The Great Wide Sea (19 page)

“Dad sure didn't need it,” I said.

“He did need it. I wish we'd had two.”

I shook my head. “You have to accept it, Dylan. He drowned himself and left us to die in the storm.”

“He didn't know about the storm. The storm came later.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. “Okay,” I said. “The storm came later. But he went over on purpose. And he took the thing we need most to get us off this island.”

“Dylan! Ben!” This time it was a little more shrill.

“Someone will have found Dad,” Dylan said. “And now he'll find us.”

“Dylan, be reasonable,” I said.

“If there's a boat over there,” he continued, “it'll be a lot easier.”

“And if there isn't—or if there isn't anywhere for one to anchor? What's the plan then? Just to wait?”

Dylan nodded. “And stay alive,” he said.

We sat looking at each other.

“Don't leave me, guys!” Now there was fear in Gerry's voice.

We glanced back toward the sound of Gerry's feet, then stood at the same instant. There was Gerry about twenty feet away, picking his way through the rocks.

He looked up at us and understood we had been hiding. “That was mean,” he said, and lifted a corner of Blankie to cover his mouth.

“You brought Blankie,” I said.

He nodded, still holding the corner to his mouth.

“Well, don't lose him. And keep up.”

With Gerry right behind me now and Dylan bringing up the rear, we climbed over the pile of rocks at the end of our beach. There we found another, much smaller and very different beach. If any beach could have been more beautiful than ours, this one was. Here the rocks rolled into the water like a low landslide. Right up next to the land was a broken-up sort of beach where sand had sifted in among the fallen rocks. The tide was low now, but we could see from the line of sea wrack where the high water came. Big, bathtub-size rocks lay scattered in the sand and glistened with algae and snail tracks where the water lapped at high tide. Some kind of mussel the size of a marble lived among the smaller rocks where they lay in piles kept damp by the tides. Steps away were tumbled rocks that had captured seawater and held it even at low tide. And beyond that were rocks that lay permanently half underwater with coral beginning to grow on the bumpy surfaces and sea urchins hiding in the crevices.

I closed my eyes and listened. The rocks softened the sound of the waves and blocked the wind. The birds were silent. I could hear Dylan and Gerry breathing beside me and the cuddling move Gerry made to nestle a corner of Blankie against his face.

Then I turned to climb the pile of rocks at the end of the tiny beach. Before the others moved, I could see over. The wind tore at my hair and the roar of the waves filled my ears. I saw that I was standing on the southwestern tip of the island. To my left the island turned sharply back to the east. The wild ocean pounded at the rocks that had broken off the landmass and dropped into the sea. To my right, the landslide of rocks holding the secret beach lay like stepping stones out into the ocean all the way to the coral reef where it turned southward. Along the rocks' seaward side, the water looked deep and still, until it met the pile at my feet. There the waves crashed and turned back on themselves in flying sheets of spray. I climbed back down as Dylan and Gerry waited.

“Can't go that way. Nothing but ocean and rocks. No beach.”

Dylan's face clouded.

“Let's go straight up here.” I pointed toward the summit. “We'll be able to see the whole island from there and get a better idea.”

“A better idea of what?” Gerry asked.

I waited for Dylan to jump in with an answer, but he didn't. “Of how the island's shaped,” I said, and charged off toward the trees.

The band of trees lasted for only about ten minutes of climbing. Then we started pushing our way through scrub bushes and cactuses. I was leading the way, trying to find gaps and spaces that weren't there. The clouds overhead were shifting and the sun broke through occasionally, hot and intense. When I heard a rattle low in the bushes ahead of us, I froze. “Snake!” I whispered.

Gerry stopped instantly just behind me.

“Snake?” Dylan asked, easing up behind Gerry.

“I heard a rattle.”

“There aren't any rattlesnakes in the Bahamas—or even any poisonous snakes.”

“Are we in the Bahamas, Ben?” Gerry asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe. Probably. I don't know.”

“But we're close,” Dylan said. “And there are no poisonous snakes here.”

“How do you know?”

“I read it.”

“And you're sure you remember it right?”

“Yes.”

“Sure enough to lead the way?”

“Yes.” He started to step forward.

“Never mind. I need you in back to keep Gerry moving.”

We started off again. I went a little more slowly. I looked more deeply into the bushes. The sun broke through completely, and my head was instantly hot through my bandanna. I saw no snakes.

“Stop,” Dylan said. “There he is.”

I felt a hot rush along my back.

“Who?” Gerry asked, and we looked where Dylan was pointing.

An iguana sat sunning on a low rock ten feet farther up the hill.

“There's your snake, Ben,” Dylan said.

The iguana was fat, with a body about a foot long and a tail dragging behind him another eighteen inches. He looked more like a dinosaur than a lizard. His leathery skin hung on him in folds. His feet spread out in claws on the hot rock. He waited with his back to us, his eyes staring forward. He blinked.

“Do they bite?” Gerry asked.

“Of course they bite,” Dylan said. “But not people.”

“He looks like he'd bite,” Gerry said.

“Well, don't get close to him,” I said. “Let's go.”

“Wait,” Dylan said, and held up his hand. “Maybe we could catch him.”

“Why?” I asked.

“To eat,” Dylan said.

I took another step, then I stopped. I looked at Dylan again. “Okay. How do you catch them? Or clean them? Or cook them?”

“I don't know,” Dylan said, not shifting his eyes from the iguana.

“Well, that's a lot of help,” I said.

“But, Ben,” Gerry said. “I'll bet we could figure it out.”

“Now? This very minute? In this roasting sun?”

“No.” Dylan looked at me. “Let's go on. I need to think about it.”

We stepped forward, and the startled iguana hobbled off the rock and into the shadows under the bushes.

I started up the hill again. “Figure it out quick,” I said. “I'm getting hungry.”

I shouldn't have said that. It made the sun hotter, the land drier, the bushes thornier. When Gerry walked too close to a cactus and got a shower of spines in the back of his hand, we found another rock and sat down. I started pulling the spines out of Gerry's hand while he screamed and tried to yank his hand away. Dylan worked on Blankie, which naturally had dragged through the cactus along with Gerry's hand. When we had done the best we could and Gerry was just sniffing, I took out the jar of water and the breakfast bars. The water was good, but when we bit into the bars, they were stale and tasted moldy. Gerry wanted to spit his out, but I wouldn't let him.

“You've got to eat it,” I shouted. “There's nothing else!” I clamped my hand over his mouth. “Swallow!”

He looked up at me with round, drowning eyes, and I was rocked by the memory of Dad holding him underwater at Honeymoon Harbour. I jerked my hand away and watched him let the wet, brown blob roll out of his mouth and drop into the sand.

I covered my eyes. “I'm too tired to keep going,” I said. “Let's go back.”

“Wait,” Dylan said. He picked up the knife and cut off a pear from a prickly pear growing five steps away. He carried the pear gingerly to the rock, scraped off the spines, and sliced it open. He cut out a piece of the red pulp, slid it into his mouth, and started chewing. We watched and waited. He worked hard at swallowing, then shivered a little.

“Not great,” he reported, “but it will do.”

I held out my hand for a piece, and then Gerry's little hand appeared beside mine, palm up and open. It's funny what you'll do, I thought, when you run out of choices.

And I had to admit that when we were finished I felt better. Maybe it was the handful of calories zooming around in my bloodstream. Maybe it was the way the breeze had come up and was cooling us in spite of the sun. Maybe it was the way the cactus looked different to me now. Anyway, I felt strong enough to keep going, and so did the others. I packed the jar and knife back into the shirt, tied it around my waist, and led the way.

When we reached the top of the island, we felt the wind hit us and push against us, as if it were trying to shove us back down the hill we had just climbed. But we braced ourselves, bending slightly forward and ignoring its roar in our ears. We turned together, like filings reacting to a magnet, and faced the rocks where
Chrysalis
had foundered.

There they were, rising up out of the moving, breaking water. There were the shallows where the colors of the coral were visible even from up here. And then the eight jagged rocks. And then the fathomless blue of the ocean, like the deep blue of space, spreading out toward the horizon and broken in the near distance into a reflective confusion of ridges and hollows where the waves rolled and twisted under the sun.

But there was no
Chrysalis
.

I don't know what I expected to see. Did I think
Chrysalis
would still be there? Did I hope she would? Did I hope at least to see her shape, white and ghostly under the water, or a gouge in the rocks or a shroud still trailing across the shallow coral—anything to prove that she once had been there?

I guess it was the complete blank that opened a hole in my chest and made me feel as if the wind were blowing through me and sucking away my breath. I watched the waves breaking on the rocks and began to forget which rocks were the ones we had hit. They started to shift in my memory, and for a second I panicked. Then I remembered clearly. Those two right there, of course. No others were close enough together to have caught the bow and held it like a vise the way those two had done.

Looking down, I saw that we had been lucky. If the rocks had not caught
Chrysalis
, she would have been dashed onto the shallower coral banks and we would have had to abandon her immediately, launching the dinghy in the dark into the crashing waves. We would have been thrown onto the coral and sliced to pieces. But that didn't happen. We were past that. We were safe on this island. This island, such as it was.

I took a deep breath and looked around.

Now we could see that the island was shaped like a boomerang with the right angle pointing almost due east. The top arm of the boomerang pointed northwesterly except for the tip which curved back due north and then narrowed and sloped into the sea. The bottom arm of the boomerang was much thicker and pointed southwest, ending in the blunt pile of stepping-stone rocks we had just explored. The meeting of the two arms was the highest point, where we now stood.

From here we could see almost every line where the island met water, and now, for the first time, we could see the southeastern shore. Only it wasn't a shore. It was a cliff. Straight down into the ocean with no tumbled rocks or coral reef. Just a sheer drop into the crashing waves. Nothing but a dinghy could ever land on this island, and then only on the single beach where we had built our camp. I looked at Dylan and he looked at me.

Then I looked again at the lonely, breathtaking beauty of where we were. The bushes and trees clung proudly and stubbornly to the thin layer of soil over the rocks. They would not be beautiful anywhere else, but here they were perfect—stunted trees bent by the wind, dull green bushes prickly to the touch, grasses that crunched underfoot, and cactuses stabbing defiantly up at the now cloudless, rainless, infinitely blue sky. And everywhere there were the rocks—the striated wall of the cliffs, the tumble of gigantic boulders, the smaller rocks huddled in the edge of the sea. All a deep, grayed brown mottled with dampness or patches of algae or the shivering slate green of some determined plant growing in a crevice. Around them all lay the pristine beach, the aqua shallows, the ocean-blue deeps, and the sudden, brilliant flashes of colored coral growing silently and steadily under the waves.

And then there were the creatures that lived here. The seagulls and pelicans and hawks and terns screeching through the sky. The iguanas and snakes and lizards and who knew what else scrabbling along in the bushes. The mussels and sea urchins. The crabs and the conch. The tiny fish flashing across the face of the coral. The larger ones hiding in the crevices and slipping through the seaweed. And just on the far side of the coral reef, the big ones—the silent rays, the graceful tuna, and the slender sharks.

I tried on words.
Majestic. Stunning. Awesome.

Then I looked down at my brothers, standing small beside me. We were three little pieces of humanity, the only people on earth, standing on the very top of the island, erect, on two feet, with hands at our sides. In a photograph or a painting, we wouldn't show up. There was so little of us and so much of everything else.

I was holding Gerry's hand to keep him from stepping too close to the edge. Dylan stood exactly at my other side, not even as high as my shoulder now.

The waves crashed on the rocks. The seagulls cawed and spun on invisible currents in the air. The thin grass hissed slightly in the wind. But we were quiet. Only one word echoed in my mind now. Over and over, pounding like the drumbeat of a dirge.