Tears rolled down Josef’s cheeks. He thought about how he’d treated his father at the Cuban doctor’s examination. How he’d made his father believe he was back in that place, where he’d seen so many awful things.
“I can’t go back there,” his father whispered. “Can’t go back.”
His father closed his eyes and put his head between his knees, and soon he was asleep. Josef sat with his sleeping parents until the cabin started to get dark and he couldn’t put off finding Ruthie any longer. He would just have to be as quick as he could.
Josef left the cabin and found his sister splashing around in the pool with the other kids. Josef asked a steward to bring their dinners to their cabin tonight, and as he led Ruthie back he congratulated himself on surviving his first day as an adult.
Until he opened the door and his father was gone.
Josef dropped Ruthie’s hand and got down on his hands and knees to search under the beds, but his father wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the cabin at all.
“No. No!” Josef cried. He shook his mother, begged her to wake up, but the sleeping draught was too powerful. Josef spun in the room, trying to figure out what to do.
He snatched up Bitsy and put the little stuffed bunny into Ruthie’s arms.
“Stay here,” he told Ruthie. “Stay here with Mama, and don’t leave the cabin. Understand? I’ve got to go find Papa.”
Josef ran out the door and into the passageway. But where to now? Where would his father go? Papa hadn’t left the cabin the whole trip, and now he had decided to leave?
Josef heard a commotion, and he sprinted up the stairs to A-deck. Up ahead, a man was helping a woman to her feet, and both of them were looking angrily over their shoulders, the direction Papa must have run.
And that’s when Josef remembered: His father had left the cabin before. To watch them bury Professor Weiler at sea.
Somewhere up ahead, a woman screamed, and Josef took off at a run. He felt as though he was outside himself, like he existed outside his own skin, and he watched himself slam into the rail and look over the side.
Someone yelled, “Man overboard!” and the ship’s siren shrieked.
Josef’s father had jumped into the sea.
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. Se?or 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 Se?ora 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. Se?or 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!