About a meter and a half from her are two or more sea wasps. She starts to move away from them but stops, reversing her arms underwater. Howard has come around the boat, swimming quietly from the bow toward the stern. She can see the light-colored bathing cap he's wearing-one of hers, taken from the suitcase-to protect his head. Halfway along the bow, he stops, apparently treading water, and then the flashlight comes on, and she realizes it's the rubber-coated one that had been upright in a bracket beside the wheel. Howard angles the light along the boat, pointing at the stern, and then slowly turns it in a half circle, and Rose pulls herself down.
Thirty heartbeats later, when she surfaces to look, Howard is gone.
She treads water, feeling the rain on her hair. He'll finish his circuit of the ship. She decides he won't swim to the rocks, as she thought at first, because it would take him too far from the boat. If she got aboard, it would be easy for her to keep him in the water-there are long poles with hooks on them, and she could swing one of those at him whenever he gets near. No, she thinks, he'll get back on board.
Through the rain she sees his head, still in the pale cap, on the deck of the boat. She hears the metallic, teeth-grating sound of the chain being wound in as he retrieves the anchor, and then the motor catches and purrs and then purrs more urgently, and the boat starts to move. Within seconds the spotlight comes on, and Rose's hopes die.
There's no way she can hide from the spotlight. Even if she were a foot underwater, he could probably pick out the bright pink of her jacket. If the spotlight hits her, he'll have her.
But the spotlight can't point behind the boat. She needs to swim behind the boat, following the man who's hunting her. At the moment he's heading to her right, parallel to the rocks, and she sees what he's going to do. He's going to make a circuit of the rocks, make sure she's not on them or behind them, and then he'll search the surrounding waters, probably in a spiral, until he catches her in the spotlight or until she's stung by a sea wasp and he finds her floating facedown.
She orients herself toward the biggest rock, closes her eyes, and starts to swim, expecting the fiery lash across her forehead and cheeks with every stroke. She's surprised at how clearly she can hear the motor when one ear is in the water. She's paying a lot of attention to it as a way of knowing how far from the boat she is, when the volume suddenly drops. She stops and orients herself again, feet downward, dark hair pulled over her face, and looks.
She's about halfway to the big rock. Howard has taken the boat behind the one to the right, which has intercepted the underwater sound of the outboard. There were three rocks, he'd said, the third hidden behind the other two. She closes her eyes and tries to visualize it. If she can get between them without swimming into a jellyfish, she might be able to stay out of sight. Even Howard can't see through rocks.
She follows the boat's route, knowing that Howard is glued to the wheel, eyes on the spotlight, carefully steering around the massive stones. He's going slowly, obviously dividing his attention between navigation and scanning the water in front of him. She realizes, as she lifts her head for a breath and looks ahead, that following the boat gives her an unexpected advantage: The wake directly behind the boat is free of sea wasps, pushed to the sides by the boat's prow.
She swims past the big rock, daring to lift her arms out of the water in an overhead crawl, knowing that she'll be seen in a minute if Howard goes to the stern and looks back. But she risks swimming a little faster anyway; the closer she is to the back of the boat, the less likely she is to swim into a sea wasp.
She pulls herself along until she's gotten around the bigger rock. She's swinging out to her right to get behind the smaller one when the engine stops.
In an instant she's floating vertically, hair pulled forward to mask her face. The boat rises above the low, flat surface of the rock, and in the stern she sees Howard, flashlight in hand, the beam transcribing arcs across the water. So it's occurred to him to look behind him after all.
Rose edges closer to the smaller rock just in case, but she stops at the sight of a cluster of sea wasps in between her and it. In fact, now that she's near enough to the rocks to see them more clearly, she sees that sea wasps have been carried to them from all directions by the water's motion. There's a ring of jellyfish, like a border of solid water, maybe two-thirds of a meter wide, wherever the rocks meet the sea.
There's no way she can get through it. She'd be stung a hundred times.
A hard core of certainty begins to form inside her. She will die here.
And something bumps against her from below.
The terror is instantaneous and all-consuming. She swims wildly, smacking the surface with her arms, not thinking about the noise she's making, swimming after the boat as though it were her refuge, putting the smaller rock to her left now and then accelerating beyond to turn around it, following in Howard's wake.
Once she's circled the second rock, she sees the boat, sliding around the far end of the third rock now, only the bottom couple of feet obscured by the stone's low-rising surface. As she watches, Howard cups his hands to his face and lights a cigarette.
All these months, she thinks, and I never knew he smoked.
The thought strikes her as absurd, and she lowers her face into the water and releases a bubble of laughter. He was like a fancy envelope, she thinks, with a toad folded inside it. She laughs again and loses some of the rest of her air. With both of her ears underwater, she's almost deafened by the grinding sound of the boat's hull scraping over rock, and she brings her head back up in time to hear Howard screaming a sustained, unvarying stream of obscenities and to see him running the length of the cabin and repeatedly slamming the side of the boat with one of the long poles, as though he's punishing it. Then he leans forward, facing her directly from the far side of the rock, shoves the end of the pole into the water, and grunts with effort. He throws his weight behind the pole again, and this time he lets loose with a scream that seems to come all the way from his belly, and as it dies away, the boat moves and he pitches forward, off balance, and has to catch himself with both hands, the pole slipping away from him and splashing on the ocean's surface as the boat floats free of the rocks. Howard runs to the wheel, cranking it hard right, accelerating to increase his distance from the underlying shelf of stone.
Rose floats there, watching him go. She thinks that he may just have opened a path for her, even if the path leads to a place she doesn't want to go. She reclines on her side and does a gliding stroke that carries her slowly down the full length of the third rock and then around it, her eyes on the receding boat most of the time, shifting only to check the surface in front of her and make certain she's not getting too close to the solid ribbon of sea wasps that surrounds the stones. As she swims, she visualizes the other side of the big rock, and slowly, methodically, like someone drawing a map from spoken directions, she assembles something that might be a plan. The idea, thin as it is, seems to buoy her up as she swims toward the place she least wants to go, the place she'll be most conspicuous, the first and last place he'll look for her. Toward the rocks.
And there it is. Floating in front of her, maybe ten meters from the first and largest of the rocks, is the long pole with the rusted hook at one end that Howard used to push the boat free. She grabs it with both hands, a surge of exultation passing through her, and scans the surface near her for a sea wasp. Sees one, about three meters away, between her and the rock. She kicks herself toward it and then puts the end of the pole under her arm, resting it against her rib cage, wraps both hands around a segment of the pole she can reach with her elbows slightly bent, and slices it sideways through the water, just beneath the surface. The resistance pushes her in the opposite direction, but she scissors her legs to stay in place, and the pole continues to ripple through the water until it hits the weight of the sea wasps. It takes almost all her strength, but Rose is able to keep the pole moving, shoving the sea wasps aside.
Four or five minutes later, gasping with exertion, she has cleared a path through the band of jellyfish surrounding the rock, and she is on her knees in the shallows, only her head and her very pink shoulders above water. The boat is a few hundred meters away, making a wide turn that might bring it back. She stumbles forward, all the way out of the water, until she is facedown on the biggest rock. She stays there for as long as she dares, watching the light, gasping for breath and luxuriating in the sensation of a solid surface beneath her. Then, without much faith in what she's about to do, she goes to work.
Fortunately, what she wants is right at the edges. Lying down, so she's out of sight below the crown of the rock, she rolls onto her back and pops open the pink jacket, then works her arms out of the sleeves and rolls off it. Lifting her arms as little as possible, she peels off the T-shirt, and then she unfastens the jeans. She tugs them down to midthigh and then rolls onto her side and brings her knees up so she can inch the jeans all the way down. They're heavy and wet, and she's sweating, despite the cool drizzle, by the time she scissors her ankles free. Then she folds her T-shirt once for protection, tucks her hands into it, and begins to gather seaweed. She's worried there
