At the Water's Edge by Sara Gruen Page A

Atlantic.

Chapter Five
    I saw my first rat before we set sail.
    Although our cabins were in the officers’ quarters, there were only two and they were tiny, so Ellis and I had to share a very small bed—a bunk, really—which would have made sleeping impossible even if the engine that powered the rudder wasn’t immediately beneath us. There was a small washbasin in the cabin, but the bath facilities were shared. I was the only woman on board, so I had to wash myself at the sink. I was also so sick I couldn’t keep so much as a cracker down.
    When I wasn’t hanging my face over the sink trying not to throw up, I was lying on the bunk with my arms wrapped around my stomach, doing my best to stare into the distance, which in this case meant trying to focus on some point beyond the cabin wall, which was altogether too close.
    The day before we were supposed to land at the naval base in Scotland, German U-boats caught up with one of the other ships in the convoy and torpedoed her. We circled back to pull men out of the water, which was so slick with fuel it was actually on fire. The Germanswere still there, of course, and we could feel the depth charges, which pitched us about until I feared capsizing and splitting up in equal parts. Unsecured items flew across the room. The electricity flickered on and off, and the cabin was so full of smoke I couldn’t breathe without choking. The handkerchiefs I held over my nose and mouth came away the color of lead. Ellis took pills by the handful—he’d refilled my prescription before we left, getting a great many more than usual since he didn’t know how long we were going to be away, and the quantities he consumed alarmed me.
    When the torpedoes came, Hank shrank into a corner with a bottle of whiskey, saying that if he was going to die, he might as well die drunk. I shrieked each time a deck gun fired. Ellis put his life belt on and wanted me to do the same, but I couldn’t. Having something bulky strapped around my middle impeded my breathing and increased my panic, and besides, what possible difference could it make? If the ship went down, the Germans wouldn’t pluck us from the water, and even if they did, the poor men the SS
Mallory
had managed to save were grievously burned and likely to die anyway.
    I flew into a tear-filled rage: I threw an alarm clock at Hank, who ducked it wordlessly and lit another cigarette. I pounded Ellis’s chest and told him he had tossed us into the middle of a war because his father was a stubborn, stupid, irascible old man, and now, because of him, we were going to be killed. I said I hoped the Colonel dropped dead in his House of Testoni shoes, preferably upon hearing that we had all been blown up, because he was a fraudulent, egomaniacal blowhard without so much as a drop of compassion for anyone else on this earth, including—and especially—his own son. I declared Edith Stone Hyde a self-righteous, bitter old cow, and said I hoped she survived deep into a lonely old age so she could reap the rewards of her treatment of us and its fatal consequences. I told Ellis that the second we hit solid ground, I was turning around and taking the next boat out of there, although even as I said it, I knew I would never willingly get on another ship. I told him that
he
was the idiot, and that his—and his father’s—stupid obsession with a stupid monster was going tobe the end of us all, and if he could come up with a stupider reason to die, I’d really like to know what that was.
    Ellis’s nonreaction was almost more frightening than the torpedoes, because I realized that he, too, thought we were going to die. And then I felt guilty and cried in his arms.
    â€”
    When we finally reached land, it was dusk. For the last couple of days, I’d been worried we might be changing ships rather than docking, because everyone kept referring to our destination as the HMS
Helicon
, but