“Ma?ana,” Lito said wearily. “Ma?ana.”
Suddenly, Isabel’s grandfather stopped bailing water. He sat up straighter, like he was looking at something in the distance. “Ma?ana,” he whispered.
“Lito?” Isabel asked.
Her grandfather blinked and his eyes found her again. Was he crying, or was it just sweat and seawater?
“It’s nothing, Chabela. Just … a memory. Something I haven’t thought about in a long time.”
Isabel’s grandfather gazed around the little boat, and his eyes suddenly looked sadder, Isabel thought. She would have crawled over and hugged him, but there was no room to do it without three people getting up and moving for her to get there.
“Don’t stop bailing,” Se?or Castillo told them from where he lay in the bottom of the boat.
“Maybe you could help,” Papi told him.
“I’m recovering!” Se?or Castillo argued. “I can barely move in this heat! Besides, I don’t see you bailing.”
“I’m tending to my wife,” Papi said. “Who’s really sick.”
Ever since the Bahamas, something had come over Isabel’s father. He’d been more attentive to Mami. More focused on her than anything else. Nobody else noticed, but Isabel did. She’d seen him hold her hand, watched him gently move her hair out of her face, heard him whispering that he loved her, that he needed her.
Things she had never seen or heard him do before.
“Are you saying my father is faking it?” Luis challenged.
“I’m just saying it’s very nice for him that everybody else is keeping this metal coffin afloat while he sits back and relaxes,” Papi said.
“You wouldn’t even have this ‘metal coffin’ if I hadn’t built it!”
“I’m not sure if built is the right word,” Se?ora Castillo said, trying to pull two of the side pieces back together. “Cobbled is more like it.”
Iván and Se?or Castillo erupted at the same time.
“We did the best we could!” Iván yelled.
“Oh, now you’re telling us how to build things?” Se?or Castillo said. “Where were you and Luis when we were up all night putting this thing together, eh? You were at your law office, doing God knows what.”
Isabel shrank in her seat and put her hands over her ears. She hated when her parents argued like this, and now everyone on the boat was mad at each other.
“I was helping people,” Se?ora Castillo told her husband. “You’ve never appreciated what I do—”
“And what was I supposed to do,” Luis threw in, “tell my police commander I had to stay home and build a boat so I could escape?”
“All of you, stop it,” Amara yelled from the back of the boat. “Right now. You’re acting like children.”
Everyone fell quiet and looked appropriately chastised.
“I think it’s time for a water break,” Amara told them. “Isabel? Will you hand out the bottles?”
It was a little earlier than their rationed water break, but none of them complained. The clear, delicious water was the best thing Isabel had ever tasted, and it settled them all down like mother’s milk for a baby.
“We’re all hot, and we’re all tired, and yes, we’re sinking,” Amara said. “But if we lose our heads, we’re only going to die faster. We can resolve this.”
“She’s right,” Isabel’s father said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too,” Se?or Castillo said. “I should be helping.”
“Only if you’re up to it,” Papi said, and he sounded like he meant it.
“The boat is falling apart, though,” Iván said. “We’re taking on too much water.”
“We have too much weight,” Se?ora Castillo said.
She was right, but what could they lose? There was just the engine, the fuel, the food and water, and the nine of them.
“What if one or two of us slipped out into the water at a time,” Papi suggested. “They could hang on to the boat. Floating in the water alongside would help take some of the weight away.”
“But it would drag on the boat. Slow us down,” Luis said.
“But it might keep the boat afloat longer,” Se?or Castillo said.
“I think we should try it,” Amara said. “We’ll take turns in the water. It’ll keep us cooler too.”
And right now, Isabel thought, cooler heads just might be the most important thing of all.
Mahmoud was in and out of sleep, waking every few seconds when the waves washed over him. Minutes—hours?—passed, and Mahmoud dreamed that a boat was coming for them. He could hear its motor over the lapping of the waves.
Mahmoud jerked awake. He ran a wet, cold hand down his face, trying to focus, and he heard it again—the sound of a motor. He wasn’t dreaming! But where was it? The rain had stopped, but it was still dark. He couldn’t see the boat, but he could hear it.
“Here!” he cried. “Here!”
But the sound of the motor still stayed frustratingly, agonizingly, far away. If only whoever was on the boat could see him, Mahmoud thought. All his life he’d practiced being hidden. Unnoticed. Now, at last, when he most needed to be seen, he was truly invisible.
Mahmoud cried in exhaustion and misery. He wanted to do it all over again. He wanted to go back and stand up for the boy in the alley in Aleppo who was getting beaten up for his bread. To scream and yell and wake the sleeping citizens of Izmir so they would see him and all the other people sleeping in doorways and parks. To tell Bashir al-Assad and his army to go to hell. He wanted to stop being invisible and stand up and fight. But now he would never get a chance to do any of that. It was too late. There was no time.
Time. The phone! Mahmoud still had the phone in his pocket! He pulled it out and pushed the button on it through the plastic bag, and the screen with the clock on it lit up like a beacon in the night. Mahmoud held it over his head and waved it in the dark, screaming and yelling for help.
The motor got louder.
Mahmoud wept for joy as a boat emerged from the darkness—a real boat this time, not a dinghy. A speedboat with lights and antennas and blue and white stripes on the side—the colors of the Greek flag.
A Greek Coast Guard ship, come to save them.
And on the front of the ship, down on his knees with hands clasped in thanks, was Mahmoud’s father.
Waleed was there too, in the back under a foil thermal blanket, and soon Mahmoud and his mother were out of the water and wrapped in the foil blankets too, what little body heat they still had left reflected back at them. Mahmoud’s mother was too insensible to speak, so Mahmoud told his father how they had given Hana away rather than see her drown with them. Mahmoud’s father wept, but pulled Mahmoud to him and hugged him.
“Hana’s not with us, but she’s alive. I know it,” his father told him. “Because of you, my son.”