Chapter 5: Forty Miles Out

"Is she awake?" I asked.

Bo looked at me.

"My mom says she's breathing on her own. She's asleep. They can't wake her up all the way."

He was already turning for the wheelhouse.

"I'm going to make the captain turn around."

"We're forty miles out in a gale," I said. "He won't, and he shouldn't."

He spun back so fast I flinched.

"Did I ask you?"

"No."

"Then shut up about my sister."

I shut up.

He went up the ladder anyway, and I heard the captain tell him exactly what I'd said.

When he came down, his jaw was set so hard I could see the muscle.

He didn't look at me, and he didn't apologize.

I understood that.

I had a family that never did either.

The storm came all the way in at eleven.

The Grace climbed every wave and fell off the back of it.

We still had four sample casts to make. The captain wouldn't skip them. The whole season depended on the September water.

At one in the morning I was on the back deck in a harness, running the winch while Bo fed the cable over the stern.

The sampler was a steel frame of bottles, hanging sixty feet down in black water.

Bo kept checking his phone in his jacket.

He wasn't watching the cable.

"Eyes on the line," I shouted.

"I know my own boat, Tilden."

A wave came over the stern rail, green and solid, and knocked the deck out from under both of us.

The cable jumped its block.

It came sideways across the deck, singing, and wrapped Bo's left hand against the drum.

He didn't yell.

He just made a low sound.

The winch was still turning.

I hit the red stop with my whole fist.

The drum stopped with his glove two inches from the gear.

"Don't pull," I shouted. "Bo. Don't pull, it'll take the skin."

"Get off me, I've got it."

"You don't have it."

I threw the brake and backed the drum off one click.

Two clicks.

The cable loosened.

His hand came out, the glove torn half off.

Then the stern dropped, and the sampler line went slack, and I watched the whole steel frame start to slide back out of its block.

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