Isabel woke to a warm orange glow on the horizon and a silver sea stretching out before them like a mirror. It was as though the storm had been some kind of feverish nightmare. Señor Castillo woke from his nightmare too, parched like a man who’d been lost in the desert. He drank almost half of one of the few gallons of water they had left in one long chug, then laid back against the side of the boat.
Isabel worried about her mother. For Mami, the nightmare was just beginning. The illness she’d felt as the storm began had gotten worse in the night, and now she had a fever hotter than the rising sun. Lito dipped a scrap of shirt into the cool seawater and draped it across his daughter’s forehead to cool her, but without the aspirin from the lost medicine box there was no way to bring the fever down.
“The baby … ” Mami moaned, holding her stomach.
“The baby will be fine,” Lito told her. “A good strong healthy baby boy.”
Lito and Señora Castillo took care of Isabel’s mother. Papi and Luis got the engine restarted, and bathed it with water to keep it cool. Amara, at the
rudder, steered them north now that the sun was in the sky. Everybody had a job, it seemed, except Isabel and Iván.
Isabel bumped shoulders and stepped on toes as she wobbled her way over to Iván in the prow of the boat. She sat down beside him with a huff.
“I feel useless,” she told Iván.
“I know,” he said. “Me too.”
They sat for a while in silence before Iván said, “Do you think we’ll have to do algebra in our new American school?”
Isabel laughed. “Yes.”
“Will they have political rallies every day at school in the US? Will we have to work in the fields all afternoon?” His eyes went wide. “Do you think we’ll have to carry guns to protect us from all the shootings?”
“I don’t know,” Isabel told him. Their teachers told them all the time how homeless people starved in the streets of the US, and how people who couldn’t afford to pay for doctors got sick and died, and how thousands of people were killed by guns every year. As happy as she had been to go to el norte, Isabel suddenly worried that it wouldn’t be as magical a place as everyone in the boat believed.
“No matter what, I’m glad you came with us,” Iván said. “Now we can live next door to each other forever.”
Isabel blushed and looked at her feet. She liked that thought too.
Castro’s face was even more submerged now, which meant they were taking on water. Between the tanker and the storm, the little boat had suffered a pounding—and it had never been very seaworthy to begin with.
Señor Castillo had only expected the boat to be on the water for a day, two at the most. How much longer would it take them to get to Florida?
And where exactly were they?
“Hey, is that land?” Iván asked.
He pointed over the side of the boat. Isabel and the others scrambled so quickly to see that the boat tipped dangerously in the water.
Yes—yes! Isabel could see it. A long, thin, dark green line along the
blue horizon. Land!
“Is it Florida?” Iván asked.
“It’s on the wrong side of the boat to be the US,” Luis said, looking back at the sun. “Unless we got blown into the Gulf of Mexico overnight.”
“Whatever it is, I’m steering for it,” Amara told them.
Everyone watched in silence as the green line turned into hills and trees, and the water got clearer and shallower. Isabel held her breath. She had never been so excited in her entire life. Was it really the United States? Had they made it? Amara brought them close to shore, then turned and ran south along it. Isabel searched the shore. There! She pointed to red and yellow beach umbrellas with chairs underneath them. And in the beach chairs were white people.
A woman in a bikini lifted her black sunglasses and pointed at them, and the man with her sat up and stared. As the boat rounded the beach, Isabel saw more people, all staring and pointing and waving.
“Yes! Yes! We made it! We made it!” Isabel said, shaking Iván’s arms.
Iván hopped up and down so much the boat groaned. “Florida!” he cried.
A black man in a white suit hurried down the beach toward them, waving his arms over his head to get their attention. He yelled something in English, and pointed for them to go farther south.
Amara followed the shore around a bend, and the open ocean gave way to a quiet little bay with a long, wooden pier. The pier had a little café on it with tables and chairs. Fancy two-man sailboats were parked on the beach next to volleyball courts, and more umbrellas and chairs dotted the sand.
Isabel’s heart leaped—the US was even more of a paradise than she ever imagined!
Luis flipped a switch, and the putter of the engine died. The white people got up from their tables at the bar to help pull them to the dock, and Isabel and the others reached for their hands. Their fingertips were almost close enough to touch when black men in white short-sleeve uniforms pushed their way between the vacationers on the pier and the boat.
One of them said something in a language Isabel didn’t understand.
“I think he’s asking us if we’re from Haiti,” Lito said to the others in the boat. “We are from Cuba,” he said slowly in Spanish to the uniformed man.
“You’re from Cuba?” the officer asked in Spanish.
“Yes! Yes!” they cried.
“Where are we?” Papi asked.
“The Bahamas,” the man said.
The Bahamas? Isabel’s mind went back to the map of the Caribbean on the wall of her schoolroom. The Bahamas were islands to the north and east of Havana, directly above the middle of Cuba. A long way east of Miami.
Had the storm really taken them that far off course?
“I’m sorry,” the officer said. “But you are not allowed to land. Bahamian law forbids the entrance of illegal aliens to the Bahamas. If you set foot on Bahamian soil, you will be taken into custody and returned to your country of origin.”
Behind the officers, one of the tourists who knew Spanish was translating for the others. Some of them looked upset and started arguing with the authorities.
“But we have a sick pregnant woman,” Lito said to the officer. He moved so the men on the dock could see Isabel’s mother, and the tourists behind the officers cried out in concern.
The officers conferred, and Isabel held her breath.
“The commandant says that for health reasons the pregnant woman may come ashore and receive medical attention,” the Spanish-speaking officer said. Isabel and Iván clutched at each other with hope. “But she cannot have her baby here,” the officer said. “As soon as she is well, she will be deported to Cuba.”
Isabel and Iván sagged, and everyone else on the little boat was silent.
Isabel felt sick. She wanted her mother to get better, but she didn’t want them to be sent back to Cuba. Couldn’t the Bahamas just let them stay?
How was one more Cuban family going to hurt? She looked back at the pier and nice café. They had plenty of room!
The situation was explained to the tourists on the pier, and they gasped and waited.
“All right,” Lito said. “My daughter is sick. She needs medical attention.”
“No!” Papi said. “You heard him! If we step off this boat, they’ll send us back to Cuba. I’m not going back.”
“Then I will go with her,” Lito said. “I care for Teresa’s life more than I care for el norte.”
Tears ran down Isabel’s cheeks. No. No! This wasn’t the way things were supposed to happen! Her family was supposed to be together. That’s why she’d insisted they all go on the boat. And if her mother went back to Cuba and her father went on to the United States, which one was she supposed to go with?
Lito started to lift Isabel’s mother, but Mami pushed him away.
“No!” Isabel’s mother said.
“But, Teresa—” Lito said.
“No! I don’t want my baby born in Cuba.”
“But you’re ill! You can’t take another ocean voyage,” Lito argued.
“I will not go back,” Mami said. She reached up and took her husband’s and her daughter’s hands. “I will stay with my family.”
Relieved, Isabel threw herself into her mother’s arms. She was surprised when she felt her father kneel down in the boat and hug them both.
“It sounds like we’re leaving, then,” Luis told everyone in the boat.
Before they could get the engine restarted, one of the tourists tossed down a bottle of water to Señora Castillo. Soon the rest of the tourists were hurrying back and forth to the café, buying bottles of water and bags of chips and tossing them into everyone’s hands on the boat.
“Aspirin? Does anyone have aspirin? For my mother?” Isabel begged.
Up on the dock, an old white woman understood. She quickly dug around in her big purse and tossed a plastic bottle full of pills to Isabel.
“Thank you! Thank you!” Isabel cried. Her heart ached with gratitude toward these people. Just a moment’s kindness from each of them might mean the difference between death and survival for her mother and everyone else on the little raft.
By the time they finally restarted the engine and Amara swung them around to leave, they had more food and water than they had brought with them to begin with. But they were farther away from Florida and freedom than they had ever been before.