Isabel slipped over the side of the boat into the sea and sighed. The water was warm, but it felt much cooler than being in the boat. The sun was just setting on the western horizon, turning the world into a sepia-toned photograph, but it still had to be close to a hundred degrees outside. If it wouldn’t have swamped their boat and drowned them all for good, Isabel would have prayed for rain to break the muggy heat.
Isabel’s father had rigged up a makeshift sunshade out of his shirt for her mother, and she seemed better now. The aspirin had kept Mami’s fever down, and though she was still exhausted and near to bursting with Isabel’s baby brother, she seemed at peace somehow. Hot, but at peace.
If the rest of them wanted relief, they had to wait for their turn in the water.
Again, Isabel thought about their journey as a song. If the riots and trading for the gasoline were the first verse, and the tanker and the storm the second verse, this part of their trip—the long, hot, stagnant day and a half they had been traveling from the Bahamas to Florida—this was the bridge.
A third verse that was different from the others. This verse was death by slow measures. This was the down-tempo lull before the coming excitement of the climactic last verse and coda.
This was limbo. They could do nothing but wait.
The last sliver of sun finally disappeared below the waves, and Luis cut the engine. The world went silent but for the soft lapping of water against the hull and the creak of their disintegrating boat.
“That’s it,” Luis said. “With the sun down, we won’t be able to navigate as well.”
“Can’t we use the stars?” Isabel asked. She remembered reading that sailors had used the stars to navigate for centuries.
“Which one?” Luis asked. None of them knew.
Amara lifted one of the gasoline jugs and swished around what little there was left in it. “Saves us gas, anyway,” she said. “The thing’s been eating it up. We’ll be lucky to have enough to get to shore when we see land.”
“When will we get there?” Iván asked. He was bobbing in the water just ahead of Isabel, hanging on to the hull like she was.
“Tomorrow, hopefully,” Señor Castillo said from inside the boat. It was the same thing he’d said yesterday, and the day before that.
“Mañana,” Isabel’s grandfather whispered. He was treading water on the other side of the boat with Señora Castillo, his head just visible over the side. He’d been whispering that word off and on since yesterday, and still seemed shaken up somehow. Isabel didn’t know why.
“We’ll see the lights of Miami sometime tomorrow, and we’ll head straight for it,” Mami said. She shifted and winced uncomfortably.
“What is it? Are you all right?” Papi asked.
Isabel’s mother put a hand on her belly. “I think it’s begun.”
“What’s begun?” Papi asked. Then his eyes went wide. “You mean— you mean the baby’s coming? Here? Now?”
Everyone in the boat perked up, and Isabel and Iván pulled themselves up on the side of the boat to see. Isabel was a jumble of emotions. She was excited to see her brother born after waiting so long, but suddenly she was also afraid. Afraid for her mother to have the baby here, on this fragile raft in the middle of the ocean. And worried too, for the first time, about how her baby brother would change her fragile family.
“Yes, I think I’ve gone into labor,” Isabel’s mother said calmly. “But no, I am not having the baby here and now. The contractions are just starting. It took Isabel another ten hours to come after my contractions began, remember?”
Isabel had never heard her mother talk about her birth before, and she was both curious and a little weirded out at the same time.
“What are you going to name him?” Iván asked.
Mami and Papi looked at each other. “We haven’t decided yet,” she said.
“Well, I have some good ideas, if you want some,” Iván said.
“We’re not naming him after Industriales players,” Isabel told him, and Iván stuck his tongue out at her.
They were all quiet for a time, and Isabel watched as the golden horizon shifted from orange to purple to deep blue. Would her baby brother be born at sea, or in the United States? Would the end of their song really be a new life in Miami? Or would it end in tragedy for all of them, adrift, out of gas, and dying of thirst in the great saltwater desert of the Atlantic?
“Hey, we never named our boat,” Iván said.
Everyone moaned and laughed.
“What?” Iván said, smiling. “Every good boat needs a name.”
“I think we all agree this isn’t a good boat,” Señor Castillo said.
“But it’s the boat that’s taking us to the States! To freedom!” Iván said.
“It deserves a name.”
“How about Fidel?” Luis joked, kicking up a splash on Castro’s face at the bottom of the boat.
“No, no, no,” Papi said. “¡El Ataúd Flotante!” The Floating Coffin.
Isabel winced at the name. It wasn’t funny. Not with her mother about to have a baby on the boat.
“Too close, too close,” Señor Castillo agreed. “How about Me Piro,” he suggested. It was slang for “I’m out of here” in Cuba.
“¡Chao, Pescao!” Mami said, and everyone laughed. It literally meant “Good-bye, Fish!” but everyone in Cuba said it to each other to say good- bye.
“The St. Louis,” Isabel’s grandfather said softly. Everyone was quiet for a moment, trying to figure out the joke, but no one understood.
“How about El Camello?” Luis said. “The Camel” was what they called the ugly humpbacked buses pulled around by tractors in Havana.
“No, no—I’ve got it!” Amara cried. “¡El Botero!” It was perfect, because it was the slang word for the taxis in Havana, but it actually meant “the Boatman.” All the adults laughed and clapped.
“No, no,” Iván said, frustrated. “It needs a cool-sounding name, like The —”
Iván jumped a little in the water, and his eyes went wide.
“The what?” Isabel asked. Then she jumped too as something hard and leathery bumped into her leg.
“Shark!” screamed Isabel’s grandfather from the other side of the boat.
“Shark!”
The water around Iván became a dark red cloud, and Isabel screamed.
Something bumped into her again, and Isabel scrambled to climb into the
boat, arms and legs shaking, panic thundering in her chest. Her father grabbed her around her middle and they fell back in a tumble inside the boat. Beside them, Amara and Mami helped pull Señora Castillo into the boat as Lito pushed her up out of the water from behind. Isabel and her father scrabbled to their knees and pulled her grandfather in behind her.
On the other side of the boat, Luis and Señor Castillo cried out Iván’s name as they hauled his limp body over the side.
Iván’s right leg was a bloody mess. There were small bites all over it, as though a gang of sharks had attacked all at once. Raw, red, gaping wounds exposed the muscle underneath his skin.
Isabel fell back against the side of the boat in horror. She’d never seen anything so awful. She felt like she was going to throw up.
Señora Castillo wailed. Iván was so shocked he didn’t even cry out, didn’t speak. His eyes had a glazed look to them, and his mouth hung open.
One of the gashes up near his thigh was pumping blood out like a garden hose, and Isabel watched as Iván’s face grew pale. She couldn’t speak.
“A tourniquet!” Lito cried. “We have to get something around his leg to stop the bleeding!”
Isabel’s father yanked off his belt and Lito tied it as high around Iván’s leg as he could, but the blood still flowed, coloring the water all around them in the boat a dark, sickening red.
“No—NO!” Señor Castillo cried as the life went out of Iván’s eyes.
Isabel wanted to scream too, but she was frozen. There was nothing she could do. There was nothing any of them could do.
Iván was dead.
Luis yelled in rage and pulled his police pistol from its holster. BANG!
BANG-BANG! He fired once, twice, three times at the fin that circled the boat.
“No!” Lito said, grabbing Luis’s hand before he could shoot again.
“You’ll just bring more sharks with the blood in the water!”
Too late. Another fin appeared, and another, and soon the nameless little boat was surrounded.
They were trapped in their own sinking prison.