She sat up and looked around the bunk room in the dark, then eased off the mattress and went quietly to the rail outside the wheelhouse to stare into the blackness. The Gulf was mournfully calm under a sky of stars fading toward morning. She wanted to be with her baby but did not look forward to living in the big house, which now would have a new ghost, another presence standing in the doorways and staring at her tingling back. She had no one who could hold her, no dance partner in light-winking shoes, no flawed and joking man to repair the machinery of her dreams.

Mr. LeBlanc came out on the deck below, a luminous T-shirt floating, and she imagined he looked up at her. “You sleep any, girl?”

“Some.”

“What time is it?”

“About five, I guess,” she told him.

He stretched and then rubbed his belly, bent over and rested his elbows on the rail. “We gave it our best,” he said.

“You could say that.”

After a minute he straightened. “I’ll go and crank up the generator.”

“Wait,” she said.

“What is it, baby?”

She shook her head. “Listen for a minute and tell me if you hear anything.”

LeBlanc turned toward the Gulf and put his head down. “I don’t think so.”

“Just give it a minute.” She listened for a sound at a great distance—maybe a machine on an oil rig three or four miles away. It disappeared altogether, and she started to turn inside, but suddenly, with a shift in the wind, it drifted back to her. It was a pulse, a fast heartbeat.

“I don’t hear much,” LeBlanc said. “Might be a drilling engine. They carry ten miles or more.” LeBlanc did not raise his head, though. Finally he looked up at her, and she could almost see his face. “I hear something.”

“Like what? You tell me.” She looked north. “You know what it is, you of all people.”

“It sounds…” he began. “Nah. It couldn’t be. Not way out here.”

“Like what? Tell me.”

He put his hands in his pockets and looked down again. “Damn if it don’t sound like a old one-lung inboard with a pipe exhaust.” He laughed at the silliness of the thought. Then Colette saw him bolt into the engine room and start the generator. His heavy feet banged on the steps as he flew past her and into the wheelhouse, grabbing the headlight lever and twisting the rotary switch. The big carbon-arc light fired up and sent a beam like a sword toward the north. “If he’s out there, he’ll find us now, girl.”