by Rima Jean
Sophie.
My throat constricted. No one said anything for what felt like an eternity. They thought I had died ten years ago, and yet here I was, looking dramatically different but, oddly enough, much the same. What did they think? What had they been told? As I stared into each of their dumbfounded faces, I heard their questions.
Sophie stepped forward and smiled at me – a stunning, radiant smile, and I saw the little girl I had left behind. “It’s her,” she said. She nudged her father. “Dad, it’s her.”
Jake looked as though someone had slapped him. “Uh,” he said, crossing his arms, uncrossing them, putting them in his pockets, removing them. “Sabrina. I don’t know what to say. You’re alive.” I saw the tears shimmer in his eyes.
“Well, I do,” Tanya muttered, dropping her handbag and rushing to me. Before I knew what was happening, Tanya and Sky were hugging me, crying, saying things about guilt, about miracles, about God.
As I began to cry myself, unable to utter a coherent thought, I looked at my husband and daughter from behind my tears. Jake stood stock still, his eyes fixed on me, while Sophie held her hands behind her back, glancing curiously from her father to me.
They’d been told I had survived alone on an uninhabited cay. The Caribbean is full of small cays, and I was stranded on one that had been overlooked. This had sent Jake into a fury. “Overlooked! How was it overlooked? This is the Bahamas, for God’s sake! We’re not talking about the South Pacific in the eighteenth century! How did she go overlooked for ten years?”
Now, as he sat on the edge of my hospital bed, he peered curiously, desperately, into my eyes. “Sabrina, what happened to you? Where were you? You couldn’t possibly have been on a cay in the Bahamas all this time.”
I couldn’t look him in the eyes. Noakes’ words echoed in my head: If you tell anyone the truth about where you’ve been, you are endangering yourself – and your family as well. “But I was,” I insisted, fidgeting nervously with my IV.
“You survived on a small cay alone for ten years?” Jake said incredulously. “Didn’t you see boats or planes or people? Didn’t you figure out how to build a fire? Didn’t you try to get off the island before ten years had passed?”
Sophie piped up. “Like that old movie… Cast Away,” she said.
Tanya came to my rescue. “Jake, for heaven’s sake, leave her alone! She just said that’s where she was. Give her a chance to recover before you start throwing questions at her.”
Jake heaved a deep sigh. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Sabrina. It’s just… You don’t know what we went through, after you went missing. And to think that you were right there… for so long…”
Sky spoke softly, putting her hand on mine. “What about what Sabrina went through? We should let her rest.”
“And bathe,” Tanya added, wrinkling her nose and smiling playfully at me.
Jake was not satisfied, but he nodded. “OK,” he said. “The hospital is releasing you tomorrow, and we’re getting you out of here.”
I said, “Can Sophie stay with me tonight?” Everyone looked expectantly at Sophie, who shrugged uncomfortably. I smiled at her. “Will you stay with me, Sophie? Please?”
She considered for a moment, then answered, “Sure.”
Jake kissed each of us, murmuring to Sophie that he’d call her, and with some strained, awkward good byes, Sophie and I were left alone in the hospital room. She pulled a chair up to my bedside, sat, crossed her legs, and stared silently at her hands. I noticed that her fingernails were painted a shimmery pink, that her jeans were high-waisted and belted. Huh. Was that back in fashion? Her hair was pencil-straight, and I wondered if she flat-ironed it. She certainly hadn’t inherited hair like that from me. I swallowed. What to say? I wanted to hug her tightly, to inhale her scent. What must I look like to her?
She spoke first. “That must have been… really hard. Being alone like that.”
I said carefully, “It was hard being without you and your dad. I missed you guys so much.”
She looked briefly at me, then scanned the walls, the bed. She didn’t know how to respond. “Dad missed you a lot. He was depressed for a long time.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she replied. “I missed you too, but it was a really long time ago.”
“Of course.”
“I was really young.”
“Yes, you were.”
There was a long pause of silence as we both fidgeted, trying to think of things to say, when Sophie reached for the tokens that sat on my bedside table. “What are these?”
“Oh,” I said, trying to arrange myself to face her more directly. “I found them on the island.” A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Hey, Sophie, do you think you could get me a laptop with internet access?”
“Why?” she asked.
“I want to try and find out what these words mean,” I said, indicating the scratched letters on the tokens.
Sophie casually pulled what looked like a cell phone – identical to the one Noakes’ sidekick had used to look me up (except this one was pink) – out of her small handbag and began tapping away at it at lightening speed. She examined one of the tokens as she typed. “L-I-B-E-R-I.”
I tried to sit up. “Are you Googling it?”
Sophie looked up at me and raised an eyebrow. “No. Google is ancient history.” She looked back down at her pink gadget and read, “‘Italian municipality… in the province of Caserta…region of Campania…’”
I made a face. “That doesn’t… fit. Try putting in ‘Liberi’ and ‘pirates.’”
Sophie grinned. “Pirates? If you say so.” After a few seconds, she read, “‘Pirate utopias… Pirates built the utopia of Libertalia in Madagascar during the eighteenth century… Called themselves Liberi.’”
I sat very still. A tingling sensation crept along my spine. What did it mean? Was it a message? I thought back on when Sam had given me the talisman, on how he had been watching me strangely, how he had insisted I wear it. I pointed to the other token. “What about that one? I know it’s not English, so just try typing it in the way it is.”
Sophie read, “O-B-I. Right? Is that one word?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. Just try typing it in as one word first.”
When that yielded no (reasonable) results, I said, “I’m pretty sure it’s in Igbo, an African language. Do you think you could narrow the search?”
Sophie sighed. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Which language did you say it was?” She tapped away for a few seconds, and then said with a victorious smile, “O bi means ‘he lives’ in Igbo. Man, I rock the Web.”
My vision blurred, my heartbeat boomed in my ears.
He lives. Liberi.
Sophie’s smile disappeared. “Are you okay?” She shifted in her seat. “Do I need to call a nurse?”
“No,” I said. “He lives. Oh my God, he lives.” I covered my face with my hands, willing myself not to cry. After a moment, I looked up at Sophie and tried to smile. “I’m OK, really.”
Sophie watched me quietly, then asked, “Mom, what’s going on?”
Mom. Powerful emotions bubbled within me as I reached for her hand and grasped it tightly within mine. “Sophie,” I whispered. “Can you keep a secret?”
Chapter Forty-Two
The day I left the hospital, there were no reporters, no camera crews waiting. My return to the civilized world, to the twenty-first century, went unnoticed. Noakes’ visit was foiled by Sophie’s presence, much to my delight. Still, his eyes conveyed the warnings, the promise to return. He would not let me be, of that I was certain.
And there was Sophie. My story had jarred her, disturbed her. I feared she thought I was crazy, but something in the way she gripped my hand as she helped me into the car reassured me. She wouldn’t write me off as insane, thank God. Her desire to rebuild our relationship filled me with relief, with love.
When I closed my eyes, I still felt the rocking of a ship be
neath me, tasted the salt on my lips. I still heard the creaking, the flapping of sails in the wind. When I drifted off into sleep, I still saw those blue eyes, that warm, mischievous smile.
He lives. Liberi.
I would not let him go, not yet.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
