A Map for Wrecked Girls

by Jessica Taylor

  They gave us soap, shampoo, and toothbrushes and showed us to a couple of showers. The water scalded my skin and I stayed under the hot stream until my knees were too weak to keep standing.

  We were sunburned, heatstroked, exhausted, but we would survive. We had survived.

  Sunlight streamed over the buildings and through the vertical blinds as I sat up in my hospital bed. Henri breathed softly as she slept in the next bed over. We must have been out all night—it was morning.

  My bladder felt like it was going to burst. I tried to sit up, but something tugged at my arm and stung. It took me a second to figure out how to unwind the IV stand to take it with me.

  The floor swayed back and forth as I moved into the bathroom.

  As I washed my hands, the face staring back at me in the mirror made me gasp. My hair and eyebrows were bleached out against my tanned skin, and my cheekbones were higher under my sunken cheeks. The island made me look less like me and more like the old lady I imagined I’d become one day.

  I pushed the IV stand back into the hospital room first, closing the bathroom behind me.

  “Em,” Henri said. Her bare arms looked unnaturally tanned against the white hospital sheets as she clutched the bedding to her chest. “I—” Her voice rose. “I woke up and thought we were still on the island.”

  She swung her legs off the bed before tearful hiccups wracked her whole body.

  My sister wasn’t okay.

  Henri shut herself in the bathroom while I collapsed into my too-soft bed.

  Voices trickled in from the nurses’ station.

  My mother’s words were first: “We got here as soon as we could.”

  “The name?”

  My father’s next: “Jones. Henrietta and Emmalyn.”

  “Oh, you’re—” Chair legs scraped against the floor. “This way.”

  Shoes echoed through the sterile halls, clicking louder as they neared our room.

  Mom filled the doorway. Her eyes were sunken deep into her skull, and her clavicles jutted from under her skin. She’d lost so much weight—too much—and her gray trouser pants bagged around her thighs as she crossed the room.

  “Mom,” I croaked.

  She squeezed me hard, falling against me and crushing my chest. “You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay.” She repeated those words until my dad cleared his throat.

  He shifted his feet back and forth. With his eyes red and full of water, he covered his mouth and his short beard. His strangled words—“You look good, Em”—almost didn’t slip between his fingers.

  Mom pressed her palm to my forehead, the back of her hand to each of my cheeks. “My God, you’re burning up.”

  “It’s heatstroke.” My hand touched hers—she’d finally stopped wearing her wedding band. “I’m okay. I’m just—”

  The bathroom door opened and my parents looked to my sister.

  Henri clutched the doorframe and didn’t speak.

  I half expected Henri to give them each a quick hello hug and ask what Mom had brought her to wear on the plane ride home. But my sister’s expressionless face cracked.

  My dad reached a hand out; it trembled as he patted Henri’s back twice and clasped her shoulder.

  Tears rolled into my mother’s frown lines, and she used her hands to steady herself against my bed instead of wiping them away. Mom crossed the room and caught Henri under the arms, wrapping herself around my sister until Henri’s sobs turned to soft gasps.

  Henri pulled back and blotted her cheeks against her hospital gown. “Were you still looking for us?”

  Mom collected Henri’s hands and pulled her to my hospital bed. The bed creaked with the weight of the three of us, while my dad pulled a chair closer to the bedside.

  Mom smoothed back Henri’s singed hair. “We didn’t know if you’d been kidnapped or killed or . . . All anyone knew was that you were missing. I saw you at breakfast that morning and then the hotel caught some footage of you leaving the property an hour later—that was all we had to go on.”

  My dad spoke up, shaking his head and staring out the hospital windows. “That kid with the boat, nobody even reported him missing. A fisherman’s saying now that he noticed the boat was gone. But the kid was kind of a drifter and he assumed he’d just taken off for another island. I wish we could sue—”

  Mom shot him a look. “Steven.”

  He sighed. “Search teams were canvassing Puerto Rico for six weeks before they refused to keep looking—”

  “Stop,” Henri said.

  Both my parents looked to Henri. The room was too small to hold so much silence.

  “Don’t blame yourself for giving up,” she said. “Anyone would have—”

  Dad reached his arms around Henri and squeezed. Cradling the back of her head in his hand, he whispered, “But we didn’t. Even after everyone else did, we couldn’t. We never could have given up on finding our girls.”

  I couldn’t stop my tears from coming. I wasn’t crying because our parents didn’t give up, but because, since the divorce, I’d never seen Henri give grace to my dad.

  “We can forget all about this,” he said. “As soon as the hospital says you’re well enough to fly, we’ll take you home.” He met Henri’s eyes and then mine. “We’ll forget this ever happened.”

  Henri frowned at me. We couldn’t afford to forget, didn’t want to forget. She knew it—so did I.

  Our parents would only remember that they’d almost lost us out there, but for my sister and me, it was the opposite. Our island was where we found so much of what we desperately needed.

  “It wasn’t as bad as you’re thinking,” I said. “We had each other. And we had Alex.”

  My dad’s voice climbed. “That boy—”

  Mom gave him a warning look and he slumped back in his chair.

  She pushed my hair out of my face. “Nothing happened with him on the island, did it? He didn’t do anything to either of you?”

  “What are you talking about? Alex?”

  “Alex,” she said, “has an officer guarding his room. They’re telling us that he’s the reason we almost lost you.”

  “What? No, it wasn’t like that.”

  “Emma, stop.” She forced our eyes together. “He’s in an awful lot of trouble.”

  That night, I lay awake in my too-soft hospital bed in my too-quiet room missing the hammock and the sound of Alex’s breathing.

  Henri was curled on her side with her back to me and her legs pulled to her chin when Mom cracked open the door.

  My bed creaked as Mom lowered her hips onto the side. “The police questioned him all day. He wasn’t cooperating. They said you can’t see him.”

  “Why?”

  “There was a raid last month on a drug house. The police found explosives. One of the dealers cut a deal—he admitted some of the others had rigged the cousin’s boat to blow up when it was far from shore. Because they were rivals. Because Alex and the cousin were running drugs.”

  “And they’re building a case based on what this dealer said? This is ridiculous.”

  Mom held a finger to her lips, glanced to Henri asleep in the next bed. “Emma, the way you’re being about this boy, it worries me.”

  “Have I ever given you a reason to not trust me?”

  “Oh, Em. It’s just that we went through so much with your sister. We’ll talk more about this when you’re rested.” She kissed me on the forehead. “Get some sleep, okay?”

  I sat up to argue, but she was already across the room. After Mom pulled the door shut, Henri rolled over and said, “We’ll fix this.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  The humid tropical breeze of San Juan blew against my arms and tangled my hair as Henri and I sat in wheelchairs outside the hospital’s electric doors. For a moment, I imagined I was on a different islan
d—our island—and we weren’t about to board a plane for San Francisco.

  “It’s fifty-eight degrees in the city today.” Mom fanned herself with our boarding passes. “I just realized I haven’t seen home in almost three months.”

  I hadn’t remembered until then to ask—“Mom, why were you and Dad in Atlanta?”

  She refolded her papers and shoved them into her tote. “Filming for CNN. Until a few days ago, we hadn’t left Puerto Rico—of course they’d find you the day we left. These tragedies, they only hold people’s attention for so long. We thought doing the interview was a way to keep the media interested.”

  I’d underestimated my mom. She’d come out of everything not unscathed but stronger for it. Maybe I’d underestimated all of us.

  Henri pursed her lips—she loved attention, but not this kind. “You mean we’ve been all over the news?”

  “It’ll die down soon enough. It almost had—but then you were found. The airline made arrangements for you two to preboard because of your condition. They expect a lot of reporters back in SF, but your dad will have a car waiting to get us out of there as fast as possible.”

  Our taxi pulled up and Mom rolled her luggage close to the curb while the driver loaded her things and Dad’s into the trunk. The bandage they’d tied around my arm was itchy, but I couldn’t scratch hard enough through the gauze, not with my brittle, waterlogged nails.

  Henri nudged me in the ribs and pointed to a police cruiser parked in the roundabout, with someone in the backseat.

  He looked up, and I couldn’t breathe.

  Staring back at me were Alex’s green eyes. They focused from the other side of the glass to where I sat, and they burned right through me.

  Amputating two fingers only kept Alex at the hospital for a little more than a week. Now they were taking him away to face an uncertain future.

  We’d tried so hard—not only me but Henri too—to make the police understand who Alex really was. They’d grilled us for hours about the day the boat went down. Had we taken any drugs? What did the explosions sound like? It wasn’t easy to know what words would help him the most.

  Mom checked our flight information on her phone and glanced through the glass doors. “I wonder what’s taking him so long.”

  Dad was inside, signing papers saying he understood it was against the doctors’ recommendations for us to fly so soon.

  Henri squeezed my arm and mouthed, Go.

  I didn’t understand until Henri closed her eyes and slumped forward in her wheelchair.

  “Henri!” Mom got to her knees in front of my sister. “Help! Someone help us!”

  A couple of nurses jogged through the hospital doors to the sidewalk. Behind me, my mom’s voice was frantic. “She was fine and then she just collapsed.”

  Henri’d made just enough of a distraction for me to slip away and move toward the police cruiser.

  In Alex’s lap, his wrists were handcuffed together and he stroked his bandaged hand. He tried to smile as he saw me. With his blistered, peeling cheeks and shaggy dark hair now past his shoulders, he wore the strain of what we’d faced, of what he had yet to face, but the eyes looking back at me were those of the boy I met on Luquillo Beach.

  His handcuffs scratched against the windowpane as he pressed his good hand to the glass. I held my palm against the outline of his.

  The car’s engine rumbled to life. My breath came fast as I tried to think of what to say before the officer put the car in drive.

  “What can I do?” I said over the humming engine.

  Alex’s voice was muffled through the window. “Nothing, Jones.”

  I kept my hand against his until the car rolled forward and broke us apart.

  CHAPTER 37

  After everything on the island, it wasn’t easy for us to slip back into double-feature movies, dim sum, buttery popcorn, and nail painting. Home wasn’t the same, and neither were we.

  We had doctor appointments almost every day because of severe headaches that sometimes left us so weak, we couldn’t stand. The doctors ran tests for days until they could rule out dengue fever, like Alex had. We were prescribed long doses of anthelmintics to kill parasites and given MRIs to check for damage outside our digestive tracts.

  We would snap back, the doctors said—we just needed time.

  When we weren’t being poked and prodded, we steered clear of the phone that never stopped ringing.

  Our return after seventy-three days missing and the truth about our shipwreck made national news. Almost every channel showed clips of us—an overhead view of search teams canvassing Puerto Rico on foot, commentators discussing the odds of finding us, security footage of Henri and me walking out of the Luquillo Beach Resort the day we disappeared, our mom wiping her eyes while swearing she wouldn’t give up hope.

  Henri had to keep seeing her therapist, and Mom and Dad scheduled me with my own. Henri told me her sessions weren’t like her first two. They weren’t about Mr. Flynn anymore, only the drowning nightmares that made her wake up screaming.

  I stood on the porch one morning before another of our many doctors’ appointments, waiting for my mom and Henri, when Jesse crossed from his yard into ours.

  “You look really good,” he said. “For everything you’ve been through.”

  I smiled. “I don’t know how to take that.”

  “I mean you look good. Sorry.” Jesse blew a breath into his hands. “I’m sorry for everything, Em.”

  “Me too.”

  “That guy you were stranded with, what was his name?”

  “Alex.”

  Even in the brightest spots of my days, Alex was never far from my mind. Alex, who was made of ocean water and sand and sunlight, he didn’t belong in a sterile gray cell.

  The first night back in San Francisco, my shaved legs had felt so slick sliding against my sheets. In my stationary bed, I’d swayed back and forth, imagining the feel of the hammock under me, Alex’s arms, his warmth radiating, the sound of distant ocean waves.

  “What was he like?” Jesse asked. “The media’s acting like he was some kind of a drug trafficker or something.”

  I’d devoured the news for the first month we were home, surviving off the scraps about Alex’s pending charges and the occasional pictures as if they were cacao pods and fresh rainwater. Mom would crowd around the TV beside me and Henri, waiting with just as much hope for a little good news. When we’d got some distance from Dad, when Henri and I were able to make her understand, Mom had seen that no matter what mistakes Alex had made, he was the reason she got us back.

  Eventually, though, the media turned on Alex, painting him as a thuggish drug runner who led astray two sweet, innocent girls. Maybe the networks were hungry for a more sensational story, for higher ratings. That’s when I stopped watching, also when I learned not to trust the news.

  Now my memories were the only place Alex existed.

  I wished people weren’t so often known for only the smallest parts of them, their careless mistakes. “Alex was smart,” I said to Jesse. “And he was brave. What you see on the news—that was only a fraction of him, and not a fraction I knew.”

  Jesse nodded like he understood.

  The front door creaked behind us, and Henri stepped onto the porch. Her purse slipped off her shoulder when she saw Jesse. I moved to help her, but she held her hand up and hoisted it a little higher.

  Jesse cast his eyes to the ground.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Jesse looked up. “Hi.”

  I took several steps down the driveway to give them privacy. Maybe their relationship could never work past what had happened, but Jesse caught Henri’s hand as she walked away. The way she kept her fingers intertwined with his for just a few seconds made me think someday they’d try.

  My dad spent a lot more time around our house after we came home. He
’d do little things like change the air filters or drag the trash cans to the curb. He thought he was helping by staying close, but all he did was tease. Because late every night, Henri, my mom, and I would walk to the door and wave as he’d climb back into his BMW and drive off. Leaving us for her all over again.

  Dad was the same, but he was trying harder to show we still mattered. It made it not hurt the same way as before.

  We sat around the TV that July, Mom, Henri, and me, with the air-conditioning whirring to keep the heat out of the room.

  Henri’s thumb was moving fast over the remote and skipped past a still of Alex. We hadn’t seen his face on the news in weeks. As she clicked back, I walked to the TV.

  The words breaking news were emblazoned across the screen as they filmed Alex leaving the courthouse. Since the hospital in San Juan, it was the first time I’d seen him in street clothes. He wore dark jeans and a crisp white button-down as he shut himself inside a taxi.

  His hair was shorter than I’d ever seen it. He’d cut it since those last glimpses I’d had of him on the news. It would have been barely long enough to hold between my fingers.

  “Turn it up,” Mom said.

  Henri fumbled with the remote. The volume surged and the newscaster said the word I’d wished for: exonerated.

  Our shocked laughs became gasps that faded into stunned, euphoric silence.

  He was free and not broken and ready to move on. My relief burned so bright, I was surprised at the shadow it cast.

  I’d been so worried about wanting Alex to have his life back that it hadn’t occurred to me that his life probably wouldn’t include me. What we had on the island, I never questioned if it was real—it was—but maybe it wasn’t something we could sustain in a landlocked world.