by Matayo, Amy
Liam
A storm is coming. I can feel it in my left hand.
When I was fourteen, I was involved in an accident. A drunk driver hit me and my older brother on our way home after an out-of-town basketball game—namely, mine. Ironically, it was my brother’s first time driving without adult supervision—he was sixteen and had only been driving for three months, and my parents made him pick me up from school so they could go out to dinner with friends. Everything went fine until we were two miles from home, which made us a statistic on many levels.
My brother broke his right leg, suffered a collapsed lung, and was hospitalized for two weeks. I broke every bone in my left hand, had it put back together with pins, and was then sent home to recover. We both missed nearly a month of school, partly out of necessity and partly because our mother wouldn’t let us out of her sight. As for my father, he talked incessantly about the college career I had likely ruined, as though I had driven that car straight into the drunk driver myself. After the month was up, I practically raced back to school.
To this day, I fail full-body scans at airports and am subjected to pat downs every time I fly. Worse, I have occasional arthritis in my hand—usually when the weather changes. Today, the weather is changing. My hand is yelling at me like an overly enthusiastic meteorologist on her first day at a new job.
My hand is telling me it’s going to storm. I can’t explain it that way to Dillon, so I approach it from a different angle.
“Can you smell that? I’m pretty sure a storm is coming.”
She frowns and looks out at the water. It’s crystal clear and unusually still. The calm before the storm.
“There isn’t a cloud around and the wind is barely blowing. I’m sweltering out here, but you think it’s going to rain?”
It is going to rain and rain hard, but I can’t deny the current state of things doesn’t back me up. The landscape is a perfect convenience-store postcard. A sharp pain throbs at the life-line in the center of my palm.
“I think it’s going to storm. Probably pretty bad. But even if it doesn’t, we should still think about what we’re going to do in case one shows up. We don’t have any sort of shelter or anything else prepared. It’s probably time to remedy that.”
She’s been working to open another coconut. She sets it between her knees and shields her eyes to look at me. “Okay. If you say so. As soon as I finish this we’ll figure out what to do.”
I pick up the spear and head back to the water, trying to ignore both the sound of my stomach growling and the sense of doom settling around me. We’re nearing the beginning of hurricane season. In two days, the ship carrying my friends and Dillon’s whole family is set to arrive back in New Orleans. Home. Everyone will go back there but us. I’ll never admit it to Dillon, but I’m beginning to doubt we’ll ever be found. Three days and already a pessimist, but being this isolated forces you to become one of two things: insane from despair and bewilderment, or a realist. I’ve never been either, but if I have to pick one I’ll go with realist. Better to be grounded in reality and fully prepared for what life might throw at you.
Right now, I’m pretty sure it’s about to throw us a major catastrophe.
Before that happens, I should probably catch a few fish. After eating one last night and actually feeling somewhat full, I want more. Right now, I’m making it my mission to catch as many as possible before the weather changes.
“Tell me when you’re done. I’ll be right back.”
“Getting pretty confident in your fishing abilities, are you?”
I hear the smile in her tone but don’t turn around. Instead, I hold up a questionable finger and wade out into the water. She laughs, and the sound settles the worry in my mind for now. There might be a storm, but it won’t get me. And it sure as heck won’t get Dillon. We’ll beat it, no matter how long it takes.
“Oh ye of little faith, how’s the coconut coming?”
Dillon looks up at me, her mouth hanging open. “No way.”
“Yes, way.” I drop the spear at her feet and add a few more sticks to the fire. At the end of the spear flop two fish, fighting a losing battle to escape. The first—a bluefish–was caught in five seconds. It made the mistake of swimming between my feet right away, and—bam! I speared it and slid it up the pole. Harsh maybe, but this fishing thing is new to me and I’m not sure if my luck will hold. I couldn’t risk letting it get away. The second—a small speckled trout, too small to keep if I were fishing with a guide—took a couple minutes longer. But I caught it. This one will be the perfect size for Dillon. One for each of us. Paired with some bananas and that coconut she’s still working on, we won’t be hungry tonight.
I’m starting to despise bananas.
“Want me to finish cracking that for you?”
“I’ll manage the coconut; you fillet the fish.”
“Deal.”
This is where the spear performs its second task—moonlighting as a knife. Since we have nothing on hand but rocks to use as weapons and for cracking coconuts, we use the spear to cut things. Only soft things though; I won’t risk it breaking by attempting to use it on anything hard like coconut shells.
I slowly slide the fish off, whack their heads on a rock to put them out of their misery, and get to work preparing them for the fire. It isn’t a pleasant experience.
Dillon hates this part, so I’ve taken care to position myself between her and the whole sordid process. Truth is, I don’t much care for it either, but neither one of us is a vegetarian and there’s no supermarket around to take care of this mess, so I win the honor of doing it. Maybe “I’m the guy” is a bad reason and more than a little sexist, but…I’m the guy and Dillon hasn’t protested. As long as we’re here, the messy tasks fall to me because that’s the way I want it.
Behind me, the coconut cracks, and I smile at the sound. “Hey good—”
She lets loose with a curse that stops me. I spin around, but she’s already bent over with her head between her knees.
“What’s wrong?”
It’s been all of three seconds, but when she looks up she’s already crying.
“The bag slipped off, and I lost most of the milk.” The words come up in tiny hiccups. I won’t lie, my hope deflates a little. All we have is one bucket full of rainwater, and I’m sick of drinking it. For all its purity, of-the-earth sounding goodness, rainwater is pretty much crap. We’re spoiled at home with our water purifiers and ice cubes. Water straight from the sky isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I realize I sound like a spoiled prima donna, but come talk to me when you’re stranded on a deserted island and find yourself wanting nothing more than a cold beer or chilled glass of wine. Coconut milk is our only alternative.
“How much did you save?”
She sniffs and holds the bag up. There can’t be more than a tablespoon, if that. It’s not that I’m irritated, I’m just tired. Living takes a lot of work when no one is helping you do it. I force myself to keep my tone light, anything to keep her from crying harder. Dillon isn’t this emotional in real life; this island is threatening to crack her.
“Tell you what, you drink that and I’ll finish cleaning these. Then while you cook them, I’ll go pick a couple more coconuts. Deal?”
She sniffs, running a palm across her nose. “Deal.”
“Better?”
She looks up, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “No. Maybe.”
We’ve been so busy working on our separate tasks that neither one of us has been watching the water. Just then, a low rumble carries up from it, rippling its way toward us like the Jaws theme played at low volume. We look up at the same time, right when the air picks up. Rain. The scent of it is everywhere; I can’t be the only one to notice it now.
“What in the world? How did you know?” Dillon looks at me with wide eyes, but I get to work on the fish. If we’re going to eat these and be ready, I’ve got to speed up.
“I’ll explain it later.” I hand her three fish fillets and
watch as she rinses them in the water and lays them across two hot rocks. It’s our only way of cooking. “I’m going to find more coconuts and clear a place in the shack.”
“What for?”
“If the storm is as bad as I think it might be, we’re not going to want to be out in it.” I pick up the spear and the life raft still lying in a heap on the sand, intending to drop them off before heading back here.
I don’t tell her of my plan to gather several coconuts and clusters of bananas. If it’s as bad as I suspect it might be, it might be a while before we can come out. Which means another long day on this island. I check one more day off my mental calendar and push against the wave of our reality crushing me underneath its strength. This is bad. It’s getting harder and harder to see the light.
Even if they’re trying to find us now, sooner or later they’ll quit.
I crawl into the little nook I cleared inside the shack and sit next to Dillon. The wind is coming at us with brutal force, shaking the walls and whooshing through the open slats in the old building. If I had to guess, I’d say this place was built in the latter part of the last century and used heavily for a decade or two before being abandoned for something better. I have no way of knowing if that sort of practice is common, or—if this is in fact what happened—if the newer excursion island is close by or hundreds of miles away. That is the worst part of having no access to information; no internet, no phones, not even a transistor radio to attempt communication. Even a flare would be helpful—some way to signal our whereabouts to anyone who might be looking. Now even our fire will be out, and we’ll have to repeat that process all over again after the storm recedes. I’ve seen the blisters on Dillon’s palms; I hate the idea of having to start over because she’ll insist on helping. I’ll let her and her hands will get worse, but what choice do I have?
All of our choices have been completely taken away, and that just might be the worst feeling of all.
“How bad do you think the storm will be?” she whispers.
“I’m not sure,” I say. But I am. My hand is throbbing to the point that the pain has made its way to my head. The only other time I’ve experienced this is when a tornado ripped through our town the year after the car wreck, knocking down neighborhoods and car dealerships and even the hospital in its wake. A total of three cyclones that spared nothing. In my neighborhood alone, twelve houses were destroyed—two on either side of ours. One minute we had neighbors, the next we didn’t. News reports showed footage of a funnel momentarily lifting over our house before dropping next door, almost as if it decided my parents had been through enough in one year and everyone else needed a turn. It took years for our town to recover in the aftermath; without donations from strangers around the country, it would have taken much longer. Even now, Chad volunteers to help with disaster relief as often as he can, considering it his way of paying back. As much as he sometimes irritates me, his soul is good to the core.
As for me and Dillon, the good news is we don’t have much to lose.
The bad news is we can’t afford to lose anything, especially not our lives. The wind doesn’t seem to care.
It picks up, rattling the walls of the shack in its voracity. It’s late morning, but the shack is so dark I can barely see my hand in front of me. Dillon is quiet, flinching at every pop and crack and creak coming from outside. In the distance a tree falls, making me jump. I tell myself over and over that there have certainly been many storms on this island and this structure has withstood all of them; it’s the one thing keeping me rooted to my spot and not running to check on our supplies. Losing a coconut tree or banana tree would be the worst-case scenario.
Aside from losing Dillon. That would destroy me, mind and body. She’s the reason I stay.
“Distract me, Liam,” she whispers.
I’m not sure what to do, so I take her hand. My own hand throbs and my heart pounds, but when I thread my fingers through hers, I realize that she’s the scared one here. There’s so much tension in her hand…in the way she grips mine in a tight, rigid hold…that I search my mind for a way to ease it. Some way to distract her. I scoot a little closer so we’re touching from shoulder to hip to foot. She sinks into me, so I take it as my cue.
“Your family is extremely protective of you.”
I feel her breath catch. “You noticed that, huh?”
“Had there been a blind and deaf man sitting at the next dinner table, he would have noticed it.” She bumps my knee with hers at the same time lightning strikes. She moves a little closer, pressing her cheek against my shoulder. “Why are they?” I ask.
Dillon sighs, the kind of sigh that begins in the toes and slowly travels upward until there’s no place to go but out.
“They had a child before me. A boy. He was four and died of leukemia because they caught the cancer too late. After he died, it took them another five years to get pregnant with me. After I was born, they found out they couldn’t have more children. So they’re overprotective. Always have been. I don’t blame them and they mean well, but it’s still something I’ve had to live with my entire life. It’s hard measuring up to a sibling you never knew. Even harder when you wish with your whole heart that you could have known him.”
I have absolutely nothing to say to the revelation, because no wonder. I’ve viewed her mother as unreasonable and judgmental, but instead she’s heartbroken. We don’t see things the way they are, we see them the way we are. Look for the negative and you’ll always find it, and that’s exactly what I’ve done. If I have the pleasure of seeing Dillon’s mom again, I know I’ll view her through a newly compassionate filter.
“I’m sorry about your brother.”
She squeezes my hand. “It’s okay. It’s weird though. I never knew him, but I do miss him. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because I actually miss him, or because I wonder what my mother might have been like if he lived. Probably much happier and less uptight.”
“As far as missing him, it’s probably a little of both. But I guess that explains the husband thing.”
“How does that explain it?”
“She wants grandkids. A baby in her life. She probably thinks it will fill a void, and she might be right. It does seem odd that they would want to marry their only child off so quickly, though.”
“Correction: they want me married, but hardly off. I’ll probably have to live in my old bedroom with my new husband at my parent’s house, especially when a baby comes. She’ll probably want to mother it more than I will.” I laugh at the picture she paints. “But both my parents are almost sixty. They’re constantly worried that if something happens to them, I’ll be all alone. I guess a husband is supposed to make that all better.”
“Of course. Everyone knows having a man in your life is better than no man at all, even if he’s a drunk heckler. But just so you know, if you marry a guy like that, I’ll kill you.”
For a split second I worry that my words sound too possessive, but Dillon laughs. “I’ll take that to heart, because I’m not ready to be murdered.” It’s a sobering thing to say, but thankfully the mood doesn’t dip.
The wind roars on all sides and rain spills through the roof, landing in the center of the room. Sand buckets are set up outside the shack to collect rain water, six in all, each undoubtedly filled to overflowing. Another tree splits and falls, this time brushing the wall behind us. Dillon yelps. A leaf pokes through and gets me in the back, but it doesn’t hurt. I turn and rip it from its root, then discard it on the ground by my foot.
“Have you ever had a serious girlfriend?” Dillon asks. The words come out high pitched and tense, like she’s asking anything she can think of to keep from having a meltdown.
“I’ve had one. I thought we might get married, but it didn’t work out. She cheated on me with my college roommate—I found them making out on my bed one night when they thought I had gone home for the weekend. I was going home but came back for my laundry—figured my mom could do it since I was heading there anyw
ay. I came into the room intending to grab the bag and leave, but instead wound up punching him in the face, breaking his nose, picking up her clothes, and tossing them in the dumpster outside. I heard she left the room wearing a towel and an old pair of my socks. Her walk of shame had to be made straight through the student center in front of everyone. Poetic justice at its finest.”
“Man, that’s harsh.”
“No kidding. The worst part was that I had to change rooms and throw away my comforter. It was a navy Tom Brady one that I paid too much for online. I should have made him buy me a new one, but after that I couldn’t stomach the sight of the guy.”
“Your roommate or Tom Brady?”
“Both.”
I hear, rather than see, her lips turn up on a smile. “Boys and their sports.”
“It’s serious stuff. Don’t knock it until you’ve been there.”
“Oh, I’ve been there. Have you ever watched figure skating? Ice dancing is the best, especially at the Olympics.”
I turn my head, making sure to over-dramatize it. “Do not ever compare football to ice dancing again or I will have to disown you.”
She blinks. “I wasn’t aware you owned me in the first place.”
“Oh I—”
I stop myself before saying the word “do.” What would possess me to say that, even as a joke? I roll my neck to ease some of the tension in the air, though what Dillon does next fizzles it completely. Without a word, she wraps her arm around my waist, tucking herself in so that we’re touching everywhere. The closeness is both pleasant and uncomfortable, a definite distraction from the storm raging outside these walls, except that suddenly I’m thinking of other ways to distract us both. Under any other circumstance, I would kiss her. As it is, I remain still and quiet, determined not to take advantage and sealing that resolve with thoughts of my brother. He seems to appear at the most inopportune times.
Even thoughts of him can’t keep me from raising my arm and tucking it around her shoulder. After a time, we stretch out on top of the partially inflated raft, her head resting on my chest, my fingers slowly gliding through her hair. Up and down, up and down. I’m taken back to a couple days ago when she let me brush through the tangles. Dillon’s hair feels familiar already. Like it’s mine to play with. Mine to enjoy however I want. On this island, I wonder if the rules are different. There’s no one here but us, so I suppose we could make up our own.
