Island Promises

by Connell, Joy

  The pilot liked to talk with his hands. Every time he got excited, his hands flew up from the wheel and the plane lurched, chickens squawking, the cargo sounding ominously as though it were about to pop open and spill its contents all over the passengers and the large man beside her belching out his anxiety.

  More than twenty-four hours after leaving Chicago, Riley felt sweaty, tired. Her hair was a rat’s nest, her legs cramped, her back ached, and she was looking at a ripped welcome sign. Her luggage was nowhere to be seen. Heavy-hearted, she made her way to the only airport personnel in sight.

  The line was long, the people helping the customers were few. Luggage and passengers didn’t seem to be an automatic match here. She sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall, which was nothing more than a thin layer of wood.

  This was supposed to be a beautiful place. All the brochures said it was filled with flowering hills that sloped down to a gentle lagoon; that it had star-filled nights and long, sun-drenched days. But Riley didn’t want to be here.

  She should be in Chicago, slogging through the slush, chasing leads and stories, rooting through her messy desk for an old lipstick and a comb, trying to make herself presentable for a stand-up on the evening news.

  In Chicago, she had known who she was, known what she wanted, been on a track for her life. But that had all blown up and now she found herself here, in the Shalee Islands, in the eastern Caribbean, trying to put the pieces back together.

  For a moment she closed her eyes and tried to block out the heat. She willed herself to visualize and feel the cold waves coming off Lake Michigan and roaring down the man-made tunnels of her beloved Chicago. Before she left, winter was just beginning to set in. The days were long and dark and, of course, cold. Most of her colleagues and friends, in fact, most of the city, were in a mood to match the weather. Tempers were short and people were surly at best and downright rude at worst.

  “Ees probly in Miami,” the guy behind the counter in the shack/terminal said, when it was finally her turn.

  “What?” Riley’s voice rose in a near shriek. The other maybe two dozen passengers milling around in the stick hut stopped to look at her. She suppressed the urge to lean across the ancient Formica counter, grab this little weasel of a man by his open-necked island shirt, and shake him until he coughed up her luggage.

  “Miami,” he said again, wilting before her intimidating gaze. “M-Y-A-M-E.” He must have decided she was deaf or dumb instead of angry, dirty, and out of patience.

  “I heard you,” she spat through gritty teeth.

  “That’s where it happen. That’s where your bags, they get on a plane to . . .” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he glanced down at the clipboard. “Venezuela.” Satisfied that he’d found the answer, he grinned up at her. The smile faded quickly in the glare of her displeasure.

  “Venezuela? Everything I brought with me, from a toothbrush to my underwear went to Venezuela?” She was mad at herself, too, for violating the rule of travel and packing everything instead of leaving some vital clothing for her carry-on. But she had been so distracted and worried about being photographed at the airport, that she’d thrown whatever she could find into whatever bag was open.

  “Yeah, that’s what it sez here.”

  “What kind of airline . . .? How could you be so . . .? This is no way to treat . . .” She stopped. She could feel the dissent behind her. Babies cried, people shuffled their feet. An American couple, already looking like lobsters in the tropical sun, stood shell-shocked. What good would it do to point out the obvious? This was not a major airline where they had rules about lost baggage and passengers could invoke FAA regulations.

  “When can I expect my luggage to be delivered?” she asked through clenched teeth, trying to keep a grip on herself.

  “When et comes from Venezuela.” The man’s gold tooth glittered in the rays filtering through holes in the thatched roof. “You leave an address. With my assistant.” He moved deftly to one side and a very big woman in a large flowered dress bent over the counter. In slow motion, she licked the tip of a pencil, straightened the forms in front of her and asked for her name.

  Outside, Riley shook in frustration. Apparently no one in this run down excuse for an air terminal knew the first thing about customer service or efficiency. By the time she had finished filling out the forms, everyone else had gone. There were no buses, no taxis, but she could see the marina, about a mile away. After the jolting plane ride, the walk might do her good, let her stretch the kinks out of her legs and her back. She was approaching the perimeter of what looked like a village when the rain began. One minute she was sweating in the sun, the next, sheets of rain were soaking her.

  Mud splashed up her legs as she ran. Her purse slipped off her arm and the contents spilled out, into a nearby ditch turned by the rain into a muddy river. Blobs of makeup congealed in the slosh. Shrieking, swearing, and wiping the wet hair from her eyes, she began to reach for possessions. She was able to grab her cell phone and her computer address book, which she ironically kept on paper. The plastic protector she kept her passport in was within range. Her credit cards and her wallet had spilled into the ditch, about six inches deep.

  Getting on her belly in the mud, she made a grab for them. A torrent of brown water came rushing out of nowhere and swept up her credit cards before cascading down the ditch and splashing murky water up onto her head and shoulders. Recovering, she tried to catch up to her belongings, holding her face to the sky, hoping the rain would wash the muck out of her eyes. She’d almost reached them when she stepped into a bed of soft, squishy, foul-smelling dirt that sucked the heel off her left sandal off and swallowed it whole.

  As she watched her money and her credit cards disappear down the ditch, Riley threw her hands up at the sky and bellowed. She cursed the island, the rain, and that snake of a congressman who’d gotten the best of her and forced her to this place.

  There was no choice but to keep going. As suddenly as it had come, the rain stopped, leaving her not only incredibly dirty, but sticky with humidity and sweat.

  She finally arrived at the marina and, limping down the wooden dock, she stopped in front of the Reprieve.

  The sailboat was the one thing she had left, the reason she had come to this place, so far away from her career, her friends, her life. RK had agreed, a little too readily, that she should get out of town and visit the boat. One of the last nights they had been together in Chicago, sipping warm wine out of paper cups, sitting on the floor of her apartment, watching the first snowflakes fall onto the Chicago skyline, he had talked up what an adventure it would be, how he envied her and wished he could go, too. What hadn’t been said, by either one of them, was that he could probably get the time off and fly south if he really wanted to.

  They had bought the sailboat during the good times, when he was the big-time TV news star come to Chicago to break into management and she had been the hot-shot reporter. It was an investment in their portfolio and their future. They’d bought it sight unseen through a charter company that would hire it out when they weren’t using it. They’d spent many nights in the small, excellent ethnic restaurants that dotted Chicago, talking about how they’d get away to the Shalee Islands, board Reprieve and sail off, shedding all the stress of their daily lives. Somehow they’d never managed that get away and after a while the boat had faded from her memory.

  Instead, her mind had been preoccupied with the string of young female reporters who fell all over RK. Riley had always suspected that in more than one case RK was ready and able to catch them when they fell. But she had always been good at denial and she chose to overlook that.

  With her suspension from the station, no other news organization wanting to touch her, money, which she’d never paid much attention to, had become the overriding concern of her daily life. She had been able to sub-let the apartment, for just enoug
h to cover the mortgage. Broke, beaten, coming here had seemed like the escape she needed to get herself in order and give the people back in Chicago a chance to see that the story they saw as her ruin would actually, in the end, prove to be the savior of her career.

  The two men on deck stopped to stare at her. “What the hell happened to you?” asked the taller one.

  Riley’s breath caught. With the sun behind him, he looked like a Greek God. Golden tan, brown hair streaked by the sun, a shade too long and shaggy, bristle on his chin that matched the hair. He was barefoot, just a pair of faded cut-offs on, which showed his muscles—hard, rippled abs, defined shoulders, strong thighs.

  “What a welcome.” Riley dropped her soaked purse on the dock.

  “Don’t be so rude.” The second man addressed the first. He was clean-shaven, shorter, more compact, his stare not as direct. He had thrown an old T-shirt over his cut-offs and wore ripped boat shoes. “Maybe the lady has a disability.”

  “Oh, right.” The first man stared at her. “Sorry, lady, you need help finding the right boat?”

  “I found it. This is my boat,” she lisped, her lips swollen from the sun, the humidity, and a lack of anything to drink.

  The two men exchanged glances. “You sure you’re looking for the Reprieve?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “We knew you were coming but there was nothing about a limp,” the shirtless guy said.

  They both reached out and hauled her off the dock onto the boat. She crawled to the shaded cockpit under the canvas awning and sprawled out on the settee. “I need water,” she croaked.

  “Look, lady, I don’t want to seem insensitive here, but this is a boat. It rocks, it sways, it bumps. Somebody with your physical problems might have a hard time handling so much motion, might get hurt.”

  “I’m in great shape.” Her voice broke and she reached down to scratch the bug bites on her inner thighs. “What are you talking about?”

  The shorter guy brought her water and she gulped it noisily and sloppily. “That’s better.” She leaned back into the cushioned settee. A breeze wafted off the water.

  “I can’t be responsible for somebody who can’t pull her weight. Especially in the galley when we’re underway. You have to watch all the hot food yourself, wield the knives in a twenty-knot breeze. I don’t think you can cut it. Find something else. There’s a hotel up the way.”

  “Why do you keep hammering at me about not being able to cut it?” Riley asked with a frown. This guy was beginning to annoy her, hard-packed abs or not.

  “You limp.”

  “I lost the heel off my sandal in the mud.” She felt a flash of heat rise to her cheeks.

  “Don’t mean to be personal here, but do you have a speech impediment?” He held his hands up as though to absolve him from asking. “On a boat, at sea, that could be a problem if you can’t communicate. We’d have to make arrangements.” He looked at the other man, who shrugged.

  “I’ve spent the last 12 hours on planes with chickens for God’s sake and not anything to drink that remotely looked like it might have seen a filter in the last decade. My lips are parched and my throat is dry.”

  “You’ve got a problem with personal hygiene. Not acceptable around food.”

  “Jesus, Joe,” said the shorter guy, “maybe a little more sensitivity would work better here.”

  She jutted out her chin, trying to control her temper. “One of the chickens got loose and pecked my hair. My compact fell out in the puddle, along with my comb. I had to crawl on my belly and reach in the ditch to try and rescue my credit cards. And right now my bags are going round and round the carousel in Venezuela before they disappear into that great storage room of lost luggage and are never seen again.” She tipped the cup up and licked out the last drops of water. Dirt from her hand smeared the outside surface.

  “Where’s my room?” She hauled herself up using one of the ropes.

  The two men exchanged glances again. “Could be true,” said the shorter one.

  “And I could headline the New York ballet,” said Joe.

  Riley shot him a withering look. The guy really was a hard case.

  Joe looked out to sea. “Okay,” he said. “You got a shot. Only because we’re desperate. And because Anthony here says I’m being an insensitive jerk. But you get a shower before you step foot back on my boat. We keep the Reprieve ship-shape and you’re expected to do the same.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Captain to you. Captain Joe Logan. This is Seaman Anthony Rodriga.” He nodded to Anthony. “Find her some clean clothes, Seaman, and let’s see what she can do.”

  A few hours later, Riley strode down the dock, holding her face up to the sun. For the first time in days, she could smell something besides her own ripeness. All she had wanted was to crawl into bed but Joe had insisted, rather rudely, that she clean up first. Anthony had rummaged through some lockers, locating some clothes that had been left behind by guests, and loaded a duffel bag with soap, shampoo, and clean clothes. Riley had assumed the shower would be somewhere on the boat but they had given each other that exasperated look again and pointed her toward the dock.

  “The head is for guests or crew underway,” he said, crossing his arms. “It’s not for when we’re sitting idle in port.” The man had actually growled. The first thing she’d do after she got oriented was fire him.

  The shower building was small but clean and the water, although not more than a trickle, felt refreshingly good. As she walked back to the Reprieve all she could think of was sleep. She hadn’t eaten in more than a day but her body craved rest first.

  The room was much smaller than a hotel room with the bed—nothing more than a bunk—taking up most of the space. There was a tiny closet no bigger than a locker, with a mirror on the inside. The only saving grace of the room was the sun sending stripes of color, oranges and reds and purples, through the porthole.

  As she plopped onto the bed to remove her shoes, she recalled how rude Captain Logan had been when she asked whether her room was on the right or left.

  “Your cabin,” he’d snarled, “is port side aft.”

  “I don’t get why you people can’t speak English? Just because you’re on a boat doesn’t mean you get to rename everything. Beds are bunks, windows are portholes, closets are lockers. What’s with that anyway?” She shoved a hunk of wet hair, which despite vigorous shampooing still smelled like chicken, out of her eyes.

  “Your resume said you’ve cruised before.” He glared up at her from his position in the cockpit, a large hammer clenched in his hand as he paused in whatever he was doing on the underside of the oversized steering wheel.

  “I have,” Riley said. “Four or five times.” It vaguely occurred to her then to ask how he’d gotten a copy of her resume and why in the world it would list the cruises she’d been on, but she didn’t have the energy to pursue it.

  “I’m exhausted,” she said. “I need to sleep.” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, but right now she was too tired to care. Sleep first, then food.

  For just a moment, he stopped working again and looked at her. “Anthony,” he called. The crew-cut head popped out of one of the openings in the deck. “Show Ms. Santey to her cabin. Otherwise, she’s liable to wind up in the engine room.”

  Riley woke, unsure of where she was, at first thinking the noises were from traffic and pedestrians. Then she realized the voices were coming from the deck. Out in the hallway, she opened several doors before she found the bathroom. A couple of the rooms were much larger than hers, had more portholes, and had their own bathrooms. If they thought they were pulling one over on her by sticking her in a hole, they would find out she wasn’t a pushover. Riley had no problem with the crew using the large rooms when she wasn’t around. Hell, she’d owned this bo
at for a couple years and had never set foot on it. It was senseless for those rooms to sit idle all that time. But now that she was here, she expected some respect. This Captain Joe Logan was acting a little too possessive, as though this were his boat.

  She brushed her teeth with her fingers and finger-combed her hair, which was becoming curlier by the instant, then made her way toward the voices. A lurch in the boat threw her to the left and she bumped her hip into one of the cabinets in the kitchen. They probably didn’t call it a cabinet, or a kitchen, but right now her hip hurt too badly and she didn’t care.

  “Damn.” She must have said it louder than she imagined, because an upside-down head appeared through the hole above, sun-streaked hair billowing out.

  “Good, you’re up,” Joe said. “I was going to send Anthony to wake you.”

  “The boat’s moving,” she said, rubbing her hip.

  “Yeah, that’s the whole idea.”

  “I’m starving.”

  “First thing we agree on,” he said. “Everyone up here is starved, too.”

  “Everyone?” The head disappeared and Riley decided to follow it up the ladder. She had to grip the handholds with everything she had to keep from pitching backward onto the boards below.

  She swallowed against the queasiness as her stomach jumped up and down, right along with the movement of the boat. Maybe some food would help settle it.

  Above, the breeze was strong, but the air still warm and soft. The sky was that clear, inviting blue that you rarely see up north, even in the height of summer. Behind them, Riley could see the distant outline of the islands. Ahead, there was only open sea. Besides Anthony and Joe, a middle-aged couple was sitting in the cockpit. Both wore Hawaiian shirts, the man nearly bald and stocky, the woman thin with hair that must have been plastered with spray because not a strand moved.