She turns and spots me. “Thank God!” she says. “We couldn’t find you!”
“I’m fine, but do you have your rope you can throw us? She’s freezing.”
Rowan shakes her head, agitated. “It’s with the lady on the board in a different boat.” She looks around and apparently sees Trey on the other side of her boat. She calls to him, and a second later I see his rope flying through the air to her. She catches it, holds one end, and tosses the other one my way. I swim out to reach it and do my best to tie it to Bridget’s life vest, but my fingers aren’t cooperating.
It’s when I’m stringing the rope through a fluorescent green loop on the vest that I realize it. My heart stops.
Bridget is wearing a life vest that looks exactly like mine.
“Where did you get this life vest?” I scream, my voice hoarse.
Bridget looks at me, scared. “The ferry was rolling onto its side and the guy made me take it. He said he could go back for another one.”
I stare at her, my face in her face, and I have no words, only fear squeezing my lungs, suffocating me from inside my ribs.
Someone starts pulling Bridget to the lifeboat, and I flounder in the water as all light disappears, paralyzed in the murk.
I scream his name.
Scream it again, louder than the voice of the storm.
People in the boats stop to look at me.
Rowan stands up, and I catch the look of terror on her face, eyes wide in a flash of lightning. She joins me in yelling. “Sawyer!”
The woman from the first lifeboat yells for me too.
And then a man’s voice.
Trey’s voice.
But Trey is screaming a different name.
Forty-Six
Our screams are drowned out by thunder and groaning and engines and blades.
There are three full lifeboats and the one that got away. I don’t know how many of the twenty-seven victims we saved, and I don’t care. I am numb on the inside and hysterical on the outside.
“Invincible!” I scream. “You said!” I cry. “You said you wouldn’t take it off!” But my voice is gone now.
What feels like hours later, I am lifted by strong arms and wrapped in a towel and put on a surface that doesn’t move. We sit in a shadow. My sister holds my head and kisses it. Her tears drip on my tears.
My brother isn’t screaming anymore on the outside. He leads us off the dock, away from the people. Even in our pain, we know we must be invisible. We escape cameras and paramedics and slip away to watch a helicopter shine a light on the water where a ferry used to be, searching for any signs of life. There are still people missing, the voices say over and over.
After a while, the light goes out.
We stare into the darkness, but there is no life out there.
Hours later, there is nothing we can do here. A bus takes my brother and sister and me to Milwaukee, and we get inside the not-delivery car with shaky hands and bare feet. When our doors are closed, Trey inserts the key, lets his forehead drop to the steering wheel, and sobs. And I cannot console him, because I am sobbing too.
And then we breathe, because we have to. And we hope, because there’s nothing else to do.
We make a stop at Kate’s because we don’t have her phone number, tell her everything about the ferry disaster but not about the visions, and we let her decide what—and when—to tell Sawyer’s estranged parents. We exchange phone numbers in case one of us hears something. And there’s nothing we can do about Ben, whose mom and dad are in the Philippines visiting family.
It’s well after midnight when we get home, and the lights are out. Rowan has taken care of Mom and Dad, bullshitting them about some major project we’re apparently helping Trey with so he can win a scholarship. And they, tired from work and happy to hear we’re so focused, have gone to sleep. We strip off our wet suits and dress in warm, dry clothes, and fall into bed, exhausted, phones in hands.
• • •
When I wake up with a start a little after five thirty, and then remember, the numbness inside of me is replaced by the most intense guilt, and I realize the extent of what I’ve done. Because I am responsible for this, too. I am responsible for all the world.
I crawl out of bed and knock softly on Trey’s door, and then go in.
He’s lying on his side in the dark, his face lit up by his phone, refreshing the news.
I stand in front of him. He doesn’t look at me.
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
His eyes twitch. His bottom lip quivers and then is still. Without a word, he opens up his arms, and I sit on the edge of his bed, and he holds me.
After a minute, he sits up and rubs his bleary eyes. And then he sighs. “It’s not your fault.”
I remain silent.
“If they’re together, they’re alive,” he says after a while. “Ben is a lifeguard. Lifeguards don’t drown. Even if that’s not true, I have to believe it.”
I swallow hard. I don’t know how anybody could have survived out there. “Ben has his phone, right?” I say. “Sawyer doesn’t.” He broke his promise, and now he doesn’t have his phone.
“I think so.” Trey looks at me. “What about Tori?”
I shrug. “I have a million texts from her. I haven’t even started to read them.”
“But wouldn’t she know?”
“Know what?”
“Doesn’t the vision change as the thing happens? Didn’t you see body bags disappearing?”