Red Sea by Diane Tullson Page A

turn her so that she’s laying on her other side and pull the quilt back around her. Wherever I touch my mother, heat comes off her in waves.
    My own heart is racing and my hands are shaking. The infection probably accounts for her temperature. Her body is trying to fight it off. I pump a bowl of cool water from the tank and with another towel, sponge her forehead, chest, and back of her neck.
    I gather the used towels into the bowl and take it to the sink. Yesterday I just threw out the bloody towels, but I’ll have to wash these or I’ll run out. If I heat water on the stove, I can boil them to kill any germs. When we left Djibouti, we had everything anyone could need on this boat. Both Mom and Duncan were crazed that way, packing and stowing and recording so that we could be self-sufficient, so that we could survive in a world without 9-1-1. And if we lost our boat, then the go-bag too had everything we needed to survive, at least for a while. My eyes go to the wall next to the stairs where we strapped the go-bag. The varnish is lighter where the bag used to be, a ghostly shadow in the exact outline of the bag.
    I let the bowl clatter into the sink. They won’t even know what half of the stuff is. They’ll probably pitch out the antibiotics. They’ll have a good laugh at the photo, telling their pirate friends how we tried to fight them off with a flare gun.
    I put my hands up to my head. I know we had antibiotics in our big first aid kit, but the pirates took them or they’re lost. And the go-bag, of course. I clench my teeth. Where else? Where else would Mom and Duncan keep antibiotics?
    I slam open the door to the medicine cabinet in the head. I’ve already checked in here about two hundred times, but maybe they put some in another kind of container. I plug the sink and dump my mother’s vitamins out. Just vitamins. Her birth control pills are here. She doesn’t use them for birth control; Duncan had a vasectomy. Apparently, they help moderate PMS . She could use a stronger dose. There’sa half-roll of Tums and a blister pack of seasick medicine, that’s it. Under the sink I pull out more pads, a package of toilet paper, several cleaners, including antibacterial surface wipes that I set aside, a package of Velcro hair rollers my mother bought and never used, thank goodness, and my shower kit. I haven’t used it since Australia. The marina there had showers so clean you could go in bare feet. In Australia, I washed my hair every day. I take a careful sniff of my underarms. Okay, so this is a different world. I put everything back under the sink, shovel the spilled vitamins back into the bottle and close the cabinet. There’s a small cabinet in my mother and Duncan’s cabin that I’ve checked, but I’ll do it again.
    When I open the cabin door, the smell of my mother’s perfume hits me between the eyes. After the attack I wiped up their floor, but the scent has permeated everything in the cabin. Breathing through my mouth, I paw through their cabinet.
    More vitamins. A small make-up kit with foundation, mascara and, wow, two shades of lipstick. Mom took this sailing minimalism seriously. Duncan’s shaving kit, even under the onslaught of broken perfume, still smells like him. I zip it back up. Mom’s kit has a tube of Tylenol that I keep, but nothing else that’s useful. I dump out their drawers onto the bed. At home I used to hide things under my bottom dresser drawer. Sometimes I’d find stuff there that fell out of the back of a drawer and down the inside of the dresser. I get onto my hands and knees and feel around the inside of their cabinet.
    Apparently, my mother knew about the hiding place as well, although the pirates missed it. In hers, I find a zipper bag with our passports and some cash and most of their credit cards. Another bag holds a picture of me, this year’s school picture. In the picture I’m wearing a pale