misheard. “Are you going to come and help us?”
“If you come ashore, we will shoot.”
She blinked. Another nearby boat radioed. “There’s an outbreak at the new local hospital. They’re blaming you for it.”
“But there were already people with ARAMIS at the hospital. That’s how he caught it. The virus is already here.”
“All the island hospitals are on lockdown from tourists now.”
She watched the lights on land and wondered what they would do if she rowed him ashore anyway. Would they really fire on them? She stared at the charts, wondering where they could go.
“I’ll sail us someplace else,” she said aloud. “Somewhere people will help us.” But how to navigate and sail and tend to Owen and still look after Noah and keep him safe? It was an impossible proposition.
“What’s wrong?” said a small voice. Noah. Reflexively, Sarah looked down at her shoes. When she’d made Owen comfortable in his cabin earlier, she’d covered her face, hands, and clothes, but not her shoes. She had no idea if she needed to or not.
“Stay at the other end of the boat!” she shouted. Noah scuttled back, his eyes fearful and chastened above the mask. “Go to bed,” she added. “Bring a book. Wait for me until I come and get you.” Then, more gently, “Owen’s not feeling well. He needs me to take care of him.”
* * *
—
Sarah figured out how to lock the hatch to Owen’s cabin from the outside. Noah was frantic when he discovered it wouldn’t open and called out to him.
“Don’t worry.” Owen’s voice was faint behind the door. “I like it closed.”
Later that night, Sarah sat with her son, a cold sweat surging over her skin, as she quizzed him about how to use the radio and the flags to summon help. She got light-headed just imagining how quickly she could succumb to the virus, the terror that would leave him with. So she spoke to him in a near-constant stream of instructions and repetitions, as though the words were an incantation that could keep the worst at bay.
She didn’t know how to tell Owen that they were being refused by the hospitals, but he asked her very few questions. The times he was lucid, he spoke urgently, though the virus had reduced his voice to a rasp.
“You’ve got to get me off this boat. Dump me in the ocean.”
“Can’t,” she said. Not wouldn’t.
She slept in a crunch of nerves and knotted muscles, and woke with bleeding cuts in her palms where she’d dug into them with her fingernails. “Noah,” she shouted.
“I’m here, Mommy. I’m safe.” His voice across the hull bringing her back to life.
She rose, bandaged her hands, donned her gloves. Everything depended on her not faltering, never missing a trick. They had acetaminophen and ibuprofen, bandages and disinfectant. Tourniquets, even a scalpel. She gave Owen fluids and pain relievers, everything she could look up online and administer from their supplies on board.
She took her own temperature morning and evening for five days, but it stayed steady even as delirium took her shipmate. Owen mumbled apologies that seemed meant for the world at large. The terrible sound of his laboured breathing was both a horror and a relief. When he asked for, or about, Rachel, Sarah said, “It’s okay,” which gave him no peace; then, “She’s okay,” which was better, and finally, “She’s coming,” which seemed to loosen the fluid around his lungs just long enough to allow a deep, shuddering breath. He slept after that. Sarah checked on Noah, whom she was alternately bribing and threatening to stay in his berth. Years’ worth of birthday and holiday and just-because gifts glutted his cabin, keeping his tiny fingers occupied. His mind distracted.
Owen stopped breathing three days before Christmas, at dawn. She locked the door to his cabin, then sat down on the other side. Burying her head in her knees, she tried to muffle her howls.
She went above deck and sat with the sunrise and a thermos of tea. Afterwards, before Noah awoke, she emailed Elliot and asked him to tell Dory about Owen. The Shillelagh office was closed, but Dory would be able to locate the writer’s next of kin. She wrote a blog post for Owen and updated his Twitter feed, a bizarre exercise that gave her a deranged spark of hope as she finished typing. She lowered his homemade flag and hoisted the yellow one. She radioed the nearest marine authority, and a U.S. liaison to the Coast Guard sent notice