Chapter 15
15
CATHERINE
J acob loses it.
Chasing me across the island—how did he even do that?—was too much for him. Trying to escape a murderer was too much for him. Everything that happened with the consortium, starting with Gabriel’s parents dying, was just way too much.
I have to promise him that Raymond Harris will be okay before he’ll rest Raymond’s head on the sand and come away from the body. We get as far as the entrance to the cave before Jacob can’t go another step.
He sinks back down to the sand, puts his head on my shoulder, and sobs.
After twenty minutes or so, it’s pretty obvious that he can’t stop.
“I’m sorry, Catherine. I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I killed him.”
“He was going to kill us.”
“But I’m the one who did it, and that means?—”
“You’re nothing like your father, or my father, or anybody else’s father unless they were just a good man. Like you. You’re good, Jacob. I still love you. I’m always going to love you.”
Jacob howls when I tell him I still love him. He howls until he loses his voice, then switches back to sobbing.
He’s still sobbing when he clears his throat and gestures at the cave. “Was that—the X?”
“On the map? I think so, yeah.”
“What was in it?”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
Jacob seems to find it genuinely distressing that there was nothing in the cave, even though it was marked on the map. It seems like it’s eating him up from the inside that there wasn’t a silver lining. No treasure to find.
“Then why did he bring you here?” he demands, sobbing harder.
“I don’t know.” I want to have an answer for him, but I don’t. I don’t know what Raymond Harris’s plan was. He seemed perfectly calm, almost eerily calm until we got to the beach, and then he…broke down and started collecting driftwood. “Maybe he was going to burn me as a witch.”
“What the fuck ,” Jacob sobs.
I know he can’t get up. There’s no point in asking him, so I sit with him on the beach, rubbing his back and watching the waves roll onto the shore and ignoring the rocks that are digging into my ass for a long time.
It’s not so bad here if you’re just sitting on the beach. I mean, the sand isn’t very nice, but the ocean view is lovely.
I want to just be in the moment with Jacob and let him cry as long as he needs to and not worry about shelter or food, but the sun keeps moving across the sky. Eventually, it’ll set. I don’t want to be out here in the open when there’s an available cabin.
I’m stroking Jacob’s back and trying to think of how to broach the topic of hiking back when he swallows, picking up his head.
“Do you hear that, kitten?”
I don’t hear anything but the wind and the waves and Jacob’s heartbeat.
Then I hear the buzz.
It’s not like a plane, or an insect. It’s something else. Jacob and I stare at the ocean, waiting. I hope it’s not another murderer. I’m too tired for that.
The buzzing gets louder.
A few seconds later, a speedboat comes into view.
“That’s a speedboat.” Jacob points. His chest continues hitching.
“I see that.” It is a speedboat. A normal, white speedboat, with a man standing up at the wheel, the wind in his dark hair. As we stare at him, he lifts a hand to shade his eyes and scans the beach.
He stands tall when he sees us and turns the boat in a wide loop until it’s facing the shore. Then he drives it in and in and in until he reaches shallow water, hops out, and drags the front of the boat onto the sand.
The dark-haired man shades his eyes again.
“Hello.” I wave to him. That’s probably a nice touch. “We’re actually, like, stranded here on the island after a plane crash, and we need to borrow a cell phone.”
“What happened to yours?” Jacob asks. He blinks a few times. No more tears. The emotion fades from his face.
“Harris threw my whole bag into the ocean.” I’m a little heartbroken over the bag. It was my favorite bag in the world, and now it’s probably lost to the tide. “I’m sad about it. But I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll get you another one,” Jacob swears.
The man from the boat cocks his head to the side. “Who the hell are you?”
“Catherine and Jacob Chambers. Who are you?”
“Are you the lady who called me on the radio?”
“Oh! Yeah! That was me!”
“…but you don’t know who I am?”
“No! I have no idea.”
He rolls his eyes hugely, theatrically, and lets out an irritated scoff. “Jesus fuck. You can call me Cancer. Plane crash? Is that what you said?”
“Yes. And we really need a ride to, like, anywhere else.”
Cancer—that can’t be his real name—drags the boat a little farther up on the beach, then comes toward us with long strides. He offers me his hand first. I take it. Cancer has a strong, calloused hand and a nice face. Not nearly as hot as Jacob, but nobody is.
Jacob’s still the hottest person on earth when he’s sitting on the beach with his shoulder slumped, expression blank.
“Your husband okay?”
“No. He’s really not okay. Are we far from the nearest hospital?”
“Nope. What about the other guy?”
I look over my shoulder, and there’s Raymond Harris, lying on the beach where Jacob left him. He has one arm over his chest. If there wasn’t so much blood, he could be taking a nap. I feel like an asshole for forgetting he was there so quickly. Is that normal? Even if it isn’t, I’m still more concerned about Jacob.
“Yeah.” I brush my hair out of my face and turn back to Cancer. “He was the pilot, but he’s dead now.”
“From the crash?”
“No. From a steak knife.”
Cancer glances between me and Jacob.
“Is that, like, a problem?”
He shrugs. “Is it?”
“The steak knife was only necessary because he was trying to strangle Jacob to death. And he took me hostage before that. He really wanted to murder us.”
“Why?”
“Because Jacob’s father and my father were in a business group that supported evil as long as they could make a ton of money, and?—”
Cancer holds up a hand. “Say no more.”
“Are you sure? I could probably explain?—”
“Nah. We all know that story. Rich fucks will fuck around until they find out.”
“Have you ever considered putting that on a throw pillow?”
He rolls his eyes again, less theatrically this time. Then Cancer and I work together to help Jacob to his feet. We make our way across the sand and into the boat, and then Cancer pushes it away from shore and vaults himself over the side. He retrieves two life jackets and a big blanket from a compartment toward the back. Jacob and I put the life jackets on, and then Jacob wraps both of us in the blanket.
“Where are we?” I shout to Cancer as he starts the engine and steers the boat into deeper water.
“You’re near the Bahamas,” he calls over his shoulder. “But you’ll be home soon.”
He takes us to another tiny island. Unlike the one we crash-landed on, this island has a house built into the side of it.
Well…some kind of building. All that’s visible from the speedboat is a row of big, square windows curving in a gentle outward arc, held in place with a thinner layer of gleaming white concrete.
When we pull up to the dock, people in scrubs come out to greet us. Two of them cluck concernedly over Jacob, and one of them is adamant about making sure I’m okay.
I am, for now. Maybe I’ll freak out later.
The house in the side of the mountain isn’t a house, as we soon discover. It’s a base that contains a bunch of different things, including a tiny hospital and a surgery suite. It reminds me of a more luxurious version of the canned foods in the cabin. Utilitarian signs decorate some of the walls—GYM and CAFETERIA and LIbrARY and so forth—but there are no plaques with the name of the organization and not a single brochure to orient us.
Inside fifteen minutes, Jacob is hooked up to a bunch of monitors and covered in blankets in a pristine hospital room with a view of the ocean and a softness to it that I didn’t expect but am instantly grateful for. I think it’s the colors. Three of the walls are a shade of marshmallow white. The fourth is an accent wall in the most comforting shade of sage I’ve ever seen.
I look at that sage green wall a lot over the next little while.
Because doctors keep coming in and going out, consulting the monitors and asking Jacob questions, and the calm, victorious, fine feeling I had when we got here changes into a strange pain in my chest. It’s not a heart attack. More people come in and make sure of that. It’s how worried I am about my husband, who has carefully, methodically, hurt himself and starved himself to the brink of death.
I don’t understand most of what the doctors tell me, or what the nurses re-explain again and again, only that it’s bad. It takes a long time for it to click that they’re all being so gentle because it’s bad and also because I just can’t, like, think . Everything seems simple—stay with Jacob, hold his hand, try to look comforting whenever he looks at me—but thinking is impossible.
Finally, a doctor with dark hair in a braid and blue eyes crouches down to my level and takes my hand in hers and explains that while I am apparently in non-medical shock as a result of, like, watching Jacob stab a guy to save me and everything else, Jacob is in the other kind of shock, where he doesn’t have enough blood in his body.
“Oh,” I say brightly, like I’ve learned an interesting fact at a dinner party.
“We’re taking care of it,” the doctor says.
“Okay. Thank you. That’s really kind of you.”
She smiles. “You’re welcome.”
I’m fine after that. Extremely calm. No more chest pain. I imagine tucking all my worry into a hidden compartment in my bag and leaving it there.
Eventually, Jacob falls asleep.
Not long after, there’s a soft knock at the door. Cancer gestures me out into the hall.
“Everything going okay?” he asks.
“Probably.” I am incredibly zen, except for the panic folded into a secret pocket in my imaginary bag.
“Good, good. Just wanted to go over a few things with you. First, this base has to remain a complete secret from everyone. I’m talking about your family, your best friend, your dog?—”
“I don’t have a dog. My brother-in-law has a bird, though.”
“The bird can’t know.”
“Okay. I won’t tell the bird.”
“What kind of bird is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s one of those birds that looks like a snowball.”
Cancer considers this.
“Does the kind of bird make a difference? Because?—”
“No,” he says quickly. “It doesn’t. The bird can’t know. Nobody can know.”
He keeps listing people who can’t know about the island, or the boat, or his heroic rescue until I hold up a hand.
“Listen. My husband is rich. I’m going to be rich soon. I won’t say anything about any of this. I just want to go home.”
He searches my eyes, then nods. “Anything you need from the island?”
“No, I don’t—oh! Jacob’s bag. He left it in the cabin. Some of my stuff is in there, too. My bag got thrown in the ocean. It’s probably long gone.”
“We’ll see what we can do.”
Cancer strides away.
“Wait,” I call after him. “What about Raymond Harris?”
He stops. “Who’s Raymond Harris?”
“The man on the beach. The…deceased one.”
“Buried.”
“You buried him?”
“Not me personally.”
“Is there…” I don’t know. I don’t know! “…paperwork?”
“Nope. Terrible tragedy. Plane crash, did the best we could do, no next of kin, et cetera.” He starts walking again.
“Wait! We need a phone. We have to tell our families we’re alive.”
He pauses at the end of the hall. “No phones. No calls to family. Not from here. As soon as your husband’s good to travel, they’ll send the two of you straight home.”
“Who’s they ?”
Cancer winks at me, then disappears around the corner.
It takes several days for Jacob to be well enough to fly. In that time, I discover that the base has a salon, where I have my hair cut and my nails done and a massage. I discover that Jacob’s hospital room has a connecting bedroom where I can sleep whenever he does, which is a lot. I discover that there are no hints anywhere about who owns this place or who Cancer’s boss—or anyone else’s boss—might be.
Everyone is so wonderful that I spend an hour or two wondering if I’ve made it all up in my head.
If it’s all, like, a hallucination, then Cancer is probably made up, too, but he still seems like the best person to ask.
When I do, he puts a hand on my shoulder and looks me in the eye. “This is real. But you’re going to forget about it.”
“From amnesia?”
He winks theatrically.
“Oh, right. Well, obviously. I just had to make sure.”
Cancer accompanies us on the trip to New York along with two nurses and two backup nurses. We don’t travel on a private plane this time. We travel on a commercial jet that’s empty except for us, Cancer, the nurses, and one flight attendant who has the poise and bearing of a butler.
Jacob has a minor breakdown about the environmental cost of using a commercial jet and can’t let it go until Cancer agrees to arrange offsets and donations for Jacob’s company. Other than that, he sleeps most of the trip, then descends into another panic when we’re an hour out from New York.
“They’re going to think we were dead,” he says, tears in his eyes. “The transmitter got blown up, so even if Gabriel got my letter?—”
“What letter?”
“I had a letter sent to him. But you were supposed to be here, where he could—where your family—but you weren’t here, because?—”
“Jacob, it’s okay.”
“And my phone—I don’t know where that is. And your phone?—”
“Don’t worry about it. I love you. And everybody’s going to know we’re alive really soon.”
“I’m sorry, kitten.”
“Don’t be sorry. It’s all okay.”
We go from the plane to a line of SUVs waiting on the tarmac. Jacob gets in first. As I’m waiting by the door, Cancer jogs past, heading for the trunk.
“We never met!” he calls as he goes.
“Okay, but, like, we did!” I go around to the trunk. “So?—”
He’s not there.
“Cancer?”
He’s not on the other side of the SUV, either.
I return to the open trunk.
Inside, on the brand-new smelling carpet, are our bags.
Both bags. Mine and Jacob’s. They’re both as clean as the day we bought them, and when I open mine, it has my stuff inside. My mini-pack of tissues didn’t survive the trip in the ocean, and neither did a couple receipts I had in my wallet, but everything else is polished and shined and?—
Are the twenties pressed? With an iron ?
Yes.
Even our phones are there.
Mine has a sticky note on the screen.
REPLACEMENT DUE TO OCEAN, it reads in bold, blocky handwriting. SHOULD WORK THE SAME. RECOMMEND A WATERPROOF CASE
A doodle underneath looks like waves.
“Ma’am?” The flight attendant is at my elbow. “Do you have everything you need?”
I have several questions, but I’m pretty sure I won’t get answers, so I just smile.
“Almost.”
We pull up in front of Gabriel’s brownstone at sunset. I keep my arm around Jacob’s waist. We walk through the frigid winter air together, the nurses close behind.
As soon as we’re at the door, I knock.
The hum of voices from inside stops.
Footsteps rush for the door.
It flies open, and there they are—Gabriel and my sisters and Gabriel’s brothers and his sister and everyone.
“Oh my fuck ! You’re alive!” Gabriel sings, and they all surge forward and crush us in massive hugs. “What the fuck was that letter, Jacob? Jesus Christ!” My sisters’ arms are around me so, so tightly. “You’re home!”
We’re home.