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spilling the water again,” cracks Ernie.
    He starts to laugh at his own joke when
wham!
    Mark leaps from the steps of the cabin, his body slamming Ernie and his arms grabbing him in a headlock. As Ernie tries to break free, the two spin around and around, officially turning my no-brainer assembly line into a free-for-all wrestling match.
    “Stop it!”
I yell, moving in to break them up. “Stop it right now!” But all I do is get knocked down for my efforts. The boys are too rough for me—they’re really fighting.
    Where’s Jake now?
    Wait a second!
    Where’s Jake,
period?
    Chapter 16
    I TURN BACK TO THE HATCH, staring at nothing but rising cold water. I’ve lost track of the time, but he’s been down there for at least a few minutes. How long can he hold his breath with just a snorkel? I don’t really know the answer to that.
    Not
this
long, I’m thinking.
    I grab a mop from the storage closet by the refrigerator and start jabbing the end of the handle through the water, banging hard on the floor of the galley. The noise immediately gets Mark and Ernie’s attention and they both stop to see what I’m doing.
    What about Jake? Did I get
his
attention?
    “He’s been down there a long time, hasn’t he?” says Carrie. At least her head is clear now.
    I nod as we all stare at the open hatch. There’s no sign of Jake coming up for air. Meanwhile, for the first time I feel the weight of the gathering water’s drag on the boat. It’s as if the ocean is slowly but surely sucking us down.
    From the corner of my eye I glimpse the radio and remember Jake’s words about using the emergency channel.
You never know,
he said.
    And I don’t want to.
    C’mon, Jake, where are you? Come up for some air. Please.
    Suddenly we see a rush of water surging up from the hatch. A hand appears and then a head.
    Jake hoists himself up to the galley and stands before us in his mask and snorkel. And nothing else.
    “What happened? Where are your clothes?” I ask.
    “Plugging the through-hull fitting,” he answers.
    I shake my head. The what?
    “It’s the hose that takes on water from the outside to cool the engine,” he explains. “Don’t ask me how it ruptured, but it did, and it took everything I had on to plug the leak. As soon as we bail ourselves out I’ll rig a more permanent fix.”
    It’s good news. No, it’s
great
news. Still, all I can say is one thing. “Uh, Jake…”
    “Yeah?”
    “You’re naked.”
    He looks down. “Oh, yeah, you’re right,” he says with a sheepish grin. “Then again, it’s nothing a doctor hasn’t seen before, right?”
    “I was thinking about the kids.”
    “Nothing I haven’t seen before either,” says Carrie with her first half-smile of the trip.
    “Oh, really?” I say back with a half-smile of my own. “Then there’s no reason you should be
staring
at it so much!”
    Carries blushes a healthy red, Ernie and Mark start cracking up, and Jake grabs the bucket out of my hands and covers himself.
    “On that note, I think I’ll go put some clothes on,” he announces.
    Chapter 17
    IT TURNS OUT there’s no quick way to rid a boat of more than a thousand gallons of freezing cold, sloshing seawater. Nor, for that matter, is there a pain-free way.
    For the remainder of the afternoon and deep into the evening, Jake and the rest of us unload bucketful after bucketful back into the ocean. We keep waiting for the electric bilge pump to kick in and help us, but it never does. Jake’s guess is that the motor’s too flooded to recover. We discuss returning to Newport or calling SeaTow to pull us back to shore but agree to keep on. If the boat has more problems after we’ve pumped it out, we’ll reconsider.
    Head to toe and all parts in between, we’re completely exhausted. So much so that by the time
The Family Dunne
is finally dry again, Carrie, Mark, and Ernie have only one word for me: goodnight.
    Too tired even to eat dinner, they trudge to their bunks and probably conk