11
The gravel and the broken concrete bite into my feet as I sprint down the road. My white dress flaps behind me like the wings of a seagull. Sweat beads over my forehead and runs down my face. The air, fresher near the ocean, grows even more thick and soupy as I sprint down the road, further inland, toward the green, jewellike mangrove forest and teeming wetlands.
Dozens of snow-white egrets perch on long, spindly legs in the shallow blue-brown waters lapping over the dense forest of tube-like red mangroves. The egrets turn their long necks, their feathers ruffling as I sprint past them. The mangroves rise out of the water like gnarled old men standing on stilts, their branches and leaves threading together so that one tree becomes another.
As my shadow flicks over a mangrove’s tube, a fist-sized crab scuttles down the wood and dives into the water with a quiet plunk. Just as quickly, the egret nearby spears the water lightning-quick, snatches the crab, and tosses it down its long yellow bill.
I keep running. The heady, spice-like, musty scent of the mangroves stings my eyes, similar to a mosquito buzzing in my ear. In the distance the shrill whistling noise I heard in the cottage sounds again, and a V formation of brown ducks flies overhead.
I’m a quarter-mile inland, past the small cluster of rainbow-colored beach cottages. Two hundred meters ahead the mangroves open up and lead to another beachy clearing.
There’s a white gazebo on the beach, three picnic tables, and a concrete shower stand with an outdoor shower and a toilet. Under a tree there’s a tree swing. I almost stumble on the road, now mostly gravel and sand, because that tree swing looks almost identical to the one I swing on over Lake Geneva.
I can almost hear Mila’s laugh and Daniel calling me to come for a swim.
My chest clenches. I hope they aren’t too scared. I pray they’re okay. As soon as Daniel knows I’m missing he’ll come for Mila. He’ll take care of her.
Ahead there’s a man standing in the road.
He’s tall, spindly like the egrets, with skin dark from the sun. He’s in a fluorescent orange vest and is wearing crisp black cotton trousers, a white button-down short-sleeve shirt, and a black hat with a short brim.
When he sees me approaching he leans down, picks up the large octagonal sign next to the metal folding chair he’s positioned under the shade of a tall palm, and moves quickly to the middle of the road.
I slow, and then the man holds up the sign, turning it to face me.
It’s a stop sign.
Up close he has a broad forehead, thick eyebrows, a bushy black mustache, and sweat running down his face in branching rivulets. He also has the firm-jawed, tight-backed look of an officer.
“Wait. You know the rules.” His voice has that same rolling lilt the man had, and the old women under the tree. They’re speaking English, but I can’t place the accent.
“Are you a police officer?”
He ignores me, instead scanning the road behind me, then the road behind him. We’re at a junction where the road opens up, becoming almost wide enough to let two lorries pass each other without squeezing.
As the road opens there’s a sort of settlement across from the beach. The buildings here aren’t wood, instead they’re single-story concrete boxes, painted bright orange or goldenrod yellow. There are about a dozen of them, and on the farthest building—a marigold-orange one with a bead-curtain entry—there’s a painted sign that reads “Shop.”
I try to move around the man—a crossing guard, I think—but he steps in my path and holds out the stop sign.
“Excuse me. I need to get to the shop.”
“It’s the rules, isn’t it?”
“But I need to use the phone. It’s an emergency.”
“Emergencies don’t mean you break the rules. If we broke rules in emergencies, then the rules weren’t necessary to begin with.”
“Excuse me, but are you an officer?”
The tall man finally looks properly at me. He stiffens, standing even taller, and his shadow stretches across the gravel, giving me a tiny bit of shade. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t belong here. A man back there took me. I need the police.”
“There isn’t no man back there but Aaron.”
Aaron.
Is that his name?
“Tall. Muscles. Tattoos. Black hair, brown eyes?—”
“I know what he looks like.” The man’s getting impatient. “Seems to me you’re the one who took him.”
“I didn’t!”
The man snorts.
“Are you the police or not?”
“You know there aren’t any police on island. They’re all on the big island.”
There aren’t any police? There aren’t any phones but one?
“If you’re not the police, what are you?”
“Crossing guard.”
“There aren’t any cars. Let me pass.”
“I’m not looking for cars.”
This place. It’s insane. None of these people make any sense.
“What are you looking for then?”
I check behind me to make sure the man—Aaron?—isn’t following me. He’s not in sight.
The man makes a disgusted noise. “Planes.”
“Excuse me?”
He jabs his finger at the widened road behind him. The concrete and gravel tapers off, leaving only hard-packed sand. “Planes. On the runway. You can’t just run onto the airport landing strip. You have to wait. Just like you wait every time you want to go to the shop.”
I stare at the man. At his broad, sweat-soaked forehead and his bright orange vest.
“That’s a runway?”
The sandy road that runs along the ocean is a runway? But where’s the airport? More importantly, where are the planes?
He sighs.
“You have planes here?” My heart trembles out a hopeful beat. If there are planes I could hire someone to fly me out of here. Home. Or at least to . . . the big island?
He frowns at me. “Not now.”
My hope deflates a bit.
“Are any coming today?”
“No.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Then why are you making me wait here?”
He lets out a loud humph. “Because it’s the rules.”
“But if there aren’t any planes and there aren’t any cars, then?—”
I cut myself off at his indignant expression. Even the sweat on his face quivers in indignation.
“When is the next plane coming?” I ask while he scans the sky.
There aren’t any clouds, just an expanse of sun-bleached blue as desolate and barren as the ocean crashing on the sand.
Overhead one giant brown seabird soars, caught on a current, holding still on the air. Its shadow falls over us and remains while it hovers above.
The man watches the seabird for a moment, then he answers, “Sunday.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No. Next month Sunday. With the groceries and the mail.”
Next month Sunday is three weeks away. That’s unacceptable.
If I can call the police, someone will be here today. Even if I can’t reach the police, Daniel can have a jet here in hours. I just need a phone.
“Can I pass?”
The man looks at his watch—a Cassio with an unraveling black fabric band—and watches the second hand tick for exactly eleven seconds. Then he looks at me, drops the red stop sign to his side, and says, “All clear. You may proceed.”
“Thanks.”
Then I’m running past him, down the sun-hot sand that stings my feet, past the beach gazebo, past the flat concrete houses surrounded by sand and palms, past a wooden sign that reads “Clint’s Backyard Rum Bar,” past a garage with two scooters parked out front next to two lime-green kayaks, past a large building about three times the size of the houses with spicy pepper and smoky paprika smells drifting out, and then finally to the orange building that reads “Shop.”
I burst through the wooden beads at the front door. They clatter and clank, and the concrete of the floor is blessedly cool on my feet.
The shop is small. Ten feet by fifteen feet at most. The walls are lined with unpainted plywood shelves, stocked with cans of food—corn, green beans, beets, olives, tomato sauce, chicken soup, spam—boxes of food—pasta, cereal, shelf-stable milk, cookies, crackers—and glass jars of food—olives, onions, marinara, oil. There’s a tall freezer stocked with vacuum-sealed frozen beef, frozen chicken, frozen shredded cheese in plastic bags, and a few cartons of rum raisin ice cream that are covered in freezer burn and look like they were produced in 1982.
The shop is dim and smells like plywood, cardboard dust, and ocean. There’s a rotating floor fan near the door with green streamers attached to it. It moans anemically and kicks a weak draft of humid air around the room.
Opposite the door there’s a plywood counter loaded with packs of spearmint gum and candy jellies. I’m guessing there’s no chocolate, because it would melt and weep from the heat in two seconds flat. There’s a large metal tackle box that says “cash” in permanent marker and a large black stereo from the 90s with a tape deck playing a tinny-sounding “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys.
Behind the counter there’s a man—Jordi, I assume—and a woman in their late twenties in a heated argument. They haven’t noticed me. Instead they’re facing off.
The woman is about five foot three. She has bright red hair and sunburned cheeks. She’s pregnant, maybe four or five months, and has the look of someone who hasn’t slept well in weeks. She looks hot, miserable, and like she wants to take the tackle box and drop it on the man’s head.
He has long, sun-bleached hair, ocean-weathered skin, and the earnest puppy-dog expression of a man who knows he’s in trouble and doesn’t know how to get out of it.
“You told me you ordered the crib?—”
“I did!”
“Yesterday! It’ll take six months to get here. The freight forwarding, the shipping container, customs on the big island, then the boat here—it won’t get here in time?—”
“Baby . . . ” He holds out his hands and she smacks them.
“Don’t ‘baby’ me! You had one job! One job! A crib. I wanted a crib for my baby and you?—”
“Come on, baby, don’t be mad. It might get here before?—”
“I’m not a dolphin! It’s not like I gestate for a year! Is that what you think?”
“No—”
“I never ask anything of you. All I asked for was a crib?—”
The man turns then, ducking his head, and when he does he sees me.
“Babe.”
“No.”
“Babe.”
“No!”
“Hi,” I say, and the red-haired woman stops.
“Oh!”
I wave my hand. “I need to use the phone. You have a sat phone, right? I can pay whatever fee you need. I just need to use it. Quickly. Right now.”
The man and the woman stare at me as if I’m speaking another language.
Maybe I am.
“The phone. Please.”
“Is this about the party?” the woman asks, rubbing her belly. The pink in her cheeks is fading, but she still looks miserably hot and uncomfortable.
Wait.
Do they know about the party too?
Does everyone on this island know that Aaron (maybe) brought me here? Maybe with the help of my mum after my fake birthday party, and maybe not.
“That party,” Jordi says. “So much trouble.”
“No,” I say quickly. “Please. Let me use the phone.”
The man, Jordi, pushes his hair back from his face and gives me a long, confused look. “The phone?”
“Yes.” I nod emphatically and take a step forward. “The phone. I need to use it.”
“Really?”
I nod again, my chest tightening.
The woman rubs her belly in a slow circle and frowns at me. Then she asks, “Did you get the ice cream I sent over? With Amy.”
I glance at her. “Excuse me?”
She raises her eyebrows. “And they say I have placenta brain.”
Jordi has ducked beneath the plywood counter. There’s rustling, the sound of metal knocking together, a creaking, and then he pops back up, a gray hard plastic case a little smaller than a briefcase in his hand.
“Got it.”
He drops the case on the counter. It’s scratched and covered in dust. My eyes widen as he flips the latches and opens it up.
Inside there’s gray plastic with vents holding a bricklike black phone. It’s a long rectangle with a tiny plastic screen, large white buttons, and a black phone cord like landlines had in the nineties. There are cords and plugs and instructions on the plastic in Japanese. The hard plastic on the phone is cracked and the edges have melted and warped.
“The phone,” Jordi says as if he’s flourishing a national treasure.
I lean forward. There’s an old musty smell rising from the case. I lift out the black plastic phone. It’s heavy. Bricklike in both weight and looks. And broken. Clearly broken. One of the cords is frayed, the metal connector is bent, and the phone looks like someone left it in an oven for fifty minutes while a cake baked.
But just to be sure, I ask, “Does it work?”
Jordi frowns. “It hasn’t worked since 2002.”
Since 2002? It hasn’t worked in decades?
I clutch the cold, sticky plastic phone in my hand. “This is the only phone on the island?”
Both of them nod, watching me like I’m the one who’s lost my mind.
“But how do you contact anyone?”
My fingers start to ache from how tightly I’m clutching the defunct phone.
“We do it when the mail plane comes,” the woman says, giving me a funny look, “just like always. Do you need some water? Or Coca-Cola? I saved a bottle from our last batch in case I craved it, but you can have it. I think you need it. You don’t look very good, Becca.”
For a moment I’m too focused on the fact the only contact these people have with the outside world is through a mail plane. Then I register the last thing she said.
“What did you call me?”
The woman and Jordi exchange a look.
“Becca?”
I shake my head. “No. That’s not my name.”
“I’ll get that Coke,” the woman says, then she turns and takes quick steps through another bead curtain, back into what must be the storage room.
Jordi scratches the stubble on his chin, then he leans his elbows on the plywood countertop. “You don’t want to be called Becca anymore?”
“I’ve never been called Becca.”
His eyes scrunch down and he has that helpless look again—the one he wore when the woman was yelling at him about the crib.
Wait, that’s it. “The crib. How did you order it?”
“Um. Through Kyle. On the mail plane?”
Why is that a question?
“Is there any other way to get word to the outside world? Any way at all?”
“No.” He extends his “no” as if he’s not sure why I’m asking. He looks back at the beads behind him. “Find it, baby?”
“It’s down on the bottom shelf,” she calls, out of breath. “I can’t bend down to reach it! My belly keeps getting in the way!”
Jordi gives me a quick glance, seeming relieved to have an excuse to end our conversation. “Right back.”
I nod.
He hurries into the back.
I wait for a moment. Then I drop the phone back in its case and run out the front door, the beads knocking aside.
The full sun, the heat, and the sound of the ocean hit me again.
It’s hard to breathe in the heat. You can see the waves of it rising from the road and the sand, making squiggly lines in the air.
My chest is tight. My heart flings itself around my chest like a grasshopper stuck in a glass jar desperately trying to find its way out. I’m dizzy.
I think I’m going to pass out.
So instead of giving in to the hand-swiping black lines in front of my eyes and pushing myself toward oblivion, I sprint to the beach. My feet hit the wet sand, sinking into the cool, foam-soaked, powdery surface.
I drag in quick, frantic breaths, and then the cool waves snap around my feet. The shells and coral rocks picked up by the waves knock against my legs. I plunge further into the water, letting the waves yank me deeper. I stand then in the sinking sand, the waves up to my knees, the white dress floating on top of the water like a cloud.
I let the cool water flow over me, tugging the panic out of me. As I stand in the crashing waves, unsteady in the shifting sand and swirling water, my chest opens. My breath comes easier. I drop my fingers in the water, drag my hands through the current, and stare out at the unending blue.
Where am I?
Why did they call me Becca?
Why did the old women think they knew me?
Why did the girl call me Mom?
And the man, Aaron, he shouted Becca too.
I stand there, my mind whirling as fast as the eddies swirling around me.
I hold still and quiet, not turning, when the man comes, wades into the water, and stands next to me. The water laps at the bottom of his shorts.
He stands less than a foot away. He’s taller this close, his shoulders broader, the magnetic feel of him so strong he’s impossible to ignore.
He stands quietly next to me, not speaking. His isn’t a gentle quiet though—it’s more like the sound of the waves on the beach, restful or tempestuous depending on your perspective.
He holds a glass bottle in his hand, a Coca-Cola. Condensation drips down the lip and coalesces in round beads on the gleaming glass. He stares at the horizon, at where the world seems to drop off into nothing.
“Junie said you needed this,” he says finally, holding the bottle toward me. “You all right?”
I reach over and take the bottle, my fingers brushing over his as I do.
My heart clamors, and for some reason I feel like for the first time in my life I’ve finally dove straight into the turbulent waters.
“Aaron?” I ask, unsure if that’s actually his name.
The ice-cold of the bottle seeps into my hand and the condensation runs over my fingers.
He looks over at me then, his hair glinting black in the sun, the light reflecting off the hard planes of his face. A wave crashes against us, swelling over my thighs, plastering the white dress against my legs. The wave drops and the sand below swirls over my feet, sinking me lower into the mire.
He smiles then, a flicker across his face, as fast as the waves rolling past. “You never call me that.”
I don’t call him anything. I don’t know him.
“What do I call you then?”
He laughs, reaches over, and settles his hand around my back, tucking me close. “You’re all riled up today.”
“Who are you?” I ask again.
He lifts his eyebrows at that, his arm stiffening at my back. “Becca?”
“Tell me,” I say insistently. A cresting wave hits me, the foam spraying up, and I knock against Aaron. He steadies me, his hand brushing against my back.
“I didn’t realize our fifteen-year anniversary would rile you so much. I thought a party was a nice idea.”
I turn to him, staring at the line of his jaw, his deep-set dark eyes, the apology in his expression.
Above a gull cries out and an icy line traces down my spine.
Fifteen-year anniversary?
There’s something wrong here. Something very, very wrong.
Everyone on this island is acting as if they know me.
As if they’ve known me forever.
And this man . . . he thinks he’s my . . .
“You’re my husband.”
He lets out a small huff of air, a stunned laugh. “Ye-es.”
I stumble out of his arms, the sand pulling at my feet. A wave crashes against my thighs, nearly knocking me under. A bit of the cola spills out of the bottle over my fingers. The liquid is sticky and cold on my hand.
“Becca, you all right? Should we cancel the party?”
The water grabs at my dress, pulling it down as I scramble up the sandy shelf, out of the water. I back away from him, the tide tugging at me, wanting to force me back to him.
I stumble again as another wave crashes into me. I drop the bottle, and it spills fizzing black liquid across the white sand. A second later a wave sweeps over it, wiping it free.
Aaron snatches the bottle, rescuing it from the water.
When he looks at me, smiling with the bottle in his hand, I’m struck again by how he watches me with such familiarity. It has my stomach clenching and rolling and my heart picking up speed.
“Come on,” he says. “We’ll go home, get some breakfast. Amy said she wants banana pancakes and I can’t make them like you. After we eat we’ll talk. We can cancel the party. It’s fine. I know you weren’t keen on it. I didn’t realize how much.”
He’s guiding me up the bluff, back toward the runway/road, and I’m letting him.
Not because I trust him or like him or think he’s sane, but because I’m desperately trying to figure out what’s going on.
I don’t think he’s dangerous. I don’t think any of these people are. But I do think they’re all suffering from a mass delusion.
As we pass the shop Jordi hurries out, a platter in his hands with a cake on top. “Junie wanted you to take this. She said it’s the last chocolate box cake on island. Just for you.”
Aaron takes his arm from me and reaches out for the cake. “Thank you. We owe you one.”
“Forget it,” Jordi says, already hurrying out of the sun, back to the shade of the shop.
The white icing has already started to melt, streaking along the sides of the brown/black cake. However, it’s not the sweating icing or the pink frosting flowers leaking over the sides that I’m interested in.
No.
It’s the words written on top of the cake in blue frosting.
“Happy Fifteen Years,” it says.
And below that there are two names.
Becca.
And McCormick.