Quest
I was up before the sun, which wasn’t unusual.
What was unusual was waking up on sand instead of Egyptian cotton, with a pocket knife instead of a phone on the nightstand that didn’t exist, next to a woman I normally woke up beside in a California king, not on the ground under a tree on an island that God forgot to put on a map.
Day two. No rescue. No boats on the horizon. No planes overhead. Just the ocean doing what it did, blue and wide and indifferent to the fact that two people and an unborn baby were stranded on a piece of land that was probably smaller than the property in Virginia I couldn’t get back to.
Mehar was still asleep. Curled on her side with her hands tucked under her belly and her face soft in a way it only got when she was unconscious.
Awake, Mehar was steel and sass and a jaw that could cut glass.
Asleep, she looked like she used to look when I first met her, before Janelle, before the warehouse, before any of this.
Peaceful. Young. Like a woman who hadn’t been through the things she’d been through.
I let her sleep. She needed it more than I did and the baby needed it more than both of us.
I checked the fire. Still going. I’d been feeding it through the night, getting up every hour or so to add driftwood and dry branches.
That thing was staying lit until somebody came for us or until this island ran out of trees, whichever came first.
No sign of the boar. Whatever we’d heard in the brush last night hadn’t come any closer.
The fire was doing its job. But I wasn’t stupid enough to think it wouldn’t be back.
Wild boars were territorial and persistent.
We were on its turf, not the other way around.
Sooner or later, we were gonna have a conversation and it wasn’t going to be diplomatic.
I stood up and stretched. My body reminded me of every single thing it had been through in the last thirty-six hours.
My hands were the worst. The blisters from paddling had dried out overnight.
The skin was tight and cracked, and every time I flexed my fingers the cuts reopened.
My shoulders were stiff. My back ached. Everything from the neck down felt like it had been put through a rinse cycle on heavy.
But I was vertical, I was breathing, and I had a pregnant woman to feed.
The body was just gonna have to get in line.
First things first. Protein.
The mangoes and coconuts were keeping us alive but they weren’t enough.
Mehar needed real food. The baby needed real food.
Fruit and coconut water would hold you for a day or two but after that your body starts eating itself.
I wasn’t about to watch my fiancée waste away on a beach while I sat around picking fruit off trees like this was some kind of resort experience. Nah. We needed fish.
I walked the tree line until I found a branch that was long enough and straight enough to work with.
Broke it off, sat down with my knife, and started carving.
Stripped the bark, shaved the tip down to a point, tested it against my palm.
It wasn’t pretty but it was sharp. My grandfather used to take me and Justice fishing on the Chesapeake when we were kids.
I wasn’t spearing fish back then, I was using a rod and reel and sitting on a bucket eating Doritos, but the principle was the same.
You find where the fish are, you stay still, and you don’t flinch when it’s time to strike.
I waded into the shallows about fifty yards down the beach from where Mehar was sleeping. The water was clear enough to see the bottom and after about ten minutes of standing still with my spear raised I saw movement. Small silver fish darting between the rocks. I waited. Tracked one. And jabbed.
Missed.
The fish scattered. I stood there with my spear in the water and nothing on the end of it and thought, this is humbling.
Questor Rufus Banks, CEO of Banks Reserve, with a net worth in the high nine figures, standing in the Caribbean in yesterday’s clothes trying to stab a fish with a stick.
If Mekhi could see me right now he would never let me live it down.
Prime would take a picture. Justice would calculate the cost-per-fish and tell me it wasn’t efficient.
I reset. Waited. Tracked another one. Jabbed again.
Got it.
The fish wiggled on the end of the spear.
I pulled it out of the water, held it up, and felt something that I can only describe as primal.
Not pride exactly. Something older and deeper, from a part of my brain that remembered what it was like to provide when there was nothing between you and starvation except your own hands.
I caught a fish. I was gonna feed my woman.
That meant something out here in a way it never meant anything when I was ordering room service or dropping two hundred dollars on dinner at Marcel’s.
I caught two more over the next twenty minutes.
Carried them back to camp by the tails and laid them out on a flat rock near the fire.
By the time I got back, Mehar was awake.
Sitting up against the tree with her hands on her belly, her eyes on the ocean, that look on her face that I’d been seeing since we got here.
Hopeful and terrified at the same time. Scanning the horizon for a boat or a plane or anything that meant someone knew we were alive.
Nothing out there but water.
“Morning,” I said, setting the fish down.
She looked at the fish. Then at me. Then at the spear. “You just went and caught fish.”
“I did.”
“With a stick.”
“With a spear that I made from a stick. There’s a difference.”
“My baby out here on some Castaway shit.” The corner of her mouth twitched. Almost a smile. Not quite. But close enough to tell me she was still in there, still fighting, still capable of cracking jokes when the world was falling apart. That was my girl. “You talk to the volleyball yet?”
“I don’t need a volleyball. I got you.”
That one landed. Her eyes softened and she looked away because Mehar couldn’t take a compliment without breaking eye contact.
She’d been like that since the beginning.
Tough about everything except tenderness.
Tenderness made her uncomfortable because she’d spent most of her life around men who used softness as a setup for violence.
I was trying to retrain that instinct but it was slow work and we had time. Apparently, we had nothing but time.
I cleaned the fish with my knife. Gutted them, scaled them, laid them on a flat rock near the fire to cook.
Yesterday I’d spelled out S.O.S. on the beach with the biggest branches I could find and lit both emergency flares, hoping somebody would see the smoke or the letters from the air.
Nobody did. The flares were gone now, used up, and the S.O.S.
was still sitting on the sand looking like a cry for help that nobody was gonna hear.
But I left it there in the hopes that a plane would fly by and see it.
“Come on,” I said, holding my hand out to her. “Let’s go to the waterfall before we eat. Clean up.”
· · ·
We bathed in the pool beneath the waterfall.
I’m using the word bathed loosely because what we really did was stand in cold water, scrub ourselves with our hands, and try to get the salt, the sand, and the sweat off our skin without soap or washcloths or any of the things you take for granted when you have a bathroom and a Target within driving distance.
We used the burnt char of wood to clean our teeth and our bodies.
It’s similar to the charcoal toothpaste and soap that’s trending in stores.
That’s where it came from, indigenous folks’ remedies.
Mehar found a plant near the waterfall with thick leaves that had a slippery texture when you broke them open.
She rubbed it between her hands and it lathered up enough to work as a substitute.
I didn’t ask how she knew to do that. Mehar was an aesthetician.
She knew skin and plants and textures the way I knew liquor margins and distribution routes. Different expertise, same precision.
We used the leaves to scrub our skin and our teeth. It tasted terrible but it worked. Mehar made a face that almost made me laugh, scrunching up her nose and spitting into the water.
“This is disgusting,” she said.
“It’s better than burnt sticks.”
“Barely.”
On the walk back to camp she stopped at a bush with small red berries that neither of us recognized. I reached for one and she grabbed my wrist.
“Don’t eat that.”
“How do you know it’s bad?”
“I don’t. That’s the point.” She picked one berry off the bush and rubbed it against the inside of her forearm.
“You rub a little on your skin first and wait. If your skin reacts, it’s toxic.
Redness, swelling, itching, anything. If nothing happens after twenty minutes or so, it’s probably safe to eat.
If it passes the skin test, you put a tiny bit on your lip.
Same thing. Wait. Then a tiny bit on your tongue.
If you make it through all three without a reaction, it’s edible. ”
I stared at her. “Where did you learn that?”
“Esthetics program. Botany module. They made us study poisonous plants because she said if we couldn’t identify what would kill somebody’s skin, we had no business touching their face.
” She shrugged. “Never thought I’d use it on an island to figure out if a berry was gonna kill us, but here we are. ”
“That lesson might have just saved our lives.”
We headed back to camp and I cooked the fish over the fire. Mehar pulled green bananas from a nearby tree, wrapped them in large banana leaves, and set them near the hot coals to roast.
“Green bananas aren’t sweet,” she said when she caught me looking. “They’re starchy. You can roast them and mash them up like a potato. It’ll actually fill us up instead of just holding us over.”
We ate. Fish and roasted green bananas and mango and coconut water. The bananas were dense and bland, and Mehar chewed hers slowly and said, “All I need is a little butter and some salt and this would actually be good.” She shrugged. “But it’ll stick to our ribs. That’s what matters.”
She was right. It was the most food we’d had since the crash and it sat heavy in my stomach in a way the fruit hadn’t.
Hunger makes you grateful for things you would’ve never looked twice at in your real life.
I’d been to restaurants that charged three hundred dollars a plate and none of those meals hit the way this one did.
Mehar ate slowly, one hand on her belly, pausing between bites to feel the baby move.
She was doing that more now, checking in constantly, making sure every kick was accounted for.
I understood it. After what we’d been through, every kick was proof of life.
Every flutter was a receipt that said still here, still growing, still yours.
After we ate, she got quiet. That particular quiet that meant she was thinking about something she didn’t want to say out loud because saying it would make it real.
“What?” I asked.
She pulled her knees up as far as her belly would let her and wrapped her arms around them. “What if nobody comes, Quest?”
“Somebody’s coming.”
“But what if they don’t? What if the mayday didn’t go through? What if nobody knows we’re out here?”
“My brothers know. Maybe not right now, maybe not today. But Justice and Prime will notice I didn’t check in. They’re gonna call the resort, find out we never showed up, and things will start happening. Those two will turn the entire Caribbean upside down looking for us. Trust me on that.”
“And if the coordinates you radioed were wrong? You said the GPS was tampered with. What if they’re searching in the wrong place?”
She was smart. She’d put the pieces together the same way I had and arrived at the same uncomfortable conclusion.
If the sabotage extended to the GPS, and it almost certainly did, then the Coast Guard was looking in the wrong grid.
Which meant my brothers would eventually figure out the math didn’t add up.
Justice would pull the flight data. He’d calculate the fuel burn rate against the departure time and realize we couldn’t have gone down where the instruments said we did.
He’d correct the search area. It would just take time.
Time we had to survive through.
“Then we wait,” I said. “We eat. We drink. We keep the fire going. We stay alive. And when they do come, and they will come, we’re going to be standing on this beach healthy and whole and ready to find out who did this to us.
And then we’re going to make them regret it for the rest of their very short lives. ”
She looked at me for a long time. Searching my face for doubt, for cracks, for any sign that I was performing confidence instead of feeling it.
I wasn’t performing. I was terrified. But I wasn’t going to fold, not at a poker table, not in a boardroom, and not on a beach.
The fear and the refusal to quit had been living side by side in me since I was sixteen years old and they’d gotten real comfortable as roommates.
“Okay,” she said finally. Quiet. Steady. “Okay.”
She leaned into me and I put my arm around her and we sat there watching the fire and the ocean and the sky turning colors above us and I let myself feel, just for a second, how beautiful this place was when I wasn’t busy being terrified of it.
Somebody did this to us. Somebody sabotaged my plane, tried to kill my family, and left us stranded in the middle of nowhere. And when I got off this island, I was going to find them. I was going to look them in the face. And I was going to show them what happens when you come for a Banks and miss.
But first, I needed to catch more fish. Because my girl was eating for two and three fillets wasn’t gonna cut it.