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 Se?ora 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.
“My baby,” Mahmoud’s mother wailed. “My Hana is gone.”
The Mediterranean was still attacking them, wave after wave trying to drown them, and Mahmoud could tell that his mother didn’t want to fight anymore. It was all Mahmoud could do to keep her head above the water.
“I’m still here,” Mahmoud told her. “I need you.”
“I gave my baby to a stranger,” Mahmoud’s mother howled. “I don’t even know who she was!”
“She’s safe now,” Mahmoud told her. “Hana is out of the water. She’s going to live.”
But Mahmoud’s mother would not be consoled. She lay back in the water, her face to the sky, and sobbed.
The dinghy coming by had reenergized Mahmoud, but he could feel the buzz quickly draining away, replaced by a cold exhaustion that left his arms and legs numb. The sea rolled over him and he went under again, coming up spluttering. He could not keep himself and his mother afloat. Not for long.
They were going to die here.
But at least Hana was safe. Yes, he had been the one to convince a stranger to take his little sister away, and yes, his mother might never forgive herself for letting Hana go. But at least neither of them would have to live long with their regret.
The rain began again, the awful, pelting, deadening rain, and it felt to Mahmoud like Allah was crying for them. With them.
They were drowning in tears.
Under the sweeping wash of rain, Mahmoud heard something like a drumbeat. Water on something that was not water. He searched the rising and falling waves until he saw it—the back side of a life jacket still strapped to a man. A man who floated facedown in the water.
In his mind’s eye, Mahmoud immediately filled in the drowned man’s face with that of his father, and his heart thumped against his own useless life jacket. He flailed in the water, half swimming, half towing his mother toward the body.
But no! The life vest was blue, and his father’s had been orange, like Mahmoud’s. And this one was a real, working life jacket. Mahmoud let his mother go for just a moment and wrestled the body over. It was the big man who had sat next to him on the dinghy. His eyes and mouth were open, but there was no life in either one. The man was dead.
It wasn’t the first dead body Mahmoud had seen. Not after four years of civil war, with his hometown right in the center of the fighting. A man had been killed right next to him in his family’s car, he realized with a start. How long ago had that been? Days? Weeks? It seemed like a lifetime ago. But no matter how many times he saw death, it never stopped being horrifying. Mahmoud shuddered and recoiled.