55. Dylan
FIFTY-FIVE
DYLAN
Adrian stirs beside me and slowly blinks his eyes open. I’ve been up for a while, listening to the noise of the hospital, trying to get used to the sounds.
He burrows closer, still half-asleep, and I close my eyes, willing myself to let go.
It’s a fail on both counts, so a great start to the morning.
Adrian goes still for a moment, then lifts his head.
“I was about to lose my shit because I wasn’t in the raft.” He snorts out a laugh.
“Yeah, I had that moment too, earlier.”
“Both insane. Cool.”
I find myself smiling at him, even if I have that fish-out-of-water feeling that makes me both irritated and self-conscious.
He starts to turn on his side but gets tangled in his IV line and huffs in annoyance before he settles against me.
“What now?” he asks, eyes tracing every nook and cranny of our hospital room.
“Umm. As far as I can tell, a bunch of tests for both of us, and there was something about the police stopping by. I’m pretty sure somebody said something like that.
I don’t know how long we have to be here or what happens when we’re released.
I mean, obviously we’re going home, but how…
” I shrug, already overwhelmed by everything, and I’m just thinking about those things and not even doing them right now.
“Too much?” Adrian asks knowingly.
I blow out a breath. “It’s a lot.”
He nods, because out of all the people in the world, he’s the only one who understands perfectly.
“How did we get off the island?” he asks next. “I have a huge chunk of time missing.”
Two short sentences that make my insides shatter.
He doesn’t remember.
Which means he doesn’t remember me telling him I loved him. Or him telling me he loved me too.
He doesn’t know.
I lick my lips and look away.
I mean, that’s good.
Of course it’s good.
It’ll make things easier if he doesn’t remember. It’s like it never happened, which is good, because then maybe things won’t be as screwed up between us.
I mean, he said he loved me too, but he was delirious with fever and had just gone through a hatchet job of an amputation, so for all I know he wasn’t even aware it was me he was talking to.
“Um, well,” I say slowly. “I did something stupid.”
He raises his brows at me. “Not from where I’m standing?”
“Oh, just you wait.” I swallow hard before I tell him the whole damn story.
“So you saved my life,” he concludes.
“No.” I rub my palm over my face. “No. I went out on a lunatic hunch and just got incredibly lucky. I didn’t really know if there was a boat out there.
I took a fucking chance, and I got lucky.
You know I never lit that last flare? That’s how stupid I was being.
I figured I’d get closer to the boat and then light it. Never did.”
I’d somehow stumbled on a research boat that had veered off course in while studying coral. That was it. No great heroics on my part, just some spectacular luck where the most effort went into me not killing both of us.
“You saved my life,” he says again.
I snort out a wet laugh. “You need to squint really hard to get to that conclusion.”
He takes my face between his hands. “We’re here, aren’t we?”
I take a deep breath and nod.
“We get to go home,” he continues.
I lick my dry, chapped lips and nod again.
I feel guilty. He’s alive, but I still feel so damn guilty about everything I’ve done, and I can’t tell him that because a lot of what I’m feeling makes no sense, and I can’t explain why I feel this downtrodden when I should be happy.
Maybe it’s the bone-deep exhaustion. And the malnutrition. And the thought of what’s going to happen to me now.
I take another deep breath.
“Do you think we could finally get our hands on a phone?” Adrian asks. “We need to call home.”
I nod. “Let’s see what we can do.”
It’s an endless wait.
Then…
“The Olsen residence,” a distracted voice says over clanking that sounds like dishes being done. “Talk, or I’m hanging up.”
Adrian draws in a shaky breath.
“Mom?” he says, and his voice immediately breaks.
There’s a long pause.
“Mom, it’s me,” Adrian says.
There’s a similarly shaky breath to Adrian’s from the other end of the line, but no words.
“It’s Adrian,” he says. “It’s… me.”
There’s more silence.
“Please don’t,” she says then. “Not again. We can’t do this again. Enough is enough. We’re real people, so stop with these sick?—”
“Video call,” I say. “Lynn, please, can you turn on your camera?”
There’s even more silence before she mutters something under her breath, and then she comes into view.
She looks tired.
The backs of my eyes feel searing hot with tears I can barely hold in check. Adrian fumbles with the display of the phone, but then his image appears in the lower right corner.
Lynn gasps, and the phone clatters onto the counter, or the floor. It’s difficult to say.
“Eric!” she calls out in a trembling voice as she picks the phone up again, her hand shaking so hard the image is all wobbly. “Eric!”
Adrian looks at me, laughing through his tears.
It takes a long time for all of us to calm down enough to speak again.
“How?” is the first question.
We tell them about the plane and the island and the research boat. It takes a while to get the whole story out. We all laugh and cry at the same time. The conversation becomes a jumbled mess, all of us too overcome with emotions to make any real sense anymore.
“Right,” Eric finally says. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll hang up for now, and I will call the embassy. We need to get you two out of there, and they’ll know what to do, okay?”
We both nod. I’m twenty-six years old, so by all accounts firmly an adult, but fuck does it feel good to have somebody else taking care of everything and not have to worry about anything.
We don’t have any documents or money or a way to get them.
We don’t even have a phone other than this cell a harried-looking nurse handed to me when I went and asked.
So we need help, and my brain seems too hazy for me to even contemplate finding some.
“Thanks, Dad,” Adrian says. Lynn and Eric start to cry again.
“We love you both,” they say.
“We love you too,” Adrian echoes.
The call drops off, and we both look at each other with tremulous smiles.
“We’re alive,” Adrian says.
I laugh. “Yeah, we’re alive.”
“And we’re going home.”
I nod. “We’re going home.”