Time lost all meaning and I focused everything on ridding whatever alien gave me so much pain.
I wanted to sleep in peace.
“You’re almost there. One more, Stel. Come on.”
My head lolled on his shoulder. Air was hard to come by, and I’d never ached so much in my entire life. The stars had gone, replaced with pink-silvery light of a new sun.
His bulk warmed my back, interposed with shots of cool seawater as he breathed. His hands rested on my belly, ready to help with the final push.
I wouldn’t lie and say it wasn’t the most excruciating thing I’d ever endured.
I screamed so loud the sound wave skipped like a skipping stone over the glassy surface, ricocheting around our island.
That final push was hell and brimstone and the devil himself.
But the rush and relief afterward? That was the most euphoric sensation I’d ever had.
Galloway’s hands left my belly, dipping between my legs to catch our child.
Raising the tiny red thing, seawater and blood cascaded from its squirming legs.
Galloway had never shared his past with me. He still refused to say what changed his heart from such a caring, wonderful man into a hardened cynic. But none of that mattered because as he held his child and patted its back to earn a squall from new lungs, a single tear rolled down his cheek.
“Oh, my God.” He cupped our baby so rapturously; she was instantly promoted as priestess of his heart.
I’d done it.
I’d endured my worst fear and delivered a healthy child.
I’d given us a girl.
Chapter Fifty-Two
...............................................
G A L L O W A Y
......
MARCH
THERE WAS A new dimension to our marriage.
A deeper depth.
A complicated, awe-inspiring connection.
After Estelle had given birth, I passed her our daughter and helped her deliver the afterbirth. Once done and both mother and child were clean, I carried the loves of my life and tied off the umbilical cord.
Using the Swiss Army knife (sterilized in the fire), I had the honour of separating the final link and creating a brand new tiny human.
I did all that on instinct.
I’d never been around a newborn before.
I’d never watched what happened or what to do afterward.
But the knowledge was inside me, just like the knowledge that I’d found my soul-mate, and together, we were invincible.
Those first few nights were hard.
I was tired.
Estelle was knackered.
Yet we had a brand new person demanding to be fed and changed and tended to. We alternated between zombie-like awakeness and catatonic sleeping.
Pippa and Conner were left to their own devices, and instead of burning down the camp, they kept me and Estelle fed. They cleaned the house, they fished, they cooked. They made me so damn proud and grateful.
There were so many things to juggle.
The first time Estelle breast fed freaked me out until the baby settled into suckling.
The first time breakfast went through my daughter to reappear in a disgusting mess, taught us that hygiene would be paramount.
And the first time she burped and fell asleep in our arms, ensured we’d put up with anything because we were in love.
We cut up a ratty t-shirt and transformed it into a reusable diaper.
We held each other when the baby slept and sympathized when she wouldn’t stop crying.
So many firsts.
So many things to learn and overcome.
By the time the first week passed, we’d recovered enough to be mildly coherent.
However, Estelle suffered a breakdown when her nipples became sore from constant feeding, and I felt utterly inadequate because I couldn’t take over and prevent her pain.
All I could do was hold her, rock her, and keep our baby as clean as possible.
Our island hadn’t changed.
But my God, our world had.
Late one night, lying in bed with a scarf-swaddled baby on my chest and my wife in my embrace, I murmured, “I’m so bloody proud of you, Stel.”
She kissed the skin above my heart. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Let’s be honest. Yes, you could.” I smiled in the dark. “But I appreciate you saying that.”
She sat up on her elbows and kissed my lips. “That’s a lie. I’m only alive because of your sheer stubbornness to keep me that way.”
“That stubbornness is what will get us through the next few months.”
She glanced at our child. “You’re very adaptable, G. I look at you and think that you were born for this life. Like it wasn’t an accident that you landed here.”
I shrugged. “What choice did we have? It was survive or die. I chose to survive. We all did.”
She ran her finger down the ridge of my nose and traced my bottom lip. “Know what else we haven’t chosen?”
“No, what?”
“A name.”
“Ah, yes.” I chuckled. “I remember asking you about that last week and you bursting into tears saying it was too much pressure to name someone for the rest of their life.”
“Yes, well.” She smirked. “I might’ve been dealing with overtiredness at the time.” Her gaze dropped as she turned shy. “I have a suggestion...if you want to hear it?”
Our daughter squirmed as I arched my neck and kissed her. “By all means, share away.”
She took a deep breath. “If you hate it, we don’t have to.”
“You’re making it sound like you want to name her something terrible.”
“Well, we all have different opinions on what terrible entails.”
“How about you just blurt it out, so I’m not wondering if our kid will be named Daffodil or Edwina.”
She swatted me. “Those aren’t terrible, terrible.”
I rolled my eyes. “Come on, spit it out.”
Her body tensed as she said, “Coconut.”
“Coconut?”
She flopped onto her back. “Forget it, it’s stupid.”
Coconut.
Coco.
Sweet little Coco.
My lips twitched. “So, you prefer a fruit over a name like Hope or Faith or We’ll Survive This Island No Matter What?”
She scowled. “I just told you to forget it. You’re right...it’s silly.”
“I didn’t say it was silly.”
“You laughed.”
“When did I laugh?” I couldn’t hold back my chuckle. “Okay, now I just did, but before, I didn’t.”
“You smirked.”
“A smirk is not a laugh.”
“It’s beside the point. Coconut is off the table.”
“What if I don’t want it off the table?”
She huffed. “What?”
“You want to name our child after something that’s become intrinsic to our lives. If it hadn’t have been for coconuts, we would’ve starved and most likely died of dehydration. They saved us. What better word would suit our daughter?”
“What word?”
“Salvation. Coconuts were our salvation.”
“So...you do like it?”
“It’s kind of perfect, actually.”
She peeked at me beneath her lashes. “Really?”
Pushing aside the material covering the squashed face of our newborn, I grinned. “You know what? It is.”
Brushing my knuckle over her warm pudgy cheek, I murmured, “Hello, Coco. Pleasure to finally make your acquaintance.”
.............................
APRIL
I did my best for Conner’s birthday—just like I’d promised.
However, the now fifteen-year-old admitted that he’d claimed Coconut as his birthday present rather than make us carve or whittle something he didn’t need. He figured their names were similar enough that we’d n
amed her after him (I let him have his illusions).
Estelle’s birthday would fall again in September (I already had ideas on how to make it the best I could) and mine continued to pass in March with no fanfare because that was how I liked it.
I hated birthdays (especially knowing I was twenty-nine and the next was the big three-O). I hated being reminded of how much time I’d wasted being angry and locked up for something I would never apologise for doing but regretted with every inch of my soul. Not because he’d deserved to die but because I was better than that. I wasn’t a monster like he was, but I’d become one to extract revenge.
Despite Conner’s assurances that his new baby sister was enough, I made him a slingshot out of a forked twig and the elastic string that’d tied up the survival kit found in the helicopter all those months ago. For ammunition, I’d dived on the reef for broken pieces of coral.
It didn’t work very well. The tension was all wrong. But we somehow made his birthday dinner of eel and taro delicious and celebrated yet another significant event on this deserted place.
That night, as dusk fell, dorsal fins appeared in our bay for the first time since we’d crashed.
Estelle froze, yelling ‘shark’ as if she was still giving birth and at risk.
However, she was wrong.
They weren’t sharks.
They were dolphins.
And Conner claimed their arrival as his fifteenth birthday present, too.
Our island was no longer foreign.
We’d explored every inch.
We’d navigated and adapted and excelled.
But how many more birthdays would we attend here?
How many more years would pass?
.............................
MAY
Two things happened in May that signalled just how fast Conner was growing up.
After dealing with a squirmy baby all morning, while Estelle caught up on laundry, I was free to stomp through the forest to collect firewood.
I kept my eye out for lizards and the leaves Estelle said were okay to eat, but what I stumbled across was something entirely unappetizing.
I found Conner wanking.
The horny teenager leaned against a palm tree in the centre of the island (obviously thinking he had privacy) and had his hand down his bloody shorts.
Needless to say, I hadn’t stayed.
What he did with his cock was his business, not mine.
Masturbation was a common thing (especially for teenagers), but it did remind me how lacking I’d been in my fatherly duties.
When I’d finished my forage and Conner returned, much more relaxed, to the beach, I’d taken him aside and had ‘the talk.’ It’d been as uncomfortable for me as it had been for him. But I had to know that he knew Pippa was off-limits as well as Estelle.
The only one not off-limits (because of marriage or relation) was Coconut, and she was only a few months old. Besides, she was banned from ever having a boyfriend, so she too was off-limits.
That meant the poor kid was doomed to spend his life as a monk. However, it didn’t mean he had to look like one.
Just like my hair, his had grown long enough to tie up. His copper strands had turned strawberry blond and the splattering of freckles across his nose were so dark they morphed with his tan.
He was good looking but his straggly beard was not.
We spent the afternoon in the sea as I demonstrated how to shave with the Swiss Army knife. I didn’t do it often. I wasn’t fussed if I had a beard or clean-shaven, and Estelle didn’t seem to have a preference, either. But Conner looked so damn grateful for the lesson, I promised myself I’d continue to teach and be there for him.
After all, it was just the two of us.
Two men.
Three girls.
We had to stick together.
.............................
JUNE
I hadn’t been drunk since my eighteenth birthday.
Mostly because I’d been in jail with no access to alcohol. More recently because we’d been stranded on our island.
We’d stumbled across a few papayas last month that’d been sweet and plump. The taste of sugar after so long had been goddamn delicious. We didn’t get a lot of fruit on our island, probably because there weren’t many birds or bats flying over depositing seeds in their droppings.
The Papaya was a luxury and I’d thought about fermenting a few to see if Estelle and I could get tipsy (if such a thing as papaya alcohol existed) but there hadn’t been many and we’d eaten them all before we realised the limited numbers.
However, none of that mattered because I was inebriated.
I was drunk.
Completely.
On my daughter.
Only a few months old, she fascinated me with how quickly she grew. Her chubby arms constantly waved and fists opened and closed. She loved lying in the sand and cried if we took her from the waves before she was ready.
It seemed being born beneath the sea made her a child of the deep and she should’ve grown a tail rather than kicking little legs.
Her skin tanned rather than burned. The fuzzy hair on her head was as white as Estelle’s. And her eyes were a mixture of vibrant blue and glowing green.
She was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, and if Pippa wasn’t carting her around being the best babysitter we could ask for, then she was in the crook of my arm babbling nonsense.
For her crazy emotions during her pregnancy, Estelle was the most relaxed mother in the world. The saying ‘you need a village to raise a baby’ was entirely true.
And lucky for us, we had one.
Pippa and Conner took turns playing. No one grew bored because Coco was passed around at will.
I wished I knew the developmental stages and what to expect.
When would she walk? Talk? Crawl, even.
I had no idea.
I couldn’t tell if she was smart for her age or slow.
But that wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
To me, she was perfect.
Just like her mother.
Chapter Fifty-Three
...............................................
E S T E L L E
......
JULY
“I WANT TO make her something. Galloway’s showing us up.”
I looked up from changing Coco’s rag-diaper and squinted in the sun. Pippa and Conner stood in halos, dripping wet from the sea, with an armful of red and yellow flowers.
“What do you mean?” I stood up, placing Coco on my hip. She squirmed toward Pippa, who dropped her flowers and took her from me.
The two girls had become inseparable.
“I mean G’s made her a crib, a damn high-chair thingy, even a driftwood horse on skates so he can drag her through the tide like a pouncy princess.” Conner dragged hands through his hair, doing his best to seem frustrated but failing.
He loved G.
In fact, they’d only become closer in the past few months since Conner well and truly left boyhood for an adult.
“Well...” I spread my hands. “What are you going to do about it? Is it a competition now?”
His brown eyes lit up. “Hell yeah, it’s a competition.”
I laughed. “And the flowers are commiseration for the loser?”
“Nope.” Stalking toward an empty piece of fuselage that we used to soak flax, wash laundry, and gather leaves, he dumped his wilting flowers and sat down. “I’m going to paint her something.”
“Paint?” Curiosity exploded. “How?”
“With these.” He pointed at the flowers. “I’m gonna crush them and paint her crib pretty colours. Poor baby must hate boring brown.”
My heart swelled for such an amazing teenager. “You want to paint Coco a mural.”
“Yep.”
“And you’re going to make your own paints and brushes and everything.”
“Yep.”
I couldn’t help it. I dashed toward him
and kissed his face in a flurry of affection. “I love you, Co.”
He cleared his throat. “Whatever.”
Fighting my smile, I left him to it.
Whatever nostalgia I’d suffered faded with every memento we made here. I no longer hankered for a tumultuous urban town. I no longer took for granted what we had.
Life had swept us away and given us so much more.
With bubbling joy and effervescent contentedness in my soul, I went for a swim with my two daughters and left my son to somehow create a masterpiece.
.............................
It didn’t work out.
The flower petals, once crushed, turned an unhappy ochre and bruised sienna. Despite Conner trying everything to add rainwater and smear the mess into some sort of design, he didn’t get the vivid colours he was hoping for.
It did make a slight difference with decorational shadows on the crib, but his disappointment broke my heart.
Galloway teased him mercilessly, but once he’d finished ribbing him, they vanished to the other side of the island for so long I began to worry.
They returned late that night with Conner proudly holding a flax woven doll complete with stringy hair. It wasn’t cuddly, it wasn’t exactly pretty (unless he was going for a voodoo kind of look), but it was absolutely priceless.
And when he gave it to Coco, her toothless smile was the biggest she’d ever given.
.............................
AUGUST
We’d found a patch of guava last week.
They were tart and juicy and far too short supply.
They’d also been the final treat we would have for a while.
Because life had been too kind to us.
Or at least, that was what faceless fate deemed.
We’d lived on our patch of dirt for two years. We’d suffered mental boredom, debilitating depression, overwhelming happiness, pregnancy, childbirth, and puberty.
Through it all, we’d kept pushing onward, determined to stay alive and not just survive.
However, instead of being rewarded for our tenacity and never-failing belief to try, to hope, to grow, we were punished far too harshly.
Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
Our daily motto was a damn mockery after what happened.