Damselfly

by Chandra Prasad

  Shuddering, I moved my hands from my face. I stared at Mel. I tried to breathe. The pig’s blood looked bright and alarming against the grimy cotton of her sock.

  “Will it die?” I whispered.

  “I didn’t get it very deep. I should have killed it. Killed it before it killed you.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat.

  “It was a boar,” Mel said. “My father sees them in Borneo. He says the ones there have beards. Funny, huh?” I couldn’t believe how offhanded, how cavalier she sounded, but that was Mel for you.

  She helped me to break free from the creepers. I swore they’d already started to twine around me, as if I was just another bothersome obstacle in their way.

  “A knife, Mel? You’re full of surprises.”

  She shrugged.

  “That’s how you carved the notch in the tree, right? Do you always carry it with you?”

  “You never know what the day will bring.”

  I raised my eyebrows, but I wasn’t truly surprised. Of course Mel would carry a switchblade. I wouldn’t be shocked if the other Sharpe sisters carried bayonets and nunchucks. That was just the way things were in the Sharpe house. Mel clicked the knife back into its bed and tucked it in her sock. It disappeared against the thick bulge of her calf.

  When I’d caught my breath, we moved on. Mel walked ahead this time; I limped behind, more scared than ever. We encountered a relatively easy stretch and then, at Mel’s insistence, veered toward a beach. It was as lovely up close as it had been from a distance. The white sand was fine and soft as sugar, flecked with bits of broken shell and coral. There was a surprising amount of washed-up garbage, too. But I didn’t mind it so much when I saw the water.

  The waves were inviting as they lapped gently ashore. When they pulled away, they left frothy trails, paler even than the sand. I ran in up to my knees, then dove beneath the surface, keeping under for as long as I could, letting the salt clean my wounds. When I came up, I saw Mel watching from the shore. She was sitting on the sand, shielding her face with a palm frond.

  I waved for her to come in, but she shook her head. I stayed, swimming, floating, diving, trying—literally—to wash away some of my anxiety. When I finally hauled myself out, Mel had relocated upshore, to a shady patch beneath a trio of palm trees.

  “I’m starving,” I told her. She unearthed a granola bar from the depths of her backpack. Snapping it in two, she gave me half.

  “I’ve been saving it for a special moment,” she said.

  It was the best damn granola bar I’d ever had.

  After I’d eaten, I made a move to get up, but stopped dead when Mel gasped. I had a terrible feeling that another boar was approaching. Slowly, I turned in the direction Mel was staring. Nearby, in the shadow of another clutch of palm trees, was indeed an animal. But it wasn’t a boar.

  It was a bird. A huge bird, almost the size of an ostrich. Its proportions were cartoonish: long, sturdy legs and little wings, fat body, and jaunty tail. I doubted its tiny wings could propel it off the ground. They were more like ornamental flippers.

  Vestigial. The word popped into my head. Mr. Sharpe would have been proud—he was surely the person I’d heard it from.

  “That bird is supposed to be extinct,” Mel whispered under her breath.

  “What?”

  “Extinct,” she repeated. “It’s an ibis. A Réunion ibis.”

  “Oh, yes!” I said, too loudly, for I remembered suddenly what a Réunion ibis was. During one of my summers at Mel’s house, Mr. Sharpe had built a diorama of Réunion island. It was one of a group of islands located in the Indian Ocean, close to the African coast. He had plenty to say about Réunion, which was a favorite from his travels. A beautiful, warm place, perhaps not unlike where we found ourselves now.

  Mel, her sisters, and I had helped Mr. Sharpe put the diorama together, molding mountains out of chicken wire and papier-mâché, painting forests, making animals out of clay. Mr. Sharpe told us that hundreds of species inhabited the island, and many lived nowhere else in the world. Unfortunately, some had also gone extinct, including the Réunion ibis. I remember being saddened when Mr. Sharpe showed us a painting of one in a book and told us its story. Waddling and mild, like a dodo, the ibis had been hunted to extinction by the eighteenth century. It had been too gullible, too easy to lure and kill.

  “A shame,” he’d said. “Gone before its time, like the mammoth and mastodon.”

  And yet, this creature taken for dead was here now, unmistakably. It looked exactly like the image in the book.

  Mel opened her backpack and found the other half of the granola bar. A precious resource, but Mel couldn’t resist. She broke off a piece and walked very slowly and quietly toward the bird. It took a step back, but halted when it saw what was in Mel’s hand. Without hesitation, it shambled up to her.

  “Here you go, pretty one. That’s it. Come and get it,” she murmured.

  The ibis ate straight from her palm. Its beak was sharp; it could have bitten off a finger if it wanted to. But it took the food gently. I wasn’t surprised to see a tear running down my friend’s cheek. I knew why. Mel wished her father could see this.

  As quietly as I could, I approached the ibis, too. It eyed me, but made no motion to move.

  “This is unbelievable, Rockwell.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  After Mel gave the ibis the rest of the bar, it peered at us expectantly. It reminded me of a dog waiting for a treat. Mel and I began to laugh. I honestly couldn’t remember a more magical moment. The ibis, the ocean, the lull of the waves, even the graceful shapes of the palm tree shadows on the sand: Nothing could have been improved upon. The only other time I had experienced this kind of magic was at Mel’s house in Maine during summers and school vacations.

  Though I worried about Alexa, those periods at the Sharpe house were the happiest of my life. Being part of the Sharpe household was bliss. There is no other word for it. When Mel’s father was home, back from another exotic place, he’d always summon Mel, her sisters, and me to his workshop.

  “Look at the wings of this butterfly,” he’d say, adjusting the lens of his heavy black microscope. “I’ve never seen iridescence like this.”

  The girls would get in line, me in the middle of the mix. With Mr. Sharpe as our tutor, we saw so many treasures from nature: honeycomb, coral, snakeskins, vials of pollen, garnets, insects and small animals pickled in spirits. As we took turns admiring the latest find, Mr. Sharpe would share fascinating tidbits he’d learned. Everything from how to extract poison from a blowfish to what to do if a polar bear attacks. I’d never heard him unable to answer a question, or unwilling to look for the answer.

  In his workshop, an enormous, gabled room overflowing with curiosities, Mr. Sharpe placed in our hands pelts, bones, fossils, crumbling pieces of pottery, tribal masks, Egyptian scarabs, arrowheads, shells from every ocean and sea. We handled these marvels gingerly, our faces calm even if our hearts were pounding right out of our chests. The workshop was a zoo, museum, curio case, and heaven all at once. In it, I’d petted the hairy legs of a live tarantula, held the bony jaw of a great white shark, and pinned dead moths to a display board. Mel, her sisters, and I were welcome to be whatever we wanted to be: naturalists, geographers, archaeologists, world-class explorers. We’d close our eyes, twirl the globe in the middle of the workshop, and point. Wherever our fingers ended up was where we pretended to go, together. One big all-girl expedition team.

  At night in our pajamas, we lay on the flat rooftop above the porch, or we camped outdoors in tents, trapping fireflies in jars and searching for night crawlers. Sometimes we toured Mrs. Sharpe’s greenhouse by flashlight, gazing at her newest sprouts and seedlings. Deep into the evening, Mr. Sharpe told us stories by a campfire. He’d had a million adventures—running for his life from flesh-eating ants in the Amazon, dodging a trampling herd of elephants in India, watching Maori faces being tattooed in New Zealand.

  He was
a wonderful, animated storyteller. I never tired of listening to him, or watching him gesture and mime his way through a tale. Nor did I find his style of dress “better suited to a younger man,” as my mother had once said. Every day he dressed as if for a journey, with scuffed boots and a satchel tossed over a shoulder. His clothes had pockets for all his supplies: knife, notebook and pencil, compass, magnifying glass, spyglass, one flask for water and another for brandy (“a natural antiseptic,” Mr. Sharpe said). He took these supplies everywhere he went, even if it was just the pharmacy or grocery store.

  He called me “girl” most of the time, as in “Come here, girl, look at this!” or “Did you hear that birdcall, girl?” I was never sure, even after a dozen visits, if Mr. Sharpe knew my name. To be fair, he confused his daughters’ names, too. But his absentmindedness didn’t bother me because he made up for it. Mr. Sharpe was the most attentive adult I’d ever met, hands down. He thought nothing of taking off a whole morning to show Mel how to tie knots, or to take Tasman to collect salamander eggs.

  Given that he had a house full of girls, I’d once asked Mr. Sharpe if he wished he’d had a son.

  He’d chuckled, admitting, “Can’t say I ever thought about it.”

  That made me love him even more.

  Oh, how I envied those Sharpe girls! What did it feel like to have a father like that? My father spent as little time with Alexa and me as he could. And when he did make time, it was usually to lecture us on something. Or to make Alexa miserable.

  Here’s something else I envied about those five ruddy-cheeked Sharpe girls: They didn’t care how they looked. Between them, they didn’t own a single lipstick or hand mirror. One brush and comb satisfied the lot of them. After being around Mel and her sisters, it was difficult for me to go back to my mother, who fixated on her looks through a medicated haze, ignoring the important stuff. Like how Alexa wore only long sleeves. Or how she drank tamarind sauce to disguise the vomit smell of her breath, and sprayed half a bottle of air freshener in the bathroom every time she went in.

  I cried for my sister sometimes when I came back from Maine. I cried because I knew there was a different way to live, and she didn’t. I alone had been part of the Sharpe tribe, whooping and hollering and running amok, five blondes and one brunette, all of us clutching birch spears we’d whittled ourselves. All of us ecstatically free.

  I’d hoped against hope that Warren would be waiting for us at Camp Summerbliss when we got back. But there was no sign of him, or rescuers, either. Yet there were changes. Betty, Avery, Ming, and Anne Marie had improved our temporary living situation. Now there was a tidy ring of rocks around the campfire and a spit on thick stick sawhorses for roasting the conch meat. Most impressive of all, the girls had woven a large tarp out of grass and plant fibers. It was draped over the horizontal branch of a nearby tree. Anchored with stones, it formed a tent as green as the jungle.

  “It’s a basic shelter, like Mel wanted. The weave’s tight, but I can’t guarantee it’s waterproof,” Betty said, walking me around it. “At least it’ll be shady during the day, though.”

  “This is incredible,” I told her.

  “My aunt’s a weaver. She has a loom in her house. I guess I’ve learned a thing or two.”

  And there was more. Betty led me to where the boulders began their ascent to the outcrop. Betty and her team had created a makeshift kitchen on the flatter rocks. One “table” held smashed conch shells, another held a heaping pile of clean meat, and a third was designated for eating, with woven mats for plates and sticks roughly hewn into two-pronged forks.

  “Betty, I had no idea you were so handy!”

  She chewed on her lip as she explained, “I did it to stay busy. If I let myself think about what’s going on, I’ll fall apart.”

  She looked at her injured arm for a moment, then continued, her voice dropping. “Speaking of falling apart, I’m worried about Anne Marie. She’s been crying all day … and mumbling.”

  “Mumbling about what?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t make it out. I tried to calm her down, but she …”

  Before she could say more, Rish, Rittika, Pablo, and Chester came charging out of the jungle with flushed faces and fearful eyes.

  “It’s bad,” Rittika said, looking at us. “Real bad.”

  “What is?”

  “All day, Ritt and I have been calling out Warren’s name,” Rish said. “Man, we’ve been everywhere. Ritt didn’t think we’d find him, but we did.”

  The way he said it sent shivers up and down my spine.

  “Show us where,” Mel said.

  “No way! I’m not going back there,” Rittika replied, slipping her arm through her brother’s.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” Mel asked.

  I looked at the twins, and saw that she’d guessed right. Rish wiped his eyes, which were rapidly filling with tears.

  “You have to show us,” Mel insisted.

  Others started crying, too—Betty and Pablo.

  “How far away is he?” Mel asked.

  “I don’t know—an hour’s walk, maybe less,” Rish replied.

  Nervously, Mel glanced at the patch of sky over Conch Lake. “Let’s go. We can make it back by sundown if we hurry.”

  There was no more discussion, just a flurry of bodies heading back into the abyss of the jungle. Surprisingly, Rittika didn’t follow her brother as he and Mel took off. But I did. I’m not sure what drove me. I’d like to think it was concern—concern for a schoolmate—but in truth, it was probably the need to be near Mel. Chester, Pablo, and Betty followed, too. In hushed, cautious voices, we shared what we’d learned that day. Mel and I talked about the wild boar, the ibis, and the realization that we were island-bound. Chester and Pablo had also seen the surrounding water, but they’d been equally focused on another discovery.

  “At the top of the mountain, there were caves,” Chester said. “Made of the same pink rock that’s everywhere around here. Most of the openings were too small to get through. But a few were bigger. We got down on our hands and knees and crawled through one. About twenty feet in, we came to an open space. We could stand up, no problem. But it was very dark. We couldn’t see, so we turned back.”

  “Were there any signs of other people?” Mel asked. “Clothing, tools, anything like that?”

  “Like Chester said, we couldn’t see anything,” Pablo replied. “But I guess there could have been something … or someone.”

  Chester positioned himself beside Mel, matching her furious pace. “We have to tell you something else,” he said. “We saw something up in a tree, like an old parachute or something, tangled in the branches. There was a bundle hanging off it. We could make it out through the leaves.”

  “It was really high up,” Pablo added. “I don’t know how we’d get it down.”

  There was a sudden light, a spark of hope, in Mel’s otherwise grim expression. “Maybe it has supplies in it,” she murmured.

  “We might be able to climb that tree,” Chester said. “Might. But I won’t lie—it would be tough.”

  “If things don’t turn around soon, we’re not going to have any choice but to try.”

  Rish told us that he and Rittika had stumbled upon shoreline early on. They’d thought about going swimming off some rocks, but had seen a fin cutting through the water.

  “A shark, a big one,” Rish said. “On the way back, we picked through some plane wreckage. Everything was charred. Forget your dream of a radio, Mel. But we did come across something—a bad smell, like rotten eggs. We followed it till it got stronger, and finally we figured out it was coming from a black pond. I’ve never seen—or smelled—anything like it.”

  Mel looked at him thoughtfully. I could almost see the wheels in her head turning.

  “I bet the smell was methane gas,” she said.

  Despite our somberness, Chester chuckled. “Methane? As in …”

  “Yeah, as in farts,” she conceded. “It sounds like Rish found hims
elf a tar pit.”

  “Damn,” Rish said. “This island’s got a little of everything.”

  “Yeah, except rescuers,” I complained.

  “They’ll come,” Betty said, patting me on the shoulder.

  “My father once took me and my sisters to see tar pits—La Brea,” Mel said. “They’re in California. The tar’s been around forever, and it’s trapped all kinds of creatures, even dinosaurs. Animals come to drink the water on the top, then fall in.”

  “They just sink?” asked Rish.

  “Yep. And the bones are kept intact because tar happens to be an excellent preservative.”

  She paused, those wheels still turning. “Later, I’d like to see this tar pit of yours.”

  Chester scratched at a mosquito bite and said, “Up on the mountaintop, the island felt small. But down here, back in the jungle, it feels big again.”

  “It’s a decent-size place,” Mel replied. “I don’t know why we haven’t seen signs of other people.”

  I noticed she didn’t mention the strange, taloned footprint.

  I became aware of the fact that Pablo and I were walking side by side, in lockstep. I was grateful for his closeness, for the faint suggestion of security.

  When our group reached the shore, Rish warned us that what we were about to see was disturbing. But I had no idea just how terrible it would be.

  Warren lay on the white sand, bloated and contorted. His face looked entirely different: broader, duller, doughy. His mouth hung open, slack-jawed, almost like he was sleeping. His eyes were open, too. Their color had faded to something bland and indistinct. His clothes were tattered and askew. I had a feeling he’d been picked at by animals—birds, maybe even boars.

  It was surreal to see him like this. Our friend. A nice, mellow guy whom everyone liked. I don’t know how long he’d been dead, but his body was baking under the hot sun—and decomposing. The rancid stink hit me as far as ten feet away. Closer, it was intolerable. I put my hands over my nose and mouth, and willed myself not to throw up.