by Tom Crockett
“And what about Gracie?” Marina decided to try a little test. “Is she here?”
“Gracie? You mean the little DeVries girl? No, she and her parents left over a week ago.” Marina was stunned. Had she been sleeping that long? What had happened to her? Marina decided to try another test.
“And Clarence, Clarence Mudder, when did he leave?”
Ingrid looked solemn. “Mr. Mudder passed away almost a week ago. He was very ill. He came to us to die. He’s buried in a little graveyard on the other side of the bay next to his wife, Kiyoko. They were regular guests at Turtle Island. We will miss them. Did you get to meet Clarence before he died?”
“Yes,” Marina answered dumbly.
“He was a truly gentle man. I remember one year—”
“Excuse me,” Marina interrupted. “Do you know me? I mean, where are we? Where do you think we are?” She realized she sounded desperate, but Ingrid looked at her like a compassionate nurse. When she spoke, she spoke slowly and clearly as if Marina were dull-witted, foreign, or a child.
“You’re Marina Hardt. You . . . we are on Turtle Island. This is a resort island. My husband, Max, and I own the island, though we let more than half of it go wild to preserve the natural balance.” She gestured west in the direction of the volcano. “You made a reservation, well actually your assistant Erin made the reservation. . . .”
“She’s my agent, my friend, really.” Marina corrected her.
“Well, she reserved three weeks for you in cabin one. It’s our most remote cabin, while still offering full services of course.”
“And how did I get here?” Marina realized her questions sounded irrational and almost hysterical, but Ingrid answered her patiently.
“Your cruise ship, the Blue Pearl, makes regular port calls here to pick up and drop off our guests. Don’t you remember?”
“No, no, I don’t remember. I mean, I do remember. It’s just that what I remember is very different from what you’re telling me.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you remember, then, and we’ll work from there.”
“I came from the other side of the island. I washed ashore there and walked here. I was dead . . . I think I was dead . . . but I had a chance to come back to life and I took it. I’ve been here for weeks, no, longer than that, several months at least. It took me a long time to get here. I . . . I . . .”
Ingrid was looking at her gently. “You know Turtle Island isn’t very big. You could walk completely around it in a day and a half. Even crossing over it wouldn’t take more than two and a half days.” Ingrid said this gently, not as confrontation, but in an effort to nudge Marina back to rationality.
Marina was silent. How could she prove anything that had happened to her? Had she gone mad? Had she dreamed the whole thing? Was she dreaming now?
“No!” She said this out loud with more force than she’d intended. “It did happen. I remember it all very clearly. I was dead, really dead. I drowned.” She said this louder than she’d intended as well. She was aware that there were other people around her, but her eyes were filling with tears and she chose to ignore everyone else and focus her attention on Ingrid. The woman had shifted her chair closer and put her hand over Marina’s.
“It’s okay, dear, no one is saying that what you experienced wasn’t real. People come here for all sorts of reasons. They often have very emotional experiences here. For some reason, a number of people have come here to die over the years. Turtle Island is a very peaceful place to spend one’s last days. There’s a strong spirit here. Perhaps you felt that spirit.”
“Yes, I did feel it, but it was more than just a feeling or a dream. It really happened to me. My soul came here after death.”
Ingrid nodded her head sympathetically, but Marina could tell she didn’t believe her.
“You think I’m hysterical,” she said, as calmly as she could. “You probably think I’m mad.”
“Not at all.” Ingrid looked to either side of Marina. People had moved chairs to form a loose circle around her. She didn’t know how many. She refused to look at them, refused to allow them into her world. Not yet, she thought. I’m not ready for this.
“I really should be heading back to my cabin now,” Marina said. “It’s a long walk and I’ve rested long enough.” She wanted nothing more than to escape back to her little cabin, to sleep some more, to find her altar.
“You stay here too long and you’ll find yourself going back up that trail looking for something you lost, something you’re sure you left behind.” It was Clarence’s voice. She heard it as clearly as she had in her dream, but one look at Ingrid, and she knew that only she had heard it. Ingrid looked puzzled.
“But your room is here now. You came back here yesterday. Max will take you out to the Blue Pearl in the morning. Remember?”
Marina did not remember. She did recall that Gracie had said that she and her parents were to spend their last night at the big house, but . . .
“All guests spend the last couple of nights in the big house. It seems to help people reaccustom themselves to civilization.”
“But my things . . .”
Marina put her head in her hands. She didn’t want to continue crying in front of this woman. She didn’t know what to think. She felt like Dorothy, trying to explain Oz to her family.
“Your things are all here.” Ingrid patted her hand. “Look, maybe it would help if you told us what happened to you.” The use of the word “us” forced Marina to look around her. No one was as close to her as Ingrid, but a group of people had arranged their chairs around her.
To her left was an elegant old man with a long, drooping, silver mustache and carefully combed hair of a matching shade. He was dressed in a wrinkled white linen suit with a blue striped bow tie. A silver-handled walking stick leaned against his chair.
To her right was a younger man in khaki shorts and an olive green T-shirt. He was deeply tanned and wore round rimmed glasses joined at the back by a strap that allowed him to take them off without setting them down.
Beside him sat a large soft woman in a loose purple dress. She had silver and turquoise bracelets on her arms and rings on her fingers that flashed with different color stones as she moved the cigarette from her mouth to the ashtray and back. She turned her head away each time she exhaled even though the breeze tended to carry the smoke right back onto the porch.
They all seemed attentive to what she might say, but she suspected they had very different reasons for being interested.
Ingrid made no move to introduce these people. Marina wondered if she’d already been introduced to them. Was she supposed to know who they were?
“Just start from the beginning and tell us what you recall,” Ingrid was saying.
Start from the beginning. Start from the beginning.
Where was that? she wondered. The beach, the cruise ship, Chechnya, Baghdad, Afghanistan, Beirut, her childhood?
“I took my own life,” she began. “I know it makes me sound incredibly self-centered, ungrateful, spoiled, but I truly could find no reason left to live. I couldn’t feel anything. I jumped from the Blue Pearl. I drowned. I had a vision of an angel . . . or a sea turtle. I’m not really sure now, but everything went black for me. Then I found myself here. Well, not here, on the other side of the island. I couldn’t move or speak. My body was burned, I think bones were broken. I couldn’t feel anything below my neck.”
She told them then, in great detail, about the Turtle Woman, the Turtle Mother, about learning to sit, to stand, and to walk. She told them what she’d learned about balance. She wished she could show them the turtle tattoo, but it seemed too fantastic even for her story, so she did not mention it. Marina noticed for the first time that she was not wearing the coral and black pearl anklet. I could have shown it to Ingrid as proof, she thought, then added, to herself, but proof of what? What would it prove? I could have had it when I came here. Mostly, she missed the feeling of it about her ankle.
She t
old them about Rafael, though she kept some of the more intimate details to herself. She described what it was like as her senses returned and she learned to attend to each moment.
Then there was Atana and her experience at the mirror pool. This was harder to explain because she lacked terminology for it. She talked about Téves and Adytum Wood. She tried explaining about auras but, again, couldn’t find the right words.
She saw Ingrid’s aura. It was a silver sheen with bursts of blue and green. The old man’s aura was irregular, but vital, with hints of gold in it. The young man to her right had a fine silver iridescent aura with a lot of green in it, and the woman next to him had an irregular pale aura of white and blue. She was not sure what this meant exactly. She felt as if it was telling her things about these people but it was speaking in a language she only half understood.
Marina tried to convey the sense of urgency she felt about crossing to the eastern side of the mountain before her time ran out. She backtracked to tell them about the tattoo at this point. She knew it sounded far-fetched, but by this point it seemed no stranger than the rest of her story.
She detailed her night crossing of the volcano, but this required her to digress and recount her experience in Chechnya. She also found herself talking openly with these strangers about the death wish she had been pursuing for the past several years. After her crossing and her escape from the death shadow, she spoke of Mai-Ling and her circles. Again, she kept some of the more intimate details to herself, but she tried to convey the sense of power she’d discovered through the use of the altar.
From Mai-Ling to the cabin, to Gracie and Clarence, to her fevered dream sleep, to the porch she found herself on, the remainder of her story poured out of her and she felt drained.
The sun was setting. She had talked for several hours straight. No one had moved. No one had interrupted her. Occasionally she’d been aware of one guest nodding or murmuring something. She’d caught side glances between them. But if they thought her mad, they were, at least, very polite. A glass of tea had appeared for her on the little table next to her chair, and she drank this now in one long gulp. Some of the cool liquid ran down her chin and dribbled onto her chest. No one spoke.
At last Ingrid stood up. “Well, Marina, if it didn’t happen just as you said it did, it should have. That was beautiful.”
“But you still don’t believe me.”
“Let me think about it awhile, okay? Right now I have some other things to attend to, but I’d like to continue our conversation later if you don’t mind.”
Marina nodded.
“Since you are new here, you won’t have met your fellow guests.” Ingrid gestured to the company that had assembled around her. Marina wondered if she was hearing condescension in the woman’s voice, but decided she wasn’t. “This is Dr. Arenbough.” She indicated the tall, thin, old man in the white linen suit and he bowed slightly. “Nigel is an anthropologist.”
“Cambridge University, retired,” he added.
“And this is Corrine Carr. Corrine is from New York. It’s her third visit with us.” The large woman in purple smiled and nodded her head.
“I’m Jack Davis.” The tan young man extended his hand.
“Jack is a scientist,” Ingrid went on. “He studies the protected turtle habitat that we have set up on the west side of the island.” Marina shook his hand.
“Now, I’ll be back shortly. Stay and talk if you’d like. I have a feeling these people have some questions for you.” There was something mildly conspiratorial about her tone, but Marina let it pass. “We have a late dinner tonight, so you have time to talk and still shower and change before dinner, if you’d like. If you’d rather, I can show you to your room now.” Marina sensed the disappointment in her fellow guests at this suggestion.
“No, I’ll stay awhile,” she said.
Ingrid walked off through the double doors, and Marina heard her speak to someone inside the door. “Michael, please bring Ms. Hardt some more tea, and see if anyone else wants anything.”
Marina looked at the guests who had remained behind. They looked at her. She wasn’t sure if it was politeness or discomfort that kept everyone from speaking. Finally she decided to break the ice. “So, do you all think I’m crazy, too?”
They all started to speak at once, laughed, started to speak again and stopped.
“Please,” Jack deferred to Corrine.
“No, first the professor.” Corrine nodded in his direction.
“Thank you.” The old man paused a moment, making a tent out of his fingers and pressing the point into his chin. “Ms. Hardt . . .”
“Please, call me Marina.”
“Very well, Marina, Each of us has a rather different interest in your story, but I, for one, can say that, while I don’t understand it completely, I don’t think you’re crazy. I think something profound has happened to you.
“This island, Turtle Island, has been in the Goeller family for generations, but its history goes back much further. As near as we can tell, this island was never regularly inhabited by natives of this area. But they did have a myth about it. They believed their dead came here to pass on to the next life. There is some evidence that their old people sometimes journeyed alone to this island across hundreds of miles of open sea. They called it Turtle Island because their navigators would follow sea turtles to the island. It’s still a rookery for a rare form of sea turtle. . . .”
“Yeah, Chelonia Somnio,” Jack interrupted.
“Dreamer’s Turtle,” Marina said with an assurance she did not recognize.
“Yeah, right. Do you speak Latin? I mean, how did you know that?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s just that they’re very rare. Only maybe a hundred left in the whole world, and this island, at least on the west side, is the only place we know for certain that they lay their eggs. They call them Dreamer’s Turtles because of their markings.”
“Green and blue with highlights of reddish brown and yellow. The markings look like little islands or continents,” Marina said softly. Jack looked at her suspiciously.
“You’ve seen one. You were on the other side of the island, weren’t you?” Marina said nothing. “You had to have been. Unless you’re an expert in turtles, it’d be very unusual for you to know about their markings. They call them Dreamer’s Turtles because sailors on watch who caught a glimpse of them were accused of dreaming them.”
“And you’re here to study them?”
“Yeah. There’s a research station the Goellers have on the west side of the island. They allow sea turtle specialists access on a controlled and rotating basis. They discourage their guests from using that side of the island so the turtles are pretty safe.”
“So they come here to lay their eggs?”
“Well, that’s the odd part. Chelonia Somnio do lay their eggs here, but both male and female turtles of other species also seem to come here . . . well . . . to die.”
Marina remembered Tarzan movies she watched when she was young. Films whose plots revolved around white ivory hunters and the existence of secret elephant burial grounds, places elephants went to die.
“It’s really most unturtlelike behavior. Turtles can live a long time if they’re not caught in nets or killed by predators, but old turtles seem to return here to die.” He gestured to the shells hanging on the walls of the big house. “We find the shells every once in a while. Never Dreamers, though—don’t you think that’s interesting?”
“Perhaps that’s the origin of the myth the islanders have about Turtle Island,” Corrine offered.
“Perhaps it’s not just a myth,” Dr. Arenbough said. Everyone was quiet for a moment. “I’m just speculating, mind you, but I find some aspects of Ms. Hardt’s . . . Marina’s story fascinating. My dear, are you familiar with the culture of the islanders in this area?”
“No,” Marina answered honestly. “This cruise was my agent’s idea. I’ve traveled a lot, but never much in the South Pacifi
c.”
“Then you didn’t read up on the area or research it?”
“No,” Marina conceded again.
“Then is this familiar to you?” He pulled back his jacket sleeve and unbuttoned the cuff of his shirt. He extended his arm to her and turned his wrist face up.
Marina gasped! It was the turtle tattoo, tiny and intricate, almost a match to the one that had crawled from her ankle to the top of her head before disappearing.
“Where . . . I mean how . . . how did you get this?” Marina looked into Dr. Arenbough’s eyes, searching for some hint of what she had seen in the eyes of the Turtle Woman or the Turtle Mother.
“Years ago,” Dr. Arenbough rebuttoned his sleeve and straightened his jacket, “I was given this tattoo in a ceremony for elders. The turtle tattoo, you see, was a mark of having found Turtle Island and returned. Some of the old ones, it seemed, made the journey to Turtle Island and returned to live for years longer. They claimed that the spirits were not ready for them and had sent them back to their communities. They often became powerful healers or spiritual guides. I suppose I earned the tattoo because I’d visited Turtle Island and returned. I don’t know whether it was visiting this place and returning or just the acceptance I earned by undergoing the tattooing ceremony, but it did mark quite a breakthrough in my work. My little turtle friend here,” he held up his arm, “gained me an insider’s access. It was extraordinary. I’ve written three books on the customs and culture of the islanders around here.”
“So you think maybe Marina earned her turtle tattoo as well,” Jack said smiling.
“It’s possible,” Dr. Arenbough said, leaning back into his chair. “I’m an old man, Jack. I’ve seen too many things I don’t have an easy answer for. I can tell you one thing, though. If you looked for an answer that reflected popular opinion, you’d find far more people in the surrounding hundreds of miles of ocean and island that would take Marina’s story as a fact.”