Read Online Red Sea by Diane Tullson - Free Book Online Page B

the milk in my stomach turn over.
    They won’t even know that we left port. They probably think we got an updated weather forecast and we were the smart ones to stay put, that we were snug on the seawall, fighting over whether “xerox” is a permissible Scrabble word, while they were fighting to keep their masts out of the sea.
    As I sit here, Jimmy’s wife is making BLTS with tomatoes from Djibouti, each tomato costing more than some workers make in a month, and Jimmy cleans the barrel of his M – 16, eyeing the horizon for the happy chance to unload it into someone.
    I wouldn’t mind if Jimmy chose Eggman and his boss. I really wouldn’t.
    We never should have left. We should have waited for the next flotilla. We’d never catch up with Emma and Mac, never see them again, but somehow I don’t think we’re going to anyway.
    I never should have left my mother alone in the cockpit.
    If I could use the engine, I could travel in the general direction of the flotilla. Not that I’d ever find them, even. I might be able to find a commercial ship, but if you believe Jimmy, they wouldn’t respond to a radio call. Not that I can use the engine, not with the fish net wrapped around the propeller. Not that I’m going anywhere.
    Not that Duncan or my mother can help me. This morning, my mother’s sweatshirt smelled sour with blood. The smell reminded me of a meat shop we once went into, dim, with sawdust on the floor and the skinned carcasses of goats and sheep suspended from a low ceiling. My mother asked for lamb, and the butcher unhooked a small carcass and tossed it onto a wooden chopping block in the middle of his shop. With an immense knife he pried free a rack of ribs, rehung the rest of the lamb, then, with a cleaver, whacked the ribs into chops. Duncan told me to stand back, but I didn’t, and bits of bone and blood hit my cheek.
    With that image, the cookies and milk rise up in my throat, abate, then with a burning fierceness, burst out my mouth and nostrils, spraying the cockpit floor. I cough,heave what’s left and heave again. I haven’t thrown up since second grade and I’ve forgotten how vomit scalds the nasal passages. I’m crying again, my nose running all down my face. I bring my feet up out of the mess, onto the bench, bending my knees under my chin. My hands smell of vomit. I want someone to come and clean me up. I want someone to deal with the toss. Tossed cookies, literally. The movement of the boat is sloshing the puddle back and forth on the floor of the cockpit.
    I grab the bucket Mom keeps tied to the stern rail, drop it over the side to fill it, haul it in, and slosh the cockpit mess out over the transom. Bending over the rail to refill the bucket, I stop myself from looking at the sea, at the inevitable panic I feel at the thought of falling in.
    With the mess finally gone, I collapse onto the cockpit bench. Next time I’ll just hurl into the bucket. That’s what Mom does. On passage, the green bucket is her best friend. She carries it with her like a handbag.
    Duncan says, or Duncan said, I mean, that fear can make a person seasick. I don’t think of my mother as a fearful person. Cautious, for sure, and a bit manic when it comes to germs, worms and things you can catch from doorknobs. I remember once when I was really little grossing her out in a public washroom by crawling on my hands and knees under the cubicle doors. Apparently, and I know this because when I emerged from my commando crawl, she drilled it into my head for the full five minutes that she scoured my hands: The highest concentration of germs in a bathroom is not on the toilet seat, or even the bowl, but on the floor. I have noidea how this can be, but I still wouldn’t test the theory by touching a toilet seat in a public washroom.
    Ty, once, at McDonald’s, followed me into the women’s restroom. It made me laugh the way he just walked in like