“We’re not naming him after Industriales players,” Isabel told him, and Iván stuck his tongue out at her.
They were all quiet for a time, and Isabel watched as the golden horizon shifted from orange to purple to deep blue. Would her baby brother be born at sea, or in the United States? Would the end of their song really be a new life in Miami? Or would it end in tragedy for all of them, adrift, out of gas, and dying of thirst in the great saltwater desert of the Atlantic?
“Hey, we never named our boat,” Iván said.
Everyone moaned and laughed.
“What?” Iván said, smiling. “Every good boat needs a name.”
“I think we all agree this isn’t a good boat,” Se?or Castillo said.
“But it’s the boat that’s taking us to the States! To freedom!” Iván said. “It deserves a name.”
“How about Fidel?” Luis joked, kicking up a splash on Castro’s face at the bottom of the boat.
“No, no, no,” Papi said. “?El Ataúd Flotante!” The Floating Coffin. Isabel winced at the name. It wasn’t funny. Not with her mother about to have a baby on the boat.
“Too close, too close,” Se?or Castillo agreed. “How about Me Piro,” he suggested. It was slang for “I’m out of here” in Cuba.
“?Chao, Pescao!” Mami said, and everyone laughed. It literally meant “Good-bye, Fish!” but everyone in Cuba said it to each other to say good-bye.
“The St. Louis,” Isabel’s grandfather said softly. Everyone was quiet for a moment, trying to figure out the joke, but no one understood.
“How about El Camello?” Luis said. “The Camel” was what they called the ugly humpbacked buses pulled around by tractors in Havana.
“No, no—I’ve got it!” Amara cried. “?El Botero!” It was perfect, because it was the slang word for the taxis in Havana, but it actually meant “the Boatman.” All the adults laughed and clapped.
“No, no,” Iván said, frustrated. “It needs a cool-sounding name, like The—”
Iván jumped a little in the water, and his eyes went wide.
“The what?” Isabel asked. Then she jumped too as something hard and leathery bumped into her leg.
“Shark!” screamed Isabel’s grandfather from the other side of the boat. “Shark!”
The water around Iván became a dark red cloud, and Isabel screamed. Something bumped into her again, and Isabel scrambled to climb into the boat, arms and legs shaking, panic thundering in her chest. Her father grabbed her around her middle and they fell back in a tumble inside the boat. Beside them, Amara and Mami helped pull Se?ora Castillo into the boat as Lito pushed her up out of the water from behind. Isabel and her father scrabbled to their knees and pulled her grandfather in behind her.
On the other side of the boat, Luis and Se?or Castillo cried out Iván’s name as they hauled his limp body over the side.
Iván’s right leg was a bloody mess. There were small bites all over it, as though a gang of sharks had attacked all at once. Raw, red, gaping wounds exposed the muscle underneath his skin.
Isabel fell back against the side of the boat in horror. She’d never seen anything so awful. She felt like she was going to throw up.
Se?ora Castillo wailed. Iván was so shocked he didn’t even cry out, didn’t speak. His eyes had a glazed look to them, and his mouth hung open. One of the gashes up near his thigh was pumping blood out like a garden hose, and Isabel watched as Iván’s face grew pale. She couldn’t speak.
“A tourniquet!” Lito cried. “We have to get something around his leg to stop the bleeding!”
Isabel’s father yanked off his belt and Lito tied it as high around Iván’s leg as he could, but the blood still flowed, coloring the water all around them in the boat a dark, sickening red.
“No—NO!” Se?or Castillo cried as the life went out of Iván’s eyes. Isabel wanted to scream too, but she was frozen. There was nothing she could do. There was nothing any of them could do.
Iván was dead.
Luis yelled in rage and pulled his police pistol from its holster. BANG! BANG-BANG! He fired once, twice, three times at the fin that circled the boat.
“No!” Lito said, grabbing Luis’s hand before he could shoot again. “You’ll just bring more sharks with the blood in the water!”
Too late. Another fin appeared, and another, and soon the nameless little boat was surrounded.
They were trapped in their own sinking prison.
Mahmoud was in another tent city. The paved parking lot at the pier in Lesbos was full of the kinds of camping tents sold in sporting goods stores—round-topped single-family tents of blue and green and white and yellow and red, all provided by Greek relief workers who knew the refugees had nowhere to stay while they waited for the ferry to Athens to come. Wet clothes were hung out to dry on bicycle racks and traffic signs, and refugees gathered around camp stoves and hot plates.
It should have been a lively place, full of songs and laughter like the Kilis refugee camp, but instead a soft, mournful murmur of conversation hung over the tent city like a fog. Mahmoud wasn’t surprised; his family felt exactly the same way. They all should have been excited to finally be in Greece, to be allowed to buy real tickets to travel on an actual ferry to mainland Europe. But too many of them had lost someone in the sea crossing to be happy.
Mahmoud’s mother had gone from tent to tent asking after Hana. Mahmoud had helped. It was his fault she was gone, after all. But no one at the dock had her, and no one had been on the dinghy that had taken her.
Refugees came and went but the tents remained, and Mahmoud’s mother insisted they miss the next ferry to Athens so she could ask each new round of refugees for word of her daughter. But no one knew anything about her.
Mahmoud felt as sick as he had on the dinghy. He couldn’t look at his mother. She had to blame him for losing Hana. He certainly blamed himself. He couldn’t sleep at night. He kept picturing his sister’s dinghy bursting on the rocks. Hana falling into the water. None of them there to help her.
Mahmoud’s mother wanted to stay at the dock longer, didn’t want to leave without knowing what happened to Hana, but Dad told her they had to move on. There was no telling when the ferry line might suddenly decide to stop selling tickets to refugees, or when Greece might decide to send them all home. They had to keep moving or they would die. Hana had to have gone ahead of them on the morning ferry they’d missed that first day. Or else …
No one wanted to think about the “or else.”