Free Ten Degrees of Reckoning by Hester Rumberg Page B

follow some tiny air bubbles to find her way up to the deck. Mike had been awakened abruptly and hadn’t yet fully absorbed the extent of the damage. She knew he would have ended up trapped. And she simply couldn’t bear to lose her husband as well.
    The dinghy flipped and tossed them out. Mike and Judy righted it, and Mike helped everyone get back in. They were all thoroughly soaked. In spite of the wild seas beyond them, the dinghy was still in a zone of calm water, surrounded by diesel fuel, so it didn’t make sense when they flipped again, and then again. Each time it was more difficult to climb into the dinghy, with their bodies heavy with salt and diesel, and limbs less agile from the cold.
    Judy became aware of an excruciating pain in her back and needed Mike’s assistance. She knew something had hit her on the side of her head when she was still down in the cabin, but she couldn’t understand what had happened to her back.
    She was glad they were close to land; she was less worried about her injuries than about Mike and Annie’s well-being. They had no physical injuries, but their scant nightclothes were already sodden with salty seawater and they were soaked to the skin.
    Mike put his arms around Judy and Annie, although he was really the one most in need of tenderness right then. Judy’s mind raced back to all the teasing she had taken from Mike’s siblings at their wedding, about making babies immediately. They had told her that as soon as he was old enough, Mike became a camp counselor, that he had always loved children. He had babysat willingly; he had helped teach Little League Baseball; he simply loved being involved with children. When Ben and Annie were born, he was overjoyed, and he never felt beset by the responsibility. Leaving a child behind was against his very nature.
    Mike and Judy had established special bedtime rituals for the kids whenever they were at anchor. They would each spend time with one child and then switch after lengthy discussions or prolonged reading sessions. Judy once asked Annie what were the happiest and saddest times she could remember.
    Annie had answered, “I don’t know, Mommy, because I always feel so happy.”
    Ben had more complicated things on his mind. “I really want to know why songs get stuck in my head,” he said once, and another time, “Where does God come from?”
    Thinking of this now, Judy gasped in anguish. Who would ask her all those questions now? She wondered, too, in the face of Ben’s death, if Annie’s once indestructible spirit would be muted. She wondered if any of them could ever return to their normal selves, their normal lives, their normal routines. Mike had always liked to be the first one awake when the family was in a pleasant anchorage with settled weather. He would stealthily get up from the forward berth, pull on his shorts, and make coffee. Then with his cup and a book, he would head out to the cockpit and sit under the awning. Even though he tried to get up without waking any of the others, Annie would always hear Mike and join him. Each morning they sat in the cockpit and watched the sun come up together.
    On those same mornings, in the sheltered anchorages, Judy and Ben both loved sleeping late. When they awakened, they would make pancakes together, singing and planning the new day ahead. Ben was Judy’s “little man,” always wishing to emulate her. It was excruciating to be without him. And thoughts of Ben trapped in his cozy blanket, as the Mummy, unable to free himself, kept intruding and tormenting Judy. All Judy wanted at that moment was to wallow in her grief. But it was up to her to move on to the next step and make sure that the remaining family survived. She had to figure out why the dinghy kept flipping, so she could warm up Mike and Annie, and pass on some of her clothing to them.
    It was a pitch-black night, but Judy’s eyes began to adjust to the darkness all around. She took a good look at the state of the