Charlie St. Cloud Page 0,15
every bump, every vine underfoot, could have run it with his eyes closed. He hurried through the cypress grove that gave way into a clearing. Here was surely the greatest secret of Waterside: a special place he had created with his own hands so many years ago. Back then, he decided to make it the exact replica of the yard at their home on Cloutman’s Lane. There was a perfect lawn ninety feet long with a pitcher’s mound, rubber, and plate.
He walked to the swings and plunked himself down on one of the wood benches. He kicked his feet up and began to glide. He floated back and forth, and with the breeze beneath him, it felt like flying. Then he leaped from the seat, landed on the ground, and grabbed his mitt. He tossed the ball into the darkening sky. It touched the treetops before dropping back down again. Then he hurled it up once more.
Just as it was about to land in his glove, the wind suddenly gusted and the ball went flying across the field, rolling along the grass, stopping on the edge of the woods. And then a little miracle happened, just as it did every night at sundown.
Sam St. Cloud stepped from the gloom of the forest and picked up the ball. He was unchanged after all these years, still twelve years old with untamed brown curls and a Rawlings baseball mitt under his skinny arm. He wore a Red Sox cap and jersey, baggy shorts, and black high-tops. Oscar sprinted from the undergrowth, tail held high. With soulful eyes and his distinctive yowl, he, too, was the same as before. The dog nipped at Sam’s scrawny knees, then yelped at Charlie.
“C’mon, big bro,” Sam said with glee, “let’s play catch.”
A thirty-foot wall of water crashed into the cockpit, knocking Tess from her foot cleats and sweeping her into the lifelines. She gasped for air as the cold ocean wrapped itself around her, sucking her to the brink of oblivion, and then, thank God, her harness and jack line held fast. Moments before, she had zipped into her orange survival suit, essentially a one-person life raft designed for sailing in dangerous weather, enabling her to survive up to a week in the ocean without hypothermia.
Tess coughed up a mouthful of seawater, then pulled herself back to the wheel. Querencia was pounding through the howling darkness under bare poles. The main was lashed to the boom, and the decks were cleared.
Giant breaking waves were raging in twenty-second sets, hammering the hull, sending great blasts of spray in the air. Splotches of phosphorus streaked the sky in a stormy fireworks show. The ocean ahead looked like an endless range of mountains and cliffs rushing toward her at forty miles an hour, and monstrous peaks collapsed with the force of a landslide.
Tess didn’t worry about the blistering wind, the confused sea, or the salt stinging her eyes. She didn’t care about the numbness in her hands or the pain in her hip from the last fall. She wasn’t alarmed by the radar showing another deep depression building behind this low. All of her attention—all of her loathing—was focused on one nagging problem: the sloshing seawater in her new nonslip boots. “Damn,” she raged at the ocean. “Five hundred bucks for this gear, and the damn stuff leaks.”
She checked the glowing dials in the binnacle. The anemometer for wind speed showed forty knots, then forty-five. As Querencia tumbled down the sheer slope of one wave, the speedometer raced, then climbing the next upsurge, the boat seemed to stall, threatening to fall backwards into the trough.
Tess braced for the impact of the next breaker. Even as it slammed the craft, washing her sideways, she held fast to the wheel. Yes, she hoped, this was definitely good practice for the Southern Ocean above Antarctica, where she would face blinding snow squalls and icebergs. That is, if she ever got there. Another tower of water hit; another blow to her body; but she kept the boat aimed at the onslaught. It was one of the oldest rules of foul-weather sailing: Point one small end of the boat into the waves.
Tess knew there were two good ways to measure nature’s fury. The first was a formula based on the Beaufort Scale, named after a nineteenth-century British admiral: wind speed plus five, divided by five. She did the math, and the result was ten. So this was a Force 10 gale on a scale