Find Me

by Liv Leighton

  “I know. Thanks.”

  He gave me a hug then and I realized that I missed him terribly. At one time, I had tried convincing him to move to Sitka, but he’d not even considered it. I think he much preferred the solitude and being able to do as he pleased. He didn’t like the idea of someone looking to him for support, even if it was only emotionally.

  “Take care of yourself, Mac,” he said.

  “You, too.”

  I gave him a kiss on the cheek and then he walked me to the front door. He waved me away as I walked down the street and to the pier. I followed the sound of the plane’s droning propellers and saw Jack standing by the opened door, waiting to help me inside. He looked up and smiled briefly.

  “You okay?” he asked when I reached him. “You look sad.”

  “It’s hard leaving him,” I said. “He’s the only family I have left.”

  And with that statement, I had revealed more to Jack about my personal life since I had met him.

  He helped me into the plane and when he took my hand to help me up, God help me, I didn’t want him to let go.

  14—Devlin

  I had never really been sure why I didn’t like to fly at night. I had done it several times before, mostly during my lessons, and found it to be daunting. When there wasn’t any land to clearly see below you in miniature, it was easy to feel like the entire world had disappeared and left you all alone in the sky.

  Mac and I had declined dinner with her grandfather mainly to try to avoid flying through the darkness for too long. But even then, we’d ended up leaving about forty-five minutes later than we had planned. I found myself flying to beat the night and, obviously, losing the race. We were still about one hundred and twenty miles away from Sitka when dull darkness fell.

  But a funny thing happened; I found that I didn’t mind flying in the dark with Mac sitting next to me. It was nothing romantic or sentimental about the feeling. I think I would have felt the same if anyone had have been there. I felt guilty in that moment because a very small part of me wanted to be with Aubrey. For the slightest, briefest of seconds, I wanted Aubrey to see me flying, to know that great things were possible outside of cosmetics and Hollywood.

  “You okay?” Mac asked.

  “Fine. Sort of sliding into a zone, I think. Not as nervous as I thought I would be.”

  “Good.”

  She was looking out of the window and appeared to be deep in thought about something. I wondered if she was thinking about her family. She had given at least a few clues just before boarding the plane to leave Queen Charlotte that made me wonder what sort of painful history she might have.

  “Your grandfather… he’s Native American?” It was the most innocent family question I could think of.

  “He is. Full-blooded Haida.”

  I nodded. “So that makes you…?”

  Mac smiled at me. “I’m just a quarter. Grandmother was white and so was Mom.”

  “That must be pretty interesting though?”

  She shrugged. “I suppose it is, but it’s what I’m used to.”

  “Me, I’m pretty white bread, so I can’t imagine that.”

  Mac laughed and turned back to the window.

  I couldn’t help but grin. This whole day—hell, the last few days in getting to know her and living through the ordeal with the plane—would make a great movie. And I think I’d be able to fit the part of the male lead perfectly.

  Mac was an interesting character. I had already determined that the anger she felt towards me wasn’t as deep-rooted as she wanted me to believe it was. I also thought that Mac, deep down, always wanted to please everyone…and that was something that was hard to do when you were busy faking an intense hatred for someone.

  “Any thoughts on our first excursion?” I asked her.

  “It went really well. Thanks for your willingness to help me with the order. It meant a lot to him. And to me, too.”

  “Of course. Still pissed at me?”

  She shrugged. I could see something resembling a smile working at the corners of her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll be honest with you, Jack. I don’t even know why—,”

  She was interrupted by a loud banging noise, followed by a tremendous jostling of the entire airplane. Mac yelped and I went rigid at the controls as the plane dipped hard to the left. An alarm started going off overhead, a whining beeping noise accompanied by a small orange flashing light.

  “What happened?” Mac asked, clearly, and understandably, panicked.

  I had been fortunate enough to have never experienced any sort of mechanical troubles during my time in the sky. I had logged in nearly one hundred and fifty hours, so that was saying something. I shoved my panic of an unfamiliar situation to the back of my head and looked up to the alarm as I righted the dip. The plane fought against me and I could hear a peculiar grating noise coming from the left side of the plane.

  “Jack, what’s happening?”

  She was close to tears now, sitting back in her seat so far that I thought she might snap the back of the chair straight off.

  “One of the engines has gone down,” I said. Once I voiced it, I was surprisingly calm. I knew that it was very possible to fly a plane that was down one engine. Of course, I had never done it before. And, worse than that, I knew that I needed to land right away. The problem was that it was dark as hell below us and we were flying across the sea. I could cruise to the east, towards the coast, but I wasn’t sure if that would be pushing my luck.

  The plane shuddered and jerked. Mac let out another yelp. “Can we make it?”

  “Yeah. I just need to land. Quickly.”

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “Not close enough to make it home,” I said. “We’re looking at a water landing. Which, because this is a float plane, shouldn’t be an issue. It might be a bit rough, though.”

  “So we aren’t going to crash?”

  “Not unless something else goes wr—,”

  The plane jolted and dropped suddenly. I felt my stomach lurch as we dropped at least fifty feet before the plane righted itself.

  “What was that?” Mac shrieked.

  I had no idea what it was, but didn’t dare tell her that. Instead, I lied and said, “That’s normal for engine failure. But I need to land right now. You ready?”

  She shook her head for a moment and then sighed. She closed her eyes, wiping a tear off of her cheek.

  “We’ll be okay,” I said, pretty sure it was the case.

  I still had control of the plane, although I was having to fight it a bit. I felt a vibration in the steering column that hadn’t been there two minutes ago. I was also starting to smell something burning, coming from the left side of the plane.

  I gradually eased the plane down. It tilted to the left again but I righted it quickly. Outside, the night seemed to shift. I was getting slightly nauseous and did everything I could to keep it from Mac. I tried to look in control and confident as I continued to lower the plane.

  The sea became much clearer below us, the crest heads of waves like little white cracks in the ocean. I figured we were, at worst, two and a half miles from the coast and an hour or so away from our destination. While we were far from in the middle of nowhere, I thought it might take a good amount of time to have someone come get us.

  Then, like some random blessing spit up by the sea, I saw the island creep into view ahead of us. While the land looked flat and relatively plain, it was as gorgeous to me as any imagined Paradise.

  I wasn’t sure if the plane was going to make it that far, though. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but the important thing was that I still had control of it. We were descending a bit quicker than I would have liked, but it could have been much worse.

  “I thought you said a water landing was perfectly safe,” Mac said.

  “It is. But it also means that we’d be bobbing up and down in the Pacific Ocean until someone comes to get us. And that could be a very long time. I
f I have a choice between water and land, I’m always going to choose land. We have to land just along the shore, of course, because this is a float plane, but it shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  I could tell that it killed her to be in a position where she had to trust me. But when her life was on the line, I guess it was easy for her to do.

  The alarm continued to shriek and the little blinking orange light filled the cabin with an eerie pulsing glow. The sea kept drawing closer, the shapes of each wave more defined now. The readouts showed that I was now at fifteen hundred feet and from what I could tell, the island was slightly closer than that. If I could keep control of the plane, we’d make it to the island.

  But if the plane continued to shake the way it was, I didn’t know how much longer I’d be able to contain it. The failed engine was easy to diagnose; it was hard to miss. But I couldn’t immediately figure out what other problems the plane was having. For now, though, I did my best to focus only on getting the plane safely out of the sky.

  We were at twelve hundred feet, then a one thousand. The ocean kept hurtling towards us and I had a morbid thought… I wondered if this was what it looked like to a man that launches himself off of a building when killing himself, watching the concrete come barreling up towards you at dizzying speeds.

  Mac was making a slight screeching sound as we descended. The plane continued to vibrate, with the occasional lurch. We neared the ocean and I pulled up just slightly. I observed the island ahead of us. Its beach was mostly flat and smooth. A few scattered trees sat in the distance but it looked like a fairly safe landing.

  For one sickening moment, right around the time we were at two hundred feet, I thought about Afghanistan. I recalled flying away from the scene in the helicopter, covered in the blood of the only man I had been able to pull from the battle zone, only to watch him die. The memory came out of nowhere and made me feel dizzy. I was going up in the memory and coming down in the present.

  This memory snared me until I felt the plane hit the water. Mac and I were jolted violently forward and the plane spun slightly to the right. I instantly felt the slow-rolling waves rocking us gently and knew that we were okay.

  Mac looked over to me, fear in her eyes. We shared a weird look between one another, part terror and part relief. We were still staring uncertainly at one another when the plane made a soft skidding noise as the floats made contact with the beach.

  “Okay,” I said, speaking out loud not only to inform Mac of what needed to happen next, but to also walk myself through the process. “We need to get out and I need to tie us off somehow. So when I get out, you come right behind me, okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, still frazzled.

  I reached behind the pilot’s seat and grabbed the tie-downs that Mr. Tanner had also used for countless years. It had been years since I had tied down a float plane, but it all came back to me as we sat there in the plane, the waves lapping at the bottom.

  I took the tie-downs and opened the door. The smell of salt water and a chill to the air seeped into the plane. I nearly hopped out and go to work right away…I didn’t want to have to deal with a drifting plane as I was tying it down.

  But I stopped long enough to look back into the plane. Mac wasn’t in shock per se, but she was trembling slightly and looking out of the plane’s window as if she was still trying to figure out just what in the hell had happened.

  “Mac,” I said.

  Her eyes widened slightly

  as she turned to me. “Yeah?”

  “We made it,” I said. “We’re okay.”

  “Yeah,” she said again, nodding absently.

  “Come on,” I said, offering my hand.

  She took it and came slowly across the pilot’s seat. I jumped down into the water and helped her down. The water only came up to our knees, but it was frigid. And the chilled air did nothing to help.

  As if the cold had pulled her from her state of disbelief, Mac looked around and gave a defeated smile.

  “What now?” she asked.

  I fastened the end of one of the toe downs to the left float, looking at the smoke issuing from that side of the plane.

  “Now,” I said, “we wait for help.”

  15—Mac

  Women have been lied to. We have been told that the key to romance is spontaneity and adventure. Stupid movies and poorly conceived novels have indicated these things. If women were to believe everything they see in movies or read on printed (or digital) pages, then surely I should have been excited about crashing on what appeared to be a deserted island with a mysterious man.

  But that’s all bullshit. Instead, I’m furious and, if I’m being honest, pretty damn scared.

  I’d been sitting on a piece of driftwood for the last fifteen minutes, watching Jack as he tries to figure out what’s wrong with the plane. I watched him with a certain sort of detachment. It’s the sort of situation where you almost want to laugh just to keep from screaming in frustration.

  After getting out of the plane, I came directly to this piece of wood. It’s sitting about three feet away from where the ocean is lazily slapping at the shore. Even without getting up to venture around the place, I have a pretty good idea of what our situation is.

  The island might be one hundred yards across. There’s a thin crop of trees behind me, the kind that look almost tropical but are, in fact, quite ugly and depressing. To my right, about fifty feet away, there’s a rocky sort of cove that loops in and then straight back out into the ocean. To the left, there’s a thing strip of beach that stretches out pretty far. I can just barely make out the place where it stops and the ocean takes over. Maybe in the daylight, it would be pretty. But for right now, in the miserable dark with angry feelings bubbling up in my guts, it’s Hell. We could have crashed on that island from Lost and been better off as far as I was concerned.

  Of course this was happening to me. Why not?

  Enjoying your pity party?

  It was my mom’s voice, echoing something she had once said to me as a teen, over and over. She had been dead for nearly ten years now but I got this little question in my head from time to time. It had remained there, nailed to my brain, in the months following the divorce. And here it was again.

  I sighed and got up from my little driftwood bench. I walked down to the edge of the water. When it lapped at my shoes, I was reminded of how cold it had been when I had been placed knee-deep into it after Jack had helped me off and tied the plane down to a tree on the beach.

  “Is there anything I can do?” I asked, hoping he’d say no.

  “No.”

  I nodded. “Are we stuck?”

  “For now,” he said. He was looking at something on the underside of the plane’s left wing. He had a hatch popped out and I did not like the fact that he looked as if he had no idea what he was doing.

  “Don’t most planes have little beacons or something? Hell, can’t we radio for help?”

  “We could,” he said. “If the radio worked.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “It did when we left your grandpa’s place. I think something came dislodged during the crash. I’m not sure.”

  “Didn’t you have it checked before you went flying?”

  “Yes,” he said, clearly getting pissed off. “I did. I had everything checked, right down to making sure the seats had plenty of cushion. Everything. And it all passed with flying colors.”

  “Then your mechanic sucks.”

  “Well, it was the only mechanic in Sitka that works on planes. So I had no choice, now did I?”

  I took a step back to my driftwood seat. He had started to raise his voice and I had never heard him like that. So I resumed my place along the natural bench, hoping that the fact that he wasn’t freaking out yet was a good sign.

  I couldn’t help the next question that came out of my mouth. I needed to know the answer so I could know whether or not I should start being scared. I didn’t think there would
be any creatures on this tiny little island that would eat or otherwise kill me, but the idea of starving to death in the middle of the ocean wasn’t exactly appealing.

  “Can you fix it?”

  He stopped what he was doing and looked out to me. He had a toolbox sitting on the float closest to him, and he held a wrench in his hand. He was slightly greasy from whatever he was doing under the wing. He looked at me like he might rush to the beach and brain me with the wrench.

  Still…

  Crap, I thought. He looks hot when he’s mad.

  “I think so. But it will take time. And I can’t see a damned thing.”

  “Ok.”

  I wanted to apologize for repeatedly bothering him, but also didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. I picked up a small stick from the ground and etched out a tiny SOS. I rolled my eyes at it and then rubbed it out with my foot.

  I sat there for another ten minutes before I heard Jack curse loudly. This was followed by a thudding sound ten feet away from me as he threw the wrench into the sand. I looked over to him and saw that he was even madder now. More than that, I saw that his shirt was soaked. It was a light colored shirt and even in the dim moonlight, I could see the definition of his body beneath it. How had I never imagined that he was that well-cut under his shirt?

  No…

  I shut the thought out as quickly as I could. Stupid romantic movies… I thought.

  “No luck?” I asked, making sure I pushed my anger ahead of the parading dirty thoughts in my head.

  “No,” he said. “It’s fixable, but I can’t see anything.”

  “What do we do now, then?”

  He shrugged. “We’re stuck until the sun comes up. There’s a flashlight in the cabin, but it’s useless.”

  “Let me guess. No batteries.”

  “Oh, there are batteries…but my guess is that they stopped working sometime shortly after Mr. Tanner first brought this plane.”

  “Did you check anything on the plane?” I asked.

  He was stomping through the water now. His hair was slicked back with sweat and ocean water. His shirt was clinging to him. And for a moment, he reminded me of someone. I could have sworn that I had seen him somewhere before.