even to reach for the oars, so instead we grabbed for the gunwales and held on for dear life.
A wall of water plowed straight toward us. We climbed the massive wave, our boats turning nearly vertical beneath us. Emma clung to me and I clung to the oarlock; behind us Hugh held on to the seat with his arms. We crested the wave like a roller coaster, my stomach dropping into my legs, and as we raced down the far side, everything in our boat that wasn’t nailed down—Emma’s map, Hugh’s bag, the red roller suitcase I’d lugged with me since Florida—went flying out over our heads and into the water.
There was no time to worry about what had been lost, because initially we couldn’t even see the other boats. When we’d resumed an even keel, we squinted into the maelstrom and screamed our friends’ names. There was a terrible moment of silence before we heard voices call back to us, and Enoch’s boat appeared out of the mist, all four passengers aboard, waving their arms at us.
“Are you all right?” I shouted.
“Over there!” they called back. “Look over there!”
I saw that they weren’t waving hello, but directing our attention to something in the water, some thirty yards away—the hull of an overturned boat.
“That’s Bronwyn and Olive’s boat!” Emma said.
It was upside down, its rusty bottom to the sky. There was no sign of either girl around it.
“We have to get closer!” Hugh shouted, and forgetting our exhaustion we grabbed the oars and paddled toward it, calling their names into the wind.
We rowed through a tide of clothes ejected from split-open suitcases, every swirling dress we passed resembling a drowning girl. My heart hammered in my chest, and though I was soaked and shivering I hardly felt the cold. We met Enoch’s boat at the overturned hull of Bronwyn’s and searched the water together.
“Where are they?” Horace moaned. “Oh, if we’ve lost them …”
“Underneath!” Emma said, pointing at the hull. “Maybe they’re trapped underneath it!”
I pulled one of my oars from its lock and banged it against the overturned hull. “If you’re in there, swim out!” I shouted. “We’ll rescue you!”
For a terrible moment there was no response, and I could feel any hope of recovering them slipping away. But then, from the underside of the overturned boat, there was a knock in reply—and then a fist smashed through the hull, wood chips flying, and we all jumped in surprise.
“It’s Bronwyn!” Emma cried. “They’re alive!”
With a few more strikes Bronwyn was able to knock a person-sized hole in the hull. I extended my oar to her and she grabbed it, and with Hugh and Emma and me all pulling, we managed to drag her through the churning water and into our boat just as hers sank, vanishing beneath the waves. She was panicked, hysterical, shouting with breath she didn’t have to spare. Shouting for Olive, who hadn’t been under the hull with her. She was still missing.
