Chapter Sixteen
The hours are infinite, looping back on themselves, hard to track.
We eat the last of the rice, the dried fish.
I feel my body turning to air, light, easily swept away by the winds.
In the evening, we sit on the porch, our bellies empty. He takes my hand in his, trailing his fingers across my palm, tracing my fate. My life mapped out beneath his touch.
He is gentle with me, like he knows there isn’t much time left.
Sometimes we’re too tired to climb the stairs to bed, so we sleep in the grass, beside the campfire, and I swear I fall asleep with my eyes open, the stars whirling overhead.
I dream of the warm, sandy beach, wading through the cove to gather coconuts and avocado. I want to slip back in time. To when our lives felt uncomplicated and endless and sure.
I don’t tell Clay about my dreams. Because I know he’ll only wish he could make them true, give me what I want.
But there’s no unwinding the clock.
He brings me flowers picked from the cliff edge, near the gravesite—blue bonnets and dandelions.
I put them in a ceramic vase, leaving them on the kitchen table beside the hole burned permanently into the wood from Kochek’s cigarette.
We’ve survived so much inside these walls.
And the wildflowers feel garish and bright against the muted white of the kitchen.
Everything feels vivid to me now, every scent, every color.
Like I’m seeing the last of it, the last shutter click of my eyelids, capturing the final moments before the end.
In the morning, sunlight filtering through the bedroom window—lace-like, dappled by clouds—I hear him stir beside me.
I’m still in that delicate place between asleep and awake, when he touches my hair, softly, almost reverently.
“I’m sorry, Ellie,” he whispers, not intending for me to hear.
He breathes, is still a moment. “I’d do anything to protect ye, but I don’t know how to protect ye now.
I don’t know how to save us.” His voice quivers, loses its strength, and he releases his hand from my hair.
I feel his weight leave the bed, and he crosses the room, closing the door behind him.
He will walk down to the shore, perch on a rock as the sun arcs over the island, hoping to pull a fish from the sea.
I should have turned to him, told him that none of this is his fault. Told him that he saved me long ago, when he pulled me from the shore. When he told me he loved me.
There was a time—back when I was still with James in Seattle—when I thought strength meant doing everything on my own, proving I didn’t need anyone’s help.
I believed I had to save myself. But what’s wrong with being saved, with feeling so unsteady that you need someone else to hold you up?
To carry you to bed and promise to never let go.
I should have touched him, reassured him.
Instead, I close my eyes, and reach for the dark, that empty void in my mind where sleep finds me again. Where my dreams are blotted-out vestiges of the past.
And never the future.
Life is rarely as perfect, or as well-timed, as the stories written down in books. I always loved the tidiness of fiction: the predictable rise and fall of each act, the anticipation as it neared its end, knowing that everything would be sorted and accounted for. No loose ends.
But here, in this world, nothing is quite so flawless.
It rains, a downpour that thunders against the roof, soaking the island, smearing the sky in watercolor grays. “Stay in bed with me,” I beg Clay.
He’s had no luck fishing from the shore, so there’s no point standing out there, soaking himself to the bone, if we won’t be able to eat anyway. Might as well spend the day in our room, listening to the rain, saving our strength.
He nods, running his fingers down my cheek.
As the days grow thinner, more desperate, he is the only thing that beats against my chest, keeping me alive.
The sun makes ribbons across the bedsheet, along my arms where they drape across his stomach.
“We always said we’d love each other until the end,” I murmur, tracing my index finger around the pink scar at his lower abdomen.
“Maybe this is the end.” There is no sorrow in my voice, only memory.
A feeling of ease—it has come to this, and he is the last thing I’ll ever see.
Maybe we’ll die in this bed, arms folded over each other, lips drawn close, the sky shedding tears over the house where I once feared him but grew to love him.
He breathes, brushing his fingertips over my temple, down my neck. “Sometimes… when I look at ye, I think my heart will burst. An’ I canna think of a better way to die.”
I laugh, the sound quick, before it sinks back into my chest.
I lift my chin, laying my lips over his, so softly it feels like I will melt into him, and we will become one. “I will always find you,” I whisper against his mouth. “Even in the next lifetime.”
His hand slides around to the back of my neck, pulling me closer to him.
I let my eyes slip closed, sinking into sleep. Where we dream the same dreams.
Where we never wake.
We die on this night.
His fingers in my hair, my palm over his heart. We exhale our final breath, the last to die. The last to ever really live.
In my dreams, we never wake.
But this isn’t really the end.
Because before the sun has even risen, just a shadowy light to the east, I hear Clay stirring awake, slipping from bed.
We didn’t die, as my dreams foretold.
Not yet.
I feel his lips against my cheek. The light outside is watery and pastel, the rain still falling.
“It’s time,” he says.
I turn to see him more clearly.
“We’ve hardly eaten in nearly two weeks. I’m going out to the henhouse, if there’s no eggs, then I have to…”
“No.” I push myself up, arms weak, and when I rest back against the headboard, the room spins around me. “We can wait another day.”
“Nae.” He shakes his head. “We winnae survive if we don’t eat.”
“If we don’t reach land, we’re going to die anyway. Killing the chickens will only get us a few more days.” I blink, trying to keep the room from tilting. “Let them live, please.”
He leans down, kissing me this time on the lips. “Yer too soft for farm life,” he whispers with a smile. “Let’s hope there’s an egg waitin’ for me when I get out there.”
He turns before I can protest further and leaves the room, his footsteps echoing down the stairs.
I sink back into bed, pulling the blankets over my head.
I don’t want to think about Clay ending the lives of our chickens—who survived a hurricane, who we caught and brought back to the island, who withstood the Arctic by living in the cellar.
They have been through as much as we have. They deserve a chance at life.
My dreams are dark and drowning, like I’m being pulled under, but I’m awoken by a hand against my shoulder. I jerk awake, eyes flashing up to the ceiling.
Clay is seated beside me, I can feel his shadow as my eyes adjust to the waking world.
“Ellie,” he says, his voice quiet, calm, different somehow. Still, I start to turn away from him, not wanting to hear what he had to do—that we will eat tonight, but it meant the sacrifice of one of the chickens. “Look.”
I hesitate, my eyes going to the window briefly, where rain drips down the glass.
But finally I turn, facing him, and his outstretched palm.
At first, I can’t tell what he’s holding.
It’s too obscure in the dim light of the room.
I blink again, and I smell its sweetness before my eyes fully settle on it.
The soft scent of summer fruit, the sultry taste as your teeth break the velvet skin.
A peach.
I sit up, and Clay holds it out to me, forcing it into my cupped hands. Slowly, I bring it to my nose, inhaling deeply. The scent is rich and honeyed. Impossible.
“How?”
He smiles. “There’s more.”
I look to the window, unsure if I’m still in a dream, but he holds out his hand and I take it, letting him lead me down the stairs.
I hold the peach against my chest as if it were a rare jewel, the most precious thing I’ve ever possessed.
Clay pulls open the front door, then waits for me to step out onto the porch.
My heart beats unevenly, a symptom of hunger, of disbelief.
Rain still dapples the sky, but the sea is gone.
Ahead of us waits a large expanse of land—green and rich, trees swaying in the morning wind, shorebirds pecking along a rocky beach.
Clay stands beside me, breathing.
“You went to shore?” I ask, surprised he would risk it. Alone. In case we got separated. But we’re also starving—desperation likely drove him out to that enticing stretch of beach.
He nods. “Orchard trees, just up a little ways. Peaches an’ apples, even pears, I think.”
“Clay—” The word is an exhale, but the tears are falling, cascading down my cheeks. He folds me in his arms.
“Eat,” he says, nodding at the peach. “I wanted ye to have the first one.”
I bring it to my lips, but before my teeth can sink through the soft skin, there is movement in the distance.
The shorebirds suddenly lift into the sky, erupting in a chorus of trills, scattering.
From the tree line, a dog appears, sprinting into the open, tongue flapping, legs bounding happily like any canine who’s been set free on an expansive beach.
It looks like a golden retriever, large and dopey, and it darts after the birds, but they’re already airborne.
A second later, something else emerges from the trees, from the same shaded opening in the evergreens.
A young boy.