She doesn't know her name, she says.
Ok, I say, but do you know how you got here?
She thinks for a minute. No, she says, not really.
I try to think what to ask her next. Well, I'm Bill, I say, and this is Alonzo, and maybe if you—
Oh, but wait, she says, speaking of names, I know a good story about names. It was when I was out with my friend Beth one night, and this guy was hitting on her, and being just clueless about the fact that neither one of us wanted to talk to him, you know? So he's like, uh, what's your name, and she goes, well, I have a name, but you wouldn't understand it.
Her grin widens, and when it does, her chapped bottom lip splits, right in the middle, and starts bleeding. She tries to laugh, but it comes out more like a pack-a-day smoker's rasp. Get it? she says. You wouldn't understand it! Oh, I mean, if you could have seen the look on that guy's face!
She starts coughing from the effort of saying so much, and she has trouble stopping. Probably I should get her to try to drink some more water, but when I offered her a liter bottle of it a few minutes ago, she took one sip, then grimaced and threw the bottle overboard. Our supply is not endless, and now there are three of us to be sustained by it.
Do you want to lie down? I ask her.
She shakes her head, then pulls her knees up to her chin and wraps her arms tight around them. I'm cold, she says.
She looks cold. I guess I'd be cold too if I were her. She's wet, and it's October, and she says she doesn't know how long she was in the water, or why she was in the water, or where she came from, or where she's supposed to be. All she seems to know is that one time her friend Beth made fun of some poor drunk guy in a bar and then the two of them laughed hard enough about it that she's remembered it ever since.
Look, she says, do you have another blanket? This one's kind of wet.
We do have another blanket. But it's Alonzo's, and he has a cold, and if she drips all over it like she's already dripped all over my blanket, he'll have to sleep all night under a damp blanket. So I ignore the question.
The thing is, I say, that I know this is hard for you right now, but I really need to know whatever you can think of to tell me. You were just floating out there all by yourself, five miles from anywhere, and what worries me is that whatever happened to you to put you in the water might have happened to other people too. And they might still be out there, in the water like you were. And also, if I don't know who you are, it's kind of hard to know what to do with you.
It'll come back to me, she says. I'm pretty sure it will. I'm just a little confused right now, is all.
It was almost five o'clock when we found her, daylight starting to fade, water and sky bleeding together, almost indistinguishable. We'd been drinking, had each had a couple of beers, so when Alonzo swore he'd seen someone's head out there floating in the water, I'd figured the beer and the light were playing tricks with him. But something in his tone of voice made me take a look anyway, and after a minute I saw it too, maybe a hundred feet away from us, something small and round and darker than the water, and moving, moving more than an inert object resting on top of the water would move, but not moving with any kind of purpose. I squinted, trying to bring what I was seeing into better focus. And just then, the thing moved again, turned a little to the left, and I saw that Alonzo had been right: what I'd seen was the back of a person's head.
The shock of it is hard to describe. To see a person out there, floating out there in all that emptiness when we had just before been sitting on the deck drinking a beer was like being slapped hard into another state of consciousness. It was like being in an accident: one minute everything is just the way you expect it to be, and then, just like that, boom, no warning, you're in another kind of situation altogether. And it seems like we didn't even consciously think about what to do next or about whether what we did was a good idea; we just did it: Alonzo cranked the engine and started to steer us in her direction; I grabbed the life buoy and stood by the railing waving to get her attention as we approached. I mean, she could hardly have missed us; the boat was a 25-footer and not exactly quiet, but waving seemed like the thing to do. And still, she didn't seem to notice it, not me waving, or even the boat itself bearing down on her. She was treading water, and her eyes were fixed on some point in the distance. It was eerie, because those unwavering eyes, those eyes that couldn't seem to take us in even as we got closer and closer, made it seem like she was dead. But she wasn't dead, because she was treading water.
When we finally got close enough for me to throw the rope, I called out to her, and still she didn't respond. I threw the rope anyway, and it was a good throw; the buoy landed about six inches from her head. When it landed, water splashed into her eyes and she blinked, and then reached out and took hold of it. She still didn't seem to see us, but she held on to the buoy the whole time I was pulling her in. When at last she was close enough that we could reach down and lift her on board, she blinked again, and then, as we sat her down on the deck, squinted up at us and said, hi.
I got her the blanket and the water. She was wearing board shorts and a bathing suit, and she had a floatation belt clipped around her waist. We tried to get her to take her clothes off so she could have the warmth and dryness of the blanket against her skin, but I guess maybe she didn't trust our intentions, because all she would take off was the belt. We wrapped her up as best we could in the blanket, picked her up and carried her into the cabin, out of the wind. Then I sat down with her to see if she could help me make sense of it all. Which would be helpful, because now that I've had a chance to start getting my mind around the whole thing even a little bit, I can see that by rescuing her, we've created a situation which might not be so good for Alonzo and me.
She coughs some more, and the coughing makes her lip bleed some more, and this time she notices it, and swipes at the blood with her hand. She looks at it, her blood on her hand, and the sight of it seems to wake her up a little, because then when she looks up at me, her eyes are sort of clearer than they were before. I'm from Greenville, she says. I just remembered that much. And I feel like my name's on the tip of my tongue. I'm pretty sure it'll come back to me in a minute. Okay, I say. And I sit there, waiting. But by the time Alonzo walks in a few minutes later, she's fallen asleep.
It's just, I say, that to me she doesn't exactly have the look of a damsel in distress. Alonzo and I are out on the deck, discussing her while she sleeps. We have to decide what to do. I'm thinking, I tell Alonzo, that this is probably one of those party-girl-got-too-drunk-and-tumbled-overboard kind of things.
But we don't know, says Alonzo. That's the thing. We just don't know.
We could—we should—just radio the Coast Guard. Tell them about the girl. Get them out here to give her the medical attention she probably needs. But Alonzo is illegal. And I have hired him. He could be deported. I could go to jail.
She could die, Alonzo says. You want that to happen?
She'd be dead already if we hadn't've pulled her out, I say. Isn't that enough that we've done for her already?
It's dark by the time she wakes up. I'm so thirsty, she says. Her hair is dry now, but matted and dull from the saltwater. Her eyes are grey, or maybe blue. She's pretty. Reminds Alonzo a little of his sister, he says. Same thick dark hair, same skinny shoulders. So would your sister, I ask him, go jumping off some boat half-drunk and end up forgetting who she is?
No, he says. But if she did, I'd like to think someone out there would be willing to help her. Even at some risk to himself.
I'm so thirsty, she says again. Please, can I have some water?
If you're from Greenville, I ask, what were you doing floating in the ocean?
I don't know, she says. I can't remember. It's like it's all there but I can't get to it. I really need some water.
We can't just keep going, Alonzo says.
What else are we going to do, I ask.
We should have been just about to Savannah by now. Boat's due down in Palm Beach by Tuesday. Dom Wyndham, the rich man who owns it, won't be pleased if it's not. But when, after the girl fell asleep, I told Alonzo to go start the engine back up again, he just said, nah, man, we can't do that. His eyes were scared, jumpy, but his mouth was firm. Now, in the dim light of the galley, he looks tired, resigned. He pours water from the kettle over a teabag we found in one of the cupboards. What she needs, he said, is a hot drink. What Mr. Wyndham will say if he notices that we used one of his teabags I don't want to speculate. It was stated firmly from the outset: we bring all our own supplies. We don't touch any of his.
Well, okay, then, says Alonzo. You're the boss. We might as well go on.
The first time I saw Alonzo was almost three years ago, and he was half-dead. I found him, broken and bloody, in the woods behind my house. I was looking for my dog, and even though I was looking low, I almost didn't see him, almost stepped right on him. He was lying so still. Three broken ribs, a broken arm, a broken finger, and he was lying there so still, so quiet. He'd only been here two months, and so when the foreman on the farm had smacked an older woman in the face in response to her request for a few minutes' rest, Alonzo had thought to intervene, to explain to the foreman that the woman wasn't feeling well. He spoke English better than she did, and the foreman spoke almost no Spanish. But Alonzo and the foreman failed to understand each other all the same, and the outcome of their encounter was Alonzo lying broken in the woods behind my house.
I got hold of a friend of mine who was a nurse, a girl I knew I could trust not to report him, and she found a doctor we could trust too, and the doctor set his bones and put a cast on his arm free of charge. I took him in, let him stay in my spare room, for three months. He didn't like it, being housebound, being beholden, but what could he do? He couldn't work and he had nowhere else to go.
I might be called Stephanie, she says. Or that might be my sister's name. It's somebody's anyway. She looks excited. It's really starting to come back to me, she says. And I've remembered a phone number, and I think it might be my boyfriend's number and he lives in Charleston. I can't remember his name, but I can picture him, he's got kind of a flat nose and light brown hair. If you'll let me borrow your phone, maybe I can call him.
Alonzo is angry. Come on, Bill, he says. Just take her to Charleston. Take her to the authorities. I'll stay on the boat. No one will know I'm here. But you show up at the police with a waterlogged girl who doesn't know her own name, and they don't just let you leave. Wyndham won't stand for it if we're late, I say. We have a job to do, you and me. That's what has to come first.
Anyway, the girl doesn't seem to care, really, that here she is just floating south on a boat, not knowing who she is or where she's going. It'll come back to me any minute, she says. It's all just right there, I can tell.
She sits there, in the main cabin, staring out the window at the water. When we get near Brunswick, Alonzo goes out on deck with my transistor radio. He wants to see if there's anything on the news that might be about her, and after about 15 minutes he beckons me out there and tells me: a boy in Charleston, a 24-year-old insurance salesman, has been arrested for allegedly pushing his girlfriend off his boat. He took her and a couple of friends deep-sea fishing. There was some kind of altercation. And he and the friends came back without her. The friends were intoxicated and couldn't say exactly what had happened, but there is, all the same, probable cause. The name of the victim is being withheld, pending notification of loved ones.
You see, I say, here she was wanting to call this boyfriend and it turns out he tried to kill her.
Maybe, says Alonzo. Or maybe, like you said before, she just got drunk and fell in. We don't know. And she can't tell us.
She can't tell us what she really wants us to do for her either, then, I say. So how are we supposed to know what's right?
It said on the radio, says Alonzo, that she has loved ones. Her loved ones are going to think she's dead.
But Alonzo has loved ones too, a mom and a sister he's supporting back home in Juarez. So you tell me, I want to say to him, how I'm supposed to know what's right.
I might've remembered something else, she says. I might've been going to leave him. I was going to leave because-oh, wait, I've forgotten that part again. But I was thinking I'd just leave him and head south.
Well, isn't that something, I say. Funny how things work out sometimes.
Just find a couple of nice guys on a nice boat, she says, and hitch a ride to Palm Beach. A new life, she says. A new everything.
And I know then: she still doesn't really know a thing. She's just decided to believe what's happening is what she wanted all along.
And probably back there somewhere behind us her loved ones are waiting, aching, not knowing. And a boy in Charleston's been arrested for a crime he didn't quite commit.
But if you keep going in that direction, you'll come up against Alonzo's loved ones too, and they too are anxiously waiting, waiting for the money from Alonzo in America that keeps all of them alive.
And it's what she thinks she wants. A new life. A new everything.
And so we sail on.