“Let them go,” she screamed.
He shook his head and sealed his lips but he worked the lever and the drum stopped hauling in the net.
It went into reverse.
Netting rolled off the drum and slithered across the deck toward the stern.
The net bag that had been coming aboard began to settle back down in the sea.
The stern lifted and water sheeted off and the Outcast was no longer foundering.
And then Lanny put the brake on and the drum froze and the net froze and Lanny barreled across the deck toward her, flailing his arms and wailing about doing bad things and these things down in the water were his fault, these things had come because Lanny had messed up and made Jock mad.
She didn't know how it happened, how Lanny lost his footing — maybe it was his flailing — but he fell on his ass and his slicker slipped on the wet deck and shot him into the water.
She froze.
He thrashed around to face the boat, trying to swim, fighting his slicker and his heavy boots, flailing.
She stood frozen, gripping the rail.
He got a hand on the netting hanging over the stern.
He'd lost his glove.
He looked up at her, face pale as death.
She knew how cold the water was. How it froze the muscles. She shivered.
He mouthed help.
He'd lost his red beanie, she saw.
She could not help following the path of the netting — from the partially-wound netting on the drum, to the netting that traveled across the deck, to the netting that hung over the stern, the part that Lanny gripped, and finally to the circle of netting in the water, now neither gathering nor releasing, just floating there with its catch of things she'd never seen, jellyfish the size of refrigerators.
The circle of net in the water was just beyond Lanny.
He saw her looking. He turned his wet head to look, too. He wailed.
They can't get to him, she thought. They're in the net.
But ropes of tentacles were entwined, were sticking through.
He turned back to look up at her and cried out, “Sandy.”
Maybe there are more, she thought. She couldn't see any more of the muck out there but that didn't mean there weren't more. Lanny said they were chipped for the satellite tracking. Did they all have chips? She couldn't tell by looking — tiny microchips would be like a grains of sand on those monsters. Maybe she should dash into the wheelhouse and look at Lanny's tracker and see if any more showed up on the screen. But she shouldn't waste time on that, should she?
Didn't matter, she thought. The cold would get him first.
He really messed up big time here, trying to net monsters, trying to fix whatever the hell else he had done, swamping their boat, probably flooding the engine, stranding them out here, oh yeah he'd outdone himself this time.
She felt like she was going to explode. There was a ticking bomb inside her and it had started ticking way back when she lost her tug license and she'd thought she'd made her peace but she hadn't. The bomb inside her was about to go off.
Lanny yelled, “Sandy!” He'd got his other hand on the net hanging over the stern but he couldn't haul himself up.
She thought, let him go.
Staring at his panicked face just above the water she pictured his face in the water another time, five years ago that felt like yesterday, Lanny in the water flailing next to the Sea Spray. He'd driven her boat over a submerged rock and bent the prop and she'd said he was goddamn going to fix it and so when they returned to the dock he'd jumped in the water to see how bad the damage was. She'd been so mad she thought she'd pee her pants and she'd stomped away, up the dock to the cafe to use the bathroom — to get away from him, really, before she exploded — and when she'd come out and started down the dock she'd seen him in the water flailing, he'd got himself tangled up in something and as he thrashed he hit his head on the hull and he rolled over like a swamped boat. She'd stood on the dock watching. Frozen. She'd thought of her lost tug license, her dream and her achievement and her pride gone. She'd thought of her future, dragging Lanny like anchor. And the thought had come, let him go. And then she'd turned — to go back to the cafe? She'd never know, because when she turned she saw Fred Stavis up on the deck of the shopping area above the docks, Fred and a bunch of other people but it was Fred she locked eyes with. And she saw him smile. Like he knew her dark heart. She'd spun back around — to run down the dock and jump in the water and save her brother? The shitty thing was, she'd never know. She'd never know because she saw somebody else had already got there. Oscar Flynn, that strange man who always gave her the creeps when she saw him around town, had jumped in the water and was saving her brother.
In the days and months and years afterward she'd carefully probed Lanny about The Shitstorm, what he remembered. She'd needed to know if he remembered his sister watching him flail in the water. If he saw her turn her back. He always said he didn't remember anything.
Fred Stavis did, though. Saw, remembered, and used The Shitstorm to get her to invest in his company, and took Lanny on at shitty wages — holding him hostage she always thought.
And Oscar Flynn saw, she was certain. She'd gone to Flynn a few weeks after The Shitstorm, carefully probing to find out if he'd seen her turn her back on her brother. Her Keasling shame. Flynn hadn't let on what he saw. What he did say, though, gave her the real creeps—“your brother is in my debt.” She'd offered to pay off that debt. Five hundred bucks she couldn't afford. He'd laughed in her face and said “he pays it off every day” and when she'd freaked and asked what that meant he'd said “karma” and told her not to worry.
She did worry. For a while. She'd warned Lanny away from Oscar Flynn and her brother had said okay but now looking back she wondered if that's when her brother had learned to lie. And she herself had been eager to move on, get the whole Shitstorm behind them. She'd told herself that Flynn's karma was good karma because in the days and months and years afterward nothing bad happened.
How blind she'd been. Now she saw. Fred Stavis and — she just bet — Oscar Flynn had gotten Lanny into something ugly. Something that she just bet involved Robbie Donie going missing, something that had sucked in her and Jake and her sad-sack Sea Spray livelihood.
How many more times could she let this happen?
Let him go.
She couldn't look at his face and so she turned away and what did she see? The sad-sack Sea Urchin flag.
She was going to explode.
She rushed up the deck to the winch control and — even now — she was torn between free-wheeling and reverse. Her hand wanted to shove the lever to free-wheel, release the net from the drum, from the boat, just let the net go with its hideous cargo and her brother riding the end of the net.
Into the sea.
But her hand obeyed some primitive command, some Keasling family wiring, and she shoved the lever into reverse.
The drum started rolling in the net again.
The winch started screaming again.
She rushed back to the stern — leaden with defeat or maybe it was acceptance — and got to her knees and anchored one arm around the side railing and watched Lanny rise, attached to the net like a limpet.
Following in the water, being reeled in once again, was the heavy catch.