Charlie St. Cloud Page 0,19

too.

But Sam had sacrificed all that. He spent his days and nights on Marblehead adventures, sitting behind home plate at Seaside Park for Little League games, sneaking a peek at Maxim magazine at Howard’s newsstand, and skateboarding down the steepest run on Gingerbread Hill.

“C’mon,” Sam said. “Let’s go swimming before it’s too late. Tag, you’re it!”

Then Sam sprinted into the woods with Oscar and Charlie giving chase. Night was almost upon them, the shadows were getting longer, and the forest filled with shouts and yelps. It was the most comforting feeling in the world—the three of them flying through the trees without a care—just as it had been all those years ago on Cloutman’s Lane, and just as it would always be.

It happened too fast to brace. Tess suddenly found herself pinned to the ceiling of her boat with bilgewater surging around her head. Radio equipment slammed about, and pots and pans clanked. Chaos resounded inside the cabin. Outside, the ocean and wind roared. Then the lights flickered out.

She heard the sea rushing into the boat, but fear was not foremost in her mind. Querencia was built to capsize and right herself. There were pumps onboard to expel the water. In the midst of all the mayhem, she was overwhelmed by something deliciously annoying: the aroma of Newman’s Own dressing. The bottle in the galley had obviously shattered, and now the whole cabin smelled like tossed salad.

She huddled on the ceiling, up to her knees and elbows in water, and muttered to the boat, “Please turn back. Come on, come on. Get upright, please?” But nothing happened, so she crawled toward the nav station and found the EPIRB emergency beacon in its bracket. She hated needing help—it was so damn embarrassing—but she pushed down on the yellow power switch, breaking the safety seal, and saw the LED flash. The device was now sending a distress signal via satellite that would ping on every Coast Guard screen in New England. Suddenly she did not feel so alone. But wait, she reminded herself, Querencia wasn’t sinking, and there was no real need yet for an SOS. Tink and the gang would really bust her chops for crying wolf when she got back to the dock. If the boat started to go down, there would be plenty of time to call the Coast Guard. So Tess flicked the toggle off, and the Mayday light stopped blinking.

A minute went by, then another. The fragrance of Italian dressing was mixing with the sulfuric stench of battery acid leaking from the power units. What was taking the boat so long to roll back over and right herself? The weight of the keel was supposed to pull Querencia upright. Her mind jumped to the worst-case scenario. She remembered Tony Bullimore, whose keel was sheared off in sixty-foot seas. He was stranded upside down for five days at the bottom of the world below Australia as his boat slowly sank in freezing waters. “Below forty degrees south, there is no law,” he said when he was rescued. “Below fifty degrees south, there is no God.”

Tess was not an especially religious woman. She went to the Old North Church on Sundays largely because it was important to her mother. She was friendly with Reverend Polkinghorne and had built him a sail or two. But she didn’t like the conventions of organized faith and she preferred doing it her own way. She considered herself a spiritual person with her own relationship to God.

Now, upside down in the Atlantic, she found herself praying in the darkness. She began by apologizing for her arrogance. She knew she had taken too big a risk. She had been careless, and now she felt ashamed. This wasn’t how she wanted it to end, all alone on a weekend sail in a storm that could have been avoided. She prayed to God to be merciful. And then she summoned her father. “Dad, please help me. Tell me what to do.” He had always bailed her out of desperate situations. She closed her eyes and promised that if she got back to the harbor she would never do anything so rash again. She would play it safe in the race around the world. She would sail with the rest of the group, even if it meant going slower. She would be a good girl.

Yes, when she got out of this mess, she would go straight to Waterside and take an oath: She would change. Dad had raised

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