Chapter Eleven #3
A house held together by fate and spite and grief. A structure that’s lasted far longer than it should have.
Clay looks at me, and the hurt in his eyes can’t be measured.
Maybe it would have been kinder if the storm had taken him too, flattened the house and both of us in it.
But it kept us alive. Kept him alive—so he’s forced to go on, rebuild somehow.
I wipe at my eyes, not wanting him to see me cry.
But when I blink, focusing beyond the farmhouse, I see something.
“Clay,” I say, pointing behind him. “Look.”
In the distance, a clot of palm trees sways in the calm morning breeze.
The storm pushed us toward a large mass of land, and now we’re perched against a long strip of reef only a few feet below the clear water’s surface.
A calm, half-moon-shaped cove lies beyond the reef, and it’s another hundred yards to the shore, where I can see the line of a sandy beach and the dense green of a jungle beyond.
“Shit,” I mutter, standing at the edge of our decimated island.
The peculiar mix of awe at seeing land after almost a year at sea—and the grief of losing nearly everything on the island—twists strangely inside me.
“We need to…” I start to say. “We should try. Before we drift back out.”
Clay stares cautiously at the shoreline. “Aye,” he agrees.
The little boat that was once tipped on its side behind the shed is now gone.
“We’ll have to swim,” he says.
I blink across the bay. It’s flat and docile.
But I can still remember my swim out to the island from the shore of the Faroes, how I nearly drowned.
How the sea swelled around me like it wanted to pull me under.
And although we’ve swum together in the sea since, we’ve never strayed far from the rocky edge of the island—for fear we could lose sight of it.
“We’ll need to be quick, gather what we can—food, firewood, anything that’s been washed ashore. An’ if we see the island starting to break free from the reef, we’ll swim back, fast.”
I nod, and he folds his hand in mine as we scramble down the rocks. We strip down to our underwear, wading into the shallows. The water is bathwater-warm, and the color reminds me of Nana’s opal earrings that she only wore on Christmas or her birthday—a swirl of pale blue and teal.
We begin swimming toward shore. The water, salty and buoyant, pushes us closer to the beach.
It’s easier than I thought it would be, and quickly we’re ankle-deep, wading up to the white sand.
The air tastes sweet, but my legs wobble a moment, adjusting to the steadiness of the ground beneath me.
I had grown so used to the soft sway of the island, the constant rocking, I had forgotten what it felt like to stand on land that didn’t move beneath me.
I turn, looking back at our island. And it feels like looking back in time, remembering when I saw it as a little girl: the impossibility of a white farmhouse atop a floating island, lost in a sea of unmeasured time.
I never imagined I’d call it my home one day.
That it would feel like the most important place in the whole world to me.
That I would leave everything behind for that mound of rock and grassy shoreline.
“What happens to time when we’re off the island?” I ask, turning to face Clay.
His eyebrows slant away from the sun, considering how to answer.
“When the island runs aground, I suspect the two timelines are joined. Fit back together.” He scrapes a hand across the back of his neck, looking thoughtful, tired.
“Only when the island breaks away again, will time slow. Unbound to the mainland. It’s just a theory, mind ye, an’ one I canna be certain of. ”
But I nod in understanding. It explains what happened when I was young, when the island broke away from the outer cape and set adrift before I could get back into Nana’s tiny boat. Time had slowed, and when I returned home, a week had passed on the mainland.
While the island is touching another strip of land, it’s linked to that time, like the lost piece of a clock clicking back into place.
Right now, standing on the beach, I am back in the same timeline as Nana. Back within the world where I once belonged.
“Let’s collect what we can,” Clay says, knowing we can’t waste any time. The sea could pull the island back out at any moment. We need to hurry.
He brought a large hunting knife, strapped at his waist, and he uses it to hack down long stalks of bamboo growing just beyond the tree line.
But it takes me longer to wheel my body into motion.
I turn in a circle, my eyes absorbing every detail and feature of the beach—the sand soft at the waterline, which turns pebbled and rocky near the trees.
Palms with heavy coconuts high above dot the edge of the jungle, but deeper in, other trees emerge that I don’t know the names of.
Crabs skitter away as I walk, small and angular and unappetizing.
In the thick of the trees, birds chatter and squawk and sing, an unrecognized variety.
I wish I’d studied the flora and fauna of the Caribbean islands.
Wish I’d thought to brush up on my knowledge of geography, and navigating by starlight.
I feel frustrated with myself for not predicting this eventual outcome.
That I’d someday be a castaway at the mercy of the tides and seas.
But no sane person would ever imagine this future for themselves.
Looking back at Clay, sweat rising on his forehead as he fells two more bamboo stalks, I know I need to get to work. We don’t know how long we’ll have before our island shimmies loose from the reef.
I use one of the cut bamboo stalks to knock coconuts down from the tall palm trees, ducking each time I break one free. Thankfully, I avoid a concussion. I don’t venture deeper into the jungle; it’s dense and overgrown and I’m wary of whatever lurks in its depth.
Clay lashes the bamboo stalks together with long strips of plant bark, while I forage down the beach.
Near a rocky inlet, I find bits of wood half submerged in the water.
I wade in, pull them out, and realize they must be pieces from our barn or greenhouse.
The storm washed them up onto the beach, and I drag the larger pieces back down to Clay. We might be able to use them.
After several hours on the beach, we secure everything we’ve gathered to his makeshift raft and push it out into the bay.
The swim back to the island is slower, Clay pulling the raft behind him, and when we finally trudge up onto the rocky shore, I feel more exhausted than I have in a long time. The sun and heat have drained me.
Clay drags the raft up onto the grassy slope and sinks onto his back. I lie beside him, staring up at the soft midday sky. I sense the relief in him, to be back on familiar soil—he doesn’t like leaving the island, for fear it will float away without us.
We carry the coconuts into the house, and I stand in the ruined kitchen, reminded of all the repairs we still need to do.
We spend the afternoon cleaning, fixing the back door, securing boards over the shattered window, and sweeping out the water and muck.
The rest of the island will take longer to set right.
We’ve lost so much. Yet, the cistern is now filled with rainwater.
“To the brim,” Clay tells me. And the cellar is still stocked with preserved food.
But we’ve lost the garden, the apple orchard and birch trees, the sheep, the beehive, and the chickens.
And eventually, we’ll run out of canned supplies too.
At sunset, after we eat a simple meal of beans and carrots, we sit on the porch steps eating chunks of white, fleshy coconut. The wooden chairs are long gone, shattered and whisked out to sea.
The night air is humid and warm, not even a stitch of a breeze. And it soothes me. The stillness, the quiet.
“It could be days, even weeks until the next storm,” I say. “We could be here a while.”
“Aye.”
His eyes are trained on the ocean.
“We could go back to the beach tomorrow, see what else we can find. I think the island is much larger than what we can see from here.”
Clay stands up, holds a hand down to me. I take it.
I expect him to tell me that it’s unsafe, that we better stay on the island.
But he says, “Okay. We’ll go back.”
“There’s a chicken!” I shout. We’ve barely stepped onto the beach after crossing the bay on our raft.
Clay constructed two oars from splintered fragments of wood he found among the wreckage, and we used them to paddle ourselves across the perfect blue water.
From the raft, we could see countless fish skittering through the shallow water below us.
If we could make a net, we might be able to easily scoop them up.
But now, on shore, I point to the tree line—where I saw the chicken dash back into the thicket.
“It could be one of ours,” I say.
Clay smiles. “Might be.”
We drag the raft up onto the sand, then start toward the jungle. I catch sight of it again, scurrying under a leafy fern, then it takes flight briefly, clumsily fluttering through the dense green.
Yesterday I was wary of the jungle, but now I crash after it, desperate. The chicken means fresh eggs—survival. And if we can find one alive, maybe there are others.
We cut even deeper into the jungle, ducking beneath tangled vines and wide, lacework spiderwebs stretched between trees.
“There!” I whisper, slowing my pace. At last, we step into a partial clearing where the chicken has stopped to peck at the ground—as if it’s forgotten that it’s being pursued.
A second one appears, a little farther off.
I’m certain they’re ours. They are plump, fattened, and the color of flecked mud, not the wiry exotic fowl I’d expect to see on a deserted island.
But there is something else in the clearing: banana trees, large leafy tops bending in the soft wind. Most of the fruit is still green, but as I move toward them, it’s Clay who grabs my hand, stopping me.