Castle of Water: A Novel(33)
Food, however, was also a problem. The tsunami had done severe damage to the island’s banana trees. A full quarter had been ripped from the ground and washed away, and another quarter still damaged and browned by the poisonous salt. The winds had loosened nearly all of the existing bunches as well, leaving only a scatter of serviceable bananas left to be eaten. With time, a few months, perhaps, Barry believed that the trees would recover. But in the immediate future, they were at risk of starvation—they needed a plan. Eggs were not a possibility, as the colony of terns was slow in returning; clams had never been all that plentiful to begin with; and the sparse supply of remaining coconuts could do only so much. The energy bars that Barry had rescued from the sea—the ones Sophie had been farsighted enough to insist that they save—did keep them going through the first few days, but even those were finally gone.
Which left only one option. And that one option was very nearly impossible, thanks to the eight-armed leviathan that lurked in the shadows. Barry did attempt fishing again in their only fishable cove, with the hope that the cyclone had pried the monster out of his hole and sent him skittering to the open sea.
But no such luck. Sure enough, at the first nibble, Balthazar resurfaced with a sickening surge, dragging the delicious-looking fish and precious lure back down to his lair, precisely as he had so many times before.
Damnit. Barry gazed down with a contained but simmering rage at the small puffs of fish scales that periodically escaped from its cave. He returned to camp empty-handed, his belly cramped into a ball of hunger. They weren’t starving just yet, but if things didn’t change soon … well, the outlook wasn’t good.
“Did you catch anything?” Sophie called out, kneeling by the fire, struggling to sort anything edible out of a fly-ridden heap of moldering bananas.
“Pas de tout,” Barry answered in the comically bad French he had begun to pick up, shaking his shaggy head to emphasize the point.
“Was it Balthazar again?”
“Mais oui.”
Sophie released her trademark puff of air. “Merde. I checked the trees, there are no more bananas at all. Rien de rien.”
“These are the last of them?” Barry looked down at the pathetic little pile of rotten fruit.
Sophie nodded. “There’s nothing left to eat. Absolutely nothing. Qu’allons-nous faire?”
“I haven’t a clue,” he answered, tousling her matted hair, although in truth, in the back of his mind, he already had the first inklings of a plan. The idea had come to him almost a full week before, but its genesis went back even further than that. Because that first night when the palm shelter had been resurrected following its destruction in the typhoon, Sophie had asked Barry, now hammockless thanks to the storm, if he would like to join her beneath its watertight roof. Barry pretended to give it some thought, shrugged his shoulders, and said, Sure, why not?
And so from that day forth, Barry and Sophie were roommates. Not lovers—just roommates. When the Polynesian sun dipped beneath the waves and the last of whatever paltry morsels they could scrounge was eaten, they would retire to the hut and lie side by side on their mat of palm leaves, listening to the growling of their bellies and whatever station they could find on the shortwave. Then, in the darkness of their primordial night, they would sometimes talk. About anything, really, but mostly memories of what their former lives had been. It was therapy of sorts, although they only dimly realized it. Keeping the past a part of their present had become crucial to both of them; the idea that that world was both real and attainable was the only thing that kept them from abandoning hope completely.
One such night, after the radio had run its charge, Sophie spoke.
“Did you understand the radio announcer?”
“No, it was in Spanish,” Barry answered. “But I liked the tango music.”
“You didn’t hear what he said?”
“I heard it, I just didn’t understand it.”
“You Americans really don’t speak any other languages, do you?”
“Not if we can help it,” he replied with a teasing nudge.
“Well”—and she took a breath as if preparing for a plunge—“he announced the date when he gave the news.”
“Oh?”
“It’s May Day. We’ve been here for over a year, now.”
Barry considered that thought for a bit. More than 365 days. Thirteen months, to be exact. Shit. He sighed in the humid night, not even sure what to do with that number. “I figured it had been about that long, but I didn’t know exactly.”
“What do you think about that?”
“What do you mean?”
Sophie swallowed. “Do you think we’ll ever get off of this island?”
In truth, Barry pondered that question almost every minute of every waking hour. Sleep was his only reprieve from it, dreams the only place he could ever forget—although increasingly, his dreams were being visited by three sparks of light that glimmered their way across the horizon.
“I sure as hell hope so. I’m getting charged by the day for leaving my car at the airport parking lot.”
Barry didn’t see it in the darkness, but Sophie smiled. At first, his little jokes had offended her Gallic sensibilities—they struck her as juvenile and irresponsible given the serious nature of their situation. But with time, she had come to see them as the outward projection of a quiet and dependable fortitude. As long as they persisted, she knew he was strong, that he hadn’t given up.