The open water made her anxious, but she felt relatively safe on a motorboat. There was comfort in its speed, in the violence of the sharp propeller blade. She liked to sit in the stern and watch the chaotic wake. As long as the propeller sliced through the water and the boat kept moving forward, Jill believed she’d be okay.
But she never felt safe in a sailboat.
Sailboats relied on the fickle wind. Small crafts abandoned by the wind could be stranded far from land. Even when the wind was cooperating, and a boat’s sails were bloated with air, the danger of capsizing was always there.
Jill’s father loved to skirt that line.
He sailed his boat, a thirty-six-foot Hunter namedNike, like he was being chased by the devil. On summer weekends, the man in the business suit shucked off his fatigue and became a man of salt spray and speed. He could read the windlike a Shakespearean soothsayer, shouting at his crew to “trim the mainsail!” or “prepare to gybe!”
His eyes would sparkle with impish glee as he steered the boat upwind.
“Hold on, Jilly!” he’d cry as the starboard side began to lean. When the balloon-like spinnaker hovered inches from the water’s surface, taunting the ocean, Jill would cling to the lifeline.
Once, she’d seen the hem of the spinnaker dip into the water. Then, a puddle formed in the middle of the blue-and-yellow sail as the water tried to suck the sail into its mouth. The boat listed so severely that Jill could reach over the side and put her whole hand in the water.
Not that she ever would. Long before she’d made the mistake of leaving the theater playingThe Fox and the Houndand creeping into the one showingJaws, she’d feared the creatures that could swim under the hull of a boat without anyone knowing they were there. Her fear had turned into an obsession.
Back in March, she’d done a report for science class on the sharks of Long Island. She’d checked out a dozen books on ocean predators from the public library and spent night after night absorbing facts about apex predators. She studied drawings comparing the sizes of the sharks’ bodies to human bodies. She learned about their acute sense of smell, how a shark’s tail rocketed them through the water, and how they hunted. Sharks could detect the vibrations or electrical impulses of prey, but what stuck with Jill the most was their ability to detect blood.
“From a quarter of a mile away,” she’d told her friends on the bus. “One drop in an Olympic-sized pool. Justonedrop.”
There were so many sharks in the waters surrounding Long Island. Sand sharks and sand tiger sharks. The smoothdogfish shark. Blue, dusky, and basking sharks. Hammerheads and makos. The unpredictable bull shark. And finally, the great white. TheJawsshark.
She knew the shark in the movie was a machine—that it wasn’t real—but it didn’t matter. There were very big, very real great whites in the waters around Long Island.
Two years ago, a man had caught a fifteen-footer. It was the same size as Una’s car. The Blue Jay boats Jill and the other kids sailed were thirteen feet.
No oxygen tanks or flare guns on board, either, she thought.Just a stupid wooden paddle.
As if the sharks weren’t bad enough, there were other scary things in the water. Eels. Killer whales. The Portuguese man o’ war, which everyone called a jellyfish when it was really a colony of zooids working together as one organism.
A man o’ war had washed up on their beach once. J.J. had poked at its kaleidoscopic balloon with a stick, trying to pop it, while Jill hung back, her eyes locked on the dark violet tentacles. The corpse proved her theory. There were dangerous creatures all around them, swimming unseen in the dark water.
That was why she hated being on her dad’s boat, but junior sailing regattas were even worse. For one thing, her father was a skilled sailor. No matter how close he seemed to come to losing control, he always adjusted the sails and righted the boat just in time.
“See?” he’d yell, directing his comment to his wife and daughter. Jill’s mom didn’t like the lean any more than Jill did.
“This isn’t fun!” she’d shout. “It’s scary! This is exactly why I won’t let Justin come.”
“J.J. likes going fast, don’t you, son?”
“Yeah!” Jill’s traitorous brother would answer.
But Jill saw his white-knuckled grip on the lifeline and howhe sprang into action to loosen or trim a sail, always trying to stay one step ahead of disaster.
At the end of last summer, Jill’s mom had announced that her boating days were over.
“I’m going back to work, so I won’t have time for sailing next year,” she informed the family while serving them chicken Parm and broccoli.
Jill wished she could get a job, too. She’d much rather babysit or be a mother’s helper than be on a boat, but there were hordes of high school girls looking for work over the summer, which left Jill another twelve weeks of swimming and sailing.
The swim meets were okay, but the regattas were pure hell.
After church, Jill’s mom went straight into the kitchen to pack bologna and cheese sandwiches, carrot sticks, and apples into two brown bags. Jill and J.J. changed into shorts and T-shirts and hurried into the kitchen to grab their bags.
“Could I come with you instead?” Jill asked her mom. “Icould help with the open house.”
Her mom was wiping off the counter with a sponge, but she paused to consider the request. “Thanks, honey, but I’ve got it all under control.”
