by Marni MacRae
After the second day of Lucas muttering about drying, and separating, and straining, and purity, he finally had the tank full in the motor, and a quarter of the gas can filled. He sported a few cut or mashed fingers as well that I had washed out and bandaged. Every cut in the jungle was a chance for infection. I kept a close eye on my burned fingers and any cut or scrape we acquired during our daily activities.
In the late afternoon of our twenty-third day from home, Lucas announced we were ready to pack.
I was floating on the raft with the fishing pole in hand, the line cast out into the clear water, fish guts as bait. Come on Cannibals, come and take a bite. I encouraged our future dinner.
Lucas waded out to me and took the pole. “Why don’t you get into some shade, babe, you're turning the color of a coconut.”
I had finally, after spending too much time boiling water on the beach, achieved a golden goddess color. Within minutes of said coloring, my skin rebelled and started running straight toward African native. Now I was a ‘blonde who spent too much time at the tanning salon’ color.
“At least I’m not orange or red though.” I smiled and gave him a kiss. “I guess if we're packing to leave in the morning, I'll boil some water and we can drink a bunch tonight, and then I'll refill them in the morning while you load the ship.”
“Ducky is a ship now?”
“Yeah, I promoted her. I offered her a purple heart for being wounded in the line of duty, but she wanted to climb the career ladder, you know how it goes, always harder for a woman to get rank.”
“Uh huh, what’s your rank?”
“Superior Master.”
“Oh, that’s appropriate.”
I waved and began wading toward shore.
“Hey, what’s my rank?” He called after me.
“Cowboy, First Class.”
The ship was loaded, we were hydrated, and all the water bottles were full. Lucas had loaded the blue raft with our suitcases. He strapped the life vests to them once again and set them, perfectly balanced, in the center of the dark blue mattress. The mattress was then tied with our one rope to the back of Yellow Ducky, a good four feet of slack between the two vessels. With no loops to secure to on the blue raft, Lucas had tied a tight knot around the blow port, which was the circumference of a gold dollar, meant to hook up to a portable pump. It seemed pretty secure, and I felt confident it would hold. Without the weight of the luggage, we ran the risk of the raft catching air and blowing around, or tangling with the motor, and plus, this left more room in Ducky to move around.
Lucas insisted we both wear life vests. ‘We're not taking any chances’ and ‘we have pushed our luck already’ becoming all too familiar quotes from his lips.
So I indulged him and prepared for the sweaty, uncomfortable ride, the vest chafing at me in the first five minutes.
We had cleared out our hut, and I wished I could take a picture, but my camera had taken a bath in the ocean when my purse went to sea, so I would have to be content with a mental picture. As with the rest of the island, I still had not gotten a single picture of Lucas either. Time enough for that when we get home.
With everything secured and rechecked, twice, I climbed aboard and sat in Ducky’s nose, flashbacks of three weeks earlier making me tense. I focused on the naked flashbacks and relaxed, trying to find a comfortable medium of at ease, but not horny. Lucas would need to concentrate.
The motor was topped off with the yummy-smelling fuel, and Lucas took hold of the rope pull. I crossed my fingers on both hands scrunched my eyes and whispered the magical; “please, please, please, please, please.” and on the twelfth pull, the motor sputtered to life.
The yanking had gotten us to rocking and drifting, and as soon as the engine began purring, Lucas directed us out away from land. “OK, Sophia, you need to navigate, so turn forward and keep an eye out for sand banks, shallows, or reefs.”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n.”
I twisted around and faced the water ahead. I imagined I was the figurehead of a great exploring ship, the form of a mermaid or Athena.
We traveled at a decent clip, the motor purring, and the thrill of it, the exploration, the hope of getting home, lifted my spirits to the sky.
I couldn’t really sightsee, as I was determined to achieve our goal without mishap. We’d had enough mishap to last a good long time. I scanned the water and directed Lucas if shallow water was ahead, or when we were headed toward a sand bar, which there were quite a lot of. This atoll had a shallow center; I almost thought we could walk across it.
We spotted a few small islands which where tiny compared to the one we had left, and I was suddenly grateful. Seeing what we could have landed on made me appreciate what we had.
The water did grow deeper suddenly, a channel between two islands, but Lucas navigated it like a pro, and we were then passing the island that had been to the south of us. While I studied the water ahead, Lucas studied the land masses, probably marking them down in his mind to update his map.
He had been right, something I was getting used to and also beginning to rely on; it took just over an hour to reach the furthest southern island. We knew it when we saw it because one, there was an old crumbled down rock pier and two, the great big ocean beyond proved free of anything but deep water.
Lucas guided our yellow ship to a sandy shore that was nearly identical to the one we had left, and we towed in Blue Ducky to our new home. Temporary, I stated in my mind, very temporary.
I gazed out in all directions as the raft bumped against the sand, hoping to spot a yacht, a boat, anything, give me a sail, or another life raft with a homing device. But the waters all around were calm and clear.
“Soon.” I whispered. I was certain the tourists would flood in soon. After all, this was the most beautiful place on earth. Of course the tourists would come.
That night, as we lay on the beach surrounded by our luggage, the raft and the air mattress, something did come in from the ocean. It wasn’t a tourist or a patrol. It was a storm. I named it Hurricane Fury, and she stole both of our rafts.
Chapter 23
We had no light.
We had made the decision to camp on the beach after Lucas spent the afternoon fishing. Then we had cooked a dinner of a tasty white fleshed fish neither one of us recognized.
I had pulled up the luggage to the tree line, and only poked into the jungle fifty feet or so, just to look around. I hadn’t spied any houses, but I did find trails that visitors had left. Or they may have been old well-worn paths from days gone by. As the sun set, I dug a fire pit, collected rocks, and wood, and started a nice bed of coals to roast on.
Lucas had taken the motor off of Ducky and set it by our luggage, and we set the inflatables up near us, but we hadn’t tied them down. Why would we? A good breeze was all we had been gifted with for nearly a month. It wasn’t hurricane season, so when Fury blew in, dumping rain like a madwoman, we dove for shelter in the trees. Trying desperately to find any spot that would keep the torrential wind and rain off of us. In the confusion and rush, we left everything behind.
“What the hell is this?” I screamed over the rain. “I thought the equator didn’t get hurricanes!”
Lucas kept a firm hold of me, the deep blackness of the clouded sky, and the noise of the storm, would make it easy to lose each other.
“I don’t know, but we need to find better shelter, this is going to last awhile!”
We struggled further into the trees, tripping and stumbling on the wet jungle floor. I had one hand in Lucas’s large, strong grasp, while my other hand clung to his waistband. I trudged behind him with my head down, rain running down my face, soaking my clothes and skin. We were making snail’s time, looking for something we weren't able to see. The wind tore at the trees, and the noise added to the confusion of blackness and chaos. I held faithfully to my seeing-eye cowboy, hoping his senses were sharper than mine.
Twenty minutes of struggling through underbrush, tripping over rocks and k
nocking into trees, and Lucas finally came to a stop in a copse of tightly-packed palms. It was similar to the clump he had taken me to, to sew me up, but these trees seemed larger, older. They grew so thickly together we just fit, huddled at the base of the trunks. The storm here seemed angry because it vibrated our shelter and whipped at the tops of the trees, but less rain got through. The heavy layer of fronds diverted the water to the sides of the copse. We were splattered intermittently whenever a good gust of wind opened the canopy to the raging storm above, but it was bearable and better than being stuck on the beach in the madness of it.
Lucas and I settled in, wrapping up in each other and leaning back, feeling the life of the storm surge and sway through the trunks behind us.
“We’ll be OK.”
Lucas spoke into my ear. Not shouting, but speaking loud enough to cut through Fury’s voice. He held me tightly to him, and I just nodded against his chest. What doesn’t kill us makes our mettle.
Hours went by. I tried to sleep, hoping to pass the miserable time away in a dreamless blackness, perhaps waking to rescue or at least a steady drizzle. The lashing and noise and the constant wet refused to let me even nod off. I huddled my wet body against Lucas’s equally soaked form and tried to think happy thoughts.
I didn’t really know how many tourists came to this area. I also didn’t know what time of year was ‘tourist’ season. I had been assured that January was the best time to visit the Maldives, but we were south of the equator now, I wasn’t sure by how much, but maybe a couple hundred miles. The weather below the equator moved in its own way, completely separate from the northern hemisphere; that much, at least, I knew. The whole thrill of the water in a flushing toilet circling opposite directions in Seattle or Sydney being a well-known trivia fact.
So what was great tanning weather to the North, may well be great storm weather to the South. From all the news coverage on the monsoons in Asia that had recently flooded out villages and rivers, I knew that a good portion of the big storms started near the equator. Then, if conditions were right, they grew in size and ferocity as they approached warm shallow water and land. Fury was most likely a tropical storm that was gearing up to head to Africa or Madagascar or somewhere south, where we in the northern part of Earth, rarely covered when it came to sensational news.
I hoped it was just getting worked up and would move on. These little islands wouldn’t hold up well to a full-force hurricane, and we most likely wouldn’t have a chance at survival out in the open. Not even any rope to lash myself to a post. An old poem my mother used to tell me came to mind, of a ship at sea hitting a storm and a father lashing his daughter to the mast for fear of losing her overboard. When the storm passed, the entire crew was lost, and her body washed ashore … still lashed to the mast. My mother tended toward the dramatic and I wished now I were there with her. At my farm, sipping a cup of hot coffee, watching the snow fall, looking forward to spring. But I was here, now, lashed to Lucas, on a small island in a storm, like a ship at sea.
I guessed that only boats would venture to the island chains this far out. And only yachts or experienced sailors would travel over great lengths of water to reach a small island chain that offered no services, no shelter or water, and one you had to jump through hoops and cut through red tape to even approach.
The entire area being a reserve meant that visitors had to apply for a permit even to anchor off shore. The fines were pretty steep, from what I understood about maritime law and trespassing on a reserve; their boat could be confiscated. So chances of rescue were looking worse and worse. Storms and restrictions would mean weeks, maybe even months before someone ventured this way.
We had to hope for a patrol, one of the law-keepers of the preserve who checked for permits, but I had no idea where they would be stationed out of. How often they patrolled the islands, which islands, this atoll had a dozen or so. Would they come ashore? Would we even see them? Perhaps they would only circle the outer circumference, looking for any boats in the vicinity. I was pretty sure no one would venture into the center of the atoll and risk getting caught up on a reef or sandbar. The reef that circled this atoll was pretty far out, we may never even hear them even if they came every day or see them if we weren’t ocean side. I was starting to panic a little. My stomach was in knots, and I clung tighter to Lucas.
The rain was warm, and even with the wind whipping around us, I wasn’t cold. I never fully dried out because the wind brought rain down from the fronds above, but I was grateful at least that even without shelter we would not freeze to death. We had more of a chance of starving if the storm lasted for days. There would be no fishing, and eating coconuts would only make matters worse.
I knew I was working myself into a state of distress. Worrying and freaking out wasn’t going to help anything, and I knew too, that given what we now had to deal with, I needed to calm down. I was starting to feel nauseous with the dread that was creeping in. I took a few deep breaths. Tucking my head down on Lucas’s shoulder, I forced all the worries out of my mind that I had no power over, and instead turned to thoughts of my future. Our future.
Lucas was the first truly wonderful thing to happen to me in a very long time. I had wanted to be married. I had wanted a farm and a hundred babies and horses and the country version of a picket-fence life. Jon, though, had wanted to live in the city. We had moved from Seattle to Portland, visited cities all over America, but he was never satisfied. It wasn’t until a few years in that I had realized it was impossible to satisfy Jon. He was a perpetual complainer, always wanting more or different. Always competing with the Jones’s. Nothing was good enough.
I had begged him to move back to Spokane where my family was. I hated the rain of Seattle and the cold shoulder of Portland. Jon refused to live in the country, and along with that refusal had included children. I was devastated, I could let go of the dream of a farm, but not the want to mother. I loved the princes and Audrey and craved so longingly for my own children, but Jon insisted we wait. And wait. And wait, until it became a battle between us. When he cheated with one of my friends at a work party, the fight wasn’t worth it. I left and bought my farm and started over.
It had been a struggle and a fight. I scraped together pennies and worked my hands to blisters putting in fencing, repairing the barn, hauling hay and cutting firewood, but finally the dream was real and my farm was just now starting to support itself. In another few years, it would start turning enough of a profit that I could relax and finally hope to find someone. Preferably someone with the same values and life goals. A man who wanted to live in the country and have a hundred children. Well, I would settle for two or three, but I wasn't getting any younger. And now, here I was, stranded with the perfect man, who loved me. Lucas enjoyed farming and horses, and … God, I hoped he wanted children. We would have to talk about that. Figure out what our future held. I was willing to move to Montana … my animals didn’t care where they lived, and Lucas had the ranch. It wasn’t far to visit home, so compromise was easy, but children was not something I could compromise on. I prayed Lucas wanted the same.
The nausea wasn’t abating, and a roll of seasickness flooded my stomach. I suddenly hoped that the fish we had eaten wasn’t poisonous; being sick now was close to a death sentence. I pulled away from Lucas and sat up straight. Crossing my legs Indian style, I began taking slow breaths, physically assessing myself. I didn’t feel cramping, no sharp stomach pains. I was thirsty, but not dehydrated. Another wave of nausea, and I sat forward, hoping to not throw up on myself.
“Sophia, are you OK?” Lucas reached out, putting his hand on my back.
“Just a little sick, it will pass. It must have been the fish.” I didn’t want to alarm him, and was thankful for the dark and distraction of the storm, that he wouldn’t be able to see my green face. “It will pass.” Not a big deal, no cramps, that’s good, not food poisoning. Then it’s probably … Oh my God.
I suddenly knew, and the realization brought all the butte
rflies to the surface and I heaved forward to my hands and knees, throwing up the fish and water from my stomach. How could I not know, this whole time sitting here thinking about children, my instincts screaming at me to notice.
I'm pregnant. Of course I was pregnant. What had I thought? I could have sex constantly for a month with a virile cowboy and not get pregnant?
I had been on birth control with Jon but hadn’t taken a pill for two years. I suppose I had plenty of excuses. Six years of not getting pregnant after having sex had trained me to not think about it. And of course I had a few distractions, pirates and floating at sea and the island and hoping to not die or starve to death. Sex wasn’t about procreation with Lucas, it was about affirmation of life and passion and expressing love. But of course it was also about procreation, whether I had acknowledged it or not. Nature didn’t care about psychology, nature only wanted lots of babies, and Lucas and I fell right into the genetic design. We created life to ensure the survival of our species.
Lucas was at my shoulder, his hand rubbing my back. “Hey Sophie, take it easy, tell me how you feel, are you feverish?” I could hear the concern and fear in his voice.
“I’m good, I think the fish just wanted out. I’ll be fine.” I sat back, wiping my mouth, and patted his hand. “Don’t worry, no fever, just stress probably. You feel OK?”
We were still talking loud; the storm hadn’t lessened even a little. He just pulled me to him, stroking my wet hair from my face and wrapped his long, strong, arms around me.
“Don’t worry.”
He somehow managed a soothing tone, as if he were settling a scared child, and I curled into him. I knew he would make a fantastic father. I just didn’t know how to tell him, or if this was even something that he wanted. I decided to wait until the storm passed. Wait until we had our bearings and a plan. Then I would tell him, and hope to God he didn’t hate me.
