“Yeah, I noticed that. I also noticed the life vest she was wearing.” I give him a patronizing smile.
“Okay, look,” Sawyer says, wiping his mouth with a napkin and sitting back. “What do you want me to do? Throw a thirteen-year-old girl with a broken ankle out into the water without one? The ferry was rolling onto its side, and there was no time, and I’d already given out all the ones I was carrying. I figured once I had her safely in the water, you guys would take care of her, and I could more easily get another life vest without her on my back. So I gave her mine. And I’m not sorry, because according to the death list, she’s not on it.”
“But you almost were,” I say. “I’m not letting this one go. I have to be able to trust you.”
He sighs. “Fair enough. Anyway, I dropped her down into the water and then tried to scale the deck, but the ferry tilted even farther until I felt like I was trying to climb straight up. And just when I’d almost made it to one of the benches with the life vests inside, the ferry shifted hard and rolled, and I lost my grip and slid down the decline, hitting the railing and flipping over it into the water.” He scrunches his eyes shut for a moment and gingerly rubs the nape of his neck. “That sucked bad. Good thing I have such a hard head.”
“I saw him go over,” Ben says. “I was in the water on that end of the ferry. I thought he might be knocked out, because he hit the railing pretty hard. So I swam out there and saw him flailing and realized he didn’t have his life vest on. So I grabbed him and started looking for debris to hang on to.”
“But,” Sawyer says, “it was almost dark by then, so we had to rely on lightning to see anything.”
Ben continues. “I decided our best option was to try to make it to the breakwall we’d hit, even though the waves were washing over it at the mouth of the channel. I could see the higher part of it, and that was closer to us than the lifeboats at this point. But then we got caught in a riptide that took us out even farther away from you guys, and honestly, I thought that was going to be the end of us. I was tired, hanging on to Sawyer, and trying to coach him on what to do without losing all of my energy talking.”
“Never fight against a riptide,” Sawyer says wisely. “Swim perpendicular to it, parallel to the shore.”
“Very good,” Ben says. “Now learn how to swim.”
“Anyway,” Sawyer says. “So by the time we get out of the riptide we’re really far from the ferry and from you guys, and Ben’s trying to conserve energy because he’s got to keep my face above water, and I’m trying not to freak out and make it worse. Then,” he says with a sardonic smile, “we make a brilliant decision to get Ben’s phone out and call for help. So he tries to keep his life vest above water and I try to get it out, except my hands are numb. I manage to get the phone out without it getting too wet, and as I’m trying to hold it above the water and get to the phone page, I fumble it, and it bounces off Ben’s vest and plops into the water. And I am a loser.”
“Dude, seriously. I kinda figured that would happen. But we had to try. We weren’t going to make it.”
Sawyer nods. “It was pretty frightening.” He pauses and looks up. “I really thought Ben was going to have to let me go any minute. We were both freezing and exhausted and running out of hope.”
Trey, Rowan, and I are spellbound. I’m gripping my fork so tightly my knuckles are white. “What happened?”
Sawyer leans forward. “But then there’s more lightning. And poof.”
“Poof,” Ben says, nodding.
“Poof?” Trey asks. “What the hell does that mean?”
Fifty-One
“It means poof! The sky lights up, and there, not forty yards away, is that runaway lifeboat,” Ben says.
“No way,” Rowan says under her breath.
“Yeah way,” Ben says.
“Hey, let’s not bring God into this,” Trey says.
I laugh because I’m a dork, but Ben ignores the joke and continues. “So then I have to decide if we should try to rest for a few minutes first by floating on our backs, and then strike out, or if we just go for it so it doesn’t get farther away. And ultimately, I don’t want to risk losing it, so I get Sawyer to kick his lazy-ass feet and hang on to my vest belt, and I flip over and start swimming breaststroke like my life depends on it, which it does, out in ten-foot waves trying to catch a lifeboat.”
“It took us forever,” Sawyer says. “I watched the helicopter leave—it never swept the light out as far away as we were. By the time Ben got us to the lifeboat, he was practically dead. I climbed in and hauled him up. He saved my life.” He turns and looks at Ben. “You saved my life, man, and I will never forget it.”
“Now we’re even,” Ben says lightly.
There’s a quiet moment while that sinks in.
“But how did you guys survive the night?” I ask. “It was cold, and you were wet—how are you not frozen or hypothermic or dead?”
Ben and Sawyer exchange a glance and a small smile. “Body heat,” Sawyer says with a shrug. “Skin-on-skin contact.”
Trey stands up, his chair hitting the wall. “What?” he screeches. “That is . . . holy crap,” he says, softer. “That’s a picture, is what that is. Mmm.”
“It was super-romantic,” Sawyer says.