by Marni MacRae
Lucas didn’t explore without me. I wondered at that at first, thinking it was a sweet gesture to wait until I could walk. But when I asked him why he hadn’t gone off into the jungle in search of a Starbucks or a tree house, he explained that was on his mental list of stupid things.
“What stupid things?”
“When you mentioned that we might be happy here, enjoy the stranding, hunt for food, find water, and not do stupid things that would get us killed. Well, I started to make a list of stupid things.”
“Finding Starbucks is not stupid, that is on the list of survival skills.”
“Wandering into the jungle and leaving your injured woman alone is pretty stupid though.”
I had sighed and basked in being called his woman, deciding sacrificing the Starbucks was worth it.
“So what other stupid things are on your list?” We had been lying under the stars, opting to sleep below the tree line so we could see the sky and wake with the sun.
“Swimming with sharks.”
“Agreed, really, really, stupid.”
“Befriending cannibals.”
“Is that an option?”
“Robinson Crusoe seemed to think so.”
“I don’t think Friday was a cannibal.”
“Well he suggested eating people, so I'm going to go with cannibal. Crusoe was lucky, at any moment Friday could have snacked on him, so I propose a house rule or island rule; no befriending cannibals.”
“OK, I second.”
“Stupid item number four; no swimming without a lifeguard.”
“Oh, come on, really?”
“Between your reef attack, my metal can attack and jumping off a yacht, I think we've both had enough water drama. Let’s not test fate. Swim where I can see you and let you know when the sharks close in.”
“Oh, then it circles back to stupid item number two.”
“Sure, but it’s not just sharks that can getcha, there are sting rays and jelly fish.”
“Sea urchins.” I added, trying to be helpful.
“Well if I step on a sea urchin you can just pee on my foot, it’s rarely life threatening.”
“Why do I have to pee on it? You can pee on it.”
“Are you saying you would refuse to treat me medically?”
“Peeing is not medical treatment, and besides you would have better aim, I would just, well, spray. House/island rule; either of us steps on an urchin and you get to administer the pee medicine.”
Lucas had laughed and curled into me. “I’ll second.” He kissed me thoroughly and then whispered, “Good night, pumpkin.”
It was now two days after our drinks on the beach. I was champing at the bit to do anything but lay around while Lucas got to fish and collect firewood and coconuts. I discovered he climbed the trees to get the fruit and walked around practically flaunting his ability to move upright. Well, now I was beyond ready.
Today was the day I got to walk.
Lucas was off in search of a crutch for me. I examined my leg one last time. At night, I had been applying aloe, to help with the tightness of the skin so the wound wouldn’t tear, and to assist in healing. In the daytime, I let it air out. My waist and hip looked fine, the scratches and scrapes would fade in time, but my leg still looked angry.
The wound was closing nicely, the staples did their job, it didn’t seem infected, and the pain was more than cut in half now. It was so shocking to look down and see one leg so smooth, a little tan now, but with creamy skin, the other a mangled mess in comparison. But I sighed and was grateful we had dodged the bullet of infection. I most likely would have died on the island, and Lucas would have been left alone.
I wrapped up my leg with the long strips of my dress. Lucas washed the strips every morning, using some of our precious clean water. They were bone dry by the time night fell, and it was time to wrap up again. I was wrapping it now to keep everything together while I attempted my stroll. No need to risk a remission due to wounds opening.
I sat on the beach in my now usual spot, staring at the same perfect, pristine, view. I wasn’t bored with it yet. Not even a little. After we had finished our beers and my Mudslide, Lucas’s Piña Colada, I had asked him again if he wanted to leave. The weighing of home and loved ones worrying, and the happiness we felt here, was a difficult one to sort out. We talked long into the night, sharing our motivations behind why we both had chosen to live in seclusion, to live on farms and be self-sufficient. Neither of us missed the city or desired to go there, even to visit. Our dream vacations had been to escape even further, to an island where there were even fewer people.
And then we landed here, where there's such beauty, it's more than feasible to survive, and we could survive happily with each other. Before we drifted off to sleep, Lucas and I had both admitted that we didn’t want to leave. The biggest pull back to the States were our animals and our guilt over our family’s concern. But given that we had no power over the fact that we were here, we decided not to indulge the guilt or worry, but to take each day and be grateful that we had survived and we had love.
Looking out over the water, patiently waiting for my crutch, I wondered now if we did spot a boat or a plane, would we signal them? Would we hide in the jungle? Would we be this happy together if we had to struggle through the seasons, pay bills, feed cattle, give sheep shots, chain up, and shovel snow? Would store-bought tuna be as delicious? Would our love be as passionate?
Lucas strolled toward me now with a crutch held in the air in triumph, and I felt deep in my heart that I would love him even in the snow. I hoped and prayed, as now was my habit, that seasons and bills and the real world wouldn’t make a difference to him either. But I was too afraid to ask.
I smiled and waved and focused on this day. Today I would walk. Today Lucas did love me.
A line from Gone with the Wind popped into my head, and I opted to agree with Scarlett, I would worry about it tomorrow.
* * *
The crutch worked perfectly. It was more of a sturdy cane with a knobby end that was easy to grip. Lucas lifted me to standing, and I adjusted my weight, taking a moment to center my balance. I took a step, bearing heavily on the cane, applying very little pressure to my wounded leg. Then another step and another, and I was laughing and hobbling down the beach.
It was difficult going with the loose shifting sand, so we took it slow, meandering toward Lucas’s fishing spot. We paused now and again, taking in the view of the thick jungle on one side, and the rainbow hues of blue ocean on the other. We neared the peninsula, and Lucas guided me to a log in the shade where we sat to relax. Here the beach turned sharply. If we followed the bend around the corner, we could see the other side of the island.
“Please Lucas, come on, you’re such a jailer!”
“Really Sophia, you sound like a teenage girl who wants to go on a date past curfew.” He flipped my ponytail and stuck out his tongue. He had been becoming easier in his manner as the days went by, not the man on the Lady Sun, who wouldn’t even talk to me, but still sexier than ever.
“Well, you are acting like my parent trying to tell me what I can do. You’re not the boss of me, Lucas Lael.”
Lucas threw back his head and laughed, “Oh, OK, Sophia, you win this battle. We can go exploring. But we rest when I think you need it, and no going into the jungle, too many things to trip you up. Let’s just keep to the beach and round the bend, see if there's a resort or a Starbucks.”
He leaned over and kissed me, one of the things I loved about him. He loved to touch, to kiss. I wrapped my arms around his neck and returned the kiss.
“I promise I'll be good, and I will more than repay you for indulging me.”
“Mm … you should have led with that. But promise of payment seals it. Off to explore!”
We drank a bit of water from the bottle Lucas carried and then made our way toward the water. We agreed it would be much easier to walk on the wet sand near the surf than struggle along near the trees. It was another typi
cal hot, muggy day, which also contributed to our lazy stroll. We reached the wet sand, and I took a pause, assessing my leg, the pain level, trying to tell if I had put stress on the staples. Amazingly, I felt great. The wound still hurt like a beast had gnawed on me, but it was tolerable, and I attributed it to healing. The wound’s way of letting me know it was still there, but as long as I was nice to it, it would be nice to me.
I turned my face in the direction we were heading. Having sorted out my inner compass, I judged that we had landed on the Northwest side of the island. I couldn’t really judge the shape as the shoreline, and the jungle itself, blocked any view further than a hundred yards or so. But now, once we rounded this northeastern bend, we would most likely be heading due south, or southeast, depending on how sharp the bend turned. I felt better having some bearing and picked up my pace in anticipation.
“You know we will most likely be seeing the exact same view as we do here, just a different direction.”
“You can’t tell me you aren’t excited to see it though, to know.” I grinned at him and punched him in the shoulder, the one that had been wounded when jumping off the Lady Sun. In seven days it had healed almost completely, it was now just a pink line along his bicep. “Come on, Luke,”
“Don’t call me Luke.”
“Come on Lukey, you have to have some adventurous blood in you, you know ‘to explore strange new places, to boldly go where no one has gone before!’" I held a fist to the sky in an interpretation of Captain Kirk in my mind.
“Sorry, I'm not a Trekkie, or a Lukey, just Lucas. And I love adventure, as well as exploring. I wasn’t trying to quash your inner Columbus or Cap’n Kirk or whatever, I’m just sayin’ the view most likely won’t change.”
The timing couldn’t have been more perfectly ironic. We had been walking a half circle beach and came to the beach that ran north/south. It was different. And at that moment everything changed.
“I know where we are.”
Chapter 18
“What?” Lucas grabbed my arm as I sank to the wet sand, steadying me to float gracefully down, rather than plop, which would have most likely popped a staple.
“I know where we are, Lucas. I've seen this before.”
“Where? What are you saying, you’ve been here?”
“No, I viewed it from space, on Google Earth. Look,” I waved my arm at the view in front of us. Our island stretched out like a long green snake with white sand fringe. But there, just in view, was another island separated by only a short span of water. It was directly east of us, rounding the bend had brought it in view. The water on this side was calm, no waves, clear as glass and a lovely pale, pale, sea-foam green. Further out it became a light aquamarine, and then a deep blue, but not like the open ocean on the other side of the island. Because this wasn’t open ocean, it was the center of an atoll.
“See that island, beyond it there is another, and another after that, if we follow this beach I'm betting we'll see another island south of this one. This atoll is a giant circle of islands similar to the Maldives, but on a smaller scale.”
“How do you know this? I mean, couldn’t we be back in the Maldives?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. The uninhabited islands there are small, privately owned by resorts for people like us to get away on. But nothing the size of this.” I waved my hand down the long beach; it had to stretch a mile before a clump of jungle blocked our view. “This is too valuable, they would have developed it. From the Googling, and research, and satellite snooping I did before I came, I'm pretty sure this is Peros Banhos.”
“Seriously, Sophie, how can you remember that, or even know that? Sometimes I think you swallowed a librarian or had a microchip implanted in your brain.”
I smiled and said, “Hey you know the Super Bowl is in a few weeks, who's your money on?”
“Completely off topic. Bengals and the Seahawks.”
“Seriously, the Bengals?”
“Yeah, what of it?”
“When was their last super bowl?”
“1988.”
“What was the score?”
“20 to 16, San Francisco.”
“Have they ever won a Super bowl?”
“No, but I have hope.”
“I rest my case.”
“You were making a case?”
“Look Lucas, you remember nonsense that interests you, and I remember nonsense that interests me. I happened to spend way too many hours searching for deserted islands when I planned my trip. Peros Banhos was a really interesting story, as well as one of the more beautiful places on earth. So yeah, I do think that’s where we are, but there's one way to know for sure.”
“OK, how?”
“We find the island with the house on it.”
* * *
Lucas seemed interested to hear the story of the island, so I began telling him what little bits I could remember. I do have a great memory, but it’s far from photographic.
“So from what Wikipedia told me -- ”
“You know, for a lady who runs a farm,” Lucas interrupted right off the bat, “You sure are plugged in. So far I know that you shop on Amazon, you Google everything including Earth, you quote movies and make pop culture references as if the cast of Lost are your good friends, and you seem to have Wikipedia pretty well memorized.”
“Hmm, well I have no excuse for using the tools of education and entertainment at my disposal … do you wanna hear Wiki’s story?” I could tell he was only teasing me, so I didn’t take offense. But I did give him my stern schoolteacher face, which he obligingly bowed to.
“Yes oh wise Wiki, tell me your story.”
I cleared my throat and continued. “So, Peros Banhos is in an atoll chain that is smaller and more scattered than the Maldives. I think it's called Chagas or Chagos, I just remember it means wound in Portuguese, which, at the time, sounded ominous.”
“Still does.”
“Yeah, I agree, especially since we're now residing on ‘wound’. So it turns out, the U.K. owns this area now, and I do know that the U.S. has a naval base about a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred miles from here, at the lowest and largest island. Diego Garcia. You might've heard of it, it’s like our jump off point for fighting in this region.”
“Yeah, it sounds familiar, but it might just be because it sounds like a Spanish superhero.”
I laughed, “Yeah, Diego is also a cartoon character my nephews love, but anyway, so the islanders that lived here were kicked off the islands in the seventies. I thought it was pretty brutal, like the good old U.S. putting the Indians on reservations.”
“Typical.”
“Uh huh, so then when the islanders took them to court, the U.K., to try to reclaim their islands, they responded by declaring the whole area a preserve. The water, the fish, the birds, all of it. The reefs here are some of the healthiest in the world, and it became one of the largest preserves on earth.”
“So the natives won’t have a chance to come back, and even if they did, they wouldn't be allowed to touch anything, so they couldn’t survive.”
“Exactly. Sneaky, like smallpox in blankets.”
“Huh, so there are houses here?”
“Well yeah, that’s what I was getting to. The atoll Peros Banhos, and another atoll about twenty miles to the east, Salomon, were settled. They had a church, a school, huts, and a manager’s house, a pier for loading off coconut crops and coconut oils and stuff. It’s been forty years now, so the jungle has reclaimed most of it, but they are on the furthest southern island if I remember correctly.”
“Wow, that’s just crazy. I feel bad for the natives, but I’m curious to see the buildings.”
“I didn't dig up much online about the area, I was focused more on the Maldives at the time. I do remember reading that the area is patrolled, and yachts can get permits to anchor and explore the islands, they just can’t disturb anything.”
“No fishing?”
“Especially no fishing,
or at least I'm sure no commercial fishing. I don’t actually know. That is all Wiki told me.”
“So now we can either explore and set up camp here and hope a yacht comes to this island or we can make our way to the other island with the house and expect visitors.”
“Yeah pretty much, the whole atoll is like sixty miles around or something like that, I remember it was a good size. Salomon was a lot smaller, that's why I figure we're in Peros Banhos.”
“OK, I believe you and your friend Wiki. Let’s head back and gather our things up, tomorrow we'll move to this side of the island. It’s more protected and looks like this area is going to be great for fishing.”
“I agree, plus the water is shallow and clear, so we can swim and not worry about sharks.”
“Island rules still apply though.”
“Island rules.” I sighed and took a swallow of water. “Maybe tomorrow we can penetrate that jungle and see if we can find something of use. This is a decent-sized island, the natives had to have used it to live on.”
“Let’s sit and form a plan. Our best bet for getting home might be to get to the other island and wait for tourists.”
And there it was. The unspoken question. We could stay. We both realized with the size of the atoll, and even with a patrol, it would be easy to hide in the jungle until we were old and gray, avoid all ships that anchored, build a hut. Eat tuna, make love. Very Blue Lagoon, but without the scary parts. Or we could do the mature, responsible thing, and move to the southern island, flag a ride home. Deal with the red tape and the fallout of the pirates, and the Lady Sun. Go home, feed our horses, our cattle, and visit each other now and again. Maybe Lucas would move to my farm. Not likely. He would want me to move to his ranch. I wasn’t against it, but the details to work it out would be nauseating and tedious.
Now I was thinking too far ahead.