Charlie St. Cloud Page 0,69

their voices were hoarse. Joe woke up around 3:00 A.M. and pitched in for an hour, steering while Charlie and Tink stood watch. With each brush of the searchlight, with every advancing second, his heart sank even further. Was he wrong about the clues? Was this all a creation of his grief? “Give me a sign, Tess,” he prayed. “Show me the way.”

There was only silence.

As dawn came at 6:43 A.M., the east began to glow with stripes of orange and yellow. But the arrival of this new day meant only the worst for Charlie. He had risked everything and he had lost. Sam would be gone. All that was left was a job in the cemetery mowing the lawn and burying the dead. He had turned something into nothing, and he had only himself to blame.

His back ached from standing watch. His stomach growled from lack of food. His head hurt from a night of crying out into the gloom. What should he do next? He searched for a sign from Sam and wondered if his little brother was okay.

Then he heard Joe down below, grumbling and grunting as he climbed the ladder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I must’ve nodded off.” His voice was raspy from sleep. “Any luck?”

“None.”

“Well, you did your best,” he said, reaching for the wheel and elbowing Charlie aside. “I’m the captain of this boat and I say we go home.”

“It’s just getting light,” Charlie protested. “Maybe we missed her last night.” He turned to Tink. “What do you say? Where should we look now?”

Joe interrupted: “Face it, Charlie. I know you had to get this out of your system, but she’s gone.”

“No! She’s alive.” He felt crazed inside. His frantic brain searched for examples. “There was that sailor who was unconscious for nine days in the Bering Sea. Remember him? He was on the news. A Japanese whaler picked him up and he survived.”

“Right.” Joe had turned the boat around.

“Cold water slows your metabolism.” Charlie barely recognized his own voice. “It’s the mammalian dive reflex. Your body knows how to shut down everything except for essential functions and organs.” It was the only thing left to hold on to. “Remember those climbers on Everest a few years ago? They were above twenty-seven thousand feet in the death zone. They were lost, frostbitten, and slipped into comas. But they managed to survive.”

“You crazy or something?” Joe said. “Those climbers were lucky, that’s all.”

“It wasn’t luck. It was a miracle.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? There’s no such thing.”

Joe pushed forward on the throttle, and the boat leaped for home. Charlie knew it was over. Numbly, he made his way down the ladder to the stern, where he plunked down on one of the benches and drowned his thoughts in the drone of the engine.

As he stared at the wake spreading out behind him, the sun climbed the sky, bathing the ocean in a soft glow. But Charlie felt an aching cold inside. His fingers trembled, his body shivered, and he wondered if he would ever be warm again.

THIRTY-ONE

SAM WAS WIND.

He whooshed across the Atlantic, skimming the wave tops, reveling in the most amazing feeling. He was liberated from the in between, and the parameters of his new playground were dazzlingly infinite—the universe with its forty billion galaxies and all the other dimensions beyond consciousness or imagination. His quietus had finally brought freedom. No longer constricted by his promise, he had moved on to the next level, where he could morph into any shape.

Sam was now a free spirit.

But there was one more thing he had to do on earth. He swept over the bow of the Horny Toad and swirled around his brother, trying to get his attention, but to no avail. Another loop around the boat and another breezy pass, with a good gust whipping the American flag on its pole, flipping Charlie’s hair, and filling his jacket, but again he had no luck. Then he twanged the guy wires of the boat, making an eerie, wailing song, but Charlie didn’t hear a single note.

Last night, Sam had felt annoyed and betrayed by Charlie’s abrupt departure from the cemetery. At sundown, he had hung around the Forest of Shadows, waiting and waiting. Loneliness had overwhelmed him as the purple light vanished from the sky, and the hidden playground had grown dark. Soon anger began to creep in as he realized his big brother had ditched him for a girl and had