Mehar
I stopped counting the days because counting made it worse.
At first I scratched little lines into the rock near our fire pit.
Tallied them up every morning like a prisoner in a movie, which was exactly what I was except my cell had a better view and my warden had a six-pack and knew how to gut a fish.
But somewhere around day fifteen or sixteen the lines started blurring together and I couldn’t remember if I’d already marked today or if yesterday’s mark was actually from the day before.
The whole system fell apart because time didn’t work here the same as it did in the real world.
Out here there was no Monday or Saturday.
There was just sun and dark and the hours between them filled with the same routine on repeat until my brain couldn’t tell one cycle from the next.
I talked to the baby constantly. Full conversations.
Out loud. She was my therapist now, which was ironic considering my last therapist chained me to a ceiling, but I wasn’t going to dwell on that because Janelle didn’t deserve space in my head and this island was already crowded enough with two people and an unborn child and whatever wildlife Quest hadn’t killed yet.
I used to consider myself an optimist. I’ve often thought things could always be worse; even when living under my father’s or ex-husband’s thumb.
But this was as bad as things could get.
Stranded on an island, while pregnant. If I had to give birth here, there was no way that I would survive.
With what medical equipment?! I thought by now we’d be rescued.
But at this point, I bet Zainab was planning a body-less funeral.
Justice and Prime were mourning Quest. They would eventually move on.
And we’d be here, immortalized on this island.
Quest had a better chance at survival. Me and this baby on the other hand…
“Your daddy is out there right now catching dinner,” I said, rubbing my belly while I sat on the flat rock near the fire pit.
“And I need you to know that when we get home, I am never eating fish again. I don’t care if it’s sushi grade, pan-seared, blackened, battered, or served on a gold plate at a restaurant with a six-month waitlist. I am done with fish.
Permanently. We are a chicken and red meat household from here on out. ”
She kicked in response. Hard. Right under my ribs where she’d been camping out for the last week, pressing on organs I didn’t know I had until she found them. I took the kick as agreement.
The fruit situation was getting worse too.
I’d eaten so many mangoes that the sight of one made my jaw tighten with a sourness that wasn’t even physical, it was psychological.
My body was rejecting the repetition on a cellular level.
The green fruit that Quest kept bringing back, the ones I couldn’t identify, were bitter enough to make my face fold every time I bit into one.
I ate them anyway because the baby needed nutrients and I wasn’t in a position to be picky, but I fantasized about real food with an intensity that bordered on obscene.
Oxtails over rice with gravy thick enough to hold a fork upright.
Garlic bread with butter melting into the crust. A Popeyes biscuit with honey.
I would have committed actual crimes for a Popeyes biscuit.
My body was changing faster now and I didn’t have a mirror to see it, just my hands and Quest’s eyes.
My belly was enormous. Sitting was uncomfortable, standing was uncomfortable, lying down was uncomfortable, and every position in between was just a different flavor of uncomfortable.
My lower back ached constantly. My feet were swollen enough that walking on the sand felt like stepping on hot marbles.
And the baby was sitting so low that every time I stood up I felt pressure in places that made me waddle instead of walk, which Quest had the good sense never to comment on.
He came back from the shore carrying two fish on a stick and I looked at them and something inside me just snapped.
“I can’t eat that.”
“You have to eat, Mehar.”
“I know I have to eat. I’ve been eating. I’ve been eating the same three things every day for God knows how long because none of us have a calendar and I am telling you right now, Quest, if you put another piece of fish in front of me I am going to lose my mind.”
He set the fish down by the fire and looked at me with that patience he’d been wearing like a mask for weeks.
The calm, steady, I’m-holding-it-together-for-both-of-us expression that used to comfort me but now made me want to scream because I didn’t want his composure.
I wanted him to be as frustrated as I was.
I wanted him to admit that this was unbearable instead of acting like it was just another problem he could CEO his way through.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked. And his voice was even, measured, controlled, because that’s who Quest was, but I heard the thread underneath it pulling tight. He was tired too. He just wouldn’t say it.
“I want you to be honest with me. Are we going to die here? Because every morning we walk that shoreline and every morning there’s nothing. No boats. No planes. Nobody is looking for us, Quest. Nobody knows where we are.”
“Justice knows.”
“Justice knows the plane is missing. He doesn’t know where we are. WE don’t know where we are. You told me the GPS was tampered with, which means whoever is searching is searching in the wrong place. We could be a hundred miles from where they think we went down.”
He didn’t respond because he couldn’t argue with math and I was right and we both knew it. He sat down across from me and eyed me up and down.
“I’m going to get you off this island.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how yet. But I’m going to do it.”
“That’s not a plan, Quest. Those are just words.”
His eyes snapped to mine and I saw it. A flash of something raw behind the mask.
Frustration or fear or both braided together, and it was the first honest thing I’d seen on his face in days.
He opened his mouth, closed it, then stood up and walked toward the tree line without saying anything because apparently that was his version of not snapping back at me.
I felt guilty immediately. This man had killed a boar with a pocket knife for me.
He paddled a raft across the ocean with his bare hands.
He fished every day, built every fire, carried me when I couldn’t walk, and checked on the baby before he checked on himself every single morning.
And I was sitting here calling his promise just words because my hormones were running my mouth faster than my brain could filter it.
“Quest.” I called after him but he kept walking. He didn’t go far, just far enough to make his point, which was that he needed thirty seconds without me testing his patience. I gave him the thirty seconds because I owed him that and about a thousand more.
He came back a few minutes later and sat next to me instead of across from me and put his hand on my belly without speaking.
The baby moved against his palm. I leaned into his shoulder and we sat like that for a while, letting the silence do the apologizing because neither of us had the energy to do it with words.
That’s when the birds went quiet.
I noticed it before I understood it. The parrots that lived in the canopy above our camp, the ones that screamed at each other from sunrise to sunset and provided a soundtrack I’d learned to sleep through, just stopped.
All of them, at once, like somebody hit a mute button on the entire forest. The silence was so sudden, so complete, that I lifted my head off Quest’s shoulder and looked up.
The birds were leaving. Dozens of birds pouring out of the canopy and heading inland, fast, in the same direction, like they’d received instructions I couldn’t hear.
“Quest.”
He was already looking at the sky. The western horizon, the one facing the open ocean, had changed color while we were sitting there.
What had been blue an hour ago was now a bruised, swollen wall of grey and green that stretched from the water all the way up into the atmosphere.
The clouds were stacked in layers that looked heavy and violent.
The wind, which had been a steady warm breeze since we crashed here, suddenly shifted direction and hit us cold.
“We need to move.” He was on his feet before he finished the sentence. “Right now. Inland. We gotta get to higher ground.”
“What about the camp? The raft, the supplies, the—”
“Leave it. All of it. We need to go.”
That’s what scared me. It wasn’t the sky or the wind.
It was the fact that a man who inventoried everything, who tracked every resource on this island like it was a line item on a quarterly report, was telling me to abandon all of it without hesitation.
He looked at that sky and calculated the math in under three seconds and the math told him nothing here was worth more than distance.
He grabbed the pocket knife and the first aid kit and nothing else.
Took my hand and pulled me toward the tree line and we started moving inland at a pace my body was not built for right now.
My belly shifted with every step. The pressure in my pelvis was immediate and sharp, my center of gravity fighting me on every uneven surface.
The wind was picking up behind us, pushing through the trees with a sound that started as a whistle and climbed toward a howl.
Ten minutes in, my ankles gave up the negotiation. I stumbled on a root and almost went down. Quest caught me without breaking stride, put his arm under mine, and we kept going but slower now and I could feel him calculating how much of my weight he could carry and still keep moving.
“Get on my back.”
“Quest, I’m almost seven months pregnant, I weigh a ton.”
“Get on my back, Mehar.”
I climbed on. My arms around his neck, my legs around his waist as far as they could go with my belly between us, my face pressed against his shoulder blade.
He gripped the backs of my thighs and started walking uphill through thick brush.
I could feel every muscle in his body straining.
He was thirty pounds lighter than when we crashed, running on fish and fruit and stubbornness.
This was costing him more than he would ever admit.
The sky opened before we found shelter. Rain hit us so hard it felt like someone turned a fire hose on the canopy above us.
The wind bent the trees sideways and the sound was enormous, a roaring, crashing, tearing noise that swallowed everything, our voices, our breathing, the sound of Quest’s feet on the ground.
I couldn’t see past his shoulder. The rain was blinding and horizontal and coming in waves that soaked through us in seconds.
He found the cave by accident. Nearly walked past it.
It was a dark opening in a rocky hillside, partially covered by hanging vines, wide enough for both of us and tall enough to stand in.
He ducked inside and set me down on the stone floor.
I scrambled backward until my back hit the wall because I couldn’t see what was in here and the darkness could’ve held anything.
“Stay here.” He disappeared back toward the entrance and I heard him pulling vines across the opening, weaving them together to create a barrier against the wind.
Then he was back, soaking wet, breathing hard, sitting next to me on the cold stone floor of a cave on an island we couldn’t name in a storm that sounded like it wanted to pull the whole place apart.
The hurricane, because that’s what this was and we both knew it, hit full force about twenty minutes later.
The wind outside screamed at a pitch that didn’t sound natural, didn’t sound like weather, sounded like something alive and furious trying to tear through rock to get to us.
Rain pounded the hillside above the cave.
Water seeped through cracks in the stone, running down the walls in thin streams that pooled around our feet.
The temperature dropped so fast I started shivering before I realized I was cold, and once the shivering started it didn’t stop.
Quest pulled me into his chest, wrapped both arms around me, held me tight enough that his body heat was all I had.
I pressed my face into his neck and cried because I was done pretending I was strong enough for this.
I was cold and terrified and seven months pregnant in a cave and everything we’d built on that beach, the fire, the shelter, the food, the raft, all of it was gone.
The island had given it to us. The storm took it back.
We were starting over from nothing for the second time.
“I got you,” Quest said against my hair. “I got you, I got you, I got you.”
He said it over and over, rocking me slowly, his hands moving up and down my back generating heat through friction while the storm raged outside like it was angry at the island for existing.
I could feel his heartbeat against my cheek, fast but steady, and I focused on the rhythm of it because it was the only thing that made sense right now.
Then I felt it.
It started low and deep, a tightening across my belly that started in my back and wrapped around to the front like a belt being cinched by invisible hands.
It wasn’t a kick. I knew what kicks felt like and this wasn’t that.
This was my entire uterus contracting into a fist and holding for five seconds, ten seconds, long enough for me to stop breathing and grab Quest’s arm with both hands and squeeze until my nails broke his skin.
“Mehar?” His voice changed instantly. “What’s wrong? Talk to me.”
The tightening released. I exhaled, hands going to my belly. The baby was moving, squirming, pressing against my palms like she was trying to tell me something and I couldn’t understand the language yet.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I think… Quest, I think I just had a contraction.”
The storm screamed outside. The water ran down the cave walls. And Quest’s arms tightened around me and he didn’t say a single word because for the first time since we crashed on this island, there was nothing left to say.