The Great Wide Sea Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  THE BOAT

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE BAHAMAS

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE STORM

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE ISLAND

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  HOME

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Acknowledgements

  VIKING

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2008 by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © M. H. Herlong, 2008

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Herlong, M. H.

  The great wide sea / by M. H. Herlong.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Still mourning the death of their mother, three brothers go with their father on

  an extended sailing trip off the Florida Keys and have a harrowing adventure at sea.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-64233-3

  [1. Sailing—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 4. Grief—Fiction.

  5. Survival—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H431267Gr 2008

  [ Fic]—dc22

  2008008384

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  In memory of Stephen Marlowe, my teacher

  GERRY SAYS HE remembers the sun and the fish. All the fish. The silver ones swimming around the rudder at anchor. The brilliant blue ones flashing across the fiery red coral. The big black ones curving like shadows at our bow as we sailed with the Gulf Stream.

  But the one he remembers best, he says, is the first one he stabbed with his spear. He tells how he shoved the spear down right into the flounder’s head, how he pulled the still-struggling fish from the water, and how he laughed—because he was six years old and could kill a fish.

  He remembers all that, he says, but nothing more. He says he was too little when it happened. He says I have to tell him stories.

  So I do.

  Once upon a time there was family. Then a boat. And then islands.

  Once upon a time three boys were lost at sea. One almost drowned. One almost went crazy. One fell off a cliff.

  Gerry says I’m making it up, but I’m not. Everything I tell him is the truth. I just don’t tell him everything.

  I don’t tell about the morning we woke up and Dad was gone. I don’t talk about the storm. Or when we wrecked on the coral reef. I don’t talk about—I never will talk about—when I left Gerry alone, standing there on the empty beach of that desert island with Dylan dying at his feet.

  I don’t tell stories about those things and I don’t need to. Because Gerry is lying. He remembers it all. Sometimes when we go sailing now we watch the shore slip by and we remember together. Not with words or even looks but with blood rhythm—with the rush of electricity from one body to another. I pull in the mainsheet. I lean on the tiller. I tighten the jib. The boat flies.

  And I don’t need to tell stories. I sit close to my brothers on the rail and I get dizzy. Like when you stump your toe and it hurts so bad you think you’ll faint. The world spins backwards. I lose my place in my life. I’m running and I don’t know if I’ll make it in time. Then it’s all starting over again. And it’s not a story at all. It’s real and I am fifteen.

  THE BOAT

  CHAPTER ONE

  WE DROVE ALL night to get to the boat. I kept asking Dad to stop and let us sleep, but he always said, “No, I want to get a little farther,” until Gerry fell asleep leaning against the door, his mouth open and drooling, and Dylan tilted over sideways on the backseat. Somewhere south of Miami, we pulled over at an all-night gas station.

  “Dad, please,” I said when we got back in the car.

  “It’s too late,” he said, and drove us back onto the dark highway.

  So I just sat there for hours, watching us rush into the hot, muggy June night and thinking about the spiky palm trees and mosquitoes and strange, quick lizards scuttling off into the crumbling asphalt along the edge of the road. When we finally made the Keys, my head was aching and the sun was just rising behind us.

  “Look.” It was Dylan’s voice. “The morning star.”

  I looked. Dylan was barely eleven, but he knew about stars. One star hung there in the sky, still bright enough to be seen in the first light of morning.

  “It’s Venus,” Dylan said.

  I closed my eyes, waiting for Dad to start some story or recite some poem, but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything. Even the way he looked had completely changed. He had wrinkles around his eyes. The gray in his hair shone in the dim morning light.

  I shifted in my seat to see Dylan. “It’s not a star,” I said. “It’s a planet.”

  Gerry stirred in the backseat. “It is a star,” he said, wiping his face with Blankie.

  “You’re only five,” I said, turning back around in my seat. “What do you know?”

  “Dylan says it’s a star,” Gerry said firmly. “And Dylan knows better than you.”

  “Be quiet,” Dad said. “All of you.”

  I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the car window and stared out at the gray ocean. I still couldn’t believe it. One day he had just announced we were going sailing for a year. A whole year. “Like on the lake, Ben,” he had said. “You’ll love it.”

  “I won’t love it.”

  “But you love sailing.”

  “I want a car. Mom said I could get a car when I turned sixteen. Five months and I’m
supposed to get a car.”

  “That’s not important anymore.”

  “It is important. She said—”

  “Enough,” he’d said. “Just stop.”

  I had stopped. What difference did it make what I said? He had already decided.

  In Key West, Dad found us a room in a motel near the marina where the boat was docked. Gerry curled up on one bed, holding Blankie bunched in front of his face. I stretched out next to him. Dylan made a pallet on the floor. Dad had the second bed all to himself. I lay watching his still profile backlit through the curtains. Suddenly he sat up trembling and covered his eyes. Then he stood, wiped his face with his shirttail, and picked his way through the litter on the floor to step outside and close the door quietly behind him.

  I eased out of bed and opened the curtain a tiny bit to look out. Our window faced the parking lot, but I could see a scrap of the marina if I pressed my cheek against the glass. Dad was right. I did love to sail. He and I had explored the lake together for hours, just the two of us. By the time I was twelve, he had let me go out alone on the twenty-two-footer we kept on the lake. For the last year, I didn’t even have to ask. I knew all the coves in the lake. I knew the shallows and the deep trench running through the middle. I loved to sail. But I also loved to come home, and this time we weren’t coming home.

  I climbed back into the bed, but I couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was the way Dylan slept so soundly, not moving at all. Or maybe it was the little sniffing, crying noises Gerry was making. He had dropped Blankie on the floor, and his thin, careful fingers were searching for it in his sleep. As I reached to pick it up, he suddenly rose up on his knees, his hair sweaty, his eyes wide open.

  “Mom?” he called. “Mom?”

  I sat up in front of him, but he looked through me.

  “Mom!” His voice went shrill. “Mom!”

  I touched Blankie lightly to his face. “Gerry,” I said, “wake up.”

  He turned slightly and saw me. His face crumpled. He took Blankie.

  “Ben,” he whispered. Then he flopped over and curled into a ball facing the wall.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He jerked his head in a quick nod and covered his face with Blankie.

  I looked up and there was Dad, standing halfway in the door.

  “He was crying again?” Dad asked.

  I didn’t say anything. I just lay down beside Gerry and shut my eyes. After a minute or two, Dad left. I wished I could shut my ears too. Why did I have to hear every sound? The maid’s cart scraping from room to room. Cartoons on the TV next door. Gerry still whimpering a little. And Dylan so utterly quiet.

  I felt as if I hadn’t slept in months, as if I had lain in my bed every night, my mind filling up with things while I stared at the stars Dylan and Mom had stuck on the ceiling of our room two summers ago. If I was lucky, my mind would eventually start playing the tapes of a story I liked to tell myself, like the one about the car I was going to get. If I was not lucky, my mind would start playing the other tapes.

  In that motel room, my mind started playing the other tapes—over and over. And the first scene was always the same. My mind saw the phone just before it was going to ring. It was lying beside Dad on the sofa, white against the dark blue. I knew it was going to ring, and I couldn’t stop it.

  It was April, early afternoon, and Dad and I were watching the ball game together on TV. Our team was ahead, but the game was slow and I felt sleepy. Gerry had already fallen asleep on the sofa, his hair still damp from his swimming lesson. Dylan was upstairs. His birthday was next month and he was studying telescope catalogs. At least that’s what he told me later.

  Mom had left in the car about twenty minutes before to get ice cream.

  Then the phone rang.

  Sometimes when you read a book or watch a TV show, you see the people and you think, Don’t do that. Don’t open that door. Don’t answer that phone. You know everything is about to change. “Stop!” you want to say. “Rewrite the story. Rewind the tape. Don’t let it happen that way.” But you can’t. The people always open the door or answer the phone. The bad thing always happens, and there is nothing you can do about it.

  So Dad answered the phone.

  “Yes?” he said. Then, “Yes,” again. “Oh, my God.” A longer pause. “Of course. Right away.”

  He put the phone down.

  Everything had changed and there was nothing we could do about it.

  Two blocks away, a guy had run a red light. He had killed Mom. Her clothes were still in her closet. Her lotions were still in the bathroom. You could still smell her little sachet things when you walked into the bedroom.

  But Mom was gone.

  I felt like slamming my fist through the motel ceiling above me. I felt like I had bad breath. I felt like I stank. I felt if I didn’t sleep soon, I’d explode like a white-hot star, and everything would disappear—Florida, the boat, my brothers, and Dad, everything—sucked into the deep, black hole that was me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MY MOM’S NAME was Christine Emily Byron and this is what I can tell you about her. The last time I hugged her, I was exactly as tall as she was. Your own mom always seems so big, and then one day you have this shock of realizing you are as tall as she is. Then you see that after all she is small.

  Mom had dark hair that she always kept in a ponytail. She wore jeans, never skirts. She took care of the house and she worked in the garden and she teased Dad, especially when he quoted poetry at us. Like, maybe we’d be taking a walk in the woods by the lake in the fall and Dad would stop and sweep his arms toward the trees and say, “ ‘Margaret, are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving?’” And Mom would say, “Jim, how many times do I have to tell you—my name is Christine.”

  When Mom died, everyone wanted to help. Dad’s sister flew down. The other professors at the university took over Dad’s classes. My friend Andrew even wanted to take me to a game, but I didn’t go. I stayed at home with my brothers while Dad sat in the dark and read poems. He’d be quiet for a while and then read us a line. “Listen to this, boys,” he would say. “‘Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ ” Then he would cover his face with his hands. After a while he would say, “Isn’t it time for you guys to be in bed?” So we went to bed and we didn’t come back downstairs. We didn’t want to surprise him. It was too easy to catch him crying.

  When it was time to dress for the funeral, he went into his room and shut the door. Usually he helped with our ties, but this time I had to do it for everyone. When we were walking to the car, he stopped and looked at us.

  “Did you tie your own ties?” he asked.

  “Ben did it,” Gerry said.

  “He did a good job,” Dad said, then rubbed Gerry’s head.

  “You messed up his hair,” I said.

  “He didn’t,” Gerry said.

  “Not much,” Dylan said quietly.

  “I like it this way.” Gerry held his hands over his head.

  “Be quiet,” Dad said. “All of you. Get in the car.”

  We got in the car, and I sat in the front seat. Mom’s seat, I thought, and closed my eyes. When we got home, I was so tired I wanted to go straight to bed, but all these people were at our house, standing around talking in low voices and eating sandwiches. I went to the kitchen, and there was Aunt Sue, loading another platter.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked her.

  “He’s upstairs.”

  “He belongs down here.”

  “He’ll be down soon,” she said, and put her arm around my shoulders. She squeezed me a little, then stepped away. “Give him time, Ben. He’ll be all right.”

  I picked up one of the sandwiches. “It’s not fair,” I said, and squashed the sandwich in my hand.

  “Ben! Don’t do that.” She unrolled my fingers, took out the sandwich, and dropped it in the trash. She handed me a cloth to clean my hand, then picked up the platter of sandwiches and left.
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br />   I wiped my hand and turned to lean my forehead against the refrigerator. It was cool and vibrated slightly. It would have been good, I thought, to disappear right then. To disintegrate. Then the refrigerator cycled off. I stood up straight and turned around. Gerry was standing in the kitchen looking at me. He held Blankie bunched up against his mouth. He lowered it a little. “Are you okay, Ben?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m okay, too,” he said.

  I sat in a chair and pulled him into my lap. He leaned his head against my shoulder. That close up, I could smell Blankie. It smelled like sleeping and yesterday and all our lives before today.

  I picked up a corner and pressed it to my nose.

  “It smells good, doesn’t it,” Gerry said, and I nodded.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THAT FIRST MORNING in Key West I woke up with Blankie half under my head and Gerry breathing in my face. Dylan was looking out the window. When I sat up, he turned toward me.

  “Dad’s gone to see the boat and do some shopping at the marina store,” he said.

  “Great,” I said. “What time is it?”

  “Lunchtime,” he answered.

  We called for pizza. When I ate the last piece, I balled up my napkin and tossed it in a perfect arc into the trash can. “Three points,” I said. Dylan smoothed his napkin on his thigh. I grabbed it and tossed it in too. “Three points again. The champ rules!”

  Nobody said anything.

  “What is the name of this boat again?” I asked.

  “Chrysalis,” Dylan said.

  “Does it mean anything?” Gerry asked. He threw his napkin. It fell on the floor.

  “It’s a scientific term,” Dylan said. “It’s the cocoon stage of a butterfly or moth.”

  Gerry picked up his napkin, sat down, and threw again. He missed again.

  “Then why don’t they just say ‘cocoon’?” Gerry asked, and tried his napkin again. Missed. It fell on the bed.