Page 59 of Swept Away

“Right, yeah, exactly,” Zeke says, not looking at me.

“And we might actually starve, you know. This is serious.”

“Of course.”

The same voice that told me to rest says,You love that bird.

“Just don’t give him loads, OK?” I say. “Hold some back.”

The smile Zeke shoots me could melt chocolate. “Yeah,” he says, reaching for the bag again. “I’ll be sensible.”

I settle back into the pillows with an exhale as I hear him step out onto the deck, the door swinging shut behind him. The rainwater I’ve been drinking all night seems to have worked a smallmiracle on my body—I can almost feel myself plumping up, as though my blood is flowing faster. I nibble at the edge of my precious digestive and my mouth even manages to generate a small flood of saliva.

“Lexi!” Zeke roars.

My nausea evaporates for a moment, replaced by something sharper: panic.

“What? Zeke?”

“Can you come out onto the deck?” He’s already back in the bedroom doorway, hair wild, eyes wilder.

“I think so?” I say, swiveling my legs out of the bed and standing gingerly, reaching for the arm he offers me.

Everything wobbles around the edges when I stand, as if I’ve just twisted a camera lens and lost focus. We move through the living area so slowly, and I keep saying to Zeke, “Tell me, tell me,” but he just says, “Come on, you have to see.” The deck is slippery; I have to step over our various rainwater-collection bowls, registering the volume in each one even as I follow the path of Zeke’s finger.

“Look,” Zeke says, pointing to the horizon above the body of the boat.

It’s…a building. That’s what it looks like. A strange gray building on thick stilts in the water, distant, but directly ahead of us, at twelve o’clock toThe Merry Dormouse’s nose. It looks monstrous, like something out of aTransformerfilm, and as I stare at it, I begin to see that it’s a platform with metal structures on its top. The legs are reddish; there’s some kind of crane on there, tilted at an awkward angle, like a bird’s neck looking down into the water below.

“An oil rig,” Zeke says. His voice is thick with excitement and his hands are gripping the rail. “It’ll be full of workers, Lexi.People. We’re safe. We’re saved.”

I double over—knocked by the boat, and by the shock of it.

I fall to my knees. We’re safe. The cold seawater soaks into my socks and the deck scrapes my bare skin.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” I chant, pressing my forehead against my arm. There is nothing like this—nothing like the rising, growing, exploding euphoria of believing things will actually be OK. A bowl of rainwater tips against my thigh, dousing me, and I hardly feel the cold, like it’s happening to somebody else.

Zeke’s laughing. “We did it. We did it. We didn’t die!”

The realist in me sits up at this. “We still need to get there,” I say, resting back on my heels and reaching one hand out to hold myself steady.

Zeke peers over the side of the boat. I hate it when he does that. He always leans so far, like a little boy who can’t resist going right to the edge.

“Honestly, it looks like the current is taking us roughly the right way,” he says. “Can we use the sail and the helm? They’ll send someone out when we get close enough anyway.”

I get to my feet and stare out at the water, the oil rig, the water, the oil rig. I can’t believe it’s real. For a second, I think to myself,What if we’ve gone mad and it’s a mirage?before realizing that I have no idea what an oil rig looks like, so this would have been some seriously inventive imagining on my part.

Zeke and I busy ourselves unfastening the sail. I pull my hair up into a tangled bun with the band around my wrist, wincing as I tug at the tender skin of my head injury. I imagine the people on that oil rig, what they’ll think, how they’ll greet us. How they’ll look at the bump on my head and the cut across Zeke’s stomach with first aid kits to hand, how they’ll sterilize them, give us bottled water…

Zeke’s talking, not really saying much in particular—“Oh my God, I knew we’d do it, I knew we’d be all right”—but I feel as though I’m floating, only half here. I’m going to see Mae again. I’m going to get home. I cling to the flagpole asThe Merry Dormouselurchesher way onward and I feel a pang of genuine love for her. What a boat. She’s been a hero, and her job is almost done. Thank God—I’m not sure how many more ways we can plug up that shower drain, and though Zeke’s not talked to me about it, I know he’s been fixing up holes in the ceiling ever since the rain started.

The next hour is another crash course in sailing, if you can even call it that. There are a terrifying few minutes in which we steer ourselves the wrong way in the wind, and every so oftenThe Merry Dormouseseems to rear forward when the sail fills with air, and my stomach drops, because I’m sure we’ve gone too hard and she’ll dip her nose into the sea and upend us. I’m dogged with a total conviction that something will go wrong any second: we’ll hit something, or capsize, and the people on the rig won’t get to us in time to save us.

Eugene squawks anxiously as Zeke and I alternate between grappling with the billowing sail and turning the wheel; both of us hit ourselves with the boom hard enough to bruise our already-battered bodies, and we’re slow, breathless, weak. But we’re heading the right way. We’re heading toward safety. For the first time in so long, we’re not just floating helplessly—we’re doing something to save ourselves.

The closer we get to the rig, the more detail we can see: the gaps between the metal structures, showing tiny fragments of sky; the worn-down stripes on the great concrete legs, battered by the sea. At some point Zeke hands me a slice of sweating cheese on a stale cracker and I eat it without thinking, hardly noticing the taste until it makes me nauseous again and I gag over the side of the boat.

As the rig looms larger, we each snatch a moment to go inside and pack up our belongings. It’s bizarre. I stand in the bedroom, and for a moment I am genuinely unable to fathom the idea of leaving this tiny space.

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