“I hit the autopilot.”
“I said please don’t tell me that.”
“It was an accident!”
Richard shakes his head in disbelief and motions for Daisy to undo her lifeline.
“Go downstairs and tell Lacey what happened,” he tells her. “I’m staying up here.”
Reluctantly she undoes her clip and gives it to Richard, then heads down the stairs.
She looks at me before she disappears into the cabin but I give her nothing in return.
“Is that true?!’ Richard yells as he comes closer. “Did it shut down?”
I spin the wheel to show him. “We’ve got nothing.”
“Shit.”
He peers around at the navigation. “We’re going eight knots with the sail reefed,” he says, noting the instrument readings on the monitor. “What is this?” He points at the blob on the radar.
“That’s an island.”
“We’re heading straight for it!” He blinks at it and then looks to me in shock.
“I know.”
He shakes his head again, rubbing at his forehead for a moment before he’s almost knocked off-balance by a wave. “This can’t be. We have to do something. Maybe we can fix it?”
“I’m going to have to try,” I tell him. If it’s an electronic thing, I’m probably out of luck, but maybe there are few wires that need to be crossed, something, anything.
I can’t do nothing.
“How much time do we have?” Richard asks as I move out from behind the wheel. He instinctively goes to it, even though it’ll do no good.
“You’re the one who loves trigonometry,” I tell him.
I leave him up top to puzzle over it, even though I know the answer is in the range of “way too fucking soon.”
You don’t have time, I tell myself. You need to prepare everyone for what’s going to happen.
I go down into the cabin and see Lacey leaning against the table, seemingly in disbelief, and Daisy sitting down beside her giant piece of luggage and for some reason the sight of that thing taking up half the boat makes me want to rage and throw it overboard.
I can’t do that right now. I already let it all out. Now I have to pull myself together and do what I can for the ship.
“I’m so sorry, Tai,” Daisy whimpers quietly.
“I don’t want to hear it,” I snap at her. I look at Lacey. “I take it she caught you up to speed?”
To my surprise Lacey isn’t crying. She’s not even blinking.
“Lacey?” I repeat.
“What’s going to happen to us?” she says eventually, slowly meeting my eyes. “Are we going to be okay?”
I tap the side of the stairs where the engine compartment is.
“The only shot we have is if I can get the steering fixed. I don’t know how I’ll do that, but I’m going to try.”
“And if you can’t? Then what happens?”
I take in a deep breath, trying to steady my voice. “I’m not sure what happens. But…I do know that we are at the mercy of the wind right now. It is pushing us in one direction and there is no stopping it. The good news in this is that we are heading downwind, which means we are going with the waves. It could be worse. We could be drifting and being battered from the side. If that happened, there’s a good chance the boat would capsize.”
Daisy gasps at that, bringing her hands to her mouth.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s pretty much my worst nightmare.”
“So if there are any freighters out there…” Lacey says.
“They aren’t the biggest concern right now. We can pick them up on radar. We could call ahead and tell them we can’t get out of their way, and maybe there’s enough time for them to get out of ours.”
“What is our biggest concern?” Lacey asks carefully.
“Ten miles in front of us is an island. It doesn’t have a name, it’s just a blip on the map. Could just be an atoll with some sand or maybe not even that. But it is land and there is a reef around it and in about a half hour, we’re going to collide right into it.”
Lacey’s mouth drops open.
“So what do we do?” Daisy asks.
“What do we do?” I repeat.
“Yes. We have to prepare ourselves for the collision. So run us through the scenarios. Tell us what you think will happen, step-by-step, so we know how not to die.”
Huh. Guess she’s on top of things now.
I nod at her and then pop my head up into the cockpit and tell Richard to come back inside.
“What about keeping watch?” he asks.
“You can stay down here and keep watch,” I tell him, pointing at the navigation table. “I want us all to be in earshot of the oh shit plan while I try to fix the steering.”
With Richard at the table watching the radar, and Daisy and Lacey watching me, I lift up the stairs and access the engine. I know when I first got the boat it had no autopilot, so I had a friend install one. The fucker was cheap but it never worked quite right, so I’m wondering if it was fucked to begin with.
There are some wires. What to do with them, I don’t know. I’ve hotwired a car before and this is nothing like that.
“So, the plan?” Lacey says, finding her voice.
Right.
“Let’s do worst-case scenario first,” I say, poking through the wires. “Run the simulation. That would be that we hit a rock far from shore. Something small enough that doesn’t come up on radar. The start of a reef. Something like that. It breaks through the hull, more like rips through it at the speed we’re going, and we quickly take on water. We have to abandon ship. We grab what we can—the satellite phone, water, high caloric foods, medicine, whatever. We get all of that, then we deploy the life raft and get in. And hope that the waves don’t capsize us, hope that the wind takes us to land and not away from it. The boat sinks to the bottom of the South Pacific.”
I have the deepest, coldest chill as I’m speaking these words. It’s hard to believe this is most likely our reality. There seems to be a disconnect with my brain, maybe out of protection.
“And then what happens if we’re lost at sea?” Daisy asks, her lip quivering.
I shake my head and get back to figuring out the wires, though I know it’s no use. “No point entertaining it. But how about we go through the best-case scenario? That would be that the wind pushes us in through a natural opening into the island. No reef. We run aground, preferably on a sandy beach with minimal damage to the boat. With any luck there’s a resort on the island. You girls can have a mini vacation while Richard and I and the locals get the boat back in the water. Then, when the weather clears, we continue sailing to Suva, which is only twenty-four hours away. Lacey and Richard would miss some work, but it’s not the end of the world.”
“I like this scenario best,” Lacey says.
“We all do. But that’s not the one we should prepare for.” I pause, remembering what Daisy once told me. “Expect the worst but hope for the best.”
“We’re eight miles out,” Richard announces.
I sigh and lean against the engine cover, closing my eyes.
Time to expect the worst.