by Marni MacRae
“Ah, ha!” I brandished my treasure and clicked it on. The light shone bright and steady. I had ordered this specific light off of Amazon for its brilliant LED and its sturdiness. I have gone through at least a dozen over the years, as flashlights are a lifeline in the country, especially in winter when the power company is iffy about repairing downed frozen lines. So my light shot across the raft and out to sea for a good many feet before it faded. Lucas knelt, dripping wet, across from me. He had the motor out of the box – and blood was streaming down his arm.
“Oh my God! Lucas, you’re bleeding!” Of course he was bleeding. At this part in the film the actress stitches up and bandages the hero and they have a ‘moment.’ It makes the viewers respect the damsel who had been in distress, and it humanizes the hero. Always one of my favorite scenes in any Matt Damon movie and most romances. I crawled carefully over to Lucas, and he looked down at his arm. His blue shirt was torn, as was his skin, right down along his bicep.
“The box caught me on the way down in the water.”
“Does it hurt? Looks like it stings like fire, I’m sure the salt water didn’t help.”
“Yeah, it made me take a lungful of ocean at the time.” He grimaced as he glanced at the blood. “I’ll live.”
“I can bandage it.” Of course I can, the viewers expect it. I shook my head and sat back with a little sigh. This was not a movie, and romancing it wouldn't help. I knew we were still in serious trouble, but my mind has its own avenues that it travels under stress, so I let the self-admonishment go and looked at dripping cowboy with pity and real concern. “You don’t want it to get infected; it could make you very sick.”
“Ah yes, you have the valued meds. Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously. I can stitch you, or staple you. I can wrap it, disinfect it and kiss the boo-boo to make it all better.” I smiled and reached out to pull aside the torn sleeve.
“I thought you were just trying to convince me to save your clothes.” He said wryly.
“Really?” I wasn’t mad, it’s something a woman would do, and a man would expect a woman to do. “Well, good thing I like my clothes – and my meds.”
Lucas pulled away. “You can treat it, we just need to get this hooked up and running,” he nodded to the motor. “Once we're moving, you can staple and stitch to your heart’s content. I don’t think the blood is coming from anything major.”
I shrugged, “That’s fine, it will help wash out any ocean water that got in the cut anyway. What do we need to do?”
“This anchors there,” He indicated two heavy duty plastic rungs at the far end of the raft. “It should simply start up and we can go.”
“Really? That sounds almost too easy.”
Lucas ignored the comment and lifted the motor into his lap. “Help me hold it onto the rungs while I fasten the bolts. If it goes overboard, we'll be paddling.”
I pushed the luggage to Ducky’s nose end for ballast, and shoved the metal box on its orange coasters there as well for good measure. Then I sat at the end of the raft and steadied the motor on its anchors. Lucas slid a long bolt through each anchor loop, and secured each bolt end with a clamp that clicked over from the body of the motor. It fit perfectly.
“OK. Head to the nose, we have a lot of weight back here.” Lucas wasn’t being rude. I could tell he was distracted and concentrating, and I obeyed at once. I scrunched myself up to the opposite end of the raft and watched as he found the pull cord and yanked. And yanked. And yanked. I heard him curse but couldn’t make out his word of choice. Then he turned to me and held out his hand.
“Light?”
I handed him the light. Like a nurse slapping a scalpel into a doctor's hand. He, in turn, shone the light on the motor and turned a cap on top. Once it was removed, it hung, connected by a plastic leash. Lucas shone the light inside.
I saw his chin drop to his chest and then the word of choice again. He clicked off the penlight and sat, his back to the motor, his legs stretched out, our feet meeting in the middle of yellow Ducky’s floor.
“No gas.”
“No gas?” I wasn’t sure if this was an even bigger joke from the universe. OK, here’s the perfect guy, but he’s grumpy and not interested. Here’s the perfect vacation, but there are pirates. Here’s an escape, but you have to paddle. “Where the hell is the gas?” A stupid question I knew, but I no longer cared if Lucas or the universe thought I was stupid. Mad was replacing the adrenaline, with frustration following right behind.
Lucas closed his eyes and laid his head back against the raft. “On the yacht,” he said in a resigned tone that made me worry – which replaced mad and frustrated. I scooted across the raft toward him.
“I won’t even go into my opinion of the yacht owners and their stupid emergency planning abilities. Hand me the light.” I held out my hand. Lucas handed me the light. I began searching through my purse again, this time for my little first aid kit, which wouldn’t help much for his wound, but I knew it held a small packet of gauze. Further down in my bottomless purse, I found my little bottle of hand sanitizer. I zipped up my best friend and scooted back to Ducky’s nose. There, I untangled the life vests from my suitcase and unzipped it. Opening the top flap, I saw that it hadn’t been as lucky as my purse. The outer layers were soaking wet, with only a few items in the interior having been spared a salt water bath.
“No wonder the damn thing was so heavy to heave over the side of Ducky.” I rummaged through the wet clothes till my hands found a plastic box. It was the size of a lunch box, and waterproof.
I never travel without a med kit. I have one for my truck, my home and even one in my barn. I'm always having to band-aid or stitch someone or something. (The thing being my stubborn horses that like the neighbor’s stallion enough to bang themselves through gates to get to him.)
The kit I had brought with me had sutures and a small stapler that could be used on animals or humans. I had only ever stapled animal skin with it. It also held a scalpel, two pill bottles for pain or allergy, and some miscellaneous med stuff I had gathered over the years and stuffed in there. I took out a strip of heavy-duty butterfly tape that would act as stitching and some antibiotic ointment. That and a roll of bandage tape would have to do.
I took my hoard of supplies back to Lucas, who now sat watching me with a strange expression. I paused and caught his eye. He didn’t look away, and I didn’t know what to say. I assumed he was tired or defeated. He looked tired, but as I looked closer, only a little defeated. He kept staring.
“You’re not what I thought,” he said quietly.
“This is the moment.” I smiled and scooted to sit beside him, returning to the movie again and the 'bonding moment' the viewers expected. I pulled his torn sleeve back and rolled the material out of my way, revealing the long slash down his arm.
“What moment?”
I shook my head and sighed. “Never mind, ignore me, just saltwater on the brain. Does it hurt?” I pressed my fingers alongside the cut. The bleeding had stopped. A good sign at least.
He was quiet a moment longer, but didn’t answer my question when he spoke again.
“I thought you were a socialite. A silly rich girl with too much money and time on her hands. I’m sorry I judged you.”
“Well, we all judge.” I squeezed some antibacterial onto my fingers. “Don’t scream, this will sting.” I lightly ran the clear gooey stuff down the line of the cut. He cringed and hissed out his breath, but there were no screams. So far, so good.
“Can you hold the light? I’ll need both hands for the bandage.” Lucas took the light in his other hand and held it pointing toward the cut, careful not to shine the beam in my eyes. “I don’t mind that you judged me.” I glanced at him. His blue eyes seemed to glow in the LED. It briefly crossed my mind to wonder if my blue eyes were the same shade as his. One tends not to stare at their own eyes, so I couldn’t remember off hand if they were as pretty, but I didn’t think so. I shrugged and looked back at his cut.
He chuckled softly. It was a nice sound, and I relaxed as I wiped away blood with a piece of clean gauze. I began applying the butterflies, pinching the skin together as I went, hoping they held because it took eight of them to finish the entire cut, and that was all I had. If they came off … it would be staples or sutures.
“Why did you come on this trip?” His voice was low and close to my ear. It held sincerity.
I looked up at his face. He leaned so near me, our brows almost touched and I could feel his breath on my cheek. A shiver ran through me in reminder that this man had a very physical effect on me.
“Truth?” I asked.
“Truth.”
“Escape.” I didn’t embellish. I knew I was just escaping life and the everyday reminder of my failed marriage. My lonely farm was the only thing to occupy my days. The need to escape what everyone else thought I should do, be, say, had been the impetus behind the decision. “Why did you come?”
Lucas looked away for a moment and then turned back again. I finished fixing the last piece of tape and sat back. Looking him squarely in the eyes. Tit for tat. He had evaded every personal question I had asked him up until this moment, and I wondered if he would be honest now. He surprised me when he answered with no evasion and with perfect frankness.
“Today is my tenth anniversary. This was supposed to be the honeymoon we never had.” He shrugged his shoulder and grimaced at the pain the movement caused. “It’s actually fitting though,” He said, and I thought I detected a touch of humor in his voice. “The vacation is as much of a disaster as our marriage ended up being.”
I mulled over his words for a moment before I replied. I didn’t want his honesty to be dismissed, he was clearly going through something in his life I'm familiar with; divorce. The sense of failure, all the questions of why didn’t it work? Were all the years wasted? Why couldn’t love be enough? It’s a tough road. One-half of American couples walk it if you can trust the statistics. But statistics aside, for each person it's different, but it always hurts.
“I’m sorry Lucas.” I knew better than to pry. I had hated the prying people when I left Jon. There were always questions I didn’t want to answer and really, I couldn’t. To this day, I had no answers. Sometimes shit happens and we just have to survive. But as appropriate as that little nugget of wisdom was to our current situation, I didn't think it would be something Lucas would want to hear.
We still sat close to each other and I reached out and laid my hand on his knee. “Ten years is a long time. Mine lasted six.” I squeezed his knee lightly and let go. “It does get better. Easier.”
“How long has it been for you?” Lucas looked at me with real interest. It was almost unnerving after our day of cat-and-mouse play, with my pursuit of a picture and some friendly banter. My God, it’s only been a day. Half a day. It seemed like a week had already gone by and I realized I had grown very, very tired. Jet-lag and sun and panic. Adrenaline and jumping off a ship. Etc. etc. etc. I wanted just to curl up, go to sleep and wake up in my own bed. I leaned back against the raft and closed my eyes.
“It has been two years. His name is Jon. I call him Snake.” I opened an eye and saw he too had leaned back, his face pointed up toward the stars.
We were quiet for a while. The raft floated along with a slight lulling motion that was soothing, barely perceptible on the calm black sea. My body began to relax and the siren call of sleep teased my eyes closed. I could hear Lucas’s breathing and feel the warm, gentle breeze on my face. The night air caressed my skin, but my clothing and hair were still wet. My braids remained magically intact, so the wet hair wouldn’t bother me much, but my pants clung to my legs and my tank was chilling even with the light breeze. Now with no adrenaline or movement, with a moment to be still, I realized how uncomfortable I was – and how exhausted.
“Lucas,” I rolled my head to face him, still lying back against the side of Ducky. “Do you think they will come back?”
“No. I don’t expect so.”
His eyes were still closed and he hadn’t moved. I wondered what he was thinking. Had his mind turned to his wife and the failure he'd flown thousands of miles to escape, or forget. We never forget. We can ignore and deny, but memory has a way of keeping us in the trap of life. It happened. Jon happened. I wondered what his wife’s name was. Is, I corrected. She hadn't died; she was just out there – somewhere. Living her life.
“We're of no value to them. They wanted the yacht.” Lucas continued with the line of conversation, reasoning away any attempt the pirates may make toward our demise. “Maybe something that was aboard. It would be costly for them to turn around and search for us. I think they won’t.”
“What about shiny shadow pirate?” I saw the dark-skinned man in my mind, lying still and quiet like a puddled shadow on the hall floor. I wanted to ask Lucas if he had killed him. If he had it in him to kill. I didn’t know how that would make me feel.
Lucas had opened his eyes and was looking at me now. He knew what I was thinking, I saw it in his eyes. I just looked back and waited for him to answer.
“The death of one pirate wouldn’t be enough to risk their catch. They were after a prize. I can't imagine revenge will sway them from keeping with their plan.” He didn’t look away. I wondered how much of my face he could see; we were still close, only a foot apart, had he seen me flinch at the word 'death'?
“So he was dead,” I whispered. A statement not a question. An acceptance of what I already guessed to be true.
Lucas turned slightly to face me. He sat up straight and reached out and took my hand. It was as warm and as dry as before we made our plunge. I briefly wondered how he managed to shed the ocean and become this warm when I had goose bumps rising on my skin in the breeze. I realized that the goose bumps had popped up with his touch. When he ran his thumb along the back of my hand, a chill went up my spine. I sat still, looking at him.
“He would have raped you, Sophia. He most likely would have killed you. Or he would have handed you to the other men who would have done worse things, and you would have wished he had killed you.”
I realized: it was true. I kill spiders and snakes on my farm. Lots of them. Not because I hate spiders and snakes, even though I really don’t like them much, especially the spiders. But because I balanced out a long time ago, that I could let them live and hope to live in peace with nature, but nature does what it's made to do. Snakes and spiders will bite, and their bites can kill. I love my horses, my dogs, and myself. The fear of having to rush one of the princes or my little niece to the hospital for a snakebite that I might have been able to prevent is all the justification I need. I don’t kill them because I am a killer. I do it to survive. Just as Lucas had done what he needed to, to help us both survive. I didn't feel mad or shocked or horrified; I understood, and in that understanding I was grateful.
I reached out and held his hand in both of mine. Giving it a light squeeze, I smiled, not knowing if he could see or not. “I know,” I assured him, “thank you.”
We sat like that for a while. The breeze picked up with the drop in temperature, and I shivered. Lucas ran his warm hands up my arms and back down again.
“You’re cold.” He leaned forward, reaching for the suitcase nearest his feet. “Do you have a jacket in your bag?”
“It’s no use, Lucas,” I waved at the bags, “they’re soaked through. Nothing is dry inside.” I suspected that by now, the wet clothes on the outside layers had surely seeped to the inner layers that had only been damp.
He turned back toward me, and his shape blocked out the sprinkle of stars behind him. Such a large man, I mused. Built like he can carry the weight of the world on shoulders that reach across the sky. I shook my head and wrapped my arms around myself. I was tired, and my mind was rambling again.
“Should we try to sleep? I don’t think we will get much done in the dark.”
Lucas sighed and slid closer. “Yes, we should sleep.” He pulled me against him, his light shirt still damp but warm from his body. I curled into him with my arms still wrapped around myself, his arms wrapped around me, and closed my eyes.
I suddenly felt strangely safe. I was adrift at sea with a stranger. There was no telling if the sunrise would bring hope, and I had no idea if we would stay on this raft named Ducky until we perished at sea, or, if by some miracle, we would be rescued. But as sleep began taking hold, I relaxed my body against this stranger who had saved me, and breathed in the scent of him that I was finally able to name. Beneath the salt water and scent of the sea, Lucas smelled like fields and sunshine and leather and comfort. Home.
Chapter 8
I awoke before the dawn with a cramped neck and one foot completely asleep. The sky had lightened to a gray-blue, hinting at yellow directly in front of me, beyond the nose of the raft.
I didn’t move. Not wanting to wake Lucas, who lay with his arms still wrapped around my shoulders, and his hands clasped under my right elbow. I flexed the muscles in my leg, trying to wake up my foot, wincing at the rush of pins and needles the movement brought. But I kept at it, flexing and releasing, adjusting slightly and relaxing against Lucas’s chest as the sun began to lighten the horizon with a brilliant orange-gold. The yellow slowly washed away all the gray, until finally, the sky was crisp and blue and the giant star was blinding me, tearing up my eyes and immediately warming my skin. It would be another hot day on the equator.
The rising sun and new day infused me with hope. In the dark, the night before, I hadn’t been able to see, or think, or plan. But now, I felt a surge of need. Need to plan, organize, figure out and achieve a goal. Overcome the challenge. I will not perish at sea. This would be my new mantra.