“Well, honestly, I’m not that good with blood. Vomit or whatever else—that’s different. Blood, though, I just don’t have the stomach for it.”
“Here.” Henri took the needle from his hand. “I can do it.”
I might have thought she would have taken some sick pleasure from sticking the needle under my skin and me trying not to cry out each and every time, but my sister winced with every jerk of my arm. She made only enough stitches to do the job, sewing me up as best she could with what she had.
After it was over, I slipped to the leaves in a fetal position to let my wooziness pass.
Alex nodded at the stitches. “They’ll work until you can get home.”
“Home,” Henri repeated. She laughed to herself before she moved toward the fire.
A log popped, sending ash and glowing embers swirling around my sister. I remembered her, standing in the Baird hallway with a flurry of loose notebook paper suspended in the air around her.
After what I’d done to her, home could never mean the same thing to Henri.
We cleaned the caiman and separated the gross, squishy fat from the tender, flaky meat. We cooked it over the fire and ate until our bellies were heavy and full, and still there was so much meat left. That’s when we spread strips on hot rocks and let them cook until they were chewy as jerky. It reminded me of the one bite of frog legs I’d tasted at one of my parents’ fancy New Year’s parties—but better because we were famished and had killed and cleaned and cooked it ourselves.
Rain thwacked against the roof of our shelter. The biggest leaves provided some weatherproofing, but no matter how hard we tried, there were spaces water leaked between.
Before the rain became a downpour, when it was only a drizzle, we’d dragged a fresh layer of palm fronds to the floor of the shelter. They were supposed to keep things dry, but if we moved certain ways and pressed too deep into the floor, mud would bubble up between our toes and fingers.
Alex swung in the hammock above us. We were going to take turns, but Henri said the strings made weird patterns on her arms and the backs of her legs, and she didn’t want to look like a ham. And Henri wouldn’t dare let me sleep anywhere that wasn’t at her side.
Water thundered down, and I thought about the wide-open beach. Even with the dense protection of overhead leaves, the small fire outside our shelter could barely survive the storms. Out on the beach, with the fierce wind and rain, the signal fire couldn’t still be burning.
“Nobody will find us now,” I said, tenting my shirt to fan myself. The warm, thick air was wet and made my shirt cling to me, the back of my neck damp with sweat. “Not until we rebuild the fire.”
Henri drifted toward the door and peeked out the flap. “It’s a waste of lighter fluid anyway. Using up what little we have for a signal fire that’s not doing us any good.”
“She might be right.” Alex held up the lighter. “We shouldn’t have gone so long without this anyway.”
“Alex,” I said. “I told you it’s okay.”
“Here’s the thing.” He rolled the lighter between his fingers. “I checked that backpack really well—two or three times. I wouldn’t have risked not looking. I carried it around to the other side of the beach, and I dumped the whole thing. And I put it all back in. There was no lighter in there. I swear.”
“Well, you’ve got to be wrong,” I said. “Maybe it was stuck in the lining. Really, how could it be not there one minute and then there the next?”
“I don’t know. It was after the accident. Maybe I was really out of it.” He didn’t sound like he thought that was it, though.
Henri tossed a handful of empty crab shells out the shelter door. “If you’re going to have a meltdown, could you try to do it in private?”
“Well, in case you haven’t noticed, Hank, space in here is limited.”
“No, I haven’t. Let’s see, what was I doing?” Henri tapped a finger to her lips. “For forty-seven days, I was too busy drinking parasitic water that I wouldn’t have had to drink if, say, we’d had a lighter this whole time. For forty-seven days, I’ve been wondering how long. How long until we end up like your cousin?”
Alex jumped out of the hammock and landed on his feet. He put on his backpack. “I’ll take that as my cue.”
As the tarp swished behind him, Henri yelled, “We nearly died out here because of you!”
I shook my head at my sister—she wouldn’t even make eye contact—and crawled out of the shelter to follow him.
Water now soaked the ground and trees, but no more rain came down. I tipped my head to the sky. Sunlight shone through the high-above treetops.
I stepped through wet tangles of underbrush and found Alex moving through the jungle in a direction I’d never gone. After the rain, everything was green and glossy, the humid, earthy smell almost overpowering.
“Alex, wait.”
He glanced back. “Please don’t follow me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry about, Jones. She does.”
He had no idea.
I picked up my pace but so did Alex.
He looked over his shoulder, but his feet went out from under him. He slipped and was gone. Grasping the vines overhead, I stepped to the place where he’d tumbled, a steep, muddy embankment. I took a step back. The wet ground crumbled beneath me, and the world went sideways and upside down as I spilled down the bank. My hands shot out, but I couldn’t anchor myself to anything. With a thud that almost knocked the wind out of me, I came to rest at the bottom of a mossy ravine. Clusters of vines screened us into a crack of the jungle, darkened by the mud-slicked hill.
I hissed as pain shot down to my fingertips and up to my shoulder—I’d landed on my stitches.
Alex was covered in head-to-toe mud as he crouched beside me. I started laughing but gasped in pain, feeling tears cut tracks down my muddy face, then laughed again.
“You don’t look so hot yourself, Jones.” He smiled, his teeth whiter in all that mud. “You didn’t hurt it worse, did you?” He probed along my arm and only made it ache. “I’m so sorry. You wouldn’t have fallen if—”
“It’s fine. Just, here—” One-handed, I couldn’t peel back the muddy bandage. He wiped his hands on some wet leaves and pulled it off. The wound was clean, with the stitches intact.
In the four days since the caiman’s attack, I’d waited for the stitches to burst open. They’d held strong, but the skin around them had turned a tender, flaming red.
“It’s okay. Let’s see what I can do for a new bandage.” Loose money escaped out of his backpack as he cut away a piece of lining with his knife and tied it over my stitches. I winced. “I wish you’d taken the Oxy,” he said. “Just because I won’t doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have.”
“Why do you even have it? Was it Casey’s? Did he use it?”
“Sometimes. But the bags are just samples Casey would give out to drum up business.”
He finished bandaging me up. “Good as new,” I said.
“That’s optimistic. You needed antibiotics. You still need them. A caiman claw—I don’t even know. This island, I swear—it’s gonna kill us if we don’t do something.”
I slung mud off my shorts. “We should head back.”
“You go ahead, Jones.”
“Don’t let Henri get to you, okay? She knows how to push your buttons now. Don’t give her the satisfaction of reacting.”
“But she’s right.”
His hair hung in his eyes, and I brushed it off his face, leaving my hand there. “You didn’t kill Casey. When you pulled him up, he was already gone.”
“Stop.”
“The gash on his head was barely even bleeding anymore. His heart stopped before he ever hit the water.”
Alex blinked. “Are you sure? You can’t be sure.”
/> “I’m sure. There was barely any. He was gone.”
“I was breathing into his mouth. I was . . .”
“Alex, I’m sure.”
A moment passed and he cleared his throat. A few bills had come free from their paper bands and fallen into the mud. He wiped the money on his shorts to clean it.
“You know what I still don’t get? What is the money for?”
He zipped the bills inside. “We’d just made a delivery of cocaine and Oxy. It was payment.”
“I mean—since Casey’s gone. Why are you carrying it around? What could it possibly be good for?”
He sighed. “Salvation.”
When he didn’t say more, just fiddled with the zipper, I waited, watching him.
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“Fine. Okay?” He dropped the bag. “The day of the accident, I—I tried to get Casey to talk to me. It wasn’t coke right away, just Oxy, and I didn’t want to mess with that—with the illegals. I wanted out once that started. I thought we could roll everything we made into an investment—a commercial fishing boat. I found one that needs work, but the problems are mostly cosmetic. If I can refinish a surfboard, I thought maybe I could work on a boat too. Maybe fix it. Stupid, right?”
“No, you could,” I said. “With the shelter . . . you’re good at building things.”
“Our money—if I was right—it would have multiplied in one season. The fishing business, it’s booming down here. It would have bought me out of this drug-running bullshit. Maybe a way back to the mainland—not that I don’t love Puerto Rico—but I can’t stay here, stuck in neutral. And now it just sounds lonely, being there without Casey.”
“And Casey didn’t want the boat?”
“No, he wanted it. Casey wasn’t planning on trafficking forever. He really was a good guy.” The slightest trace of a smile formed on Alex’s lips.
“What?”
“I was just remembering—this thing Casey did. Back in Puerto Rico.”
“Tell me. I mean, if you want.”
Alex moved from his knees back onto the ground, still grinning. “There was, uh, this kid—seven or eight—who terrorized us.” He glanced at me. “He would ride his bike like hell up and down the dock, almost knocking tourists over, scaring off business. A total nuisance. So one day, the kid, he’s pedaling like mad right for these tourists, but they don’t move—I don’t know, maybe they don’t see him. The kid, he turns wrong, catches himself on the side of Casey’s boat, but the bike goes flying right off the dock, wheels spinning in the air, and splashes into the ocean. Casey and I, we’re laughing so hard, we can’t breathe, doubled over, tears streaming.” Alex looked at me, put up his hand. “Kind of dickish, I know. But this kid, he was the absolute worst. And really, he was fine. Not a scratch on him.”
I smiled. “No judgment here.”
“So, we’re waiting for him to dive in for it—it’s submerged in probably ten feet of water—when the kid loses it. Just starts crying—like, bawling. And he looks really young, right? This is a little kid. Casey goes over to him. Finds out the kid can’t swim. And Casey just takes off his shirt and dives in. No hesitation. After he gets the bike up, and swims all the way around the dock dragging this thing, the kid just gets on and rides off, doesn’t even say thanks.” The smooth ride of Alex’s voice went rough, and he exhaled. “I asked Casey, later, why he did it. He shrugged and said maybe the kid would remember it someday.”
The Casey from the boat—all I saw was him throwing out beers, laughing, Henri pulling him toward her like a magnet. I didn’t know him at all.
I leaned into Alex. Hoped it was enough.
Alex scrubbed his hands over his face and was quiet. At last he said, “The fishing boat—Casey said we didn’t have enough to buy it. And we didn’t.”
“What about the backpack?”
“We only get to keep a small cut of that money. We owe the rest to the supplier. With the accident, though, everyone’ll think the money’s at the bottom of the Atlantic. I was thinking— I could buy that boat outright if we ever got off this place. At first, I thought it was honoring Casey or something.”
“And now?”
He picked up the backpack. “I don’t know. Lately it’s feeling less and less like the answer.” We went silent, and as Alex wiped a hand across his eyes, he glanced behind him. “Do you hear that?”
He helped me up and we walked farther along the ravine. Vegetation clustered together, forming an almost-impassable green tunnel. The sound got louder as we walked. Something about it was familiar, even though nothing out here was really familiar, but I couldn’t place it. We reached a point where the vegetation thinned enough that Alex could yank aside a curtain of vines. And the jungle gave way.
A silt bank surrounded a pool of water that was no bigger than my bedroom back home but so clear we could see all the way to the rocky bottom. A vent of water ran off one side of it and thinned to a brook only inches deep, eventually disappearing into the ground.
I looked toward the sky, where the shifting treetops wove together, blocking out most sunlight. When I had stood on the cliff side with Alex and looked down, those trees had completely obscured this place, this cranny in the island.
This hidden-away spot—we had to be the first to ever see it.
Alex touched the water and licked his fingertip. “It’s not salty. We can drink it.”
I followed the pool to the other end, where an opening in the bedrock cliff streamed water off the hillside in a continuous white sheet. It was only a few feet wide, but it was an actual, literal waterfall.
We finally had water. And it was a waterfall.
Alex loosened the tie on his muddy cargo shorts and dropped them. I watched him strip off his shirt and wade into the water, not cutting my eyes away when he glanced back at me.
I looked to the bottom as he swam into the middle.
“No caiman,” he called. “It’s clear as glass. You should get in.”
I paused. Then I took off my mud-caked shorts. Watching Alex looking up at me, my pulse raced, and I took my time. I pulled my T-shirt over my head and slid off my shoes until I was down to my bikini and bare feet. I’d never stood in front of someone so fully on display.
“Come in here, Jones.”
I walked to the far side and slipped beneath the surface.
The cold was like Thai iced teas and honey lavender gelato. I sank down to my waist and closed my eyes, feeling cool and clean for the first time in weeks. I looked at Alex and laughed.
“I know!” he yelled back. “I didn’t think anything could ever feel this good again.” He grinned from the middle of the pool. “Swim out here, Jones. It feels amazing. The waterfall—it’s like a cold Jacuzzi.”
“I can’t.” I held up my arm. “I shouldn’t get the stitches wet.”
He swam closer. “You could . . .”
“What?”
“Well, you could hold on. I’ll keep your stitches above water and take you out into the middle.” He squinted up at me, water beading on his eyelashes. “Do you trust me?”
I’d asked myself this very thing so many times in recent days.
This boy, he wasn’t perfect.
But neither was I.
“Yes. I trust you.”
Facing him, I laced my fingers behind his neck. He wrapped his hands under the back of my thighs and pulled me close.
His voice turned husky. “How’s this?”
“It’s good,” I whispered.
With my arms around his shoulders and my legs around his waist, we moved into deeper water.
The force of the waterfall dropping into the pool made bubbles rise up around us. They burst against my legs and back, and we laughed and shrieked—cold, clean, alive. He pressed his forehead against mine and spun in a slow circle, making a whirl
pool encircle us.
“Do you want to go under?”
“Yeah.”
“Your arm will get wet.”
“Like it isn’t already.”
He laughed and hoisted me a little higher. “Hang on really tight, okay?”
I nodded, and Alex walked forward, backing me under. Water lapped against my back, my hair, my shoulder blades, my breasts, and finally my ears filled, and I held my breath.
Everything was still under the wall of water, but the sound rushed against my eardrums. It was sensory deprivation, except for two things I felt with a new kind of intensity: the cool explosion of water over me and the warm press of Alex’s body against mine.
I could have stayed under for longer, but Alex whipped me out and into the shifting sunlight. The force of it almost knocked us apart and we grabbed each other, sliding closer. I blinked away drops of water and looked at him, our faces level. My heart beat fast. “Do you know what I want?”
A breath shook free from his chest. “Jones. Are you sure? Do you want me to ask?”
“You just did.”
“And?”
“Yes.”
Pushing a wet curl off my lips, he leaned in. He brushed his mouth softly against mine. The touch made my whole body unspool. He teased my lips apart with tongue and teeth, gently, his fingertips stroking circles on the backs of my thighs underwater. I pulled him closer and pressed my palms against his sun-warm back. His soft, rapid breaths were inside my mouth. The kiss deepened. I made a sound I didn’t know was inside me, and he smiled against my mouth, working his fingers into my hair. We found a rhythm, sank into each other, dissolved until we were like liquid, part of the water.
He broke away, searched my face, and with me still wrapped around him, said, “You’re the only thing keeping me sane, Jones.”
My mouth inched back to his. I closed my eyes, and pulled him closer.
We ran back for the beach-trash bottles and carried enough water to the shelter for the three of us. By then it was drizzling again. The leaf cover overhead kept the sprinkling rain from putting out our fire, so we poured water inside my makeshift pot and balanced it above the flames.
A Map for Wrecked Girls Page 17
