She continued to blow long after the boat was lost in the heaving dark swells. She saw the moon, tipping precariously. It was blotted out by a wave, no worse than the one that had spilled her overboard, but monstrous from her angle. She rode up its face like a cork, glimpsed the top of the mainsail, distant against the stars. She whistled again, and listened.

Nothing. She screamed his name once more.

Then she lay whimpering passively in the swells, while the enormity of it all soaked in. Once she thought she saw a faroff flash. She could not orient it well enough even to swim toward it. But if he had dropped the strobe, at least he had heard her go, and was looking for her.

She didn’t see it again. After a while she decided that she had imagined it.

When dawn came and she saw no sail instantly, she was shaken and scared, as much for him as herself. She knew that she was OK; he knew nothing.

She did not doubt that he’d find her.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

The sun edged higher. He clutched the wheel, unable to shake the compulsion to turn back and retrace his track. The urge to turn was distracting him from his search. He would find himself staring blindly at water he had not really scanned, weighing the odds on her being ahead or behind, thinking when he should be watching every swell.

His guilt was enormous, distracting him further. He had brought her here and never really even told her why.

Three weeks ago they had sailed into the pass at Bora Bora and anchored behind a sandy motu in the lagoon, isolating themselves from the hotels and the village. They were exhausted, licking their wounds from a hurricane which had driven them to sea, licking other wounds as well. That night, as they sat in the cockpit sipping scotch, she asked him idly when their cruise had really begun.

“When we spotted the boat,” he said, too quickly.

“You’re not leveling,” she said. “And we promised.”

He had caught a quick image of himself at fourteen, a rawboned adolescent already almost six feet tall, reading in his bedroom of a penthouse on a San Francisco hill. It was a year after Pearl Harbor. The U.S. Navy had crawled back into the ring, due, from his own point of view, to his father’s suicidal participation. He was sunk in the old man’s leather chair, hauled months before from the den, where his mother sat every night in majestic masochism, listening to radio news Mitch refused anymore to hear. Weeks before, a sergeant whose leg his dad had saved at Tarawa had called from Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, across the Bay. His old man had turned down orders to take over a battle-wagon sickbay for another tour with the Second Marines.