She lay bedded in the heaving water, cradling the plastic jug. She had not seen another flash for a long time, maybe an hour. She was racked with deep, uncontrollable tremblings which passed and left her exhausted. Her thirst was agonizing. She succumbed, sipped salt water, and gagged.

The skies had partly cleared, and she glimpsed stars she should have learned: Mitch had tried to teach them to her. And Jean-Paul had tried, briefly. Everyone was always trying to teach her the stars. Why? Tonight they were friendly but elusive; there were still enough clouds scudding across the horizon to blot out their patterns, just when she was about to identify one. She made out the Southern Cross, oriented herself to face it, and then lost it under the crest of a swell.

She began to move her legs faster, to keep her circulation up and ward off the next attack of shivers. Her jacket was more and more a hindrance. The armpit seams were eating away at her skin and the soggy sleeves restricted her arms.

She found the Southern Cross again and lay back to study it. She became aware of a sudden stillness. It was the sort of visceral hint that came with the sound of flapping sails in the lull before a storm. She pictured Mitch, striking the main as he felt the wind drop and the oily swell begin.

The Southern Cross flickered out. She had the sense of an immense anvil-cloud bearing down, towering thousands of feet into the velvet sky. She heard a gurgling rumble. When she was carried to the crest of a swell, she felt wind on her nose and cheeks. Then, in the trough, the breeze would die; she was cozy in the valleys and vulnerable on the peaks.

As her body sank into canyons, her descents became more ominous, like an elevator starting too fast. She was hurled aloft on each rise, no longer lifted gently as she had been before. In one trough, she heard a freight-train rush of water down the slope. She instinctively sucked in a breath and ducked. She was tumbled in the breaker like a surfer torn from his board. She clung to the jug through the whole wild ducking.

Great waves began to hammer her down. Hearing one coming, she would take a breath and try to dive beneath it, as if heading out from a beach. Once, the jug left her hand. She groped after it and grabbed it again as it began to sail on the wind up the slope of a swell.