by Gabi Moore
But something about this place …something about having everything of your life stripped away from you makes it so much harder to cling to flimsy illusions. When I saw it, it felt like someone had ripped away a blanket I had been holding onto forever. But once I saw it I couldn’t not see it. Ellie was a sweet woman. And Todd cared for her. And, as much as it pained me, he didn’t care for me. At all. I saw the way they looked at each other, and it was something I didn’t have the strength to ignore anymore.
Everyone woke up soon after me and we all stirred, getting up early to see Todd and Ellie off. Anthony remained in the pit. It was creepy how little he moved. But he was coming back into consciousness here and there, and at least seemed calm. I knew that a single bottle of vodka could easily kill a person, so I had to admit, for a guy as intoxicated as he was, he still put up a pretty good fight. I wanted to think of him as a crazy idiot, but I soon realized I was nobody to talk.
I straightened my clothes, re-braided my hair and quietly rekindled the fire. The night before, we had tried with some success to smoke some mussels for Todd and Ellie to take on board. After we discovered a few bags of mysterious peanuts in Anthony’s trouser pockets, we packed that in the boat as well. Ellie put the finishing touches on her makeshift parasol, and the second she woke up she started looking for a way to attach it to the canoe so it hung over to form an enclosure.
For the next hour, we all worked on our own little projects in silence. The mood was heavy but hopeful. We were all exhausted, hungry and sick of one another, but it felt like the only option we hadn’t tried yet was working together. They were our last chance at rescue. I didn’t even want to think about what life would be like here once they were gone. So instead I put my mind to sorting out the fire and tried to forget about everything else.
The sky went faintly yellow at the horizon. It would be sunrise soon. I didn’t know where we were, but they’d have to give their all with a full day on that canoe if they didn’t want to be floating in the middle of nowhere when night fell.
There was a strange tension in the air as the boat was pulled out into the water and everyone started to load it up with what little we had: peanuts, a vodka bottle filled with stream water and some leftovers from last night’s dinner. Livvy had wrapped the tough little mussels and some crab meat in a broad leaf and folded it up, tucking it into the foot of the boat. All that remained was to attach the canopy.
But Ellie was having trouble. She tried at first to just prop each leg against the inside edge of the boat to create an arc overhead, but it wasn’t stable, and kept sliding out. Carl stepped in to help, and we all battled with it for a while, trying to figure out a way to keep the surface both anchored but high enough that they could sit inside and be shaded. The sun peeked out menacingly, letting us know that the clock was ticking.
“We need some kind of rope or string,” Ellie said. “These leaf strips aren’t strong enough to attach over here. Don’t we have anything else?”
We had already used up Carl’s leather belt, had torn off six inches from Livvy’s sundress as well as poached a few threads from her buttons. There really was nothing else. I thought carefully for a moment.
“Wait, I’ll get my knife,” I said and ran off. When I came back, Carl and Ellie looked at me with curiosity. I grabbed one of my braids in my hand and positioned the knife high up on it, close to the scalp.
“Charlie! What are you doing?”
Before they could say any more, I brought the knife forward and it sliced through my hair with a zing. The braided cord came loose in my hands, and I handed it over to her, then hacked the other one off in the same way. They were both wide wide-eyed, holding the limp braids in their hands.
“Don’t look at me like that, it’s a rope, isn’t it? And human hair is strong.”
I grabbed it back from them and started to immediately show them how to knot the unstable edges of the palm frond roof, hoping they didn’t see the wetness growing in my eyes. They said nothing, but both jumped in to help and in a matter of minutes we had firmly bound the rickety canopy to create what looked like a floating ox wagon.
Ellie tried to catch my eye, and I could tell she wanted to say something, to thank me, maybe, but I couldn’t look at her. Not yet.
“You all ready to go?” I said, voice crackly.
Carl, Livvy and I waded outside in the water and held onto the smooth boat edges while Todd helped Ellie climb in. She had woken up with a foot that had turned from red to a disturbing purple color. I tried not to stare as she lowered herself in, her flimsy cocktail dress basically nothing but a memory at this point.
It was a solemn moment.
Todd settled up front with his improvised stump oar and Ellie took up her own, smaller oar, not much more than a flat enough slab of wood. They both looked so small and vulnerable in there. We waded out slowly, the refreshing blue water lapping up till our navels. Todd was able to dig down into the sand with his oar and push the boat along. With all we could muster, we three shoved hard and sent the boat floating smoothly off into the distance. Livvy put her hands to her mouth and cried a little, and blew them kisses. Carl put his arm around her and we all watched them bob and glide away.
They waved.
We all shared the same thoughts at that moment. Would they ever come back? What would happen when they did? What would we do without them, now? They had barely floated off fifty yards when my mind started to race off with ideas of what could happen when they returned. To my surprise, one thought popped up that never had before: I would quit the military.
We all three turned around and went back to the shore. I wanted to tell someone. Tell them that if I got out of here alive, I’d turn over a new leaf. That I saw now, clear as day, every mistake I had ever made, and now I was hungry to get back to the real world and do the work of putting everything right again. The military wasn’t for me anymore. I couldn’t say exactly why yet. But it was so. I thought about telling Livvy and Carl. About trying to explain some of this to them, to tell them that I was sorry, that I had been wrong, that I really had never meant to do any harm… but before I could speak Carl was already talking.
“Livvy, you want to go and check up on Anthony? I think Charlie and I had better get busy finding today’s food as soon as possible. Right, Charlie?”
I nodded quickly.
Of course. Food. Maybe Todd and Ellie would find land and send us help soon. Or maybe they’d be hit by another storm and we’d never see them again. In any case, it was all out of my hands now. The only thing I could do was look for food.
The thought was strangely soothing.
Chapter 20 - Ellie
It took a long time for the figures on the beach to grow smaller and smaller and then disappear. It was as though the ocean itself was rising up to swallow them and the island they stood on, till there was nothing left but blue all around us, everywhere you looked.
It was overwhelming. The utter flatness of it all was so striking it grabbed the eye and kept it there, even though there was nothing to focus on, and no landmark to indicate any distances. We ourselves were squashed flat into that landscape, flat along the horizon which was all consuming. The world was cut in two – pale blue on top and deep heavy blue on the bottom, and us in our little boat wedged in that endless vanishing point between them. It was hard to know how fast we were moving after a while. Or whether we were moving at all.
Once we had broken away from the frilled edge where the water met the beach, and cleared the waves, the ocean was surprisingly flat and smooth. Regular, low waves lapped against the canoe. I sat near the back, under the awning that was tied in place by Charlie’s hair, and Todd sat up front, his shirt off and draped over his head to shield him from the sun. He rowed like a machine. Literally, like a machine made of muscle and skin and whatever rolling energy underneath that allowed him to keep paddling so strongly and smoothly, one beat after another. I watched as the lattice of knotted muscles over his back tightened when he lifted the o
ar, squeezed on the opposite flank to lower it, and his entire trunk twisted strong and smooth to pull, bringing the whole boat forward on its watery track. Up came the oar again, and then again.
Out here, time seemed to flatten out as well, and the only indication that a few hours must have passed was the slow ascent of the sun. Though the rough fibers underneath me prickled right through my dress and grated at my skin, I found my own steady rhythm with my own lighter, smaller oar. Still, I was soon sweating and breathing deeply, watching his back closely and adjusting to his movements without a word – when we veered to the left I quickly double-paddled on the left side to correct us. Without turning around, he made his own efforts to keep our course straight as well. We were a machine together. A slow, fragile rowing machine powered by two slow, fragile bodies that had momentarily found a shared goal together and could move as one. And we were moving. Slowly, perhaps, but we were moving.
In, pull, lift, forward, in, pull, lift, forward, on and on went the simple cadence of wood on water, nearly meditative, till my mind found some art in it, and even though my arms were burning with exhaustion, I approached each new stroke with a fresh intent to master it.
It wasn’t that it was sexual. But it was something close to it. One man and one woman out on the wild ocean of life, sharing a boat and using nothing but their bodies to propel them to an uncertain future. I imagined myself telling this romantic anecdote to all the people we’d meet once we found land again. But that thought quickly evaporated and my attention was lost again on the muscular workings of his back.
Then he stopped. Lifting a dripping oar and crossing it over the top of the boat, he carefully swung himself around so he was facing me.
Had I forgotten how to talk? Or was I just in a new stage of my life altogether, where I had forgotten why anybody needed to talk in the first place?
“I think I’ll try rowing from the back for a while,” he said after some time. Skin sprinkled with a few days’ tan and the deep azure blue all around him, he looked like he belonged in a fancy commercial. We looked at one another for a moment. It was odd: though we both knew so little about the details of the other one’s life, it was as though the turmoil we had endured together acted like a kind of glue, creating a foregone intimacy that played out on a deeper, more primal level. What we had left in this world was so meagre, it felt unnecessary to have any boundaries between us. And so we looked at each other nakedly. No pretense. For now, no words either. It felt like our gaze was all that we needed or wanted to communicate. In this new paired down day, it felt easy to shed layers, to peel down attitudes until only the barest, most essential core remained. And I found that core in his eyes.
I wanted to share everything that was knocking around in my heart. I wanted to tell him that I was sorry for involving him in my messy, stupid life. That I didn’t want him to feel responsible. That he deserved better than to just be some ‘other man’ and that I hadn’t planned any of it. That I felt raw and exposed and defenseless, but that whatever it was worth, I felt good with him, and admired him, and wanted to let him know that it was all OK, even the parts that weren’t OK.
But I said nothing. We sat and silently exchanged looks. There was water, and boat, and body, and nothing else. Eventually, he cleared his throat started dragging his finger through the still water beneath.
“We should carry on again in a moment,” he said. “We need to cover as much distance as we possibly can. Are you hungry yet?”
And with that he opened up the verbal floodgates and we began speaking, and we spoke for hours afterwards, with as much rhythm as we had when we rowed together.
We nibbled on the frankly revolting little morsels Livvy had packed for us and chatted about …everything. About the training he was going to. About his mother and how he had helped her through not one but two separate bouts of cancer. About how him and his friend had this shrimp barbecue once, where he had seem the biggest shrimp of his life. We spoke about the color of the ocean, and how expensive the cruise had been, and wondered out loud if it really was a hurricane that had hit us, and if so, what name they had given it. Then the topic of Charlie came up.
“To be honest, I don’t really understand her. I don’t get what the relationship between you both is. I have to admit it all seemed strange, even from the first day. Is she an…?”
“An ex? Well, yes, in a way.”
I was surprised at how easy it was for him to talk now, when he had seemed so withdrawn on the island.
“The thing you have to understand about Charlie, is that she’s not nearly as tough as she looks. Really. Charlie is …a complicated person. And even though things looked pretty bad back there, she is in the end my friend, and I respect a lot of things about her. Not everything, but a lot.”
I laughed.
“That’s a long-winded way to answer a simple question.”
“Yeah I know. Put it this way: Charlie and I …not dated exactly, but we were together very briefly. It was a mistake on my part, but she never could let it go.”
“You mean you guys just slept together?” I said. A guy as hot as Todd would obviously have loads of casual relationship, so I didn’t know why I felt so disappointed just then.
“Well, actually, just the one time. There was a lot of alcohol. We were young and stupid, I don’t know. I guess I had a lot to prove back then.”
“Wait, a lot to prove? What do you mean?”
He took his time answering me now. We were back to rowing again, our voices at the right pitch to carry over the slapping of the oars into the water. But I swear I could see him thinking in the muscles of his back. It was easier to talk, when we weren’t face to face, but I could tell we were now on a sensitive topic.
“Well, before her, I was inexperienced,” he said carefully.
“You were sexually inexperienced?”
“Well, yeah.”
“You mean …you were a virgin?”
His muscles rolled and pulled.
“Uh, yeah. Exactly. I’m usually not one to be pressured into anything, you know? But she really wanted to, and I guess I thought it was time and…”
“So she got really attached, but you both broke up?”
“Well, there wasn’t a whole lot to break up. I was honest with her. But she was convinced, I don’t know, that this meant we were soul mates or something.”
We rowed on a few paces further.
“And all your girlfriends afterwards didn’t mind that she was always there?”
He laughed out loud.
“All my girlfriends?”
“Well …however many there were.”
“Well, there were exactly none.”
“Bullshit. You must have had girlfriends.”
“Nope.”
Silence.
“Well …why not? Clearly there must have been plenty of opportunity along the way, right?” Was he an unrepentant player after all? Some kind of immature commitment-phobe? Gay?
“Well, it’s hard to explain…” he said.
Here, without thinking, I reached out to gently graze the skin on his back with my fingertips to catch his attention. He spun around quickly.
“Let’s stop here, I’m getting hungry again,” I said.
While he balanced the oars, I pulled out some more shriveled brown mussels and laid them out on our makeshift leaf plate. They were surprisingly tasty.
“Well, try to explain. I’m listening,” I said and gave him an encouraging smile.
I watched as he rolled his neck and shoulders to crick out the tension, and opened and closed his broad hands which by now must have been getting tired and sore.
“It’s like this. I realized that sex was a much bigger deal than I had thought at the time. I didn’t appreciate how …attached I could get. You know, I’ve always been this tough guy, right? Always the one that keeps his head in emergencies, that fixes shit when it breaks. I always played the rough sports, and did hunting and shooting and all the rest. So I guess you c
ould say I was the most surprised of anyone when I realized I was actually a big softie. Long story short, after Charlie and I ...did our thing, I realized what a mistake I’d made. That I really should have waited for someone who it would be special with, you know? I realize that sounds pretty lame.”
I chewed thoughtfully on the last remaining morsel and folded away our leaf.
“No. It doesn’t sound lame at all.”
“You have to understand, the culture in the military is very …well, they don’t exactly encourage you to get in touch with your emotions,” he laughed. “I guess I expected sex to be just another thing to master. Just something to tick off the list of achievements, to get it done and say you did it.”
“And then …it wasn’t like that?”
“No, not even close. It was …important. I don’t know if I’m making sense, you know I’ve never told anyone about this so it’s hard to put into words. But after Charlie I told myself that the next time it happened, I would make sure I did it properly.”
I caught his eye.
“Wait, you’re saying you haven’t been with anyone since her?”
He colored a deep red.
“I’m sorry, that came out wrong, I’m just …surprised,” I said quickly.
“Yeah, well, that’s the problem. I just look like a big stupid meathead, but I’m not really,” he laughed awkwardly.
I shook my head.
“I would never have guessed, honestly. But thank you anyway for sharing that with me.”
Again our eyes met. In some ways, talking like this felt more intimate than the secret kisses we’d stolen in the days before. I almost felt embarrassed now even thinking about kissing him again, after so personal a revelation.
“What about you? So long as we’re floating out here in the middle of nowhere, sharing secrets, what are yours?” he asked.
It was going to happen. We were going to slowly ratchet up this conversation until one of us chickened out. I loved talking to him like this. Loved how this plain, blue, empty day felt like it might roll on forever.
