She watched a red buoy come into view. “We’ll have to rely on their good sense,” she said, knowing even as the words came out that if they’d hit money shrimp, after what she had told Paul on her porch about going back with him, he’d fish in a hurricane.

The trees fell back completely on either side of a broad, calm channel, and the envelopment by marshland was complete—a flat, endless plain of sighing grasses veined with openings of barely a skiff’s width. She endured miles of this bland mirage pretending to be land. Putting her head down she stared at her hands, white and still, and thought about Matthew’s face, his plastic tools. Time raced with the boat, and eventually she noticed that the sound of the engine changed. She looked up to the open water, which offered nothing for noise to rebound from, and she felt like a toddler escaping alone into an enormous, strange yard.

“My God,” she said, looking from window to window. “One way is Mexico, the other is Florida, and to the south is … is—I don’t even know, some foreign country.”

Emile turned the wheel and said nothing.

“I feel so damned stupid.” She banged the backs of her hands on her knees and looked again at all the water.

The old man lit a cigarette. “Let’s just say we got our work cut out for us. Sit on the roof like a Indian and work both sides with the glasses.” He jerked a thumb toward the ceiling and she climbed up, wedging herself between the horn and an antenna just as the boat took on a small trough and rolled ten degrees. They headed west, and she lined up her fine eyes with the old pair of German binoculars that had been her father’s, scanning the empty water. She watched north and south for an hour, marshland a mile to her right, the Gulf to her left, and she prayed for something to swim into the eyepieces other than the abandoned oil platforms farther out and rafts of pelicans floating at the edge of her range. Emile slowed the boat to a crawl and came out of the cabin.

“Let me take a turn and you run the boat,” he said.

“Fine. I already have a headache.”

“I thought you might. Even with the clouds, there’s glare.” He dug into his pocket. “You take aspirin?”

“Sure.”

“Take two of these and chew ’em up to powder. Then wash them down with a Coke.” He held up his hand and cocked his head. “I know what you going to say about the Coke not being good for a headache. That’s bull. Wash ’em down quick and get in the seat. Run maybe half speed. You can close your eyes awhile if you want. Can’t bump into anything out here. Just check the compass every few minutes.”