Castle of Water: A Novel(29)
Crap.
Barry’s stomach sank. It suddenly occurred to him.
“I’ve got to go back down.”
“What? Are you out of your mind?”
“We left everything in the shelter. All of it.”
The matches, the freshwater, the solar still, the flare gun, the fishing gear, the utility knife, the radio, the energy bars, the first-aid kit—not to mention the inflatable life raft—everything they needed to ensure their survival was in a waterproof duffel bag in what remained of their shelter. If the waves hadn’t already washed it away, they surely would soon.
“Barry, it’s okay, just stay here, please.”
But he knew it wasn’t okay. Far from it, in fact. That survival kit was their only hope.
“I’ll be back. I promise.” And with that he planted a smooch on her cheek and bounded down over the edge, leaving a desperate Sophie screaming his name just as a beast of a wave, several orders of magnitude larger than the giants that had preceded it, emerged from the depths off toward the horizon.
22
The term lost everything is one bandied about loosely in this day and age. More often than not, it’s attached to an acrimonious divorce settlement or a declaration of bankruptcy. Oh, they lost everything, the misfortune is detailed in a scandalous whisper. But how often is it actually true? How many people out there—living people, for the dead are surely exempt in such matters—have ever truly lost everything? Certainly a treasured automobile or a cherished home or even a beloved spouse is painful to part with. But everything?
When Sophie first tumbled from the deflating raft in the immediate aftermath of the plane crash, she had lost a great deal. The people she loved, the life she had enjoyed, the simple pleasures of normal existence … all those things had been severed from her being by the sharp shank of that ill-timed bolt. But she had not truly lost everything. She still possessed a modicum of hope and at least one other human being, as imperfect as he was, to share it with. And it was only that small remainder of a normal life that discouraged her from doing what she had almost done alone on the water. It wasn’t much of a reason to keep on living, but it was something.
When Barry was swallowed by the wave and washed out to sea, that fragile reason was swept away with him. As soon as the surf receded to its standard dimensions and the rains calmed to a drizzle, Sophie climbed out from the little cleft in the side of the rocks and scrambled back down to terra firma, screaming out Barry’s name the entire way. She ran to the ruined site of their beachside camp, where a tattered rope hammock fluttered from a corpse of a tree, and found no trace of him. She scoured the palms and did frantic laps of the island, shouting until her voice went hoarse, Ba-rreeee, Ba-rreeee, Ba-rreeee. But her pleadings went unanswered; there was only the sound of the wind in the shredded palms and a few weak rumblings of delinquent thunder. Sobbing and suddenly too weak to stand, Sophie leaned against the remains of what had once been her home and emitted a sound of pure agony. It was a sound few ever hear and even fewer ever utter. It was the sound of having lost everything—she literally had nothing left.
For two days and nights she held a desperate vigil, squatting in the sand and staring bleakly out at the sea. She neither ate nor drank, in part because she held no appetite, but also as a matter of circumstance—the cyclone had stripped the trees of virtually all their bananas, and the tidal waves had filled the twin cisterns with brackish salt water. Instead, she prayed. She prayed as only a lapsed Catholic can, cutting all sorts of deals, laying out all manners of bargains, if only that stained-glass-colored God she had long since left to the leaded windows of Saint-étienne Cathedral might grant her this one small favor: Bring Barry back to me, s’il vous pla?t, Seigneur, please, bring him back. The sea yielded nothing, however, but curt waves and sour winds.
On the morning of the third Barry-less day, following a dawn as bleak and gray as a bone, Sophie decided she had waited long enough. “Pardonnez-moi, Seigneur,” she muttered as she rose to her feet and approached the stringy remains of Barry’s hammock. The knots were caked with salt and bloated by water, but she was able to untangle a single length of rope about six feet long. While certainly no Boy Scout as Barry had once been, she was able to tie a rough but functional rendition of a noose and, standing on tiptoe, secure the other end to the worn-out notch in the palm that had supported her shelter. All that was left was to say farewell, fall to her knees, and wait for the rope to finish what the spiraling Cessna had begun. As she saw it, she was only quickening that which was now inevitable. Without bananas, without drinking water, without fish of any kind, she knew she wouldn’t last more than a week. Frankly, there was no longer any reason to postpone it. It was time. Shaking, weeping, but resigned to her fate, she tightened the knot and prepared for the plunge.
“Good-bye,” she wheezed out in English, for Barry.
“Au revoir,” she sobbed to the world she’d once known.
23
Sophie’s anguished assumption—that Barry had been swept out into the open ocean and had joined étienne and Marco in the cold, dark deep—was indeed well-founded but only half-correct. The wave did hit him, and hard at that. He had just ducked out of the windblown shell of Sophie’s palm shelter, the duffel bag in question slung over his shoulder, when he came face-to-face with the monstrous tsunami. The thing by that point was no longer the heaving swell that Sophie had noticed from her rocky perch; after breaching the reef that encircled their island, it had transformed into a thirty-foot torrent of surging white water. Barry had no time to run or climb, only a few short seconds to curse and brace.