The Noble Pirates (40 page)

The first man spoke again, his voice louder. “What year are you from?”

I flinched, and the woman in the white coat squeezed her way between us. “Give her a chance to recover, gentlemen. She’s been through a lot.” The woman was Asian, with thick black hair and a soothing voice. She smiled at me as she took my vitals. “You have three broken bones in your left leg. You are malnourished, underweight, have anemia, mild scurvy, scabies, fleas, and lice.” The doctor shook her head. “It’s as though you’ve been living…”

…among pirates? I thought, raising my eyebrows.

“…in the wild,” she finished, glancing at the two men behind her. “Now gentlemen, I realize that you have many questions for her, but please remember that she’s sick and probably in shock.”

“I’m not in shock,” I croaked, licking my lips and attempting to shift myself. Ouch. Major ouch. I winced and continued, trying not to hold my breath. “I’m Sabrina Granger. I… went missing in 2011.”

The men exchanged looks. “Where have you been?”

I narrowed my eyes at them. “Who are you? You know Roberts – are you SEALs as well?”

After ensuring that the doctor and her nurses were gone, the bald man approached my bed. “How much did Roberts tell you?” he asked.

My leg hurt. I said, “He told me all of your classified information. P54 and all that.”

The bald man glanced back at his colleague, who was tapping away at what looked like a cell phone. “Yep, found her,” the second guy said. “Sabrina Granger, born Sabrina Beauchamp, 1978. Attorney at Cotts & Beaker, LLP. Husband Jake Granger, daughter Sophie. 2011, fell off a yacht in the Bahamas during a storm, probably in a drunken stupor, body never found. Presumed dead.”

I scowled. “What! Drunken stupor? Who said that?”

The bald man gazed at me in wonder. “Where did you go?”

I sighed. Screw it. It didn’t matter who he was. “Seventeen-eighteen. I was there until August of 1719.”

The man moved closer, his eyes on me but his mind clearly elsewhere. “Seventeen-eighteen. My God. What did you do there for a year?”

“I hung out with pirates,” I replied. The second man snorted, as if I’d said something funny. I tried to move again, felt the sharp pain race through my leg again. I winced. “Please,” I said. “My family… Can you tell my family I’m here? I need to see them.”

“Yes,” the bald man said, coming back from his thoughts. “But first… We need to discuss some things.”

His name was Dr. William Noakes, and he was the Director of Research for the Naval Research Laboratory. He had been one of several scientists working closely with John Roberts on P54. Roberts, he said, had left an audio recording in which he said he would return at the next P54 occurrence, so the Navy had been waiting that day I came crashing back to the future.

“For some reason, he didn’t come back,” Noakes said, “but sent you in his place. You, Mrs. Granger, are now a walking piece of highly classified information.”

They’d been expecting Roberts. Roberts had sent me. I let my head fall back against the pillows. What a fool I was, thinking Roberts had sent me back from the kindness of his heart. He’d sent me back to finish his job for him. “I want to see my family,” I said again.

Noakes frowned. “Mrs. Granger, I don’t think you realize what’s happening here. This is a matter of national security. If you tell anyone the truth about where you’ve been, you are endangering yourself – and your family as well.”

My body tensed, my leg throbbed. “Is that a threat?”

“Call it what you like.” He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “What you know, where you’ve been… It’s knowledge over which wars are fought, power over which innocent men die.”

I glared at him. “What’s your point?”

“My point,” Noakes replied, “is that you would serve your country well by helping us, by telling us what you know. And, at the very least, by keeping quiet about this entire experience to everyone else.”

I closed my eyes and cursed Roberts to hell in my mind. For the third time, I said, “I want to see my family.”

“I understand,” Noakes said with a smile that he probably intended as kind, but came across as forced. He turned and stepped toward his colleague, and the two of them conferred in low voices for a few minutes. Then Noakes looked back at me and said, “Your family may come and visit you. But I’ll be back before the hospital releases you, Mrs. Granger.”

I turned my head away. “Oh good,” I said dryly. “I was afraid you’d go to hell.”

They left me alone, but I couldn’t sleep. And even though the food the nurse brought smelled good enough, I had no appetite. (I did, however, eat the dessert – a chocolate brownie with frosting – and thought I had died and gone to heaven.) I stared in awe at the television screen above my bed, at the gizmos and gadgets that beeped and blinked at me. I didn’t even know where I was. I peered out the window, at the palm trees, the glittering skyscrapers in the distance, the BMWs and Mercedes parked in the lot below. I had to be in Miami.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Sophie. She’d be all grown up now. I’d missed everything. I tried reminding myself that I was lucky to see her again, to be given the chance to develop a relationship with her at all. I was a shitty mother to the child Sophie, but maybe I could be a good friend to the woman Sophie.

I fidgeted restlessly, wondering where the remote control to the television was. There was only so much
All My Children
(Christ! Was that show still running in 2022?) I could take. Strange, how sedentary people’s lives were these days. How so unbelievably different their priorities were. How would I get used to this again, particularly with Noakes and his Navy cronies on my ass? How would I keep myself from slumping into a deep, dark depression?

I twisted my head to the side in frustration, willing myself to think of something else. That was when I saw the neatly folded clothes and leather pouch. The talisman sat atop my dirty, ratty slops, its strings carefully coiled on top. I leaned carefully from the bed, my hand outstretched, and grasped it. As I pulled myself back, grunting from the effort, the tokens that had been inside the pouch fell to my lap. I looked at the pouch in surprise to see that it had been cut open. I cursed aloud. Those jerks! They’d cut open my talisman.

I lifted the two tokens gently and examined them in my palm. They were oval-shaped and made of a soft stone. Both were inscribed with roughly-scrawled Latin letters, which caught me off guard. One token contained an inscription that was unintelligible to me, while the other read:
Liberi
.

I stared. That’s odd. That wasn’t an
Igbo
word. What had Sam said? Magical words to protect me… Their existence, and not my ability to see them, made them powerful. I scratched my head. This didn’t seem to fit, for some reason.

As I pondered the tokens, the door opened. I looked up to see the faces of my past: Jake, tall, dark, and handsome as ever, even if he was a bit softer around the middle and a bit grayer around the temples; behind him, Tanya and Sky, both still attractive, Sky a bit too pudgy, Tanya a bit too cosmetically-enhanced; and finally, peering timidly around her father’s shoulder, a beautiful young woman with large blue eyes and soft brown hair.

Sophie.

My throat constricted. No one said anything for what felt like an eternity. They thought I had died ten years ago, and yet here I was, looking dramatically different but, oddly enough, much the same. What did they think? What had they been told? As I stared into each of their dumbfounded faces, I heard their questions.

Sophie stepped forward and smiled at me – a stunning, radiant smile, and I saw the little girl I had left behind. “It’s her,” she said. She nudged her father. “Dad, it’s
her
.”

Jake looked as though someone had slapped him. “Uh,” he said, crossing his arms, uncrossing them, putting them in his pockets, removing them. “Sabrina. I don’t know what to say. You’re alive.” I saw the tears shimmer in his eyes.

“Well, I do,” Tanya muttered, dropping her handbag and rushing to me. Before I knew what was happening, Tanya and Sky were hugging me, crying, saying things about guilt, about miracles, about God.

As I began to cry myself, unable to utter a coherent thought, I looked at my husband and daughter from behind my tears. Jake stood stock still, his eyes fixed on me, while Sophie held her hands behind her back, glancing curiously from her father to me.

They’d been told I had survived alone on an uninhabited cay. The Caribbean is full of small cays, and I was stranded on one that had been overlooked. This had sent Jake into a fury. “Overlooked! How was it overlooked? This is the Bahamas, for God’s sake! We’re not talking about the South Pacific in the eighteenth century! How did she go overlooked for
ten years
?”

Now, as he sat on the edge of my hospital bed, he peered curiously, desperately, into my eyes. “Sabrina, what happened to you? Where were you? You couldn’t possibly have been on a cay in the Bahamas all this time.”

I couldn’t look him in the eyes. Noakes’ words echoed in my head:
If you tell anyone the truth about where you’ve been, you are endangering yourself – and your family as well.
“But I was,” I insisted, fidgeting nervously with my IV.

“You survived on a small cay alone for ten years?” Jake said incredulously. “Didn’t you see boats or planes or people? Didn’t you figure out how to build a fire? Didn’t you
try
to get off the island before ten years had passed?”

Sophie piped up. “Like that old movie…
Cast Away
,” she said.

Tanya came to my rescue. “Jake, for heaven’s sake, leave her alone! She just said that’s where she was. Give her a chance to recover before you start throwing questions at her.”

Jake heaved a deep sigh. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Sabrina. It’s just… You don’t know what we went through, after you went missing. And to think that you were right there… for so long…”

Sky spoke softly, putting her hand on mine. “What about what Sabrina went through? We should let her rest.”

“And bathe,” Tanya added, wrinkling her nose and smiling playfully at me.

Jake was not satisfied, but he nodded. “OK,” he said. “The hospital is releasing you tomorrow, and we’re getting you out of here.”

I said, “Can Sophie stay with me tonight?” Everyone looked expectantly at Sophie, who shrugged uncomfortably. I smiled at her. “Will you stay with me, Sophie? Please?”

She considered for a moment, then answered, “Sure.”

Jake kissed each of us, murmuring to Sophie that he’d call her, and with some strained, awkward good byes, Sophie and I were left alone in the hospital room. She pulled a chair up to my bedside, sat, crossed her legs, and stared silently at her hands. I noticed that her fingernails were painted a shimmery pink, that her jeans were high-waisted and belted. Huh. Was that back in fashion? Her hair was pencil-straight, and I wondered if she flat-ironed it. She certainly hadn’t inherited hair like that from me. I swallowed. What to say? I wanted to hug her tightly, to inhale her scent. What must I look like to her?

She spoke first. “That must have been… really hard. Being alone like that.”

I said carefully, “It was hard being without you and your dad. I missed you guys so much.”

She looked briefly at me, then scanned the walls, the bed. She didn’t know how to respond. “Dad missed you a lot. He was depressed for a long time.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she replied. “I missed you too, but it was a really long time ago.”

“Of course.”

“I was really young.”

“Yes, you were.”

There was a long pause of silence as we both fidgeted, trying to think of things to say, when Sophie reached for the tokens that sat on my bedside table. “What are these?”

“Oh,” I said, trying to arrange myself to face her more directly. “I found them on the island.” A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Hey, Sophie, do you think you could get me a laptop with internet access?”

“Why?” she asked.

“I want to try and find out what these words mean,” I said, indicating the scratched letters on the tokens.

Sophie casually pulled what looked like a cell phone – identical to the one Noakes’ sidekick had used to look me up (except this one was pink) – out of her small handbag and began tapping away at it at lightening speed. She examined one of the tokens as she typed. “L-I-B-E-R-I.”

I tried to sit up. “Are you Googling it?”

Sophie looked up at me and raised an eyebrow. “No. Google is ancient history.” She looked back down at her pink gadget and read, “‘Italian municipality… in the province of Caserta…region of Campania…’”

I made a face. “That doesn’t… fit. Try putting in ‘Liberi’ and ‘pirates.’”

Sophie grinned. “Pirates? If you say so.” After a few seconds, she read, “‘Pirate utopias… Pirates built the utopia of Libertalia in Madagascar during the eighteenth century… Called themselves Liberi.’”

I sat very still. A tingling sensation crept along my spine. What did it mean? Was it a message? I thought back on when Sam had given me the talisman, on how he had been watching me strangely, how he had insisted I wear it. I pointed to the other token. “What about that one? I know it’s not English, so just try typing it in the way it is.”