moment that wasn’t safe, either. I concentrated on swimming. Don’t think about anything.
It could have been an hour, or two hours, when I looked off to the right and saw the mast. It was at least a mile away and she wouldn’t see me, but even so a great surge of hope and thanksgiving went through me and I broke the rhythm of my stroke and went under and almost strangled. She was all right! She’d only been knocked out. I reminded myself realistically of the odds against her ever finding me in this immense waste of water, but just knowing she was alive and could reach land helped me to keep going.
I waved frantically each time I was lifted on a swell. She went on past, far to the westward, and was soon hull down to the north. I kept watching her, looking over my shoulder. Now she was swinging, heading east. I began to hope. I saw what she was doing. I loved her. God, she was wonderful. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, she was wonderful. When she’d regained consciousness she didn’t have any way of knowing how long she’d been out or where we’d gone overboard, so she couldn’t go back and swing in a big circle. But she knew the sloop was on a 180 degree heading. So she was running offset north-and-south courses, cutting the whole area into a big grid. A girl who didn’t know anything about boats or compasses or the sea. I turned and started swimming toward the sun.
Far out, she turned, heading south again. I tried to estimate how far to the eastward she’d pass me. I couldn’t tell yet, but I swam faster. She steadied up, began to grow larger. She was passing three or four hundred yards ahead of me. I could see her. She’d lashed the tiller and was standing on the boom with an arm about the mast. I remembered the glasses again. Each time the ground swell lifted me I kicked myself as high as I could in the water and waved an arm. She was going on by.
Then I saw her jump down from the boom and run aft. The bow began to swing. I closed my eyes for an instant, and the breath ran slowly out of me.
The sound of engine died and she drifted down toward me and came to rest, rolling gently in the trough. Shannon was in the cockpit with a coiled line in her hand. She started to throw it. I shook my head. She watched me swim over. Her face was utterly still. She didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. I caught the rail when the boat rolled, and pulled myself up. She knelt on the cockpit seat to help me. She put a hand on my wrist and an arm about my shoulders and I came up on the seat beside her in the warm sunlight. She let go then. Everything went. They blew the dam.
Maybe you live your whole life for one moment. If you do, that was the moment.
She was all over me. She was crying. I started to cry. I couldn’ t help it. Tears ran down my face and I was holding her so tightly she couldn’t breathe and I was kissing her. I kissed her on the mouth and the boat rolled and it was the way it had been that other time with that sensation of falling through light-years of rose-colored space and the way it had been the first time with that feeling of drowning in her, of being overrun, submerged, lost, of never being able to come up again, nor ever wanting to. I kissed the tears on her face and kissed the closed eyelids, and at last I just held her in my arms with my face pressed to her throat, feeling her heart beat. Neither of us had said a word.
After a long time I raised my head so I could see her. Water had dripped out of my hair onto her face, mingling with the tears. I had got her dress all wet, holding her against me. There was a puffy and discolored bruise on her forehead, just at the hairline. The morning sun slanted across the closed eyes and the broad-cheekboned planes of her face, and with all of it she was so beautiful my breath caught in my throat.
Her eyes opened. They were wet and they were radiant, and the lashes looked darker, matted together