by Leslie Lutz
How to make fresh water from salt water.
Most of the contents of the charter had been lost when the thing attacked us, but I took stock of what was there. An emergency kit with a penknife, bandages, and Neosporin. Ten wet suits, ten tanks, ten masks, all tethered to the benches. Ten slates with little golf pencils attached. Teague’s sopping wet notebook with the snobby sticker on the front, hidden by my clever little brother in a bench seat. Your small plastic toolbox, Gianopoulos written with Sharpie across the lid—Mom’s catchall for anything she didn’t want sliding around the deck—screwdrivers, a hammer, a small box of tampons, and some no-run pens. Underneath it all I found a Tarpon Springs key chain, the one you bought a thousand years ago when we all went up to see Yiayia for one of your “family-togetherness” weekends. The ignition key was useless, and the happy scene on the fob—flip-flops and palm trees—felt like it was making fun of me somehow, so I dropped it into the box and kept searching.
And then I found what I really needed—an empty water bottle wedged between the broken radio and the gunwale.
I used the penknife to saw open the water bottle. I kept the top, in case I found a use for it later. I only needed the bottom half. Once I filled it with seawater and set it inside one of the masks, I put another mask upside down on top of the makeshift cup. Marshall’s was the best choice, a crazy-expensive thing that wasn’t flat, the glass coming to a point to give him a five-hundred-dollar view. I set it all in the sun, far back from the tide line.
A strip of neoprene I cut from a wet suit served to cover the sides of my contraption. The medical tape held it place and kept the water in, evaporating and beading on the top mask and sliding down the sides to drip, nice and fresh and salt-free, into the bottom mask. In a few hours I would have a glass of desalinated water, courtesy of physics, Mother Nature, and the big ball of fire in the sky.
I sat in the shade of the Last Chance and waited.
The sun peaked, burning high above me, and my shade disappeared. The sand gleamed, stretching in either direction for a mile before curving into the palms. The forest shadows were cool, but my body recoiled at the thought of going back in. Something was wrong with that place. And the guy with the gun . . . Out in the open, I could see him coming. Thirst was bad, but whatever could happen to me in the palm tree cave was worse. Besides, a part of me still believed someone else from the charter had survived. Felix, Mom. Anybody. I was more visible out here on the beach.
After an hour of watching the waves for swells or ripples, wondering if that horrible thing had enough reach to snag my ankle and drag me off the beach, I got up to check my desalinator. Water beaded thickly on the underside of the glass. I prayed it wouldn’t drip back into the saltwater cup, so I watched it, the sun beating the back of my head, until a drop finally rolled to the lowest point and dripped. So beautiful, this small miracle. At this rate it would take several hours, but I would eventually have enough to keep me alive.
I marked the time with a stick in the sand. After two hours, I’d stopped sweating, which was a bad sign. Staying visible on the beach no longer seemed important, so I lay on the deck of the Last Chance under the sun shade, tilted, and listened to wave song. Breathed in the salt breeze. Tried not to die.
The third time I got up to check the water, my head throbbed.
Drip.
One bead at a time.
Drip.
I couldn’t wait any longer. I peeled it back and drank it all, a little less than a tablespoon. I topped off the cup with seawater and reassembled it. I returned to the shade.
Three hours, staring out into the big blue and waiting.
This time when I got up to check, my joints ached. The heat and dehydration working against me. I rounded the stern and stopped. There was a bird that favored one leg standing next to the mask and container, pecking at the glass.
“Hey!” I tried to run, but my legs gave out. I struggled to sit up, and the world tipped. I threw a handful of sand and seashells at him. “Get away from that!”
The bird hopped away and side-eyed me, then ducked its head and edged toward it again, holding one foot off the hot sand, and I noticed it was missing a toe. I got to my feet and made my way toward the desalinator, swaying like a drunk girl. The bird blurred. “Touch that and you’re my next meal.”
It took off in a flurry of white feathers. I kneeled beside the mask to inspect the damage. Thank God, the neoprene strip was still intact.
I forced myself to leave the thin layer of water that coated the glass—not near enough—and returned to lie in the cool sand on the other side of the boat, where shade had appeared as the sun sank.
Four hours. My mind felt foggy. I forgot about keeping an eye out for my feathered friend and watched the ocean, the bits of seaweed floating in the white froth. The world smelled of salt, and suddenly I was with my grandmother again, learning to swim on the beaches near the sponge docks.
I could even see her, as real as the sand or the waves or the burning hot sun. Yiayia stood in the surf, dropping her silver stopwatch into my little palm. I remembered how it felt seeing her disappear beneath the waves, hair trailing out and mixing with foam and seaweed. The awe and terror of that moment, when a part of me thought she wouldn’t come back.
It was always my job to keep my eye on the second hand, and once the silver needle had rounded the face twice, she’d pop up, wave at me, and yell, “Your turn!” I’d toss the stopwatch onto the beach and dive into the waves headfirst, then hold my breath for a whopping ten seconds before sputtering to the surface.
You don’t remember this—you were working one of those live-aboard dive charters, the kind that took you away for a month at a time—but I reached the one-minute mark right after I turned twelve, just before Epiphany. Afterward Yiayia and I sat in her window overlooking the sponge docks, celebrated with mountain tea and her famous braided cookies. She talked about what life was like back before the war, back on Kalymnos, when her dad worked the sponge fleets. Gone for months, like you. How much she missed him and wished on stars that he would come home and never leave again.
And he did come home. Men from the sponge fleet came, carried him into the house and laid him out on his bed. He’d stayed down on the bottom too long, they told her. What my grandmother called “the sickness” had taken the use of his legs. She said every family on the island had lost someone that way, or had come back with pain they couldn’t shake, or a limp that kept them from work. That’s when she stopped wishing on stars, she said. And she swore she would never dive with anything except her own breath.
I remember covering my ears and telling her to stop. You were so far away, living life underwater. Yiayia pulled me against her, said she was sorry. You’d be home soon. You’d be okay.
A week later, just before she died, Yiayia told me something I’ll never forget, sitting with me watching the fishermen come into the harbor at sunset, with their piles of sponges. She said that when people died, their spirit left not from the heart or the brain, but the lungs. One exhalation of breath, and their whole selves slipped out. “Not a bad way to go,” she said.
I sat beside the Last Chance eying the small buoy in the distance, the one that marked the USS Andrews, and thought about my grandmother and all her talk about breath. The thought of Felix slipping under the surface, that hot coal of want burning beneath his sternum until he drowned . . . that horrible thought punched right through the thirst, and at that moment—but for only a moment—I wanted to see him more than I wanted water.
Five hours. My tongue was dry as old leather. My body ached, and my mind felt slow. And I was pretty sure I smelled. Like a rotting barnacle. I laughed to myself then, wondering what Yiayia would say if she could see me, breathing like a fish out of water here on the sand.
Six hours. The sun dipped low above the palm trees. The glare off the beach dimmed. When I stood to walk to the condenser, my legs shook. I forgot my name. I was only thirst. Afraid I would fall on my contraption and spill ever
ything, I crawled the last few feet. My hands shook as I peeled off the tape, unwrapped my mask like it was made of eggshells, afraid one breath would make it all disappear.
I pulled off the top to look inside.
Nothing. I blinked, afraid my mind was gone. Where was it? Not a drop. I sat back on the slowly cooling sand. I would’ve cried, but tears were impossible. I screamed. So loud it must have woken every dead sailor within a mile.
I picked up the mask, hands shaking, and examined it. My vision blurred, but I could see the seal had failed. The sun, the heat, so many hours, my own stupid impatience, the little bird I now hated—they had all betrayed me. The fresh water had leaked out and filled the sand with glorious honey.
I threw Marshall’s five-hundred-dollar mask into the water, rising now with the tide. The ache and the fog joined up in my head. The palm forest, its long stalks darkening, bled into a mass of gray. I watched it, my hands in the sand, my knees digging in. A flutter of white wings rose from the edge of my vision and disappeared into the dusk. A surge of regret moved through me. I’d expected a bigger finish, for the end to mean something. But I was just fading, like all things fade. My last thought was whether I’d be awake for it, the last moment. When my spirit slipped out of my mouth, whether I’d feel it. Whether I’d have one last glimpse of the ocean before it all ended.
ENTRY 10
I WOKE TO THE FEEL OF WATER on my mouth. Sweet and delicious. And voices hovering above me like birds, the vowels wings, the consonants sharp beaks. A tumble of sound. At first, I thought it was you, here on the island to rescue me, but I couldn’t muster the strength to open my eyes.
“Hey, hold her up.”
Not you.
Someone else.
“I am holding her up.” A guy’s voice. Familiar. “It’s like trying to pick up a dead body.”
Dead. The stranger’s last words dropped in my head like a stone. Dead. Was I? Am I? Maybe I was in the next world, wherever that is. And it was hot, so much hotter than I expected. I started to worry.
A small cry, a voice higher and younger than the others. “T, wake up! Wake up. You’re okay, T, come on, you’re okay.” That little hitch in his voice when he called me T . . .
Please, I thought, please be real.
I took a deep breath, to see if I still could, and opened my eyes. There he was, Felix, his small, round face hovering over me, the panic in his eyes turning to relief. That smile broke out, the one I know so well. The one I bet you miss.
“T, you’re okay!” Felix threw his arms around my neck and put his head on my chest, like he did when he was a toddler and Mom had me take over bedtime. I put a hand on the back of his head. It felt greasy, sweaty. He really needed a bath, but we could deal with that later. Right now the sight of him was almost as good as the capfuls of water someone was rationing into my mouth.
Two figures kneeled on either side of me, but their images swam. Sunlight strobe. A flash of blue, like the world had become a grainy screensaver. The scent of coconut sunblock filled my nose. A familiar dark-skinned face leaned close.
Ben. Yes, thank God, it was Ben. Even though I’d only known him a day, if I had to be stuck on a desert island with anyone, he’d make my top five.
I tried to say his name, but my lips had turned to rubber, so it came out as “bean.” In my head, the word sang. Ben, Ben, Ben is alive. Ben is here with me. He smiled, looking to the girl across from him, someone I vaguely recognized, but I couldn’t put a name to the face. Someone who didn’t return his smile. The song died a little in my head.
I sat up with some help and shook the sand out of my hair, spit it out of my mouth.
“See, Steph?” Felix said to the redhead. “I told you she was tough.”
I locked eyes with the girl named Steph, and she looked away first. From the science trip, I guessed, although I had the feeling I’d seen her around Key Largo somewhere. Small, like me, but red-haired and pale-skinned. Her spaghetti strap top was dirty, her shoulders sunburned. She shielded her face when she talked. Really not the best genetics for a desert island. I didn’t envy her.
But then I was the one who’d almost kicked it. I was the one who almost died because a survival technique went sideways. A smell wafted up. Me. Ugh. This was not what my fantasy of stuck-on-an-island-with-a-hot-guy looked like. Not that I had those fantasies regularly. Or ever. Sorry, Dad. I don’t have an eraser.
Steph helped me sit up against the Last Chance in the shade. Felix leaned against my knee, his damp rash guard cool. Ben collapsed on the other side of me, grimacing. He’d torn off the bottom of his T-shirt to make a bandage for his thigh. The image of the whiplike filament wrapping around his leg hit me full force, and I felt a little sick. His scream, how the blood flowed. Then I imagined how his leg would feel once it became full-blown infected.
I searched the horizon, the blinding sunlight shattering on the waves. Endless. Empty. Not even a seagull. Definitely no ships. “We need the Coast Guard,” I said, my words still slurred.
“No kidding,” Steph said.
“Or to find more survivors,” Ben said. “Somebody with a satellite phone.” He leaned his head back against the Last Chance and closed his eyes.
More survivors, I thought. Mom. She had to be alive. She just had to. Out there in the palm trees somewhere, wandering and looking for us.
Just as Felix ducked out of sight, into the cabin of the Last Chance, I remembered who I’d run into yesterday.
“There’s someone else on the island,” I managed, although I sounded a little drunk. “With a gun. Went into the palm forest. Scary guy. Almost shot me. I could see he wanted to. He’s out there in the forest.” Along with all those eyes watching me, I thought. Or maybe I said that last part out loud.
Ben side-eyed me. “Don’t worry about that.”
“But—”
“He’s gone now. We’ll keep an eye out for him. Just drink. Rest.”
I was too woozy to figure out what that meant, but I found it vaguely reassuring. Felix came back to feed me capfuls of water, each one making me crave a gallon more.
Felix started to bring the whole bottle to my mouth and Steph stopped him.
“Uh-uh. We’ve only got one more,” she said. “Stick with the capfuls.” She held out her palm. “Hand it over.”
Felix pulled a bottle from behind him and reluctantly handed it over.
“Where’d you get it?” I asked, staring at the magical, beautiful half bottle.
“In the filthy head of your charter,” Ben said.
“Ugh,” Steph said. “So gross.”
She didn’t know the half of it. And she probably hadn’t cleaned a toilet in her entire life.
“We’ve got to find more soon,” Ben continued. “And make a signal fire and get out of here.”
I checked both ends of the beach, hoping for a glimpse of Mom’s familiar form. “Where are the others?”
“There aren’t any others,” Steph said. “They all went down with that thing.”
Felix’s expression slumped. He capped the bottle and put it on the sand beside me, then stood to take a couple of steps away from us. Arms crossed, he checked out one end of the beach, then the other.
“Don’t say that,” Ben said, glaring at Steph.
Felix looked from Steph to me. “They might be here,” he said, his voice breaking. “We just haven’t found them yet.” He swallowed, took a breath, and held it for a few seconds. I’ve seen him do this on the playground when the bigger kids push him around. Trying to stop the tears.
Steph threw her hands up. “I’m just—”
Felix cut in before she could say another word. “You told me my sister was dead. And look at her!” He pointed at me. “Mom’s somewhere on the island, looking for us.”
Steph opened her mouth to speak, but I held up a hand to cut her off. She didn’t know my little brother from Adam. And if she said one more thing about my “dead” mother . . .
“Come here,” I said and patted
the cool, wet sand next to me. Felix sat cross-legged and I put my arm around his small waist, hoping he was right. The thought of Mom gone forever made it hard to breathe. “We’ll look for her. But we need to find more water first, okay?”
“We need to find her.” He swallowed again and held his breath for a few seconds before blowing it out.
“We will, but we need to get water for her.”
Felix nodded and wiped his nose with his hand. I reached up and finished the job with the sleeve of my rash guard. Steph mumbled “gross” under her breath and tried to hand me a beach towel. I waved her away. The look she gave me was beyond irritated, and again I got the feeling she knew me somehow. And really didn’t like me.
Felix sniffled, his eyes welling with fresh tears.
“Why don’t you go pick up some driftwood?” I told Felix, pointing down the beach where a few pieces lay baking in the sand. “Like we did last year when we camped out on the beach with Mom for her birthday. Bring it back here and we’ll make a signal fire.”
He sniffed and looked toward the driftwood, but it was clear he wasn’t listening.
“Felix?”
“What?”
“Did you hear me?”
“No.”
I repeated the whole request, slower this time, ending it with, “Don’t go near the water. And stay off the big boulder, the one jutting out over the water. It’s too deep on the other side.”
He nodded, his eyes widening a hair. We were both imagining the same thing, that tentacle snaking up the rock face, pulling him over the edge and into the waves.
“And don’t go into the palm forest.”
“Why?”
“Just stay where I can see you.”
“But why?”
It’s always this way with him, more so over the years you’ve been gone. “Do you really want to go into the forest?”
“No.”
“Then don’t be a butthead.”
His face darkened into a scowl, and he moved off in the direction of the driftwood.