The Christmas Surprise

by R. R. Banks

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth I felt my face drop and saw the expression on Hunter's face change. He scrambled away from the edge of the water where he had paused to rinse his feet and we started running through the jungle toward the beach. I wasn't paying as close attention to where I was stepping as I usually did and the brush bit painfully into the bottoms of my feet, but I didn't stop. We needed to get to the shelter and find out how much damage the storm had caused, and if all of the work that we had put into the structure had been destroyed. The moment that I got to the beach I felt like everything inside of me emptied and I was completely deflated.

  The once pristine sand was now scattered with the branches, fronds, and ropes that had once been the shelter we had poured ourselves into building. Pieces of tattered fabric and broken pieces of the ship moved in the lazy waves that slid up the sand and then back, gradually pulling the destroyed remnants of their supplies back into the sea. I stepped out onto the beach and felt emotion catch in my chest. Fighting tears, I rushed toward the site where the shelter had been. It hunkered at the edge of the jungle in a heap of broken bamboo and torn leaves. I could see the crates of supplies that we had positioned inside tipped over, the contents that hadn't been tossed onto the beach spilled on what had been the floor.

  From the moment that I noticed the storm coming, I had been trying to deny it. I had been trying to keep memories forced down as far within me as I could possibly get them, not wanting to face them. I had struggled through the sound of the rain and the angry rumble of the thunder. Now, though, I couldn’t keep them away any longer. Brutal memories, moments that I had never wanted to see or think of again, sliced through my mind and forced themselves onto the backs of my eyelids as I squeezed my eyes closed so hard that I saw spots of light bursting in the darkness.

  "Fuck!" I screamed, picking up one of the fronds that had been a part of the roof and throwing it as far as I could into the jungle. "Motherfucking storm!" I kicked at another piece of the rubble and spun around so that I could scream at a different portion of the beach. “Son of a bitching cocksucking, assblasting piece of shit! Motherless whore! Fuck-stick shitheaded bat-brained dick splinter! Donkey-fucking three fingered cunt kicking blueballed limp dicked fuck monkey!”

  It felt amazing and I wanted to scream more, but I felt like I had used up all of my profanity creativity and couldn’t think of any other words to use.

  "Eleanor," Hunter's voice said from behind me.

  "No!" I shouted, whipping around to face him. "Don't you dare tell me to calm down. Are you seeing the same thing that I’m seeing?" I demanded.

  I gestured frantically around us at the beach.

  "Yes," Hunter said, taking a cautious step toward me and holding up a hand as if to calm me.

  Either that, or to act as a defensive tool in the event that I chose to fling part of the shelter at him.

  "Then you can see that everything we went through was for shit. It meant absolutely nothing."

  "It didn't mean nothing, Eleanor," Hunter said, approaching me. "We knew that that storm was going to come. We had to have shelter. We couldn't just sit around. We had to do something to help us handle being here, or even just to occupy our time."

  It was meant to be a comforting statement, but something about Hunter's words pushed me into even deeper fury.

  "To occupy our time?" I shouted. "Is this fun for you? Is this some sort of warped tropical vacation?" I kicked at the bamboo and palm fronds spread across the ground. "Well, let me tell you something. This is not a fucking vacation. There is no five-star hotel hiding on the other side of the rocks and we don't get to dress for dinner in the banquet hall. In fact, we barely get to fucking dress at all."

  I gestured toward Hunter who was wearing nothing but his pants, and then at myself and the wet castoffs I wore. His jaw set as he stared at me. This was ruining everything that we had experienced together and I was disgusted with myself for causing that, but I couldn’t stop the anger that was coursing through me. It was all too much. The night before I had been able to convince myself that everything was alright, but now it was like I was being punished, pushed back down to the ground where I should have always stayed.

  "This isn't our fault. We didn’t choose for this to happen.”

  "Yes, it is," she said. "It is my fault and I hate myself for it."

  "Why do you think that it's your fault?" Hunter asked. "You couldn't control the storm that made us crash here anymore than you could control the storm that happened last night."

  "But if it wasn't for me we wouldn't have been in that boat trying to get away from the ship so the storm wouldn't have mattered." I started to stomp away from the shelter and then whipped back around to face him again. "No. You know what? This isn't my fault. Everything that I do nowadays might turn to absolute shit because somewhere along the line I apparently lost all of my ability to function, but this isn't on me. This," she gestured wildly around herself, "this is Virgil's fault. This is all fucking Virgil's fault. If he hadn't been such a raging sleazeball this wouldn't have happened."

  I was fairly sure I could have come up with something better to call him if I had taken the time to really think about it, but at that moment that seemed like the most appropriate term. It didn’t have the flair of my previous tirade, but it would do.

  "He's not here," Hunter said. "He can't hurt you anymore."

  "Yes, he can!" I replied. "Can't you see that? He's always here. He's always around. As soon as he found out that I knew about everything that he had done, I signed my death warrant." I felt at once like I was being dramatic and like I was telling the truth for the first time in as long as I could remember. "He cheated people out of millions of dollars. He ran drugs. I wouldn't be surprised if there was blood on his hands. Do you really think that he isn't capable of making sure that I don’t go unpunished for humiliating him with our divorce and then holding the evidence that I have over his head? He sent men after me. The cruise ship wasn’t the first time that it happened. They’ve found me in the grocery store. They’ve found me while I was jogging. They accosted me while I was fucking trying on shoes for the wedding. I had to hobble over to a group of salespeople wearing two different heights of heels just so that I wasn’t sitting alone with them.”

  “Have they ever said anything to you?” Hunter asked.

  I nodded, feeling as though I had gotten myself onto a slippery slope. I had already revealed more than I ever intended to and now I could just feel him scrutinizing me and everything that I had ever told him, but I was already on my way now. I couldn’t go back and pretend that I hadn’t opened my mouth and let all of this fall out.

  “They say that Virgil just wants to talk to me, but when was the last time you needed to send multiple very large, very scary men after a woman just because you wanted to have a conversation with her?" I shook my head and clawed my hands back through my hair to get it out of my face. They caught on tangles that pulled at my scalp and frustrated me even further. As soon as I got off this damn island I was spending three days in the shower and using ten bottles of shampoo. "I guarantee you that he wouldn't mind if I had just tipped off of that ship and never came back up. He only wants to see me so that he can have the fun of getting rid of me himself. He just wants me to disappear so that I won't be any trouble for him anymore. He'll do whatever it takes and send whoever it takes to make sure that it happens."

  “Well,” Hunter said, his eyes looking slightly lighter, “maybe that’s what happened.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, feeling confused.

  “Those guys who were chasing us on the cruise ship saw us jump off into the water. Gavin’s boat was too far away for them to actually get a good look at us climbing on. To them, we did just tip off of the boat and disappear.”

  I stepped back and let out a long sigh.

  I never thought that I was going to reach a point in my life when I should feel relieved that I was stranded on an uninhabited, storm-battered island because
the alternative was worse. That’s a somber realization.

  "Come on," Hunter said, reaching for my hand. "Let’s take a break from the shelter for a bit. Come talk to me.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hunter

  Eleanor seemed reluctant to take my hand, but she finally did and I started leading her further down the beach. After the rather flailing but truly impressive display of temper and fury that she had shown, I felt like she needed to get away from the visual of the tattered shelter for a few minutes. I understood what she was feeling. We had put an incredible amount of work into that structure, and as primitive and lacking in amenities as it was, it was supposed to be something that we could rely on for as long as this nightmare of a detour continued. Seeing it ripped apart by a storm wasn’t just upsetting because the work was gone. Part of me imagined what it would have been like had we been in that shelter when the storm hit. We really thought that it would have provided us some level of protection. Now that we had seen the aftermath, though, we knew that it was a far more likely scenario that we would have ended up palm tree shish-kabobs and would likely never have been found. It felt like just another reminder of what couldn’t be trusted.

  I tried to get us far enough from what remained of our shelter that we weren't walking through the pieces of it that the storm had thrown across the sand, but no matter how far we walked there wasn't a stretch of the sand that wasn't studded with pieces of bamboo, palm fronds, and other debris. It was surprising in a way, looking like there were more pieces of it once it was blown apart than there had been when it was actually solid. We walked along in silence until we got to the edge of the water and stood letting the cool foam wash up over our feet.

  "How much do you really know about what your husband did?" I asked.

  Oh, what the grimy-living-holy fuck was that? Where did that question come from? I had absolutely no intention of continuing on with that train of conversation and yet…there it was.

  "Ex-husband," Eleanor said with bitterness in her voice.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "Your ex-husband."

  She shook her head and stared out over the waves. Her hand didn't grip mine tightly, but I continued to hold it, not wanting the connection between us to end. I couldn’t get the thoughts of our night together out of my mind. I could still feel her skin against my palms and her breath on my neck. I could still hear the whimpering, cooing sounds that I had made tumble from her lips just from the light touch of my hand on her breasts. I craved more of her, but I could also feel my heart drawing toward her as much as my body was. Every time that she mentioned her ex-husband and everything that he had put her through, I got angrier, filled with a primal need to protect her.

  I wondered if she could feel that energy coming off of me, but by the way that she held herself, I doubted it. She seemed smaller and withdrawn, the age more apparent around her eyes. I knew that she was self-conscious about them. So much of how she presented herself seemed focused around concealed the years that made themselves visible in the corners of her eyes, but I preferred her this way. Each of those lines meant something. They carried with them the testament of all that she had survived and all that had persevered even through the suffering that she had endured. I wondered which of those lines had been there, even in their earliest incarnations, when she met Virgil. Which of them had formed from the days that she had spent smiling and laughing before he darkened her life? Those were the lines that were the most precious. They were the ones that proved that no matter what he put her through, she was still, at her very essence, her.

  "I'm not sure," she finally said. "Obviously I don't know the full extent of everything. I'm sure that if I did I wouldn’t be standing here with you.” She gave a short laugh even though I wasn’t exactly sure what she found funny about that. “I know just enough that it is dangerous to him."

  "What do you mean?"

  Eleanor looked up at me and stared into my eyes for several long seconds as if she was trying to find something in them.

  "When I met him, I was completely starry-eyed. His confidence and the power that he seemed to have absolutely won me over. I hate even admitting that about myself." She looked back over the ocean. "I wasn't always this person. I used to be so much stronger. I never would have wanted someone to have power like that over me.”

  She had expressed the same sentiment to me before, but this time it sounded more like she was trying to convince herself.

  "I like the person you are," I said.

  Eleanor gave another short, emotionless laugh.

  "You don't even know me," she said. She glanced up at me and then away again. "I don't even know me anymore. I told you that I used to spend a lot of time outside."

  "Yes,” I said. “But you didn’t have the right uniform so you weren’t allowed to go on Cub Scout campouts.”

  She looked at me with a glimmer of a question in her eyes and then they widened and she nodded.

  "Right. Well, before all that, I would go camping with my father and my brothers. We did it every summer. We never really knew when we were going to go. My father was not exactly a planner. He would just get up one morning and come into our rooms fully dressed in his camping gear and tell us it was time to go. We'd be on the road right after breakfast."

  "Do you still camp with them?"

  I knew that she was going to say that she didn't. It was obvious that she had separated herself from that part of her long ago. I just didn't want her to stop talking.

  "No," she said, shaking her head. "We stopped when I was a teenager."

  "Why?"

  Her head dropped and I saw a tear forming in the corner of her eye. I wanted to brush it away, but I worried the touch would break the stream of thought that she was now following. It seemed like something that she had had coiled tightly inside of her was starting to loosen and I wanted to give her the opportunity to let out whatever she needed to.

  "There was a storm," she said weakly, as if she was unsure of whether she even wanted to say the words. "The weather was supposed to be clear the whole weekend. We were out on the lake in the little canoe that my father loved. The clouds came in so fast. We barely had time to react. It was like it went from day to night in seconds. By the time that we headed back to shore the rain was already making it almost impossible for us to see. My brother stood up to try to grab a flashlight from our kit." She drew in a shuddering breath and I tightened my grip on her hand. "He went over the edge. We could see his face bobbing in the water in the flashes of lightning. I could see his mouth open. I knew he was screaming, but the thunder and the rain on the water was so loud that I couldn't hear him. We didn't find him until the next day."

  "I'm so sorry," I said, not sure what else to say.

  Now it was painfully clear why she had been so afraid when the storms came. I wished that I had known the story before so that I could have comforted her.

  "We tried to keep up our trips after that, but it was just too hard. They got shorter and then we missed a year. They just tapered off. My father put all of his camping stuff in storage and we just never talked about it again. Storms have been really hard for me ever since."

  "I'm glad that I was with you last night, then," I said.

  She looked at me with a blend of emotion in her eyes and I immediately felt a pang of guilt. She turned away from me, dropping my hand and walking a few steps in the opposite direction. Her head was down as if she felt bad about the way that she had weathered the storm the night before rather than spending it afraid and sad as she imagined was her usual response.

  "Eleanor," I said, starting toward her.

  "Is there something that you wanted to talk to me about?" she asked, turning to face me.

  I didn’t know what to say. Something had shifted in her tone and I felt like she had put everything away in a neat little file cabinet, closed the drawer, and walked away, not ready to see or think about it.

  “I just wanted to make you feel better,” I said, feeling like the sentimen
t fell flat. “I want you to know that I’m here to help you and protect you if we face any danger here.”

  "I feel like I was already in some pretty serious danger literally running for my life through a cruise ship."

  "I know and I'm sorry that I didn't find you faster, but the point is that I did find you. I found you and I got you off of the ship safely."

  "You threw me off of the side of the ship."

  "I didn't throw you. I helped you jump."

  I absolutely threw her.

  "And now we are on quite literally a deserted island with absolutely no way of getting off."

  "I know. There’s not really anything that I can do about that. I wish that there was. That wasn’t really what I thought was going to happen when I got us off the ship.”

  “Really?” Eleanor asked. “What exactly was going through your head when you scooped me up and tossed me into the ocean? How did that situation play out in your mind?”

  “I didn’t honestly have any plan beyond that. It was a bit of a split-second decision. I hadn’t really thought anything through.”

  “Good to know that I’m in such analytical and quick-thinking hands.”

  I smiled at her, relieved to hear some of the levity in her voice. Eleanor let out a sigh and looked around. It was almost like she was seeing the damage from the storm for the first time, as if her mind had erased her reaction and was allowing her to re-evaluate. This time it seemed that she was seeing the carnage from a more practical and logical place rather than one fueled by emotion, and that was a place where I was comfortable camping out for a while.

  “So, what do we do now?” she asked.

  I looked around with her, trying to let my eyes follow the same path that hers did so that I could see what she had and hopefully get some of the same perspective.

  “I don’t know,” I finally said. “There’s so much to do, I don’t even know where to start.”

  Eleanor let out a long sigh.