On the Island

  The impact knocked me off my feet, as if someone had tied a rope around my ankles and yanked it hard. The sound of shattering glass filled my ears, and I had the sensation of flying followed by searing pain as the plane broke apart.

  I plunged into the ocean, seawater pouring down my throat. Completely disoriented, the buoyancy of my life jacket lifted me slowly upward. My head broke the surface, and I coughed uncontrollably, trying to get the air in and the water out.

  T.J.! Oh God, where is T.J.?

  I pictured him trapped in his seat, unable to get his seatbelt unbuckled, and I scanned the water frantically, squinting in the sun and screaming his name. Just when I thought he had certainly drowned, he surfaced, choking and sputtering.

  I swam toward him, tasting blood, my head throbbing so hard I thought it might explode. When I reached T.J., I grabbed his hand and tried to tell him how happy I was that he made it, but my words wouldn’t come out right and I drifted in and out in a hazy fog.

  T.J. yelled at me to wake up. I remembered high waves and swallowing more water and then I remembered nothing at all.

  Chapter 2 – T.J.

  Seawater churned all around me, up my nose, down my throat, in my eyes. I couldn’t breathe without choking. Anna swam toward me, crying and bleeding and screaming. She grabbed my hand and tried to talk, but her words came out all fucked up, and I couldn’t understand anything she said. Her head wobbled, and she splashed face-down in the water. I pulled her up by her hair. “Wake up, Anna, wake up!” The waves were so high, and I was afraid we’d get separated, so I shoved my right arm under the strap of her life jacket and held onto her. I lifted her face up. “Anna. Anna!” Oh God. Her eyes stayed shut and she didn’t respond, so I shoved my left arm under the other strap of her life jacket and leaned back with her lying on my chest.

  The current pulled us away from the wreckage. The pieces of the plane disappeared below the surface, and it didn’t take long before there was nothing left. I tried not to think about Mick strapped in his seat.

  I floated, stunned, my heart pounding in my chest. Surrounded by nothing but rolling waves, I tried to keep our heads above water and forced myself not to panic.

  Will they know we crashed? Were they tracking us on radar?

  Maybe not, because no one came.

  The sky darkened and the sun went down. Anna mumbled. I thought she might be waking up, but her body shook and she puked on me. The waves washed it away, but she trembled and I pulled her closer, trying to share body heat. I was cold, too, even though the water had felt warm right after the crash. There wasn’t any moonlight, and I could barely see the surface of the water around us, black now, not blue.

  I worried about sharks. I freed one of my arms and put my hand under Anna’s chin, lifting her head off my chest. I’d felt something warm just below my neck where her head rested. Was she still bleeding? I tried to get her to wake up, but she’d only respond if I shook her face. She wouldn’t talk, but she’d moan. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I wanted to know if she was alive. She didn’t move for a long time, which freaked me out, but then she puked again and shivered in my arms.

  I tried to stay calm, breathing slowly in and out. Handling the waves was easier floating on my back, and Anna and I rode them as the current carried us. The seaplanes wouldn’t fly in the dark, but I was sure they’d send one when the sun came up. Someone would have to know we’d crashed by then.

  My parents don’t even know we were on that plane.

  Hours passed, and I didn’t see any sharks. Maybe they were there, and I didn’t know it. Exhausted, I dozed for a while, letting my legs hang down instead of fighting to keep them near the surface. I tried not to think of the sharks that might be circling below.

  When I shook Anna again, she didn’t respond. I thought I could feel her chest rising and falling, but I wasn’t sure. There was a loud splash, and I jerked upright. Anna’s head fell loosely to the side, and I pulled it back toward me. The splashing continued, almost like a rhythm. Picturing not just one shark but five, ten, maybe more, I spun around. Something jutted out of the water, and it took me a second to figure out what it was. The splashing was the waves hitting the reef surrounding an island.

  I’d never felt such massive relief in my whole life, not even when the doctor told us my cancer was gone and the treatment had finally worked.

  The current pulled us closer to the island but we weren’t heading straight at it. If I didn’t do something, we’d pass it by.

  I couldn’t use my arms because they were still under the straps of Anna’s life jacket, so I stayed on my back and kicked my feet. My shoes fell off, but I didn’t care; I should have taken them off hours ago.

  Land was still fifty yards away. Farther off-course than before, I had no choice but to use one of my arms, and I sidestroked, dragging Anna’s face through the water.

  I lifted my head. We were close. Kicking frantically, my lungs on fire, I swam as hard I could.

  We reached the calm water of the lagoon inside the reef, but I didn’t stop swimming until my feet touched the sandy bottom of the ocean floor. I had only enough energy to drag Anna out of the water and onto the shore before I collapsed next to her and passed out.

  ***

  The blazing sun woke me. Stiff and sore, I could only see out of one of my eyes. I sat up and took off my life jacket, then looked over at Anna. Her face was swollen and bruised, and cuts crisscrossed her cheeks and forehead. She lay still.

  My heart hammered in my chest, but I made myself reach over and touch her neck. Her skin felt warm and relief washed over me a second time when I felt her pulse beating under my fingers. She was alive but the only thing I knew about head injuries was that she probably had one. What if she never woke up?

  I shook her carefully. “Anna, can you hear me?” She didn’t respond so I shook her again.

  I waited for her to open her eyes. They were amazing, big and dark grayish-blue. They were the first thing I noticed when I met her. She had come to our apartment to interview with my parents, and I was embarrassed because she was beautiful and I was skinny and bald and looked like shit.

  Come on Anna, let me see your eyes.

  I shook her harder and it was only when she finally opened them that I slowly let out the breath I’d been holding.

  Chapter 3 – Anna

  Two blurry images of T.J. hovered above me, and I blinked until they merged into one. He had cuts on his face and his left eye was swollen shut.

  “Where are we?” I asked. My voice sounded scratchy and my mouth tasted like salt.

  “I don’t know. Some island.”

  “What about Mick?” I asked.

  T.J. shook his head. “What was left of the plane sank fast.”

  “I can’t remember anything.”

  “You passed out in the water, and when I couldn’t wake you up I thought you were dead.”

  My head throbbed. I touched my forehead and winced when my fingers grazed a large bump. Something sticky coated the side of my face. “Am I bleeding?”

  T.J. leaned toward me and combed through my hair with his fingers, looking for the source of the blood. I cried out when he found it.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s a deep cut. It’s not bleeding as much now. It bled a lot more when we were in the water.”

  Fear gripped me, traveling through my body like a wave. “Were there sharks?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see any, but I was worried about it.”

  I took a deep breath and sat up. The beach spun. Placing my hands flat on the sand, I braced myself until the worst of the dizziness passed. “How did we get here?” I asked.

  “I looped my arms through the straps of your life jacket, and we drifted with the current until I saw the shore. Then I dragged you up on the sand.”

  The realization of what he’d done sank in. I looked out at the water and didn’t say anything for a minute. I thought about what might have happened if he’d let go of me or if the sharks ha
d come or if there hadn’t been an island. “Thank you, T.J.”

  “Sure,” he said, only meeting my gaze for a few seconds before looking away.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  “I’m okay. I think I hit my face on the seat in front of me.”

  I tried to stand and failed, overcome by dizziness. T.J. helped me back up and this time I stayed on my feet. I unbuckled my life jacket and let it drop on the sand.

  I turned away from the shore and looked inland. The island looked just like the pictures I’d seen on the Internet except it didn’t have a luxury hotel or any vacation homes sitting on it. Barefoot, the pristine white sand felt like sugar under my feet; I had no idea what had happened to my shoes. The beach gave way to flowering shrubs and tropical vegetation and then finally a forested area where trees grew close together, their leaves forming a green canopy. The sun, high in the sky, burned with an intense heat. The ocean breeze failed to lower my rising body temperature, and sweat trickled down my face. My clothes clung to my damp skin.

  “I have to sit back down.” My stomach churned, and I thought I might throw up. T.J. sat down next to me and when the nausea finally passed I said, “Don’t worry. They have to know we crashed and they’ll send a search plane.”

  “Do you have any idea where we are?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  I used my finger to draw in the sand. “The islands are grouped in a chain of twenty-six atolls running north to south. This is where we were headed.” I pointed to one of the marks I made. I dragged my finger through the sand and pointed at another. “This is Malé, where we started. We’re somewhere in between, I guess, unless the current took us east or west. I don’t know if Mick stayed on course, and I don’t know if seaplanes file a flight plan or if they’re tracked on radar.”

  “My mom and dad have got to be freaking out.”

  “Yes.” T.J.’s parents had undoubtedly tried to call my cell phone, but it was probably at the bottom of the ocean by now.

  Should we build a signal fire? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when you’re lost? Build a fire so they know where you are?

  I had no idea how to build one. My survival skills were limited to what I had seen on T.V. or read in books. Neither of us wore glasses, otherwise we could have angled a lens toward the sun. We didn’t have any flint or steel either. That left friction, but did rubbing sticks together actually work? Maybe we didn’t need to worry about a fire, at least not yet. They’d see us if they were flying low and we stayed near the beach.

  We tried to spell out SOS. First we used our feet to flatten the sand, but we didn’t think it would be visible from the air. Next, we tried to use leaves but the breeze scattered them before we could form letters. There weren’t any large rocks to hold the leaves down, only pebbles and fragments of what I thought were coral. Moving around made us hotter and the pain in my head worse. We gave up and sat down.

  My face burned in the sun and T.J.’s arms and legs turned red. Soon we had no choice but to move away from the shore and take shelter under a coconut tree. Coconuts covered the ground, and I knew they contained water. We banged them against the trunk of the tree, but we couldn’t get them open.

  Sweat ran down my face. I gathered my hair into a pile and held it on top of my head. My swollen tongue and dry mouth made it hard to swallow.

  “I’m gonna take a look around,” T.J. said. “Maybe there’s water here somewhere.” He hadn’t been gone long when he came back to the coconut tree holding something in his hand.

  “I didn’t see any water but I found this.”

  It was the size of a grapefruit and green, spiny lumps covered its surface.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, but maybe it’s got water inside, like the coconuts.”

  T.J. peeled it, using his fingernails. Whatever it was, the bugs had gotten there first and he dropped it on the ground, kicking it away with his foot.

  “I found it under a tree,” he said. “There were lots of them hanging but they were up too high for me to reach. If you get on my shoulders, you might be able to knock one down. Do you think you can walk?”

  I nodded. “If we go slow.”

  When we arrived at the tree, T.J. clasped my hand and helped me climb onto his shoulders. I stood five-six and weighed a hundred and twenty pounds. T.J. had at least four inches and probably thirty pounds on me, but he wobbled a bit trying to hold me steady. I reached up as high as I could, my fingers stretching toward the fruit. I couldn’t get a grip on it, so I hit it with my fist instead. The first two times it didn’t budge, but I hit it a little harder and it went flying. T.J. lowered me to the ground, and I picked it up.

  “I still don’t know what this is,” he said, after I handed it to him.

  “It might be breadfruit.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a fruit that’s supposed to taste like bread.”

  T.J. peeled it, and the fragrant smell reminded me of guava. We divided it in half and sucked on the fruit, the juice flooding our dry mouths. We chewed and swallowed the pieces. The rubbery texture probably meant the breadfruit needed to ripen longer, but we ate it anyway.

  “This doesn’t taste like bread to me,” T.J. said.

  “Maybe it would if it was cooked.”

  After we finished it, I climbed back on T.J.’s shoulders and knocked down two more, which we consumed immediately. Then we walked back to the coconut tree, sat down, and waited again.

  Late in the afternoon, with no warning, the sky opened up and a torrential rain poured down on us. We got out from under the tree, turned our faces to the sky, and opened our mouths, but the rain ended ten minutes later.

  “It’s the rainy season,” I said. “It should rain every day, probably more than once.” We didn’t have anything to collect the water in, and the drops I managed to catch on my tongue only made me want more.

  “Where are they?” T.J. asked when the sun went down. The desperation in his voice matched my own emotional state.

  “I don’t know.” For reasons I couldn’t fathom, the plane hadn’t come. “They’ll find us tomorrow.”

  We moved back to the beach and stretched out on the sand, resting our heads on our life jackets. The air cooled and the wind blowing off the water made me shiver. I wrapped my arms around myself and curled into a ball, listening to the rhythmic crashing of the waves hitting the reef.

  We heard them before we figured out what they were. A flapping sound filled the air followed by the silhouettes of hundreds, maybe thousands, of bats. They blocked out the sliver of moonlight, and I wondered if they’d been hanging above us somewhere when we walked to the breadfruit tree.

  T.J. sat up. “I’ve never seen so many bats.”

  We watched them for a while and eventually they scattered, off to hunt elsewhere. A few minutes later, T.J. fell asleep. I stared up at the sky, knowing that no one was searching for us in the dark. Any rescue mission undertaken during the daylight hours wouldn’t resume until morning. I pictured T.J.’s distraught parents, waiting for the sun to rise. The possibility of my family getting a call brought tears to my eyes.

  I thought about my sister, Sarah, and a conversation I’d had with her a couple months ago. We’d met for dinner at a Mexican restaurant and when the waiter brought our drinks I took a sip of my margarita and said, “I accepted that tutoring job I told you about. With the kid who had cancer.” I set my drink down, scooped some salsa onto a tortilla chip, and popped it in my mouth.

  “The one where you have to go on vacation with them?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll be gone so long. What does John think about this?”

  “John and I had the marriage talk again. But this time I told him I also wanted a baby.” I shrugged. “I figured, why not go for broke?”

  “Oh, Anna,” Sarah said.

  Until recently, I hadn’t really given much thought to having a baby. I was perfectly content bei
ng an aunt to Sarah’s kids – two-year-old Chloe and five-year-old Joe. But then everyone I knew started thrusting blanket-wrapped bundles at me to hold, and I realized I wanted one of my own. The intensity of my baby fever, and the subsequent ticking of my biological clock, surprised me. I always thought the desire to have a child was something that happened slowly, but one day it was just there.

  “I can’t do this anymore, Sarah,” I continued. “How could he handle a baby when he can’t even commit to marriage?” I shook my head. “Other women make this look so easy. They meet someone, fall in love, and they get married. Maybe in a year or two they start a family. Simple, right? When John and I discuss our future, it’s about as romantic as a real estate transaction, with almost as much countering.” I grabbed my cocktail napkin and wiped my eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Anna. Frankly, I don’t know how you’ve waited this long. Seven years seems like enough time for John to figure out what he wants.”

  “Eight, Sarah. It’s been eight.” I picked up my drink and finished it in two big gulps.

  “Oh. I missed a year in there somewhere.” Our waiter stopped by and asked if we wanted another round.

  “You should probably just keep them coming,” Sarah told him. “So, how did the conversation end?”

  “I told him I was leaving for the summer, that I needed to get away for a while to think about what I wanted.”

  “What did he say?”

  “The same thing he always says. That he loves me, but he’s just not ready. He’s always been honest, but I think for the first time he realized that maybe it’s not just his decision to make.”

  “Did you talk to Mom about it?” Sarah asked.

  “Yes. She told me to ask myself if my life was better with him or without him.”

  Sarah and I were lucky. Our mother had perfected the art of giving simple, yet practical, advice. She stayed neutral, and she never judged. A parental anomaly, according to many of our girlfriends.