’re getting it right except for knowing the day. So that makes me think it’s imminent.”

“Like Monday imminent?”

“Like Monday imminent.” I close my eyes, trying to really think it through. I muse, “Do we take a chance and
get tickets for Monday’s six a.m. voyage? If we’re wrong, we’ll miss school, and that’ll be really hard to explain if we have to do it again later in the week. Not to mention expensive. And since none of us is working much at the moment, the money stash is definitely dwindling.”

“How much is a ticket?”

“Like eighty-five bucks.”

“Sheesh.”

“I know, right? Not only do we have to save people, but we also have to spend big bucks to do it. This is getting outrageous.” I turn my head to look at Rowan and smile. “We could always leave you home and save some money.”

“No!”

“I’m kidding. We need you. Twenty-some people to save—heck, if we had any more friends I’d recruit them, too. We need all the help we can get.” I size her up. “I wonder if they have children’s tickets. If you can act like a little kid, we might be able to save money by getting you one.”

She snorts. “Yeah, I’ll tape my boobs down and wear my Burger King crown. That’ll fool ’em. They see five-foot-seven-inch-tall, hippy eleven-year-olds all the time.” She leers at me. “You, on the other hand . . .”

“Did you just call me short?”

“And, apparently, boobless.”

“Sawyer doesn’t think so. How about Charlie? Oh,
wait, he can’t even tell because he’s your fake Internet boyfriend.”

“Shut your face, I hate you.”

“I hate you, too.”

•  •  •

That night Sawyer comes over with a diagram he somehow found of the ferry, showing the locations of the lifeboats and all the life vests. We study the diagram and Trey takes a photo of it and e-mails it to Ben so he can look at it too.

On Friday night we check the weather forecast. It’s unchanged. Ben and Sawyer come over while my parents are out at some Friday-night food truck festival.

My phone vibrates. It’s Tori with her daily call.

I hold my hand up to hush everybody, and answer. “Hey, Tori, how’s it going?”

“There’s something new,” she says, almost breathless.

“Finally,” I say. “What is it?” I cover the mouthpiece and whisper, “She says there’s something new.”

“Two things, actually. The first thing is inside the glassed-in deck. There’s, like, a banner of some sort. Like a long birthday banner, you know? I can’t read what it says, not even with my mom’s binoculars, but I got to thinking that maybe on the first day of the season they might put up a banner of some sort, don’t you think?”

I shrug. “Yeah, sounds reasonable.”