Quest
The contractions stopped around three in the morning. I know because I counted every single one.
Four total. The first one was the worst, the one that made Mehar dig her nails into my arm hard enough to draw blood.
The second came about forty minutes later, shorter, less intense.
The third was barely anything, just a tightening across her belly that made her wince and grab my hand.
By the fourth, she was half asleep against my chest and the tightening came and went without waking her fully.
I stayed awake the entire night. The storm raged outside the cave for hours, wind screaming, rain hammering the rock above us, water running down the walls and pooling at our feet.
I held her and counted the minutes between each contraction and tried to remember anything I’d ever heard about pregnancy and labor.
Braxton Hicks. That’s what it was called when the body practiced for the real thing.
False contractions triggered by stress or dehydration or physical exertion.
Mehar had experienced all three yesterday.
I told myself it was Braxton Hicks because the alternative was something I couldn’t process in a cave with no light and no help and no way to keep my child alive if she came three months early.
By dawn the storm had passed. The wind died down to nothing, the rain tapered off.
The only sound left was water dripping from the cave ceiling and birds starting up again in the distance, cautious and scattered like they were checking to see if it was safe to exist again.
Mehar stirred against my chest and lifted her head and looked at me with swollen eyes.
“Is it over?” she asked.
“Yeah. It’s over.”
“The baby’s okay. I think it was just Braxton Hicks.
” She said it like she was reassuring me and I realized she’d been awake for more of the night than I thought.
She’d felt me counting. Felt my body tense with every contraction.
She knew I was scared and she was trying to make it easier for me, which was so backwards and so Mehar that I almost laughed.
“Let’s go see what’s left,” I said.
We walked back toward camp slowly. Mehar held my arm and we picked our way through the brush, stepping over branches and debris the storm had scattered across the hillside.
The forest looked like it had been shaken by something enormous and careless.
Trees were stripped, leaning at angles that didn’t make sense.
Leaves and broken limbs covered the ground so thick we were walking on top of them instead of dirt.
When we reached the beach I stopped walking and just stood there.
The camp was gone. The shelter I’d built from palm fronds and driftwood was scattered across the sand in pieces.
The fire pit was buried under debris. The flat rock where Mehar sat every morning was still there but everything around it had been rearranged by the wind and the water.
The tide line had pushed thirty feet further inland than normal.
The beach itself looked wider in some places and narrower in others, reshaped by a storm that didn’t care how many weeks we’d spent making this place livable.
And the raft was gone.
I scanned the shoreline twice to be sure.
It had been pulled up on the sand near the tree line, tucked between two rocks where I thought the wind couldn’t reach it.
But the storm wasn’t regular wind. The raft was gone, probably ripped loose in the first hour of the storm and carried out to open water where it would float until the ocean swallowed it or the current pushed it to some other shore a hundred miles away.
Our one visible signal, the one thing a search plane or a passing boat could’ve spotted from the air, bright yellow and orange against blue water, was gone.
I didn’t say anything about it. Mehar hadn’t noticed yet and telling her would do nothing except add weight to a situation that was already heavy enough to drown in.
But the fruit was everywhere.
The storm had ripped through the trees and shaken loose everything that was clinging to a branch.
Mangoes, coconuts, the bitter green fruit I still hadn’t identified, all of it scattered across the ground like the island had emptied its pockets.
Some of it was bruised and split open. Some of it was perfect, ripe and ready, sitting in the sand like gifts nobody asked for.
Mehar saw it and her whole body softened.
She let go of my arm and walked to the nearest cluster of mangoes and picked one up and bit into it without wiping it off, juice running down her chin.
She sat down right there in the wet sand with her belly between her knees and ate like someone who’d forgotten what abundance looked like.
I picked up a coconut and cracked it against a rock and brought her the water inside and she drank it without stopping.
Then she reached for another mango and looked up at me and for the first time in days there was something on her face that wasn’t exhaustion or fear.
It wasn’t hope exactly. It was closer to relief.
The temporary kind that comes when the worst thing you imagined doesn’t happen and your body unclenches long enough to feel something other than dread.
“We survived a hurricane,” she said, almost like she was testing whether the words were real.
“We did.”
“Our baby survived a hurricane.”
“She did.”
Mehar rubbed her belly and shook her head and bit into the mango again. “She’s going to be so dramatic when she grows up. I can already tell. First baby to survive a plane crash AND a hurricane before she’s even born. She’s going to hold that over everyone’s head for the rest of her life.”
I smiled because Mehar needed me to smile and because the image she painted was one I wanted to live inside for a minute.
Our daughter at five years old, telling her cousins she survived a hurricane in the womb.
Our daughter at sixteen, rolling her eyes at whatever inconvenience a teenager thinks is the end of the world, saying “I literally survived a Category 3 before I was born, you’ll be fine.
” Our daughter existing in a world where this island was a story we told at Thanksgiving instead of the place where we died.
I wanted that so bad I could taste it.
But the raft was gone. And the camp was destroyed.
And the fire was out. And we were starting over from zero for the second time on an island that nobody was searching for because they were searching in the wrong place.
I didn’t know how many more resets we had in us.
I didn’t know how many more weeks Mehar’s body could hold out before the baby decided she was done waiting.
I didn’t know if Justice had any idea where we were or if he’d already started planning the funeral.
I didn’t know anything anymore. And I was a man who had built his entire life on knowing everything, controlling everything, buying and strategizing and muscling his way through every obstacle that ever stood between me and what I wanted.
None of that mattered here. My money was in accounts I couldn’t access.
My power was in boardrooms and on streets I couldn’t reach.
Out here my name meant nothing. The ocean didn’t give a fuck who I was.
But I could build a fire.
That was one thing I could still do. One thing this island hadn’t taken from me.
So I gathered the driest wood I could find, stripped bark for kindling, and started working the friction method I’d taught myself weeks ago.
It took longer than usual because everything was damp from the storm.
My hands were raw, my arms burning. Twice the ember died before I could coax it into flame.
But on the third try the kindling caught and the smoke rose and the fire built itself from nothing into something and I fed it carefully until it was strong enough to survive on its own.
Mehar watched me from her spot in the sand, mango juice drying on her chin, one hand on her belly.
She didn’t say anything. She just watched me build a fire on a destroyed beach after a hurricane and I could see in her eyes that she understood what I was doing.
I was choosing to keep going because the alternative was lying down and waiting to die and that wasn’t something a Banks did. It wasn’t something she did either.
The fire crackled. The smoke climbed. And somewhere out there, past the horizon, past the storm, past the miles of open water that separated us from everyone we loved, I had to believe that somebody was looking for us.
I had to believe it because the fire wasn’t enough on its own. It needed the belief to keep going. And so did I.