Chapter 4 #2
I know what you’re thinking. Get a coconut, dude. If there are palm trees, there must be coconuts, too, right? I tried. I shook a dozen trees, but the trees barely budged and the coconuts definitely didn’t. None were on the ground, either.
Night fell again, fast. Twilight in Giraffe Land didn’t hang around long. The black sand was warm, but the air was cold, and night number two in Giraffe Land was as bad as night number one.
I shook, like I had a fever. Maybe I did, because that night I drifted in and out of a weird sleepy-exhausted-shaky-thirsty state, and woke the same way.
The sun came up, and I just lay there. So thirsty.
My brain couldn’t think, but it could imagine, and here’s the one memory that I fully admit might be a delusion: I tilted my head toward the trees and a girl materialized from the brush.
She had long dark hair falling around her shoulders, a white skirt and matching white tube top, and a thin halo of white flowers around the top of her head.
I think she was an angel. I’m still not sure she was real.
She was real.
She placed one finger over her lips, came forward, knelt, and placed an oyster shell to my lips. “Slow,” she whispered. Brown eyes as warm as chocolate. “Drink.”
I drank. Water. The cleanest water I’d ever tasted.
She lifted my hand to take the shell. “Go north,” she said. “Find those like you. Find what you seek and Godspeed home.”
She went to stand and I grabbed her wrist. “Wait! Who are you? Where am I?”
She shook her head and deftly slid her wrist from my grip. “The answers you seek do not lie with me.” She pointed to the sand beside me. “Find what you need. The island helps those who help themselves. And stay away from the meadow.”
I looked down, following her finger, and found a piece of dingy white cotton—a loincloth. Beside it rested a gourd. Heavy. Full of water.
When I looked up, she was gone.
I never saw her again.
My name is Scott Bracken, and this is the truth.
Needing a break, I closed the journal, feeling dirty even though Dad had told me to read it. Reading my uncle’s journal was like prying into someone’s mind—possibly a very fractured, damaged mind.
What Uncle Scott wrote couldn’t possibly be real.
Could it?
I ran downstairs, journal in hand.
“Dad!” I shouted.
“In here,” he called from his office. He faced the wall map of the South Pacific but turned the moment I entered. “Yes?”
“What is this?” I held up the journal, a private account of something. “Was Uncle Scott mentally ill? Is that why he was on that bridge?”
“How far did you get?” he asked. His voice was remarkably calm.
“I stopped after entry number three.”
He nodded. “So you know that I was late, and that he might have never made it to that place—” He paused, visibly wrestling personal demons I’d never known he had.
“Giraffe Land,” I added helpfully.
Dad tipped his head. “Giraffe Land, if it weren’t for me. For my carelessness with time, my utter lack of awareness of it. It’s a selfishness of another sort. And that’s part of my drive, Skye. Because I’m partially responsible for what happened to him.”
I thought about Scott’s words. “The road less traveled.”
“Indeed.”
But Uncle Scott picked the route. I shook my head. “You can’t blame yourself. He chose to bike rather than wait. He chose to take that particular street, and for all you know, the same thing would’ve happened if he’d driven. So to blame yourself for this”—I held up the journal again—“um, no.”
“Perhaps I’m not fully to blame, but I shoulder a great deal of responsibility.
Call it the butterfly effect, a ripple in time or fate.
Our choices define and shape our lives, and our choices impact others.
Because I was late—which was my choice, conscious or not—Scott was in the wrong place at the wrong time. ”
We were discussing the journal as if it were truth.
“So you’re saying Uncle Scott wasn’t crazy.” I paused, trying to wrap my head around Giraffe Land and failing. “You’re saying that his journal is fact, not fiction.”
“Let me tell you what isn’t in that journal.
” Dad sat on the edge of his desk and folded his hands in his lap.
“A week after our sixteenth birthday, Scott disappeared. The police never found a single lead except for his bike. Ten months later, Scott was found less than two hours away in Boston on someone’s lawn, naked, scratched, and tan—mind you, it’s March—with old, healed scars on his cheek and calf.
He was taken into police custody and refused to talk until our parents arrived.
He looked older, in ways I couldn’t even begin to describe, and when he told us the story, I’d no doubt he’d survived something both wonderful and terrible.
He’d survived Giraffe Land, as he called it. ”
He pointed at the journal in my hand. “I believe that what he wrote is the truth. Not a delusion, but a reality that he fought to understand after the fact. I looked in his eyes his first day back, Skye. It was all there. Not just the belief, but the depth of sorrow and growth and triumph and strength borne from his experience; it reached all the way to his soul. We were the same age, yet he was so much older. It was in his eyes.” His voice softened.
“And that’s something your mom never had the chance to see. ”
He looked at me. “I’m the first to tell you I don’t understand how he got there, and as a scientist, it’s baffling.
Maddening. Almost incomprehensible. But I firmly believe Giraffe Land exists.
And”—his expression was as fierce and protective as I’d ever seen—“now you know why I’ve always driven you to be strong.
To be resourceful. To be prepared in the event of any sort of catastrophe.
So that if you—God forbid—find yourself on that island, you are as equipped to survive as you can be. ”
A long moment passed.
“The true name of the island is Nil,” he said quietly. “And I think I know where to find it.”