Damselfly

by Chandra Prasad

  “I feel like I’m missing a part of myself,” she whispered. She told me she’d written them notes, put them into capped water bottles, and tossed them into the sea—even though there was virtually no chance Drake, Gaspar, Tasman, or Leif would ever receive them.

  “Still,” she said with a sigh, “you never know.”

  Moments later, Mel fell asleep. I could hear the others still talking by the light of the campfire. They seemed to be reconfirming their commitment to finding the enemy. Not surprisingly, Rittika’s voice was the most strident. She said they’d look for him again tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that, if necessary.

  “Sooner or later,” she said confidently, “he has to come out and play.”

  The next morning, Mel and I woke up with the rising sun. Mel made another mark on the V-shaped tree and then we headed back to the beach to check on the raft. I touched the tar with my finger and was elated to feel it bounce back from my touch. We poured seawater onto the black seams and watched it bead up and roll off. Mel gave me a triumphant high five.

  “What next?” I asked excitedly. “The pontoons?”

  “I still don’t know how to make them.”

  A little of the morning’s shine wore off.

  “So what do we do now?”

  She scratched her head, then smiled broadly. “We make sails.”

  I couldn’t help but smile back. “With the nylon.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s get to work.”

  It had already occurred to me that we could make sails from the nylon. I had a hunch it had occurred to Mel, too—and maybe the others. But Mel had been so hell-bent on making her hot-air balloon, no one would have been able to wrangle the nylon from her.

  We retrieved the damaged fabric from the supplies tent. Then I helped her spread what was left of it on the sand. It didn’t look promising. During the fire, the majority of the nylon had burned up, and what remained was smoke-stained and singed at the edges. But there was enough—just enough. And if I squinted hard, I could see it: two sails—small, but trusty and true. Sails that could catch and harness the wind, and take us all the way back to where we’d come from.

  Mel and I drew in the sand with our fingers, imagining the fabric reincarnated: upright and triangular, straightened by a mast, by the tension of rope, reinforced by bamboo canes.

  Mel’s attempts at a design were messy, and she soon grew frustrated. Her control of her left hand was getting better, but it was still a work in progress. More and more, I felt like I was her right-hand man. Literally.

  After about an hour we arrived at a plan that we both agreed on, then got to work. We labored through the morning and past high noon, the scorching sun blazing down. I’d forgotten how hard and tedious it was to sew the nylon. How holding the needle for hours made my fingers cramp. Despite the discomfort, we had to be even more careful than last time. There was very little thread left, and no room for error.

  When we’d finished, we were as spent as we’d been yesterday. Mel said she’d forage for fruit; I volunteered to fetch more fresh water from the outcrop at Conch Lake. We agreed to meet back at the beach in a little while to test the sail, but on my return, I became distracted. I remembered how Mel had said she’d written to her sisters, tossing plastic water bottles back into the ocean. I thought about how those bottles had already traveled hundreds, maybe even thousands of miles to reach our shores, and how they could probably travel many more. Plastic bottles, naturally light and sturdy.

  Naturally buoyant.

  The full gourds sloshing in my hands, I ran to the supplies tent. My fatigue vanished suddenly, replaced by a swell of adrenaline. Inside the tent, I stared at Rittika’s heaping pile of water bottles. There had to be a couple hundred. Enough, I thought to myself.

  Before, I’d felt revolted by that gleaming tower of litter. But now I saw the bottles in a new and redeeming light: not as garbage polluting our oceans and killing our planet, but as an unusual way to stabilize the raft.

  I grabbed one of the bottles, the gourds now forgotten, and dashed all the way to the beach, back to Mel. Catching my breath, I excitedly explained my idea.

  “Crappity crap crap. That’s brilliant!” she said when I’d finished.

  With new momentum, we talked about how to make the pontoons. The best idea, we decided, would be to stuff the water bottles into large, missile-shaped mesh bags woven from vines.

  “I’ve watched Betty,” I said gamely. “I think we can do this.”

  After another high five, Mel set out to find long, slim, sturdy vines. She cut them with her blade and brought them back to the beach, where I tried my best to weave them together.

  Hours of trial and error passed. The sun began to descend all too quickly.

  “I can finish,” I said stubbornly, squinting through the dim light.

  Mel saw I wasn’t going to stop. Quietly, she set about making another fire so that I could work into the night.

  The stars were shining by the time we finally finished. The nets were messy-looking, like quickly-cobbled-together craft projects. But they did their job. They kept the water bottles together. Under the constellations Pegasus and Pisces, Mel and I rolled one of the pontoons across the beach and into the water. It performed as we’d hoped, bobbing like a giant buoy, staying well above the waterline even when we climbed on top of it and rode it like an inflatable pool toy.

  We laughed with happiness, than hauled it back onto the sand and stared at it.

  “I guess my father was right,” Mel said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All the tools we need really are right in front of us.”

  By the time we reached Camp Summerbliss, everyone else was already tucked inside their tents. We didn’t sleep very well that night. We were too excited. We were so close to our goal. All we had to do was attach the pontoons to the raft and gather some supplies.

  “We’ll do a test run tomorrow,” Mel said into the darkness.

  I knew what she was implying. If the test run went well, we could leave. I’d thought about this moment for so long, yet now that it was almost here, I didn’t know what I felt more—relief or anxiety. Anything could happen here on the island, but anything could happen out on the water, too.

  The next morning, we didn’t talk about what was to come, only about what had to be done in the here and now. We attached the pontoons to the bottom of the raft with homemade rope and more vines. With only one hand, Mel tied knots that would have made her father proud.

  Betty had already made rough oars. With these in hand, we climbed aboard the raft and pushed off. As we glided over the shallows, watching bright fish flit through crystal-clear water, I knew the raft was going to work. With the addition of the pontoons, it barely sank an inch. The tar had set nicely, and it was as waterproof as a rain slicker.

  I was feeling a hundred percent confident until we reached the underwater marker of the reef. As we crossed that dark threshold, I felt my stomach drop. I tended to see the ocean as bisected: the part inside the reef being safe, the part beyond it, not. I didn’t like the look of the outer ocean: its dark color and choppy breakers, the way it seemed to stretch on forever. I was alarmed by the rugged whitecaps and the sharp fins that occasionally sluiced through the surface.

  Mel pulled in her oar and adjusted the sails, which rustled and flapped. The wind grew stronger, pulling us away from the island more rapidly than I expected. The raft began to bounce and jostle, holding its own against the current, but making me queasy. I motioned to Mel that we needed to turn back. She nodded and adjusted the sails again. Seconds passed and our raft headed farther out to sea. A horrible thought seized me: What if we couldn’t turn the ship around? What if we became stranded out on the water with no water or provisions?

  But I shouldn’t have doubted my friend. Moments later she got us turned around. Slowly but surely, we began to sail back to the island.

  “This baby’s unsinkable,” she shouted to me g
leefully, a spark in her eyes.

  “Don’t jinx it!” I shouted back, knowing very well that our raft was anything but.

  “We could leave today,” Mel said breathlessly when we reached the shore. Together, we dragged the raft out of the water.

  I felt an electric pulse run up my spine. “Do you want to?”

  She nodded. “For our sisters.”

  We left the raft and oars high on the beach, beyond the tide line. As we began walking back to Camp Summerbliss, I asked a question I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to.

  “Mel, what do you think our odds are?”

  She rubbed her bad arm. “Do you really want to know?”

  I nodded.

  “Fifty-fifty, at best. But realistically? A lot lower.”

  “And if we stay on the island?”

  “About the same.”

  “Are you going to feel bad,” I asked. “Leaving everybody?”

  “We’re not leaving just for ourselves, Sam. We’re leaving to get help.”

  “But they don’t want help. They don’t want to be rescued. Betty told me that.”

  “Sure, she says that now. But can you honestly see Rittika here a year from now? Five years from now? She’ll be totally unhinged. They all will. Bad things will happen. Very bad things,” she finished ominously.

  I stared at her, not sure what to believe. Not sure of anything. I knew only that we were about to take the biggest risk of our lives. We were silent for a time, then Mel began to discuss preparation. It was easier to talk about the logistics of leaving—how many water gourds we’d need, how much conch meat, coconuts, and seaweed, what the currents and winds and weather conditions might be like—than to reflect on the right or wrong of it.

  “A tarp would be nice. To catch water, if it rains. But we already used up all the nylon.”

  “We could use our tent as a tarp,” I said. “It wouldn’t catch water, but at least it would give us shade.”

  She smiled at me appreciatively. “Not bad, Sam. Not bad at all.”

  We locked eyes, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was. There was one question we’d so far avoided. Maybe the hardest question of all. How were we going to tell the others?

  Back at camp, I didn’t expect to see my classmates. I figured they’d be out in the jungle, continuing their futile search for the enemy, but to my surprise, Rittika and her brother were swimming in Conch Lake.

  I went to the shore and rinsed off my hands and face. There, I watched her lean body zip through the water, her long dark hair trailing after her like a mermaid’s. She surfaced, appeared to take a breath, then dove under. She was gone so long I couldn’t help but think of our arrival on the island, when she’d dived off the outcrop. Then, we’d all thought she’d drowned. This time, I knew better.

  She surfaced eventually and called to Rish. I watched him eel his way to her, his strokes swift and elegant. When he looked at what she was holding, he whistled. Eventually, they swam to shore. We greeted each other perfunctorily, like strangers. I wondered how it had come to this.

  What Rittika had found was a conch shell. The biggest yet, almost twice the size of any we’d previously caught. She turned it over, declared it hollow, and then did something none of us had ever done before. She put the spiral tip to her lips and blew. I didn’t know what she intended to accomplish. But then I heard the sound: a deep, lonesome boom that seemed to spread out over Conch Lake and through the jungle, ricocheting off the trees and the peaks of the mountain. She blew again. This time a bass note, a plaintive cry at the lowest octave, solemn and penetrating.

  Mel came stumbling toward me, as awed as I was by the sound.

  “How did you do that?” Rish asked. Rittika looked at him, then at Mel and me.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “It just came out.”

  The jungle seemed to go quiet. I wondered if every bird, boar, lizard, and monkey was listening.

  Rittika blew the conch again. Chester came running out of the jungle as if lured by the sound. Minutes passed and the others came, too. They gathered around Rittika in a circle, leaving Mel and me beyond the periphery.

  Since everyone was together, I resolved to tell them that Mel and I intended to leave. But just as I made that decision, I heard a distressing noise. Avery began to scream, just as she had the night after the crash, when she’d complained of a man touching her in her sleep. To my horror, I saw two more figures crossing the threshold between jungle and camp.

  A very old man, hunched and wiry. And someone familiar. I froze, wondering if what I was seeing was real.

  “Man, Pablo, is that you?” Chester asked tremulously.

  We could all see that it was, if not Pablo, then his ghost. He was darker and skinnier than before, like the rest of us. His hair was dirty and unkempt, and his chin was fringed with the beginning of a beard. But he had the same walk. The same intense stare. When that stare landed on me, I felt the eerie sensation that I’d experienced a hundred times on the island. All at once, I realized that the enemy, the person who had been spying on us, who had severed the neck of the ibis, might very well be looking at me right now.

  As for the old man, he was a strange creature. Leaning on a walking stick, he was mostly bald, save the odd tuft of yellow-white hair sprouting above his ears. Moles and freckles mapped a dermatologist’s nightmare atop his head, on his shoulders, and along his skeletal arms. When he stepped forward with his stick, he was more spry than I would have guessed. I zeroed in on his filthy hands and feet. In the firelight, I could see that his nails, particularly his toenails, were long and pointy as claws.

  The ragged loincloth drooping about the old man’s waist looked so ancient it was impossible to know what color it had once been. A beat-up belt held up the loincloth, and from that belt hung a knife sheath and a pair of wire-rim eyeglasses. The glasses were old-fashioned, something you’d find at a flea market or antiques store, maybe even a museum. I noticed that one of the lenses was missing. For some reason those glasses gave me an awful feeling.

  “Pablo, are you all right?” Chester asked incredulously. “I can’t believe it’s you. Where have you been?”

  Pablo’s expression didn’t change as he eyed us, one by one. I could tell that Chester wanted to go to him and embrace him but was holding back out of fear. There was something frightening about Pablo, beyond the obvious changes in his appearance, or the fact that he was standing beside an ancient stranger. I think it had to do with his eyes. At Drake Rosemont, they’d been serious, but open and friendly. Now they were grave.

  The old man looked at us and glowered. “Who blew the conch?”

  His voice was gravelly, and he had a British accent. Only it didn’t sound anything like Rittika’s. Hers was highbrow, the old man’s raw and unpolished. His jaundice-yellow eyes scanned each of us, but settled on Rittika, who held the huge shell in her hands.

  “Only the chief blows the conch,” he said.

  “Who are you?” she asked, taking a half step closer to her brother.

  The old man smiled, revealing a wasteland of a mouth. He had only a couple of teeth left, and they were yellow-brown, stumpy as an old horse’s.

  “The chief,” he replied.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Mel take her knife out of her sock. A second later, she had it pointed toward the old man.

  “What do you want from us?” she demanded.

  Pablo looked at the chief, clearly deferring to him.

  “We told you before. Leave this island,” the old man spat.

  “Why do you want us to leave?” she asked.

  His eyes narrowed. “Why? You’ve eaten my fruit, hunted my pigs, stolen my conchs, taken my …”

  “We were just trying to survive,” Mel interrupted.

  “This island is not yours!”

  “It’s not anybody’s.”

  The old man seemed to be growing angrier. “I fought for this island. I stayed, even after the big liner sailed away. I’ve been
here longer than you’ve been alive.”

  “We mean no harm,” Mel said, changing tactics and lowering her knife.

  At that, Pablo laughed hollowly. “You mean no harm,” he repeated sarcastically. “Do you say that to yourselves when you think about Anne Marie’s dead body?”

  “You know what happened?” Mel asked.

  “Of course I know.”

  “You’ve seen everything,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “What you guys did to Anne Marie at the tar pit—it was the most vicious thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, his bitterness palpable. “You were like animals. No, worse than animals! Because animals at least have a reason for what they do.”

  Suddenly, a monkey appeared. The same one that was always lurking around. I watched it intently, expecting it to dash into the jungle as it always did. Instead, it ambled up to the old man and sprang into his arms. The man propped the creature on his shoulder, where it perched contentedly, as if that were its usual roost. Ming and Avery shrank back fearfully. Rittika slipped behind her brother.

  “Is that why you left?” Mel asked, zeroing in on Pablo. “Because you couldn’t stand to be around us anymore?”

  “I knew I was better off on my own,” he replied coolly.

  “Where did you go?”

  “I slept in the jungle a couple of days. Then I went to the caves. That was where I met the chief.” Pablo glanced at the old man, a glint of adoration in his eyes. “He didn’t like me at first; I could tell. But when I told him I didn’t mean any harm, he let me be. He even gave me food and water. He was kind …”

  “I was waiting for you,” the old man said. He fished something out of his loincloth and held it up for us to see. It was, of all things, the pilot’s glass eye. “When I found the sign, I knew you’d come.”

  “He’s been waiting for someone to help him watch over the island,” Pablo explained.

  “I’ve been here a hundred years,” the old man said. “All this time—no hunters, no friends, ’cept a monkey or two. My job’s to keep others out. But I’m slow now, slower every day …”