Wreckage (12 page)

When Margaret was still alive, Lillian was different. She had these stubborn embers of hope that warmed us all and wouldn’t go out. When Kent took charge of our water supply, doling it out a capful at a time, he told her that Margaret was no longer allowed her ration because it spilled down her face and was, as Kent put it, wasted. She didn’t crack. She didn’t demand the water back, the water that had been taken out of her bag, that she was kind enough to share with all of us. No—instead she shared her own meager capful with her mother-in-law.

But after we saw the island and determined it wasn’t merely a mirage or a hallucination as a result of dehydration, Margaret was almost gone and Lillian started to change.

For a day, we kicked, rested, and waved our arms feebly in the water, until the tide finally caught our little boat. With a few kicks off the ribbon of reef that surrounded the island, we were brought to its sandy shore on the waves as the sun sunk into the ocean.

With the raft safely beached, I jumped in to help Lillian carry Margaret ashore. There we found a banyan tree with roots that arched up as though the tree spent years making a little room for this exact moment. A room only big enough for two, so I retraced my steps to the raft.

Darkness fell rapidly, and once my feet splashed in the black water blanketing the bottom of the boat, a powerful surge of fatigue crashed over me. As soon as I lay down, I was sound asleep. A cool breeze and waves lapping at the beach woke me some hours later. It was dark. No, it was black.

“Lillian? Kent? Are you there?” I called out.

Out of the darkness came a new sound, something like a high-pitched whine, that shook my eardrums. Hope thrummed through me with each wail. An engine? A siren? No. This sound was alive, like some kind of animal.

Every Animal Planet show I’d ever watched flashed through my mind. The episodes I remembered the clearest contained mostly huge snakes, poisonous spiders, and giant rats with glowing eyes.

Burrowing deeper into the slowly deflating bench, I hoped that a two-foot wall of sagging plastic was enough to hide me from whatever was making that sound. “Go to sleep. Go to sleep. Go—to—sleep.”

The overwhelming drowsiness that had put me under like anesthesia was gone, and now that sound, that pathetic but haunting sound, had me on high alert. Clouds blotted out the moon and stars, and the palm trees shook in a high wind; I wondered if we were in for another storm. Even the weather had joined the plot against our survival.

“Ahhhh!” I yelled, trying to empty all the steam from my boiling emotions as if through a release valve. “Where
is
everybody?!” All the questions I’d heard Lillian and Kent ask themselves over and over again began to inundate me, lying heavy on my chest, making it hard to breathe. How are we going to get enough food? Enough water? Are they coming for us or did they just give up?

“Dave?” A voice in the distance called my name.

“Is that you, Lillian?” I yelled, my voice still shaky.

“Yes, I’m over here by the rocks. Where are
you
?”

“In the raft, but if you keep talking I’ll make my way over to you.” I squinted into the darkness, trying to figure out which way to go. “Keep talking and I’ll head your way.”

I took a step in the direction of her voice. For a few seconds I felt and heard nothing but my feet in the sand and the waves lapping lazily at the shore, until my foot hit something solid, making me yelp.

“Are you at the rocks?” Lillian shouted in response.

“Yup. Keep talking, I’ll follow your voice.”

“Uh, okay.” She paused uncertainly. “What should I say?”

I took a step toward her voice. I’d never make it there before dawn at this rate. I needed questions that required more than a one-word answer.

“Where’s Kent?”

“Um, around here somewhere. When we landed he wandered off, and I haven’t seen him since.”

Nice. Both Kent and I abandoned the two most injured survivors within minutes of hitting dry land. That’s chivalry for you. I kept walking, listening to the sound of Lillian shifting her weight a few yards to my left.

“And Margaret, how’s she doing? Is she stable?”

“She’s dead.”

“Dead.” I repeated the word. I felt bad that I didn’t sound surprised. “I’m sorry, Lillian.”

Then she started to cry. I’d heard her cry plenty in the past few days, from pain or fear or guilt, but this sounded different. This was a wail crossed with a scream. I wanted her to stop, but even her breaths were choking, gasping whinnies. That sound, I knew it instantly—Lillian was the injured animal I’d been so afraid of.

Listening to her scared me in a whole new way. It would’ve been easy to find her then, following the sounds like a rope, but I wanted to run away. I didn’t know how to comfort that kind of raw sorrow.

Now I was confronted with a question that scared me more than starving or drowning: If I can’t comfort her sorrow, how can I comfort my own?

A salty tear dripped down into the corner of my mouth and I knew: I can’t do this alone. I need Lillian and she needs me. Without another thought, I staggered toward her voice, grateful for the dark. The last thing Lillian needed to see was my face, red and swollen from crying. When my foot grazed her leg she let out a choked gasp.

“Dave?”

“No,” I joked, lowering my voice, “it’s Elvis.”

Immediately her hand bumped into my hand, which was wet with tears. “There you are,” she whispered, and I couldn’t imagine that voice issuing those violent cries. Her fingers intertwined with mine.

“That was like Marco Polo but without the water. It’s more fun in a pool.” I tried to ignore how nervous her fingers on mine made me.

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t much help.” The grainy outline of her head developed like a Polaroid.

“Are you kidding me? I’d still be crying like a little girl inside the raft if you hadn’t called me over here.”

“Come. Sit.” Tugging on my hand, she guided me down into an empty spot in the sand. I sat cross-legged beside her.

“How are you doing? You hanging in there?” I asked, feebly, rubbing my thumb across the back of her hand for my comfort as much as hers. She fell against me, putting her head on my shoulder, warming me all over.

“Not really.”

“In the morning we can search for food and make a shelter, then figure out our next move. We have more options now that we’re on dry land. This is a very good thing.” I tried to sound like I knew what I was talking about, pulling her whole arm over my knee and into my lap.

“I can’t even think about tomorrow right now.” She turned her face into my shoulder. “With Margaret gone, it feels like the sun will never come up, like we’re trapped in a hole for eternity.”

“That’s what I like about you,” I teased, “your unending optimism.”

“They’re not coming.” She ignored my joke. “No one’s coming.”

“No, I guess they’re not.” No use in lying. She drew in a huge breath and let it out slowly, making the air stir around us.

“Then we’ll die on the island.”

“Not necessarily.”

She shook her head against my wet shoulder. “If no one’s coming for us then we’re stuck here and like Margaret we’ll all die, sooner or later.”

“No one lives forever, Lillian.” I rub my cheek against her tangled hair. “Not on an island or at home in St. Louis. But we have a lot of living to do in between. We aren’t just going to die on this island; we’re going to
live
here too.”

“But I don’t want to live
here
for the rest of my life, Dave. I want to be with my children and Jerry and Margaret and my brothers and my parents and my friends.” She shifted suddenly to face me, her warm breath condensing on my face. “Let’s say we find a way to live here. Think about it, what kind of life would the next five or ten or twenty or however many years be? Here, on this lump of sand. How can I find happiness here?” Her voice falters and I know this is more than just losing Margaret. She’s not going to see her kids again. They’ll think she’s dead too.

“I know. I want to go home too, and maybe we will. But until then we need to take care of ourselves, and make the best of this situation.” I took short breaths between each sentence. “We’re going to take care of each other. We
will
make the best of this.” This time, I believed myself.

Her eyes, wide and vulnerable, flitted across my face, each of her breaths coming faster than the one before it. Licking her lips with the tip of her tongue, she let out one long, slow blow that tickled the stubble on my chin.

“I guess you’re right,” she said with an air of surrender. Her head returned to the empty spot on my shoulder and I shifted her weight so she didn’t have to put any pressure on her bad arm. “I’m so tired and hungry. I don’t know . . . what . . .” She was asleep before finishing her thought. Leaning back into the sand, careful not to wake her, I lay flat, staring up at the sky.

A small patch of clouds broke the weather gods’ ruling and parted to let me view a little slice of the sky, the pinprick light of the stars piled one on top of the other. How many solar systems was I watching through that sudden gash in the clouds? I tried to count the stars, as if counting sheep, before the clouds closed and I dozed off.

Kent shook us awake in the peachy morning hours. Overnight, Lillian sunk into a semi-catatonic state, moving like a zombie, carefully avoiding Margaret’s stiff body, which had turned a haunting shade of blue in the evening’s chill.

Even when Kent shoved a coconut into her hands, the sweet milk sloshing out of the hole he’d cut in it, she did little more than lift it to her lips and sip. Then Kent taught us how to use his knife to break down the nut and bite off the sugary flesh, but she only nodded and nibbled on his offerings.

“That chick is crazy,” Kent grumbled, grabbing the empty shells to throw in the ocean.

“Give her a break. Her mother-in-law died less than a day ago. She needs some time to adapt.” There’s something about that woman that makes me get all protective.

“Yeah, I lost somebody too but you don’t see me wigging out.” He assessed Lillian, like a teacher grading a science project. “She’s not going to make it long. I think she’s lost it.” Kent tossed each shell individually, sending them spinning like Frisbees as he spoke. “She’s not eating, she’s not drinking, and she can’t contribute to camp. It doesn’t mean much to me if she wants to give up, but that’s another mouth to feed. I have a strict ‘you don’t work, you don’t eat’ policy.”

“Oh, so you already have
policies
about being stranded on an island?”

“Don’t be a smart-ass.” He paused to chew a stray piece of coconut off one of Lillian’s untouched shells. “I’m not gonna carry her for very long without something in return.”

I stood with my bare feet in the edge of the tide, stunned at Kent’s bold proclamation, as though he was king of the island and I was his lowly peon. I began to formulate an argument in my head but gave up. After all I’ve learned about Kent I should know by now that he’s not one to listen to reason.

“I’ll try to talk to her.”

“M’kay,” he said, sucking on a large chunk of coconut, smacking with his mouth open. “Wait.” He dug down deep in his cargo shorts pocket. “Here, you should have this.”

He pressed a bright piece of orange plastic into my palm, like I was his valet and he was passing me a tip. Unfolding my fingers, I saw the sharp metal tip at the end of the plastic catch the sun. It looked like a beefed-up X-ACTO knife. Kent must have read the confusion on my face because he explained.

“It’s a knife . . . from the boat. They had two in there to cut it away from the plane. I thought you should have one, you know, just in case.”

A knife, the one I’d told Lillian to use to cut the raft from the plane. She must have put it back in the raft pocket. I was baffled that Kent would give it to me; it’s not like we’ve been buddies post-crash. As I curled my fingers around the glowing handle, I felt fractionally more powerful. Other than the clothes on my back and ruined leather shoes still drying by the fire, it’s my first asset. I promised myself I’d learn how to use it to my advantage.

Tucking the tool into my pocket, I noticed Kent watching me with alarm, maybe regretting the decision to give me the knife. I walked away before he tried to get it back.

Kent followed close behind me, wiping his hands on the baggy khaki captain’s shorts he’d been trapped into wearing. As intimidating as he can be, those shorts make him look like an overgrown little boy trying to escape Sister Agatha’s ruler. He laid out the agenda for the day, taking on the role of leader without waiting for an election. I didn’t feel like fighting so I let him play boss, relishing the knife in my pocket resting against my thigh.

First we buried Margaret. As insensitive as it sounded coming from Kent’s mouth, he was right, she’d start to decompose in the heat and sun of the day, inviting predators and scavengers to feed. He’d picked the peninsula to be her resting place because of its distance from camp and the jungle. I thought it was fitting to bury Margaret by the ocean—where we all could see her, where we’d be reminded of what we’ve lost.