The Lost Island of Tamarind

by Nadia Aguiar

  “I don’t know what other choice we really have,” she said. “Maybe we can build some sort of raft. Or do boats ever come along? Maybe they’d take us with them.”

  “Barges come along sometimes,” Helix said reluctantly. “The traders carry supplies up and down. But, really—it’s very dangerous. I think you should stay with me—I can get you to Port Town safely.”

  Maya looked at Simon. She could tell that he had decided that he wasn’t going to act like a baby in front of Helix, but she could also see that his feet were rubbed raw and he was already exhausted.

  “I think we’re going to have to wait for a barge,” she said. “I think it’s our best option.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” Helix said.

  “Can’t you come with us on the river?” Simon asked Helix.

  Helix shook his head. “I won’t go near the Nero Jungle,” he said. “And if you were smart, you wouldn’t either.”

  Maya opened her mouth to speak but just then she heard a voice coming from the beach that was just beyond the fringe of jungle. The others heard it, too.

  “Someone’s there,” Maya said urgently, gathering up Penny and scrambling to her feet. “Simon, come on, I hear someone out there, I’m sure I do! Let’s go!”

  “Wait!” said Helix. “Don’t go out there.”

  Maya grabbed Simon’s arm but he pulled away. He stood wavering between Maya and Helix.

  “Oh, come on,” Maya cried. “Before whoever it is is gone!”

  “Why shouldn’t we go out there?” Simon asked Helix.

  “There is someone there,” Helix said. “But he’s not going to be able to help you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Maya. “But I heard someone out there and we have to go! Come on, Simon, now!”

  Simon turned to Helix and shrugged. “She’s my sister,” he said. “I have to go with her.”

  With that, Maya went crashing through the undergrowth toward the voice. She could hear Simon behind her. In a moment she burst out onto a beach and stopped. All up and down it were hundreds of giant turtles. On land the creatures moved so slowly that they barely seemed to move at all, like a scene from a dream. Some were swimming in on the tide, their dark heads bobbing in points of blackness on the blue. When they reached the shore they scrambled up the beach, their pebbly legs scouring the sand, leaving faint, windswept etchings in their wake. The others already sat high up on the dry sand, basking in the sun, which shone on the tiles of their vegetable-green backs.

  And in the midst of them a man with wild white hair had frozen in his tracks and was staring at Maya.

  A grown-up! thought Maya. Finally they were saved!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Mad Zoologist * Limmermor Turtles *

  Strange Coincidences Singing Sand *

  Down by the Tide Pools

  Maya and Penny, Simon just a few paces behind them, jogged towards the figure, but the man just stared at them in horror. Not knowing what to do, the children stopped and stared back at him. He wore a limp white hat. Beneath its brim the skin around his very light blue eyes was crinkled from years of squinting at the glare from the sand and sea. He was very pale—the kind of profoundly pale person who should never really be out in the sun—but he had been, anyway, and in consequence, his neck and hands had grown thick and leathery and had a permanent ruddy burn. Time and exposure to the elements had leached the color from his threadbare clothes. He was holding a small turtle in his hands and the turtle was cycling its legs through the air, trying to get away. When he put it down the creature trundled off down the shore and joined others who were basking on the hot sand.

  “You can’t be here,” the white-haired man said finally. “You’ll have to find another beach for yourselves.” When they stood there motionless he waved a hand at them. “Go on, go, back the way you came.”

  Maya was taken aback, but she thought that if she could just explain their situation, he could help them. Before she could get very far, the old man interrupted her.

  “I can’t help you,” he said. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!”

  “Please,” pleaded Maya, beginning to feel desperate. “Do you at least have a radio or telephone?”

  “None of that here,” said the man, sweeping his hand down the beach. Maya looked past him and he certainly seemed to be telling the truth. Aside from the slumbering turtles and a ramshackle hut thatched with palm leaves, there were no signs of life. The man turned and began walking away. It was as if he hoped that if he couldn’t see the children, they wouldn’t really be there. He mumbled to himself as he went.

  Simon had been looking at the turtles lumbering inelegantly out of the sea. The only time they reached any speed was on the rush of the final wave that carried them up onto the sand. Simon had an idea. He could always figure out how to get people talking.

  “We’re here to ask you about the turtles,” he called out suddenly.

  The man stopped and turned back around. For the first time he looked at them with some interest.

  “Limmermors,” he said, eyeing the children keenly. “They’re Limmermor turtles. You won’t have heard of them— no one has yet. They won’t until I get back one day. I’m a zoologist—Dr. Limmermor, you may have heard of me—my boat sank in a storm—I’m sure there would have been newspaper stories. . . .”

  He paused a moment but the children looked at him blankly.

  “Oh, well, you’re all awfully young, perhaps it was before your time. At any rate, I didn’t know it then, but it was my great good fortune that the storm happened. It’s how I discovered the Limmermor turtle right here, on this beach. In the zoology directory under turtles it should go between the leatherback and the loggerhead. When I go back one day they’ll have to publish a new edition of the directory to include it. It’s going to take the zoology world by storm. It’s priceless, you know. Years and years of research on an unknown species in a pristine environment—how many scientists can say they’ve had that opportunity? Limmermors are unique, you know,” he said, looking at the turtles. “Their eggs—” He stopped and changed the subject abruptly.

  “A pristine environment,” he repeated. “This beach. So I’m going to have to ask that you leave nicely now, just the way you came. I can’t have the turtles disturbed.”

  Maya, feeling quite desperate now, opened her mouth to speak, but the man cut her off.

  “No, no, no!” he said. “No more! Please go! This is very bad for the turtles. You’ll all have to go and figure things out for yourselves,” he said, turning and shuffling away from them. “No visitors for years and now five at once,” he mumbled to himself.

  Visitors. Five? But there are just three of us, thought Maya—her and Simon and Penny. Who were the other two? She looked at Simon. No, it was too much of a coincidence. . . . But it was possible, wasn’t it? Simon seemed to think so.

  “Wait!” he cried breathlessly, running after Dr. Limmermor. “Who else has been here?”

  Dr. Limmermor shied away as Simon reached him.

  “Alone!” he said. “Leave me alone!” He closed his eyes and when he opened them he seemed pained to find that they were still there.

  “I’ll tell you what I told them and then you have to leave!” he said, distressed. “Stay out of the jungle, it’s full of soldiers; stay out of the sea, it’s full of pirates. Find a quiet corner for yourself somewhere where you can live peacefully. A beach— but not this one, it’s taken. Now, please, leave us alone!”

  “But . . .” said Simon.

  Maya caught up with Simon.

  “The people who were here—maybe they were our parents,” Maya said urgently. “What did they say? Where were they going?”

  Dr. Limmermor waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the jungle.

  Simon tried to ask another question but Dr. Limmermor put his hands over his ears and bellowed, “No more questions! Good night!” He began striding quickly away on the soft sand, mumbling “no, no
, no” over and over to himself.

  The light had begun to fade swiftly and the turtles had become just dark bumps on the sand. In the last light the children watched the zoologist, like a blot of salt spray whipped up by the wind, spinning ethereally down the shoreline.

  Maya stood there helplessly. The zoologist was mad. And now evening was falling and the jungle was beginning to get dark. A tear slid down her cheek. They were supposed to have found people by now—people who could help them. They were supposed to have sounded the alarm and rescue boats were supposed to be out searching for their parents right now. And instead, here they were stranded who knew where and of the only two people they had met so far, one she didn’t trust and the other was plainly crazy.

  Simon looked up at the dark hills of the jungle.

  “Mami!” he shouted, a note of desperation in his voice. “Papi!”

  Maya joined in and for a few minutes they called as loudly as they could. Finally they fell silent, holding their breath and listening. Their shouts had scared a few birds, who flew up out of the trees and farther down the beach, but that was all. Except for the chirping of frogs and insects and the purr of the sea, all was quiet. Maya could hardly bear it. She felt so alone. The jungle loomed solid and dark over the beach. Could their parents be out there somewhere? She looked down at the sand for their footprints, but even as she watched, a breeze was rippling the beach into small dunes. Any footprints from the day before would have dissolved long ago.

  Just then a soft noise nearby caught Maya’s attention. Between two nearby dunes was a turtle, digging in the sand to bury her eggs. What startled her were the eggs themselves. There were seven or eight of them and they glowed faintly. Strange, thought Maya.

  Before Maya could think about it further, there was a crackle at the edge of the jungle. The children jumped.

  “Helix,” Simon cried. “You stayed!”

  “I tried to tell you,” Helix said. “He’s been on this beach practically forever. He thinks he’s from the Outside. He’s crazy.”

  “What do we do now?” Simon asked.

  “If you would like, that is, if Maya would like,” said Helix, “I can take you just over these rocks to the next beach and we can sleep there tonight.”

  From the new beach on the other side of the low rocks they could see Dr. Limmermor and the Limmermor turtles in the distance. Inside the jungle it was already pitch-black, but the white sand of the beach held the light longer. The first thing the children did was to gather driftwood and soon a fire was crackling merrily. They caught a fish and roasted it on a makeshift spit over the fire, and Helix returned from the fringe of the jungle with a shirt full of avocados that they ate with the fish. Reluctantly, Maya heated the last tin of milk for Penny. From then on she would have to eat grown-up food. When dinner was finished, Helix went down to wash in the sea, which, in a trick of the tides, was as still as a mirror except for a fine lace of white foam that trembled slightly along the edge of the shore.

  Simon sat cross-legged in a patch of sea daisies. The logbook was open in his lap, and he was studying it intently by the light of the fire. Finally he sighed and closed it and held it in his lap.

  “Maya,” Simon said slowly. “Do you think it was Mami and Papi that Dr. Limmermor saw?”

  Maya wondered the same thing. How many people just washed up by storms could there be on the island? It could have been their parents. If it was, where had they gone?

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I hope so. It would mean we’re going the right way.”

  The children fell quiet. The jungle behind them and the sea before them were both pitch-black and when a cool breeze blew over them, they felt lost and lonely.

  “I wish Mami were here,” said Simon softly.

  Maya did, too. Her heart ached. She looked over the rocks, down Limmermor beach, and saw Dr. Limmermor down by the water. A funny sound began to come from the edges of the darkness, from where the palms leaned over the beach and the shadows multiplied. A high, singing sound, like thousands of delicate crystal chimes, so beautiful it held the children transfixed. After a moment Maya noticed that the sand was shifting around them. A fine surface layer was rolling over itself. It was the particles of sand rubbing against one another that made the singing sound.

  “Musical sand,” she whispered. “Papi told me about it, that in some places in the world the sand sings.” Tears welled up in her eyes at the thought of her father.

  Helix returned from bathing in the sea and suddenly Maya and Simon both felt more cheerful. He had washed the camouflage off of his face, and Maya was startled to see that without it he looked completely different—he looked quite nice, in fact. He sat down by the fire. Penny was fast asleep already. Lulled by the singing sand, Simon was heavy-eyed and he yawned and nestled down in the sand, his head on his backpack.

  Eventually the breeze died away, and the muggy breath of the jungle descended onto the beach. The sand lay silent in little hillocks of moonlight. Down by the shore, moonlight shone in the tide pools.

  “Come see the pools,” Helix said to Maya. “We won’t be far away—we’ll be able to see your brother and sister the whole time.”

  Still moved by the beauty of the singing sand, Maya felt happy for a moment that Helix had asked. She nodded and they walked down to the tide pools. The pools stretched out down the beach, and each one of them contained a reflection of the moon, nearly full now and already quite high in the sky, so that there were dozens of moons glimmering before Maya and Helix. Maya knelt down to look into one of the pools. As she watched, the reflection of the moon began to recede and a light inside the pool grew brighter and began to rise through the shallows, shattering the moon into dozens of soft, jagged pieces. It was some sort of sea creature that was casting the light, but it was still impossible to see the animal clearly beneath the rippling surface. Maya looked up and saw that other bright lights were surfacing in tide pools all the way down the beach.

  When she looked back down at the tide pool, the surface of the water had settled and she could see the creature clearly. Her heart skipped a beat. A tiny, perfect octopus, just like the one that her parents had collected from the sea and taken to St. Al-ban’s on their last day together, was looking up at Maya with its familiar indigo eye. Its tentacles glowed so brightly they outshone the moon. Then Maya realized that there were dozens of creatures just like it in tide pools up and down the beach. The lights in the pools grew more intense, until the beach seemed almost as bright as day, and then together they began to dim and the pools fell back into darkness. Maya once again found herself looking at the reflection of the moon.

  Was this where all the strange, glowing sea creatures that her parents had been collecting came from? Maybe it wasn’t an accident that the children had landed in Tamarind. Could their parents have been looking for the island? Did these creatures have something to do with the Red Coral Project?

  Helix reached into the water and a polyp crawled up his hand and wrist, tiny red tentacles flowing in the gentle current. Past the tide pools, the waves sizzled white around the boiler reefs. Maya glanced behind them. Except for them, the strip of beach was deserted. She snuck a sideways glance at Helix. Maybe she had judged him too quickly. Maybe he wasn’t so bad. He was almost handsome, in a way. His curly hair was bleached from sun and salt and ropy veins crossed the muscles on his arms. He was probably only a couple of years older than she was. Maya looked bashfully down at her hands and picked at her nails.

  “I didn’t want to tell you earlier,” he said. “In front of your brother. But you may as well know, whether you take the river or come with me on foot, you aren’t going to be able to find help in Port Town. Not the kind of help you’re looking for. There’s no one who can help you on Greater Tamarind.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Maya. The good mood she had been in a moment before abruptly slipped away. “Somebody has to be able to help us.”

  “You don’t know much about this place yet,” said Helix
. “But I know it isn’t anything like where you came from. If I were you . . .” he said. He paused. “If I were you, I’d try to start forgetting everything in your life before and get used to being here.”

  “We’re going to find our parents,” Maya said coolly.

  “Well,” said Helix. “You’ll see.”

  Maya didn’t know what she had been thinking. Helix wasn’t nice-looking, and he certainly wasn’t nice. The earlier mistrust she had felt for him flooded back. She looked at him angrily.

  “What do you know?” she asked. “You aren’t much older than I am. Who are you to tell me we won’t find our parents? And why are you out here by yourself, anyway?”

  Helix didn’t answer and Maya grew angrier.

  “Oh, forget it,” she said, beginning to climb down the rocks, so quickly that she scraped her knees. She couldn’t wait until she never had to see Helix again. “I don’t care what you say, anyway. We’re going to find our parents, I’m going to make sure of it. And now I’m tired. Good night.”

  Back with the others, Maya lay down in the sand so that Penny was sheltered between her and Simon. Forget about Helix, she thought. Think about something else. Name the constellations. That very bright star, the brightest in the sky, it was Betelgeuse, part of Orion. And there was Taurus. And Pisces, the fish. She could see its scales, just faintly. Those were just the big constellations, though there were hundreds and hundreds of others; she had memorized them, sitting wrapped in a blanket with her mother on nights on the Pamela Jane. Lying on the sand, Maya started with the constellations in the east and let her eyes travel west and read them across the sky as tiredness overtook her. Farther down the beach the phosphorescent glimmer of the tide pools glowed on and she fell into a troubled sleep.

  Later she thought she half woke, to see Helix sitting close to the fire for light, intently studying the pages of the logbook. She wanted to stop him—he had no right to be looking at their book—but sleep was too powerful and it pulled her back under before she could resist.