The Lost Island of Tamarind

by Nadia Aguiar

  But something was missing. Something was . . . Maya looked up and saw Helix, standing a little apart, looking at them all. Their eyes met, but just then a flash of green appeared over the sand. Seagrape squawked, breaking the silence, and Maya and Helix looked up to see the parrot coasting past them. Helix was suddenly alert and scanned the shore quickly. Then he started to jog down the beach after Seagrape.

  “Helix!” Maya called, breaking away from her family. Where was he going?

  In a moment Helix stopped and waved at them to follow him.

  “We’re here again!” he said excitedly. “Come on, I know where we are! The cove is just around the corner!”

  The family followed Helix along the sand and into the trees, where they shoved branches and leaves out of their way and stumbled over roots in their haste. Mud caked Maya’s feet and brambles scratched her arms, but in only a few minutes they burst through the undergrowth and they were back at the original cove, calm and glittering blue, the white crescent of sand bright in the sun. And there she was.

  The Pamela Jane. In the same place that Maya and Simon had anchored her. Maya nearly wept at the sight of her. There were still vines wrapped around her mast and hull but she was there. Helix withdrew a knife from his pocket and, taking careful aim, hurled it through the air. It stuck in one of the biggest of the vines. The vine recoiled as if it felt the injury, and it began to withdraw. Soon others began to follow it, falling away from the boat and drifting off across the water and sliding back into the jungle. Within moments the sunny yellow hull and tall straight mast were revealed, fresh and new. The beautiful, beautiful Pamela Jane. Home. Maya’s heart leaped and beat painfully against her ribs. She felt like it would overflow.

  Maya ran into the water and began to swim. She was the first to reach the boat and clamber onto the deck. Simon was climbing up the ladder behind her and the others were still swimming across. Maya stood there for a moment, feeling the deck rock gently beneath her feet, and then she ran down into the cabin. Everything was all there, just how they had left it. Nothing had been touched or changed. The captain’s quarters, the galley, her parents’ room, the bunks that she shared with Simon and Penny. Penny’s crib was hanging in the middle of the room, just as it had been when they had left. Maya jumped into her bunk bed—she still fit in it!—and bounced up and down a few times. There was the half a porthole that she shared with Simon, which she looked out of every night. She heard the others on the deck and she dashed back up to meet them, beaming.

  “This is our home,” she said to Helix. “This is the Pamela Jane!”

  A soft wind had risen and was funneling across the cove and they would be able to sail out on it. Maya remembered that when they had arrived the wind had not favored leaving the cove and she knew that they had to leave then, while they could. But then a terrible thought occurred to her.

  “Helix,” she said sadly.

  No, she thought, no. She couldn’t bear to say good-bye to him. Sorrow welled in her heart. Simon, too, was looking at him in disbelief. Helix had been quiet since they had reached the boat. Now, as the family stood there looking at him, he lifted his chin and spoke shyly but firmly.

  “I want to come with you,” he said. “To the Outside.”

  While the children’s parents prepared to set sail, Helix had Simon write a note to Mathilde for him on a page in the logbook. He would not let Maya hear what he had to say to Mathilde, but she watched him curiously as he whispered to Simon. Helix, their friend. She could hardly believe he would be coming with them. She watched as he tore the page out of the book and folded it into a tiny square and tied it to Seagrape’s leg with a piece of string from the hem of his pants. Mathilde would not be able to read it, but she would take it to someone who could. Seagrape cracked her beak and made grumbling noises.

  “Go on,” said Helix. “Get going. Take it to Mathilde.”

  Seagrape flapped her wings several times and lifted up into the air above them. Maya’s heart hurt, seeing the parrot for the final time, and she could only imagine how Helix felt. They shaded their eyes and watched her circle a few times, her broad green wings catching the sun, before she flew straight toward the coast in the direction of Port Town.

  “Well,” said Helix. “That’s that.”

  The sails were hoisted and the Pamela Jane began to move slowly through the water. They passed through the mouth of the cove and were out on the open sea again, where the wind picked up and they began to clip along quickly.

  For the last time, Maya saw the movement of the vines on the Lesser Islands and she was sure she heard a jaguar growl from inside the jungle, but then the wind filled the mainsail and they were on their way. They passed the beach with the Limmermor turtles, but there was no sign of the doctor, so they sailed on without him. They saw peculiar bubbles rising in curtains to the surface of the sea and they watched a storm brewing in the distance, the sky around it black, lightning flashing from inside the dark clouds. The sound of the rain traveled across the water. But the storm withdrew and they sailed onward into fine weather.

  Greater Tamarind had already slipped from sight when Maya caught sight of the Blue Line, stretching strong and bright from horizon to horizon. This time she braced herself before the Pamela Jane crossed it, lurching as if she had struck something solid. Then they were over, back on the ordinary side of the world, and when Maya looked back, the Blue Line seemed to dissolve and the sea behind them was empty.

  She sighed deeply.

  She went to sit by herself in her favorite old spot at the bow of the Pamela Jane, a hundred thoughts sifting through her mind.

  There was Helix, leaning on the starboard railing, the wind tousling his hair, lost in his own thoughts. After they knew he was coming with them, bursting with excitement, Maya and Simon had shown Helix everything on the deck and in the cabin. Maya caught sight of the textbooks her mother used to teach them. Helix will have to learn how to read, she thought. Helix seemed strangely shy—there must be so many things going through his head right now, Maya thought. But she could tell he was happy he was there.

  Maya’s father was standing at the wheel of the Pamela Jane. The powerful waters of the cave pool had restored his health. His sight and his voice had returned, as had the hearing in one ear. The other was still deaf. Though he was thin, his body was strong. His skin had healed and his eyes were bright as he looked out to sea. He had shaved his beard, and the only visible sign of what he had been through was his hair, which remained long and white. It was still astonishing to Maya, but she was slowly getting used to it.

  Her mother was in the cabin, bathing Penny, and Simon was sitting on the deck writing in the logbook. He had decided to record an account of their adventures, in case it was useful to their parents’ research. Maya looked around the boat at her family.

  After the flash flood in the cave and Helix and Maya and her father had been washed downriver, the river had surged and Simon and the children’s mother and Penny had been swept away after them. Simon was the only one who had noticed that the river split into different tunnels. The tunnels ran separately beneath the earth before meeting up and pouring out at the base of a cliff into the sea. Maya and Helix were the last ones to shore because they had been carried down a longer series of passageways. Miraculously, they had ended up very near the cove where they’d arrived. And now they were homeward bound.

  They had not been sailing for long when something quite extraordinary happened: Penny began crawling for the first time.

  “Thank goodness she didn’t start doing that when we had her,” was all Maya could say.

  When they were out at sea, sailing briskly along on course, they all sat down to talk about everything that had happened and to try to piece together the mysteries.

  The children’s parents had indeed seen Dr. Limmermor on their first morning in Tamarind after the storm. He had been no help at all, but they had seen the strange, glowing eggs of the turtle. Although they didn’t know it then, that was their
first clue that they had come to the place that was the source of the mysterious Element X that had been causing all of the sea creatures they were researching to glow.

  After the children’s parents had split up to look for them, the children’s father told them that he had met a stranger who told him that he had heard of three children who had gone to the Ravaged Straits.

  The children’s father went back to meet their mother, but when she never showed up he decided that he would press on to the Ravaged Straits to find the children, and once they were safe they would try to find their mother. By this time, though he didn’t know it, the children’s mother had already been kidnapped by the pirates. On the outskirts of the final town before the long walk to the Black Cross, an old sailor had shared his lunch with him and tried to persuade him not to go.

  “I met him, too!” said Maya. “In Port Town. That’s how we knew where you were.”

  Not having any other clues to go on, the children’s father did not feel that he could take the old sailor’s advice, and so he set out for the Ravaged Straits. Once he reached the Black Cross, he cobbled a raft together and headed into the Straits and could not find his way out again.

  “But why?” asked Simon, struggling to understand. “Why would somebody tell you we were there, when it wasn’t true?”

  “Some people enjoy leading others astray,” said their father. Maya and Simon nodded, remembering the little man with the bag of skulls. “It was just bad luck that I ran into one of those people. But it doesn’t matter now. All that matters is that we’re safe and together.” He put his hand on Simon’s shoulder. “And that’s entirely due to my children’s bravery and strength. You’ve made your mother and me extremely proud.”

  Maya had looked down at the deck awkwardly. Her cheeks felt hot.

  Their father looked at Helix.

  “And to their good friend,” he said. “Who we owe a great deal to, and who we all feel very happy and fortunate to have with us.”

  Maya’s head was spinning a little as she took everything in. It was a bit of a shock to know for sure that they had been so close to their parents so many times—they had met Dr. Limmermor in the evening, their parents had been there only that morning. If they had been luckier and their timing had been just a little different, everything would have turned out another way. She tried not to think about this.

  “What about the Red Coral Project?” asked Simon.

  “They’re a company that hired your mother and I about a year ago,” said the children’s father. “Dr. Fitzsimmons had become involved with them, and he brought us on board, too. Our job was supposed to be to research the growth cycle of a rare type of coral within a specific zone of the ocean—a relatively simple task. But we started to find some bizarre things— things that in our whole lives on the ocean we had never seen before.”

  “Basically,” said the children’s mother. “We were finding things that glowed that shouldn’t be glowing.”

  “That’s the simplest way to put it,” said their father. “We found unexplained bioluminescence in living creatures not usually bioluminescent, and we also discovered that much of the mineral matter—shells, mostly—were glowing, too. It simply didn’t make sense. Then we began to find marine life that— well, that simply didn’t exist! We were finding animals that had never been seen anywhere else before. We reported what we found, of course, but we were told that our job was to collect samples and not ask questions beyond that.”

  Maya glanced over at Simon. He was frowning, listening intently.

  “But our findings were amazing,” their father continued. “Too amazing not to study further. We believed that there must be a substance in the water that was causing the luminescence. But it was impossible to trace it to any source. We tried analyzing the creatures themselves, but what ever the substance was, it was in such trace amounts that our tests couldn’t identify it. We sent several of the creatures to be analyzed at an independent laboratory. The laboratory found that the mineral compound that caused both the living creatures and the shells to glow was the same composition as the substance found in the bedrock of ancient rain forests. So we knew it came from a very old rain forest, but where?”

  “That’s why there are all the drawings of sea creatures in the logbook,” said the children’s mother. “We started drawing the creatures we found and noting the coordinates and depths we found them at, and the winds and currents they were carried on, trying to see if we could identify a pattern in their movement and, from that, trace their source. But we were never able to figure out where they were coming from—they didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere.”

  “We went to Dr. Fitzimmons about it again—” said their father.

  “The last day we were in St. Alban’s, before the storm,” said Maya. “I heard you arguing through the window.”

  Her parents nodded. Their faces were grave.

  “He told us in no uncertain terms that we couldn’t pursue our research any further, or we risked being dropped from not only the Red Coral Project, but we’d face being banned from all the Marine Stations,” said the children’s mother. “At the time, we couldn’t understand it.

  “After the storm, when we arrived in Tamarind, we began to put the pieces together,” she went on. “What we believe now is that the Red Coral Project is really just a front for an organization investigating Greater Tamarind. It’s a huge mystery—an island that isn’t on any map, that can’t be reliably found by ship or plane. It seems to exist simultaneously yet separately from our world. Who could believe it? Your father and I were so close to it for months—ever since Red Coral hired us last year—and we still had no idea.”

  “Somehow the Red Coral Project knows about Tamarind, and they want their investigation into it to be top secret,” said the children’s father. “We think that they’ve hired scientists like us to conduct tiny parts of their research. If they keep all these parts isolated, no one can put the big picture together, and their secret is safe. We think they want to find Tamarind before anyone else can.”

  “Why?” asked Simon.

  “Ophalla,” whispered Maya.

  “I’m sure they have lots of reasons,” said the children’s father. “But even from the little we know about it from the results from the independent lab, the substance—ophalla—could have many uses. We believe it could have special healing properties. Look at what it did for me! It could be an important source of energy. We don’t really know all the things it can be used for yet, but it’s quite astounding. Its potential seems limitless. Your mother and I think that one of the reasons the Red Coral Project wants to find Tamarind is so they can exploit its ophalla. Whoever controls it stands to become very wealthy and powerful.”

  “But they can’t!” exclaimed Maya. “Look at everything bad that happened in Tamarind because of ophalla—all it caused was misery. Tamarind finally has peace—the Red Coral Project can’t just come in and start interfering. You have to tell Dr. Fitzsimmons that they can’t do that!”

  Helix had been listening silently.

  Simon took out the ophalla stone and held it in his open hand and they all looked at it again as it glowed in the daylight. “Here,” he said, handing it to his parents. “You should have it. We kept it for you.”

  Simon was a bit sad not to have the ophalla stone anymore, but it was a relief, too, ophalla was too dangerous. His father held the stone in his hand and they all looked at it, shining brightly with its own light, even as the sun streamed down.

  “Thank you,” said their father. “This will be tremendously important for any research that’s done. It’s possible that in the right hands, ophalla could make many people’s lives better.”

  A vague, restless worry was circling in Maya’s mind.

  “What happens now?” she asked her parents.

  “We’ll be resigning from the Red Coral Project,” said their mother. “Now that we know what’s really going on, it just isn’t safe to have all of you involved.”
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  “What about Dr. Fitzsimmons?” Maya asked.

  Her parents met eyes over Maya’s head. They looked both sad and angry. Her father cleared his throat. “We’ll talk to him. He was far more involved in the RCP than we were.”

  Maya decided not to ask any more about this now, but the vague bad thought gnawing at the back of her mind wasn’t going away.

  “But what about Dr. Izquierdo?” Simon asked. “Do you think he’ll find us again?”

  “If he found us once, he can find us again,” said Maya.

  “It’s weird that he was down there at the dock at St. Al-ban’s right when we sailed in,” said Simon. “How did he know that if he found Dr. Fitzsimmons, he’d find us?”

  Maya stared at the horizon, puzzled. Then suddenly it clicked into place. “That’s it!” she said. “You’re right, it’s too weird a coincidence. Unless . . .”

  “Dr. Izquierdo didn’t find Dr. Fitzsimmons, Dr. Fitzsimmons found Dr. Izquierdo,” finished Simon.

  The two children looked at each other.

  “Somehow the people in charge of the Red Coral Project knew about the captain, Dr. Izquierdo, whoever he is—he probably isn’t even a doctor at all—and they tracked him down because they think he can take them back to Greater Tamarind,” said Maya. “Maybe Dr. Fitzsimmons told him that he could get the Pamela Jane back for him.”

  Maya felt ill. It was terrible to think that Dr. Fitzsimmons would betray her parents—they had all known each other for years, long before Maya had even been born. Her parents and Dr. Fitzsimmons had been students together at the Marine Science Academy. Her father called him “Fitz.” They had published hundreds of articles in marine biology journals together. If it was a betrayal, it was a staggering one. He had kept the true nature of their task from them, and he had found the man who believed the Pamela Jane was his—he had put their home in danger. He had put their very lives in danger. Maya looked up at her parents.