Buried At Sea (13 page)

"She looked so normal sitting in a regular chair."

"There are signs on the highway for Bridgeport. It's spelled with a B."

"Let's take my car," said Shannon. She had mastered the motorcycle-like twist-grip accelerator and brake-lever hand controls on her 740, and when she was driving it was almost as if the accident had never happened. Compared to dragging around on sticks and her wheelchair it was like flying. Light as a bird. Fast as the wind. As they pulled out of the lot, her father said, "I hope you don't mind, we're not going to the Fish House, we're going to Emil's."

"Why?"

"Uh . Fred had fish for dinner last night and he didn't feel like fish. Again."

"Fred?"

"Fred Bernstein. You know—"

"I know Fred. Why is he having lunch with us?"

"I was talking to him on the phone—just asked him last

minute. Give the two of you a chance to get to know each other a little better. Hon, you'

re driving awful fast." "Did Mom set this up?"

Her father squirmed. Caught between her and her mother, he was like a toad trying to escape from two angry cats. "Remember, Fred sold the company:'

"You and Mom say 'sold the company' like he saved the world or something. He sold his company for a bunch of money; now what's he going to do with himself?"

"It made Fred a very wealthy man. And how many men would . ." His voice trailed off as he saw the black hole he was stepping into.

"How many men would go out with a cripple?" "Hon, don't say cripple."

"How many men would date a woman who is ambulatorily challenged?"

"You know what I mean."

It was hard to separate her life from an injury that affected her every waking hour. But she was also still what she had been before the accident: the daughter of a driven, competitive couple obsessed with getting rich. Her father had flourished in government work because he had a taste for power, and when that ran out, he had switched his ambition to money. Her childhood had been a daily battle to escape from their single-minded pursuit of success.

She knew plenty of kids like her, who were growing up in the strivers' towns her parents were drawn to. If they didn't become success-crazed like their parents—consumed with 800 board scores and Ivy League admissions—they found ways to escape: doing drugs, or zoning out in front of a screen, or hanging with a white-bread gang, or, as Shannon had done, skateboarding. One extreme had led to another, surfing, snowboarding, skiing, and rock climbing—all had taken her further and further from her parents' obsessions. Until her luck ran out one dark night and left her their prisoner. She said, "I know two men who would date such a woman."

"Who?"

"Your Fred and my Jim."

"But Fred sold the company."

Shannon gave the accelerator a vicious twist and the big car jumped like a lion.

"The man is loaded," her father said. "He's young. Rich. He doesn't just want to date you. He wants to marry youhon, you're driving extremely fast."

"You know why Fred wants to marry me? Because he thinks a crippled woman would be easier to control. I mean, think about it, Daddy, I can't run away. Pretty good deal for a guy who's built like a pear with dandruff."

"He sold the company—dammit. I won't be around to take care of you forever."

"But Jim will. If I let him."

"Jim can't afford you."

"But he doesn't want to control me. He likes me the way I am."

"He's only a trainer. He's a goddamned fitness instructor, for Christ's sake. I've got forty of 'em working for me and a hundred on the wait list."

"Jim is not just a fitness instructor."

"Oh yeah?"

"He's my fitness instructor."

"If he loves you so much why'd he run off sailing?"

"I made him go sailing. He wouldn't have gone if I hadn't pushed him. I want him to have a chance to test himself. To grow up so he realizes he can do better than a cripple." Ahead, an official-use-only cut crossed over the median. Shannon squeezed the brakes hard and took the crossover in a cloud of burning rubber.

"Jesus Christ! Hey, where are you going?"

"Back to the club. I'm not hungry."

"But Fred is waiting for us."

"Fuck Fred."

"Hon? Why are you crying?"

"I'm crying because Jim loves me and I don't want to wreck his life. . . If I were really a good person . . . and a

lot braver than I am . . . I would write Jim never to come home because I'm marrying your goddamned Fred:' "I was just trying to help."

"I'll bet it never occurred to you that I have to wonder what's wrong with Jim that he needs a crippled girl?"

That silenced her father. He slunk down in his seat, until he heard the siren. "Brilliant. There's a cop chasing us."

"I know." She signaled and pulled over onto the shoulder. "Jim is a good person," she said. "He may not be that ambitious. He may not have enough self-esteem. And he'll never have a company to sell. But what's so terrible about just wanting to do a good job?

"

She extended her license and registration as the cop stormed up. He was a Connecticut state trooper and he looked angry and wary, his hand hovering near his weapon.

"Step out of the car, miss."

"Would you hand me my crutches, please? They're on the backseat." She pointed to the brake lever and a twist-grip accelerator on the steering wheel. "I'm crippled. I can't walk very far."

The trooper swallowed. Then he registered the tears streaking her makeup. "Are you all right, miss?"

"I'm okay."

"Who are you?" he asked her father.

"I'm her father. I'm attempting to explain to my daughter that her mother and I love her very much and only want what's best for her."

The trooper shook his head. "Yeah, well, you could start by telling her she's going to get killed driving like that. Miss, I'm going to issue you a verbal warning. These median crossers are reserved for police use. It's dangerous to turn in them because there's no deceleration lane."

"I'm sorry," said Shannon. She wiped her eyes and smiled.

"Yeah, well, take it easy; you'll live longer."

The cop started to walk away. Then he turned back and spoke in a low voice only Shannon could hear. "Between me and you, miss? I have never seen anyone, patrol officer or

civilian, handicapped or whatever, handle a vehicle better. That was one cool turn."

"I used to ski. I was into speed?'

Jim prepped for their approach to the African coast by reading the Sailing Directions and poring over the charts. Work-boats, tugs, and various support craft churned the waters, the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency publication warned, serving the offshore rigs. Heavy seas displaced marker buoys.

Worse.

"It says they have pirates," he told Will (another fact that Shannon was going to have to discover on her own). "Not like they used to."

"What happens if they attack us?"

"Pray we can pay them off with my stereo and your blue jeans. Don't worry about it. I'll ring up my old pal Steve Kenyon—he's the head American oilman in these parts, which makes him the big chief."

"How's an oil executive going to protect us two hundred miles from the coast?"

"I know for a fact that Steve had one of his helicopters fitted out as a private gunship. And so do the pirates."

While still a full week's sailing from the Niger Delta, they began to see the long, thick silhouettes of oil tankers on every watch. In the final days, they often had one steaming into view while another was prowling the horizon—until the dry Harmattan wind swirled dust off the African continent and blanketed the sea with haze.

With visibility unreliable, Will ran the radar day and night and set the collision alarm to sound whenever a ship came within three miles. At the same time, he moved back into his hammock for his off-watch catnaps. "Not that I doubt you, CC Kid. But two sets of eyes are better than one."

"I'd really prefer you call me Jim."

"In spinning class I'd have preferred you call me Will. Everybody had a name but me. You called me sir." "You were older?'

"It was so good of you to remind me."

"Sorry. How long am I going to remain the CC Kid?" Will laughed. "Till you tell me why you're afraid of the outdoors."

"Hey, I'm pulling my own weight—starting to."

"Given the choice, you'll still stay indoors. When you're outdoors, I've never seen more sunblock and long sleeves—I know, I know. Skin cancer. I should cover up, too." Jim picked up the binoculars and scanned the haze, dividing the circle of the horizon into small increments as Will had taught him. At that moment, a battered tanker flying the Panamanian flag was drawing close. A boat-show-bright Exxon tanker was passing outbound. And a freighter heaped with oil derricks was crossing their wake. "Sorry, Will. This is not indoors."

"What flag is that freighter?"

"I can't see his flag."

"What color is his funnel?"

The ship's smokestack was a stubby appendage to a murky-hued deckhouse. Seen through the haze it could be any light color. He blinked, refocused. "I can't tell. White, maybe, with a couple of thin blue stripes."

"Any red on the white?"

"It could be rust. It could be red."

"Russian. Douse the sails!"

"What for?"

"I told you, they have their hooks in shipping. Douse 'em!" Shannon Riley was reading herself to sleep on Jim's side of the bed, when she was suddenly jolted awake by a creepy sense of menace.

Something had been troubling her since shortly after Jim left. Something he had written in an e-mail, early on, before the course change—even before the Flipper thing—long before she began to regret sending him with Will. She couldn't put her finger on it and found herself rereading the sailing magazines with a vague idea that the mystery—

maybe a

word she was trying to remember—was in one of them. And suddenly there it was, the word she remembered.

Time bomb.

An article about seasickness cautioned what not to eat when you set sail. Doughnuts. The author called doughnuts "time bombs": when the boat started rocking, a greasy doughnut was the last thing you wanted sloshing around in your stomach. Coffee was another. Jim had written her that when the fishing boat caught up with Will's sailboat that first night in the gale off Barbados, Will Spark had fed him a snack of doughnuts and coffee. Oh Jim, you should have known better—you'd never pop a doughnut before a bike race. She could just hear him saying, Thanks for being nice to me. Sure, I'll have a greasy doughnut.

And Will Spark, what were you up to? An experienced sailor had to know that poor Jim would end up puking his guts up. Why deliberately do that to him? Was it out-and-out cruelty like the big shark laugh, or was it a means to control Jim? But why would such a rich guy bother? Unless he wasn't as rich and successful as he claimed. Or was it merely some sort of twisted passive-aggressive act—heavy on aggressive. Should she e-mail Jim? But what good would that do? Thank God the trip was almost over. Africa

A HUNDRED MILES from the Bonny River they turned north. The wind wheeled with them—a southwest monsoon that displaced the Harmattan and built an enormous swell. That night as they surfed the mountainous waves speeding toward the coast, the sky began to glow red.

"Gas flares," Will explained. "Burning off waste gas from the oil wellheads. We're almost there. What do you say we celebrate our last night at sea?" Their previous "celebrations"—of their eventual escape from the Doldrums, surviving the squall, repairing the damage from Jim's first attempt to raise the spinnaker—had meant downing a magnum of French champagne iced in one of the freezers. But tonight, Jim thought, a clear head seemed a prerequisite for sailing among the supertankers converging on the Niger Delta. They had seen several of the lumbering behemoths before dark and one or two after nightfall, their red and green and white lights rendered beguilingly soft and buttery by the humid haze.

"Why don't we celebrate with one last spinning class?" Will cast a longing glance down the companionway. Then he turned his face to the wind.

"Harmattan will be back pretty soon," he mused. "Maybe you're right." Jim winched the bikes up. Will patched the collision alarm into the loud-hailer just in case a ship bore down on them while they were concentrating on uphill sprints. But the old man was still in a playful mood and he rigged a strobe rescue light to flicker their shadows on the sails.

"Disco spin!"

"Resistance, not too heavy, not too light. It should feel like work, but we're still warming up. Let's say four on a scale of ten. . . ."

By the oscillating light, he could see a jerkily slow-motion Will pretend to turn up his resistance. But Jim gave his all, anticipating several travel days of enforced inactivity, trapped in airless airplanes and departure lounges. Soon he broke a sweat and minutes later was dripping.

Hustle plowed along, rising and falling on the following swell, her sails spread wide, pushed shoreward by the slackening monsoon.

"Okay, Will, back it off, spin 'em out.. . ." He gave him a sixty-second respite. "If you're thirsty, take a drink. If you're not thirsty, take a drink. And when I'm gone you're going to remember to hydrate. Right?"

"Right, boss. 'Hydrate or die."

"Resistance increases, RPMs drop. We'll turn it up to eight. . . . And in a minute we'll go up to third position. . . Remembering to increase resistance . . . we go up to third." He was feeling some regret that the voyage was ending. The boat routines had become a comfortable habit and he had been learning so much that he hadn't had time to get bored. He looked over at Will, who was pumping his heart out. He would miss the old guy a little; he wouldn't miss Will's crazy demons, real or imagined. But what a trip!

He checked his heart-rate monitor. His pulse was getting up there, with a full twenty minutes to go. He wondered where his new monitor, his clients' gift, had got to: still floating like a message in a bottle? Or sunk to the bottom of ocean? Or monitoring the belly of a shark?

He glanced over at Will again—crazy lunatic—jumped

off his bike, crossed over, and reduced Will's resistance. "Pick it up, Will. Pick it up." Boom, boom, boom, with his foot. "Yes! Beautiful! Now you're flying."