by Ann Kelley
Sand is creeping over the little girl’s face as we watch. Mrs. Campbell suddenly pulls the zip up over Sandy’s bloody head and gestures to us to follow her back to the shelter. She gathers the older girls together and tells them what we already know.
“She’s dead, she’s dead!” May starts screaming, and Mrs. Campbell slaps her on the cheek, but not before Carly gets the message.
The little girl tries to run to where her sister lies but Mrs. Campbell grabs her and hugs her tightly.
“No, don’t look, don’t look.”
Carly doesn’t cry. She just closes her eyes, her mouth a thin straight line, and curls up in Mrs. Campbell’s arms.
three
MAY 13
DAY 2
We’ve survived. Barely. But last night was the worst night of my life. Sandy is… my God, I can’t even write it. Sandy is dead.
There was a terrible storm and now Sandy is dead. Mrs. Campbell says we have to keep calm.
I wish Mom was here. I wish she hadn’t changed her mind about coming.
I try to think back to the day before yesterday. To a normal life.
“Bonnie, sweetie, Bonz… where are you?”
“Hi, Mom, I’m here.” I’m sitting in the shade of a huge fig tree, on the steps of Lan Kua’s house. His five little brothers and one sister are giggling and pushing one another off the steps.
It’s a hot, sticky day, hotter even than usual, and very still, the air full of the smell of burning charcoal and a sickly scent of rotting lotus blossoms.
One of the kids is poking at an ants’ nest under the tangling roots of the tree. Lan Kua takes his stick away. The five-year-old looks astonished.
“There you are! Hi, kids! Sawat dit!” Mom’s wearing baggy white shorts and a black vest, flip-flops, and big sunglasses, and she’s fanning herself with a folded magazine. Her face is shiny with perspiration. She sits next to me on the step.
“Bonz, do you mind if I don’t come on the island trip?”
“No, that’s okay with me.”
“Sure, sweets? You know I get seasick in a rowing boat, and anyway”—she stands and shimmies her feet in the sandy earth, wiggling her hips—“I was invited to a party at the base.” In front of Lan Kua! I’m so embarrassed. She’s forty, for goodness’ sake.
“I’m cool, Mom.” I wish she’d go and leave me in peace.
“Okay, I’ll let your Mrs. Campbell know. She’s perfectly able to look after you all, I’m sure.”
“Yes, of course.” I want Lan Kua to know that this isn’t some silly girls’ outing that I’m going on. “Mrs. Campbell’s all about survival in the wilderness, and that sort of thing.”
“Well, I hardly think survival skills will be necessary. You’re only going for three nights.” Mom laughs. “Lemonade’s ready, dear, are you coming?”
“Lemonade’s for kids, Mom. Mrs. Campbell swears by English tea. Earl Grey would be delightful.” Hey, I sound exactly like her! Mrs. Campbell’s originally Scottish, from Edinburgh, like us, but she lived in England for a while, and she knew the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. She’s going to teach me how to play the guitar.
“Hmm, Earl Grey tea and survival don’t seem to go together somehow.”
“Mom, she’s a civilized survivor.” Mrs. Campbell—Layla—is in her mid-twenties, and I don’t think Mom likes her very much. She’s very pretty, with curly red-brown hair to her shoulder blades, fair skin, and brown eyes. She lives in Pattaya, which Mom says is a glorified brothel. It’s an R and R destination for U.S. troops, and I’m not allowed to go there without her or Dad. We’ve met Mrs. Campbell only a few times. She couldn’t be more different from Mrs. O’Hanlon.
I overheard Mom and her friends talking about Mrs. Campbell last week. They were gossiping about her because she was married to an American flyer who died in enemy action last year and now people say that she is being “kept” by a senior member of staff. Whatever that means.
“She should have been sent back stateside long ago,” I heard one of them say once. Then someone called her “a clever survivor.” I expect that’s how she got to be cadet leader.
I feel sorry for her. Imagine the man you love dying a year or so after you marry him! They’re jealous because she’s young and pretty. Jas and I love her.
“Hi, Bonn, you ready for a trip to paradise?” It’s my best friend, Jas. Jas makes me laugh. Like my dad, her dad is in the USAF at Utapao. He’s a colonel. Our maid, Lek, is married to their cook.
Jas has Jody and Natalie in tow, as usual. Jody is her shadow and Natalie is Jody’s little sister. Jas is so pretty she attracts people to her as if she were a movie star. She has a permanent tan and a figure to die for. She’s only my age but she looks sixteen. I’m taller but my figure is straight up and down, no boobs yet, just buds. Mom says I shouldn’t worry; she was the same, and clothes hang better from a flat chest. I’m not interested in clothes. I live in shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops. I should have been a boy, Mom says.
Jas carries her baby brother on one hip. Her mother gets really bad migraines and has to lie down in a darkened room for days. She can’t even stand the sound of the ceiling fan.
“Yeah, I’m ready. You?” I say to her. “I’ve got my new flashlight, sleeping bag… not sure what book I’m taking.”
“I’ve got something you might like,” Mom says to me.
“Mikey’s coming,” Jody interrupts.
“Sure he is.” Jas knows about Jody’s imaginary friend and humors her.
Natalie is quiet. She’s a timid child: scared of the guard with one leg; scared of the scabby dogs that roam the beach; scared of her own shadow. She’s nine but acts younger: sucks her thumb and drags a scraggy piece of blanket with her wherever she goes. Their mother shouts at them a lot. I think she’s too young to be away from home for three nights, but maybe she’ll enjoy it.
“What does Mikey look like?” I ask Jody.
“Don’t be silly, you can see what he looks like.” She points vaguely to one side and smiles at her invisible pal.
“Oh, okay, yeah, that’s Mikey? Aren’t I stupid! Hello there, Mikey.” I shake an invisible hand and Jas and I giggle.
“Come on, gang.” Mom picks up Lan Kua’s three-year-old sister, and the other little cherubs follow us, chanting, “Leem-on-ay, leem-on-ay, leem-on-ay…”
I chant, “Earl Grey tea, Earl Grey tea, Earl Grey tea…”
That night after supper Jas comes over, as usual. I have the ceiling fan on high, making the pale blue cotton curtains dance over the screen windows. Green geckos wait patiently on the ceiling and walls for passing insects. The first time I saw one I thought it was a plastic toy. Jas says they have these amazing suckers on their footpads that allow them to walk up and down anything, including mirrors and glass, and upside down.
We lie on my bed and listen to the night—the patter of small lapping waves on the beach beyond the dirt road, the shrill squeak of cicadas, the big tokay lizards calling. They usually repeat their call three or four times, but tonight one repeats the metallic song, tokay… tokay… tokay… tokay… tokay.
“Did you hear that? Five times. That’s bad luck. It means death,” Jas says.
“Yeah, death for a mouse,” I say and laugh. I’m not superstitious.
“Who’s all coming on the trip?”
“Well, not my mom.”
“Yeah, shame. I like your mom.”
“It doesn’t matter. There’s only four juniors—Jody, Natalie, Sandy, and Carly—and us seniors—Hope, Arlene, May, you, and me. Should be great.”
“Arlene and May! Oh my God!” Jas exclaims.
“Yeah, I know, they’re complete airheads. But we’ll have each other.”
“What do you think of Hope?”
“I feel sorry for her, kind of. Her father’s an asshole.” Mom would hate me using that word.
“And she looks like him, doesn’t she? She’s got so little going for her.”
“We’ll be extra nice to
her.”
“Okay.”
“Who’ll she share a tent with?” I ask.
“Don’t look at me! I’m not going to be that nice!”
LATER, SAME DAY.
I must record everything right now. I need to remember it all as clearly as possible. So much is happening, and my head is spinning, and it hurts. Don’t know how I hurt it—a branch? Or did I fall and bang it on a rock? Maybe.
The winds have let up a little but not much, though the wind doesn’t sound so awful in daylight. Sea dark and huge. No sun. Mustard tinge to low clouds. Humidly warm, as if we’re in a washing machine before the drying cycle.
All of us have cuts and scratches—from flying debris, I suppose.
Can’t find first-aid kit. All the seniors tried to find it, scoured the sand and the scrub behind the beach, but no luck.
We’ve put a screen of palm fronds around Sandy’s body. The sleeping bag is practically buried by sand already. It’s so awful. An unending nightmare. I can’t think straight. My head hurts. Is this really happening?
I just want to be home with Mom and Dad. The hardest part is… that we can’t contact anyone! We have to wait until the boat comes back before anyone knows what’s happened to us.
Mrs. Campbell says we must dry our sleeping bags: It’s a priority. We hang them up inside out on shrubs or spread them on the big rocks, weighing them down with stones, and we light a fire nearby in a shallow pit. Matches and food supplies are safe in an airtight box in Mrs. Campbell’s kit. My poor journal is wet, but I’m trying to dry it on a rock out of the wind. Some of the pages are stuck together. But at least it’s survived.
Natalie cut her leg when she fell on jagged rocks last night and is whimpering like a puppy. I think she needs stitches, but what do I know? Worse, she’s lost her shoes.
“Oh, that’s nothing to cry about,” Mrs. Campbell assures Nat. “Don’t be a baby.” She cleans the wide gash with clean water from a water bottle and gives her a Hershey bar, which the little girl eats greedily.
Most of us went to sleep in sweatshirts and T-shirts and shorts over swimsuits. They are pretty well soaked, but even without sun the air is warm and we strip down to our swimmers and hang our wet things on a tree close to the fire.
“Okay.” Mrs. Campbell claps her hands. “Now that you’ve got your sleeping bags drying, let’s see what we can find. The wind’s died down a little and I’m sure there’ll be food, water, and, most important, the first-aid kit there somewhere.” We stand up and brush the sand from our bodies. “Hope, you stay and look after the juniors.” Mrs. Campbell waves her hand in Hope’s direction, but doesn’t meet her eye, ignoring Hope’s look of dismay. The rest of us set off, our heads bent once again into the wind, sea spray, and sand.
We find the cases of bottled water quite easily, buried beneath sand drifts but otherwise undamaged. There’s nothing to be seen of our tents, not even on the tops of the remaining upright coconut palms; our campfire has been blown away. The tide line is littered with branches, coconuts, dead birds, dead fish, and huge hunks of seaweed like giant rice noodles smeared with soy sauce. Jody, who has tagged along with us, sits crying quietly on the sand while we work our way through the debris, a dead seabird in her lap, its white neck broken. I crouch to push her hair from her eyes and plant a kiss on her head.
Suddenly I see the tin barbecue, jammed between the branches of a casuarina tree. Like a metal nest. Nearby we find the bag of charcoal. The brown paper wrapping has been shredded, but the damp charcoal is intact. Jas and I are desperate to find the first-aid kit, but it seems to have vanished along with the tents. We search in the bushes and find two of the backpacks—mine (Thank you, God) and May’s, full of crap like makeup and face cream and hair curlers. She’s ridiculous.
“Oh, May, face cream!” Arlene screeches, grabbing the jar. She takes off, dodging between fallen tree trunks, May screaming after her, “You pig, you pig, bring it back. It’s mine!”
The other backpacks have disappeared, maybe buried or blown away. Mrs. Campbell still has her nylon bag. She’s never without it and managed to hold on to it last night. Her guitar is gone, though.
“Enough, girls,” she says. “We can come back later.”
We are blown by the fierce wind back to our rocky shelter.
“If we’d pitched camp here—” I start, but Jas holds the palm of her hand up to stop me.
“Nobody could have known,” she says. “All we wanted to do was sit around the fire and watch the sunset.”
Thunder still rolls across the massive sea, and great flashes continue all around us.
Once, Lan Kua told me a folktale about how thunder and lightning come about. There’s a beautiful woman who lives in the sky and has a huge glinting diamond. A giant (or is it an ogre?) covets the diamond and asks her for it, but she won’t give it to him. In a rage he throws his ax at her, but it misses and hits the ground, burying itself with a great crash. Lan Kua explained that the flashes of lightning are the shafts of light sparkling from the diamond and the thunder is the crash of the ax. I must tell the juniors this story once we’re all together again.
“Look over there. Toward the mainland. What is it?” Mrs. Campbell points at a billowing of thick smoke like black roses in the sky. “Looks like an explo—”
“A lightning strike? Maybe the storm is centered over Utapao?” I interrupt her, cold at the thought of war coming to Thailand. Of course they aren’t explosions. They can’t be. I glance at Jas. She’s looking calm, as usual. No, they can’t be explosions.
Those of us who can have spent the rest of the day searching for firewood, which isn’t that easy, what with the heavy rain. Jas and I put our efforts into finding firewood and trying to dry out broken-off branches to put on the fire. It’s a full-time job. The others are useless. May is putting her recovered curlers in her hair, Arlene is asleep or pretending to be, and Hope is holding her stomach and moaning. Jody is cuddling her tattered toy bear and sucking her thumb.
Carly hasn’t moved. Jas says she’s in shock. She wraps her in her WESTERN WILDCATS sweatshirt and gives her sips of water. The little girl shivers and shakes her head and won’t look at us, staring into space as if she’s sleepwalking.
Mrs. Campbell sits in the dark of the cave, smoking, her head in her hands.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Campbell?” I ask several times, and finally she answers.
“For Christ’s sake, Bonnie, no, I’m not all right.” She takes a bottle of Thai whiskey from her backpack and drinks. There’s an uncomfortable silence. She’s angry and I don’t know what to say.
Natalie, huddled next to her, breaks the silence, howling, “I want to go home, I want to go home.”
She sets the other juniors off, and soon the three of them are sobbing their little hearts out. We older girls try to cuddle them, but Natalie won’t be quieted and won’t let anyone near her, and her leg is looking sore. I wish we could find the first-aid kit.
“I can’t believe we’ve lost the first-aid kit!” I stare pointedly at Mrs. Campbell, who ignores me. “It could have gone in the waterproof bag with the food.”
Jas shakes her head at me, frowning. She knows how I’m feeling, but she’s determined to keep the peace.
The boatman will be back the day after tomorrow, and we’ll have to make the best of it in the meantime. The wind is still very strong and the waves are high and we feel safer if we stay in the shelter of the rock. We’ve stacked a great pile of palm fronds across the cave mouth to give us more protection from the wind.
I pull out my journal. I’ve started mapping out the island on a double page. I’ve named the cave Black Cave, because it is almost a cave and the rock is very dark with black lichens. I suddenly feel guilty. Why wasn’t someone holding on to Sandy? How did it happen? She shouldn’t have died. Could we have saved her? Her poor parents. They don’t know. How will we tell them? Will Mrs. Campbell tell them? Will the Thai police or USAF military police have to come to the island? We�
��ll have to take her body back with us in the boat. It seems inappropriate—disrespectful—to make a map when Sandy is lying dead. I replace the journal in the waterproof plastic folder with my pencil and Swiss Army knife. I’ve attached it to my belt with a clip.
I’m still upset by Mrs. Campbell’s outburst. Jas comes to give me a hug, but I shake her off. I can’t get over it.
Arlene and May are useless. All they talk about is boys.
“If we had boys with us they’d know what to do. Boys are good at building and stuff.”
“Yeah, Lan Kua’s useful with his hands.”
“So I’ve heard,” May says knowingly, and Arlene smirks.
“Shut up, you two!” I shout at them and they make faces at me.
I’m trying to distract myself by thinking about William Golding’s book Lord of the Flies. Our teacher told us it was about the falling apart of society when there is no order, no authority figures. But the characters are all little boys, and everyone knows little boys are barely human.
Anyway, we’re all female on this island, and we won’t become savages. The bit when they attack Piggy is horrible. Girls wouldn’t act that way. We’re much more civilized.
Hope has started her period, and broken her glasses, and she wants to go home.
four
DAY 3, MORNING
Didn’t sleep last night—sleeping bag gritty and damp. My hair is sticky and tastes of salt. My scalp is itchy with sand and dirt. Lips are dry and cracked. Wish I’d brought ChapStick or Vaseline. I’ll never go to an island again for as long as I live.
None of us feel like eating, except Hope, whose appetite never seems to suffer no matter what happens. But Mrs. Campbell says we must.
So, just like yesterday, it’s tinned sardines and cold baked beans for brunch straight from the tin, with damp matzos.
Natalie’s leg looks bad and she refuses to let Mrs. Campbell tend to it—screams if she gets close. Not that Mrs. Campbell can do much anyway, without the first-aid kit. But when Natalie falls into an exhausted sleep Mrs. Campbell examines the injury. I help her clean it with bottled water and attempt to remove dirt from the wound, which is closing up. Mrs. Campbell says it should have been stitched and heroically sacrifices a strip of her torn petticoat skirt to make bandages.