Dead In The Water (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery #4) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

boosting Keil over the side, still had one eye on his child. “Don’t massage her, Rebecca. Take off her PFD. Hold her close to your body.”
    “PFD?” Was the jargon ordeal ever going to be over?
    Libby was helping Keil in. “Lifejacket.”
    “But PFD?”
    Keil said, “Personal flotation device.”
    Oh. Of course. Did they think I was mentally deficient? By now I had it off and I’d draped an extra sweatshirt I’d brought around her shoulders. I couldn’t get her arms into it. They wouldn’t move easily.
    Julio climbed in and took the tiller. Keil had taken off his own PFD and was sitting, back straight, trying like hell to be brave, holding his elbows and shivering nearly as badly as Esperanza. His lips were also blue.
    “Libby, hug Keil,” said Julio.
    “Ewwww. Gr—”
    “Do it.”
    Keil said, “No. Let her huddle with Esperanza and Rebecca.”
    Julio hesitated. If the three of us formed a huddle, Esperanza’s body heat would return much more quickly. Almost visibly, I saw him shake off the impulse to agree. It would leave Keil with no help.
    “Shut up and do what I say!”
    Libby put her arms around him, but she wouldn’t press tight against him and he wouldn’t hold her close, soak up her warmth.
    Julio said, “Dammit, sit in his lap. Keil, hold her like a baby—up close.”
    Libby said, “Yuck. That’s incest.”
    “You two are the worst sailors I ever saw.”
    That did it. They snuggled up.
    Expertly, Julio sailed the Victory back to her slip, shivering himself, his own lips turning blue.

CHAPTER NINE
     
    We’d come in Marty’s car because there was more room in it. Libby knew about a blanket in the trunk, the one that had been there since the time she had appendicitis and they wrapped her in it at the doctor’s office and sent her directly to the hospital. Her mom was going to take it back to the doctor one day, but we could use it now for Esperanza.
    Somehow the high-pitched chatter was comforting as I wrapped the soaked child, who seemed as bony and vulnerable as a wet kitten. She leaned heavily against me, cuddling up in a way that let me know she wanted comfort and she was glad to be alive and intended to stay that way. Her fur-soft eyes were pleading, but what they wanted I hadn’t the least idea.
    Julio had to tie up the boat, though he said he’d come back later to take the sails down. He was going to meet us at Marty’s, where, despite Ava’s witchy presence, we’d decided to go—it was more cheerful than his house, and more important, it had two bathrooms, which were what we needed most right now.
    I put the three kids in the back, in a hypothermia huddle, Esperanza in the middle. Though Libby and Keil were silent now, I felt them. I knew what was going on with them. Libby was all right, she was excited, she didn’t begin to comprehend what had happened, that Esperanza might have died. It was almost an adventure to her. Keil was deeply ashamed at having jumped in without thinking, having needed to be rescued himself.
    I said, “You kids are heroes, you know that? It was pretty amazing what you both did.”
    I didn’t know if it was the right thing to say or not. It certainly didn’t come from the heart. Libby, the so-called difficult one, had truly saved the day, and I wanted to give her the praise she was due. Clearly everyone, including me, had seriously underestimated her. It made me sad to think how stories get started about people—they take on a role first in the family and then in the world—and we just keep believing the stories instead of seeing the real person. It was pretty hard to believe any ten-year-old, much less one who everyone seemed to think was a big baby, could have performed so beautifully in an emergency. Libby was no baby. She was a kid who had a bad rap—and she was obviously one of those people who came into her own under pressure. Maybe she’d end up a brain surgeon.
    As for Keil, I wanted to tell him it nearly broke my heart watching him try to be a grownup and the best little boy in the world and now Superboy, and that he didn’t have to be any of that, but I didn’t think he’d believe me.
    So I ended up doing what all adults probably did—giving him strokes for doing the stuff that was standing between him and being a kid, his own kid, not everybody’s perfect image of a kid.
    It truly
was
amazing what he’d done. Amazingly stupid. He could have been killed. And amazingly unnecessary. And astonishingly inappropriate.