dangling down from his neck. He reset the course of the Abracadabra so we now had the swell at our back.
“What . . . what does my throat look like?” he croaked. “Is . . . is it bad?”
I fought a wave of nausea and took a closer look at the damage. Bile surged into my throat. I couldn’t see properly because his neck was bleeding now. “Wait.” I wiped my bloody hand on my pants and reached for my backpack. I took out my sweatshirt and pressed it gently to Martin’s throat, mopping up some of the blood so I could see better.
“Two of the three hooks have gone right in, barbs and all. And they’ve ripped some skin where they were pulled.”
“My arm? What about my arm?”
I pushed up his sleeve. The cut was clean and it wasn’t deep. I pressed on it and tightly wrapped a bandanna from my backpack around the wound.
“Reel in the lines,” he ordered as he steered us back toward land.
With shaking limbs and blurring vision, I struggled to wind in all the lines. I hooked the lures safely into the rod eyes near the reels so they wouldn’t swing around and snare anyone else. My hands were slippery with blood. It was my blood, his blood. It stained my jacket and pants. I adjusted my cap and got blood on that, too. I set all the rods back into the rod holders while Martin kept the Abracadabra on course. I collected the fishing knife and the gaff from the bottom of the boat and stashed them carefully in the compartment that ran along the side so we wouldn’t stand on either the blade or the sharp gaff tip and incur more injuries.
Martin ordered me to sit down, and he increased speed. We began to bang and thump toward home. I saw him wince each time we hit a big swell.
“Aren’t you going to radio in your injury?” I yelled over the engine and the wind.
“And have a whole bloody entourage of ambulances waiting? No fucking way.” Vitriol laced his words. I hated the way he was cursing. I honestly had not heard him do this before—not in Canada. Not on our trips, either.
“But that would be good, right?”
“This shit with hooks happens all the time—just need someone to push the barbs through the flesh, cut off the barbs, and pull out the shanks. I can drive to the hospital. They can do it there.”
“I can drive you.”
“No, you bloody can’t! You’re fucking three sheets to the wind. Jesus, Ellie.”
“Martin, please don’t swear.”
He mimicked me in a child’s voice: “Martin, please don’t swear.” He shot me a chilling look. “How about you stop popping pills and getting completely blotto every time you face a tiny bloody challenge, huh, Ellie? How about that? This is your fault, you know that?”
“It’s not my fault.”
“If you’d been sober, if you hadn’t been sneaking pills and downing wine coolers while I was fishing, you could have gotten that net under the fish instead of losing it overboard. We would have been going home with a fish instead of a fucking hook in my neck.”
I fell silent, my heart thumping in my ears. Horrified by his language, his vitriol, by how ugly he looked with that rage twisting his face. My gaze fell to the wine cooler bottles that had rolled to the back of the boat. I shifted my gaze to the sky. A vague memory stirred. I’d asked him if he’d brought water. He’d told me to look in the cooler. All I’d found were the cold alcoholic drinks. I’d refrained from opening a bottle. But after more than three hours of trolling back and forth around the FAD buoy with no water, under the relentless sun, with salt drying my lips, I’d buckled and reached for an ice-cold cooler because it was part fruit juice and I was desperate. That was the last thing I recalled before waking up on the bottom of the boat. Humiliation and anger burned into my eyes as a vehemence rose inside me. Hatred—that’s what I felt. It was pure white and black and dark and hot. Hatred for this man. My husband. I truly abhorred him right now. I felt I could kill him, wished I had.
When we neared the Point of No Return, I could see the surf had risen even higher. Throngs of spectators lined the headlands in the late-afternoon sun. I could hear the roar of