others, but carried his rifle on his back, not in front, and the other pirates were careful never to get in his way. Seeing the way he observed his surroundings, Jenny always made sure to stand between him and Alexandra whenever he looked at her. Despite the looting, he kept the others from stealing the radio and the navigation equipment on the chart table.
When the thieves had gotten what they wanted and given in to the drowsiness of victory, their leader went up on deck. His rust-red beard shone intensely in the sun. It took Jenny a while to realize that the man was kicking Carl-Adam like the others, but he wanted something specific. “Here!” he shouted, waiting a few seconds for the prisoner’s reaction, and then starting in again. “Here!” Then Jenny got a glimpse of the man’s handheld GPS and understood.
It would take several days before the pirates grasped that Jenny was the skipper of the MaryAnn. But this time, when Redbeard kicked, she managed to go up on deck and get his attention. With a final kick to his side, bringing Carl-Adam down once again, the pirate leader turned around.
“Here!” he repeated, reaching out his arm with the GPS right in front of her. The display showed a point on the Somali coast, just south of Harardhere.
Jenny set the course with the autopilot. They veered to starboard, a gentle turn in the breeze. A new course to the west, toward a place everyone had been told to avoid. Redbeard watched her quietly during the entire maneuver, then checked the course on his own GPS. After that, she was allowed to take care of Carl-Adam.
The shot had gone straight through his hand. She picked out bone chips, then washed the wound and bandaged it. At least one bone in there was shattered. The gash in his thigh was inches long and deep; she did what she could with a first-aid kit. She had a hard time getting a hold around Carl-Adam’s heavy thigh, and the wound started to bleed badly again, while her arms got shaky before she finally managed to squeeze so hard that it stopped. Her hands were shiny with her husband’s blood, so much of it on herself and her clothes that she could smell the iron. Carl-Adam was panting from exhaustion, and at times his gaze went blank. She started to take off his stained shirt but stopped when she saw all the big bruises forming and the lump rising on his back from the first blow with the rifle butt. How much more, for how long?
“They’ll miss us” was the first thing he said, when she was nearly done. Carl-Adam was leaning back, and she put an arm around his head in an attempt to comfort him and get close. She thought he meant the kids, that he was already thinking of himself and her as dead.
“I’m all right,” she said, and tried to smile. Not a second passed without her thinking about Alexandra and Sebastian, left alone in their cabin below deck.
But Carl-Adam had seen a glimmer of hope, knowing that they’d turned west toward the Somali coast. “The link,” he explained, his voice a whisper. “Everyone will see.”
On their blog, which they kept so friends and family could follow their trip, their location was automatically updated every ten nautical miles with a small red dot on a map. They probably wouldn’t be able to write another word, but their dotted trail now went counter to all their previous posts about where they were heading. “They’ll sound the alarm.” Even in his weakened state, this was Carl-Adam’s way of relating to what had happened, maintaining his distance, shunning the blood and vulnerability with his hope that someone would see the conflicting data. Jenny didn’t know what to think. He was busy finding a logical solution, while she was doing everything to keep them alive. Below deck, the children were still alone, with at least five pirates.
“Of course,” she said, kissing Carl-Adam’s forehead. “Someone will get worried, and they’ll find us.”
The days went by. A sixty-two-foot sailboat towing two skiffs close behind. Westward went the dotted trail on both the MaryAnn’s GPS and the family’s sailing blog. The corpse, left exposed in one of the skiffs, had begun to swell. There were only a few meters between the boats, and from the quarterdeck they could clearly see his face, the teeth shining white in an unnatural grin. Starting from the mangled shoulder, the flesh was turning a bad color and slowly cracking. Whenever they went up on deck, it was impossible not to look, and the weak wind blew the stench at them.
Below deck, Jenny tried to restore order, unwilling to give in. She kept picking up, even though the floor was soon covered with trash again. Wads of paper and food packaging lay everywhere. She gave up on the toilets, which reeked ever more strongly of urine. But for her own sake and for the dignity of the children, she tried to keep their regular routines. She got up at the same time every morning, tried to cook at least one meal a day in an orderly way, kept busy, supervised Alexandra’s schoolwork. Her efforts were often blocked, as sometimes activities would be forbidden, or stuff would disappear, or someone would take away their food, but still—she’d try again. Jenny’s patience was all that kept the creeping resignation at bay, creating a sense of safety and keeping them from giving up: they are there, and we are here. Before the pirates, on board she’d always worn shorts and gone barefoot, but now she covered her legs and wore shoes. And as a mother she was forced to choose: the children or Carl-Adam? So their shared cabin had become his infirmary, and she slept with Alexandra and Sebastian. She didn’t leave them alone for a moment, unless absolutely necessary. On board, she and the children moved as a pack. For an hour or so every evening, she tried to make sure all four were together, although her injured husband mostly slept.
The second time the pirates went after Carl-Adam was when they wanted to go faster; the weak wind was making Redbeard impatient. They shook Carl-Adam and landed a couple of decent punches before Jenny understood and started up the engine. She didn’t try to explain that the tank would soon be empty. They ran out of diesel two days later, and then there was more shouting and a few kicks before they were powered only by the wind again. Carl-Adam recovered somewhat, but he had trouble putting weight on his injured leg, and his hand was an ominous red. He mostly just sipped water and lay on his bunk, and Jenny washed and dressed his wounds every day. They’d run out of bandages, so ripped sheets had to do. When she asked him to move his fingers, only his thumb twitched.
It wasn’t long before Alexandra made an innocent mistake. One afternoon, on her own initiative, she sat down at the computer on the chart table, to send an essay in for school. Despite all the chaos on board, she still wanted to do well in her last semester of junior high. Jenny couldn’t stop her, and Redbeard saw and understood what a satellite link could lead to. He yelled, Alexandra glared, a loud slap was heard, and she cursed in defiance before Jenny stepped between them, and then he furiously snatched all the cables out of the computer. The link was broken; there was no more dotted trail. Later that evening, when she and the children were below with Carl-Adam, he asked about the commotion. Alexandra shrugged, and Jenny said Redbeard had gotten upset when she’d opened some cans. She held his hand in bed, and in his eyes, saw that he didn’t completely believe her.
“Someone will notice?” he said.
“Of course,” she replied. “Someone will miss us.”
Her lie in front of the children, her own sense of hopelessness while needing to keep up an appearance of strength. It was the loneliest moment she had ever known on the boat.
Redbeard was called Darwiish by the other pirates, and after the incident at the chart table, Alexandra kept a close eye on him. She’d slip past Jenny and say: “We have to watch out, Redbeard is drunk.” The liquor bottles on board had disappeared from the cabinet on day one. No one saw when he drank, but after nightfall, they sometimes saw his awkward movements and moist lips. From time to time, he’d fire shots into the night, but mostly he kept to the cockpit at the stern, or the middle of the cabin below deck, sitting up straight and thin, and watching everything and everyone through narrow eyes.
The slowness, the heat, and the weak wind that kept them at a crawl took their
