On the Island (9781101609095)

by Graves, Tracey Garvis

  “I’m sorry,” he said, not making eye contact. “The last thing you need is another broken bone to take care of.”

  “Listen,” I said, kneeling down in front of him. “I will never criticize anything you do if it helps you cope, okay?”

  He finally looked at me, nodded, and took the Tylenol from my outstretched hand. I handed him the water bottle, and he swallowed them down. I sat cross-legged next to him, staring at the sparks that drifted into the air when I dropped a log on the fire.

  “How do you cope, Anna?”

  “I cry.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Sometimes.”

  I stared at his broken hand and fought the urge to wash the blood off and hold it in my own. “I give up, T.J. You once said, ‘It’s easier if you don’t think they’re coming back’ and you were right. This one’s not coming back either. A plane will have to land in the lagoon for me to believe we might actually get off this island. Until then, it’s just you and me. That’s the only thing I know for sure.”

  “I give up, too,” he whispered.

  I looked at him, so broken, both physically and mentally, and it turned out I had some tears left after all.

  I checked his hand the next morning. The swelling had doubled the size of it.

  “It needs to be immobilized,” I said. I grabbed a short stick from the woodpile and rummaged in my suitcase for something to wrap around it. “I won’t put it on tight, but it’s going to hurt a little, T.J.”

  “That’s okay.”

  I put the stick under his palm, and gently pulled the black fabric over the back of his hand, winding it around twice and tucking it underneath.

  “What did you wrap my hand with?” he asked.

  “My thong.” I looked up at him. “You were right; it’s totally uncomfortable. Awesome for first aid, though.”

  The corners of T.J.’s mouth turned up slightly. He looked at me, his brown eyes showing a trace of the spark that had been missing the night before. “It’ll make for a funny story someday,” I said.

  “You know what, Anna? It’s kinda funny now.”

  T.J. turned eighteen in September of 2002. He didn’t look like the same boy I crash-landed in the ocean with fifteen months earlier.

  For one thing, he really needed to shave. The hair was much longer than a five-o’clock shadow but shorter than a full beard and mustache. It looked good on him, actually. I wasn’t sure if he liked the facial hair, or if he just didn’t want to bother with shaving.

  The hair on his head was almost long enough to pull back in one of my ponytail holders, and the sun had bleached it light brown. My hair had grown, too. It hung past the middle of my back and drove me nuts. I tried to cut it with our knife, but the blade—dull and nonserrated—wouldn’t saw through hair.

  Although very lean, T.J. had grown at least two inches taller, bringing him to about six feet.

  He looked older. Having turned thirty-one in May, I probably did, too. I wouldn’t know; the only mirror I had was in the makeup bag in my purse, which was floating around in the ocean somewhere.

  I forced myself not to ask him how he felt, or if he had any cancer symptoms, but I watched him closely. He seemed to be doing okay, growing and thriving, even under our less than desirable conditions.

  The man in my dream moaned when I kissed his neck. I slid my leg between his and then kissed my way from his jaw down to his chest. He put his arms around me and rolled me onto my back, bringing his mouth down to mine. Something about his kiss startled me, and I woke up.

  T.J. was on top of me. We were on the blanket under the coconut tree where we’d lay down to take a nap. I realized what I’d done and wriggled out from underneath him, my face on fire. “I was dreaming.”

  He flipped onto his back, breathing hard.

  I scrambled to my feet, then went down to the water’s edge and sat cross-legged on the sand. Way to go, Anna. Attack him while he’s asleep.

  T.J. joined me a few minutes later.

  “I am completely mortified,” I said.

  He sat down. “Don’t be.”

  “You must have wondered what the hell I was doing.”

  “Well, yeah, but then I just rolled with it.”

  I looked over at him, my mouth hanging open. “Are you insane?”

  “What? You’re the one that said I was adaptable.”

  Yes, and apparently quite opportunistic.

  “Besides,” T.J. said. “You like to cuddle. How am I supposed to know what it means? It’s confusing.”

  My humiliation level kicked up another notch. I often woke up in the middle of the night way too close to T.J., my body curled around his, and I had assumed he slept right through it.

  “I’m sorry. This was completely my fault. I didn’t mean to give you the wrong idea.”

  “That’s okay, Anna. It’s no big deal.”

  I kept my distance for the rest of the day, but that night, in bed, I said, “It’s true. What you said about the cuddling. It’s just that I’m used to sleeping with someone. I slept next to him for a really long time.”

  “Is that who you were dreaming about?”

  “No. It was one of those weird dreams that didn’t make sense. I don’t know who it was, actually. But I’m really sorry.”

  “You don’t have to keep apologizing, Anna. I said it confused me. I never once said I didn’t like it.”

  The next day, when I came back from the lagoon, I discovered T.J. sitting beside the lean-to prying his braces off with the knife.

  “Do you need help with that?”

  He spit a piece of metal out of his mouth. It landed on the ground next to several more.

  “Nope.”

  “When were you supposed to get them off?”

  “Six months ago. I kinda forgot about it until yesterday.”

  That’s when I realized what woke me up, during the dream. A boy with braces hadn’t kissed me since high school.

  Chapter 18

  —

  T.J.

  I was standing in front of Bones’s shack when Anna found me. Sweat ran down her face.

  “I chased a chicken all over the island, but it ran too fast. I will catch it if it’s the last thing I do.” She leaned over and put her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. She looked up at me. “What are you doing?”

  “I want to tear down this shack, then bring the wood back to the beach to build us a house.”

  “Do you have any idea how to build a house?”

  “No, but I’ve got plenty of time to figure it out. If I’m careful, I can reuse all the wood and nails. I can make an awning with the tarp so the fire won’t go out.” I examined the hinges on the door, wondering if they were salvageable. “I need something to do, Anna.”

  “I think it’s a great idea,” she said.

  It took us three days to knock down the shack and carry the pieces back to the beach. I pulled all the old nails out and put them in the toolbox with the others.

  “I don’t want to be too near the woods,” Anna said. “Because of the rats.”

  “Okay.” I couldn’t build on the beach, though, because the sand was too unstable. We chose a spot between the two, where the sand ended and the dirt began. We dug a foundation, which sucked because we didn’t have a shovel. I used the claw end of the hammer to pull chunks of dirt out of the ground, and Anna followed along behind me, scooping it up in one of our plastic containers.

  I used the rusty saw to cut the wood into the right size. Anna held the boards while I pounded in the nails.

  “I’m glad you decided to do this,” she said.

  “It’s going to take me a while to finish it.”

  “That’s okay.”

  She walked to the toolbox to
get me some more nails. After she handed them to me she said, “Let me know if you need more help.”

  She stretched out on the blanket nearby and closed her eyes. I watched her for a minute, my eyes moving from her legs to her stomach to her boobs, wondering if her skin felt as soft as it looked. I thought about the other day, when she kissed my neck under the coconut tree. I remembered how good it felt. Suddenly, she opened her eyes and turned her head toward me. I looked away quickly. I’d lost track of how many times she’d caught me staring at her. She never said anything about it, or told me to knock it off, which was just one more reason why I liked her so much.

  It would have been my senior year, and Anna hated that I’d missed so much school.

  “You’re probably going to have to get a GED. I wouldn’t blame you at all if that’s what you wanted to do, instead of going back and finishing high school.”

  “What’s a GED?”

  “A general education diploma. Sometimes when kids drop out of school, they choose that option instead of going back. But don’t worry, I’ll help you.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t give two shits about my high school diploma right then, but it seemed important to her.

  The next day, when we were working on the house, Anna said, “Are you ever going to shave?” She felt my beard with the back of her hand. “Isn’t that hot?”

  I hoped there was enough hair to hide my red face. “I’ve never shaved before. What little I had fell out when I started chemo. When we left Chicago everything was just starting to grow back.”

  “Well, it’s all there now.”

  “I know. But we don’t have a mirror, and I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “Why didn’t you say something? You know I would help you.”

  “Uh, because it’s embarrassing?”

  “Let’s go,” she said. She grabbed my hand and pulled me back to the lean-to. She opened her suitcase and took out a razor and the shaving cream she used on her legs, and we went down to the water.

  We sat cross-legged facing each other. She squirted shaving cream into her hand and dabbed it on my face, then spread it around. She put her hand behind my head, pulling me toward her until I was at the right angle, and then shaved the left side of my face with slow, careful strokes.

  “Just so you know,” she said. “I’ve never shaved a man before. I’ll try not to cut you, but I can’t promise.”

  “You’ll do a better job than I would.”

  Only a few inches separated our faces, and I looked into her eyes. Sometimes they were gray, and sometimes blue. Today was a blue day. I never realized how long her eyelashes were. “Do people notice your eyes?” I blurted.

  She leaned over and swished the razor around in the water. “Sometimes.”

  “They’re amazing. They look even bluer because you’re so tan.”

  She smiled. “Thanks.”

  She scooped up water in her hand and ran it over my cheeks, rinsing the shaving cream away.

  “What’s that look for?” she asked.

  “What look?”

  “You’ve got something on your mind.” She pointed at my head. “I can practically see the wheels turning up there.”

  “When you said you’d never shaved a man before. Do you think of me as a man?”

  She paused before she answered. “I don’t think of you as a boy.”

  Good, because I’m not.

  She squirted more shaving cream into her palm and shaved the rest of my face. When she finished, she held my chin and turned my face side to side, running the back of her hand along my skin.

  “Okay,” she said. “You’re all done.”

  “Thanks. I feel cooler already.”

  “You’re welcome. Let me know when you want me to do it again.”

  Anna and I lay in bed one night, talking in the dark.

  “I miss my family,” she said. “I have this daydream I play out in my mind all the time. I imagine that a plane has landed in the lagoon and you and I are right on the beach when it does. We swim out to it and the pilot can’t believe it’s us. We fly away and as soon as we find a phone, we call our families. Can you imagine what that would be like for them? Being told someone has died and having their funeral, and then they call you on the phone?”

  “No, I can’t imagine what that’s like.” I turned onto my stomach and adjusted the seat cushion under my head. “I bet you wish you never took this job.”

  “I took the job because it was a great opportunity to go someplace I’d never been. No one could have predicted this would happen.”

  I scratched a mosquito bite on my leg. “Did you live with that guy? You said you slept next to him.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t think he’d want you to be away for so long.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “But you did?”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute. “I feel weird talking about it with you.”

  “Why, because you think I’m too young to possibly understand?”

  “No, because you’re a guy. I don’t know if you can relate.”

  “Oh, sorry.” I shouldn’t have said that. Anna was really good about not treating me like a kid.

  “His name is John. I wanted to get married, but he wasn’t ready, and I was tired of waiting. I thought it would be good for me to get away for a while. Make some decisions.”

  “How long have you been together?”

  “Eight years.” She sounded embarrassed.

  “So he doesn’t ever want to get married?”

  “Well. I think he just doesn’t want to marry me.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him anymore. What about you? Do you have someone back in Chicago?”

  “Not anymore. I used to go out with this girl named Emma. I met her at the hospital.”

  “Did she have Hodgkin’s, too?”

  “No, leukemia. She was sitting in the chair next to mine when I had my first chemo treatment. We spent a lot of time together after that.”

  “Was she your age?”

  “A little younger. She was fourteen.”

  “What was she like?”

  “She was kinda quiet. I thought she was really pretty. She’d already lost her hair though, and she hated that. She always wore a hat. When mine fell out she finally stopped being embarrassed. Then we just sat around like two baldies, and we didn’t care.”

  “Losing your hair has to be hard.”

  “Well, it’s probably worse for girls. Emma showed me some old pictures, and she had long blond hair.”

  “Did you ever get to spend time together when you weren’t having chemo?”

  “Yeah. She knew her way around the hospital. The nurses always looked the other way when they caught us making out somewhere. We went up to the rooftop garden at the hospital and sat in the sun. I wanted to take her out, but her immune system couldn’t handle being in a crowd. One night the nurses let us watch a video in an empty room. We got in the bed together and they brought us popcorn.”

  “How sick was she?”

  “She was doing okay when we first met, but after about six months, she got a lot sicker. One night on the phone, she told me she’d made a list of things she wanted to do, and she told me she thought she might be running out of time.”

  “Oh, T.J.”

  “She’d turned fifteen by then, but she wanted to make it to sixteen so she could get her driver’s license. She wanted to go to prom, but she said any school dance would do.” I hesitated, but lying in the dark next to Anna made it easier to talk about things. “She told me she wanted to have sex, so she could know what it felt like. Her doctor had put her back in the hospital by then and she had a private room. I think the nurses knew, maybe she
told them, but they left us alone and we managed to check one thing off that list. She died three weeks later.”

  “That’s so sad, T.J.” Anna sounded like she was trying not to cry. “Were you in love with her?”

  “I don’t know. I cared about her a lot, but it was such a weird time. My chemo stopped working, and I had to start radiation. It scared me when she died. Wouldn’t I know if I loved her, Anna?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  I hadn’t thought about Emma in a while. I’d never forget her though; it had been my first time, too.

  “What did you decide about that guy, Anna?”

  She didn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t want to tell me, or maybe she’d already fallen asleep. I listened to the waves crashing into the reef, the sound relaxing me, and I closed my eyes and didn’t open them until the sun woke me up the next morning.

  Chapter 19

  —

  Anna

  “Do you want to play poker?” T.J. asked.

  “Sure, but I left the cards down by the water.”

  “I’ll go get them,” he said.

  “That’s okay. I have to go to the bathroom. I’ll grab them on my way back.” I hated going anywhere near the woods after dark, and I had about two minutes before the sun went down.

  I had just grabbed the cards when it happened. I never saw it coming, and it must have swooped out of the sky with some speed behind it, because when the bat collided with my head, it almost knocked me off my feet. It took me a second to figure out what hit me, and then I started screaming. I panicked, my hands raking through my hair to get the bat out.

  T.J. ran to me. “What’s wrong?” Before I could answer him, the bat sank its teeth into my hand. I screamed louder. “There’s a bat in my hair,” I said, as stinging pain radiated across my palm. “It’s biting me!”

  T.J. sprinted off. I shook my head back and forth, trying to dislodge the bat. When he returned, he pushed me down onto the sand until I was flat on the ground.

  “Don’t move,” he said, cupping his hand around my head. Then he drove the blade of the knife through the bat’s body. It stopped wiggling. “Just hold on. I’m going to get it out of your hair.”