Castle of Water: A Novel(7)
“That’s our plane?” Sophie asked worriedly, and in French.
“Oui, c’est ?a,” answered étienne. “But don’t worry, it will get us there.”
Over the course of his life, étienne had been correct on many counts, from his suspicion that the attractive brunette in his architecture class in Montpellier might like to join him for coffee to his conviction that it was better to set out and start a small firm of his own. But in this instance, regarding the reliability of the single-engine Cessna 208 and the integrity of its custodian, étienne could not have been more wrong.
6
Morning number two of Barry’s maroonship proved no more eventful than the one that preceded it—at least at its onset. Emerging damp and stiff from his palm shelter, he encountered the same flat, featureless sky, the same blank, unyielding sea. True, the sun was beginning to peep out from behind an ashy haze of clouds, throwing at least a tinge of gold upon the palms and turquoise upon the water. Beyond that, however, nothing had changed. A long, hot shower and a crisp change of clothes would have been most welcome, but a starchy bunch of bananas and a gulp of fresh rainwater were the only amenities the island offered. He had at least gotten some sleep, though—that was nice—and something to eat was better than nothing. Feeling reasonably energized and relatively well rested, Barry was in the process of inspecting the damage that the previous night’s rain had done to his SOS signs when he noticed the raft, not to mention the half-dressed female form hanging out of it.
“Hey!” he shouted midstride, loping over the sand toward her. “Hey, are you okay?”
The female form in question flinched and did half a turn on the sand, and he saw that it was indeed the French honeymooner, although considerably worse for wear. Her eyes rolled dazedly in her head, visible through a bedraggled mat of sand-caked hair. Her Breton-striped Saint James T-shirt was gone—only a black bra remained to cover her torso—and a single soggy blue espadrille dangled from her big toe.
Barry crouched beside her (what was her name again—Silvia? Sonya?) and helped her fully out of the raft to lie flat on the sand. He pushed the hair from her eyes and gave them a closer inspection. They seemed unable to register his existence.
“Sonya, are you okay? Where’s your husband? Did he make it?”
Barry recognized the cruelty inherent in the last question and immediately regretted asking it. Not that it mattered. Sonya, as he believed she was called, appeared to be in some sort of catatonic shock. She was shivering, in fact, and he removed his shirt-turban, sat her up, and draped it around her shoulders. What to do next?
Once upon a time, Barry had been a Boy Scout. And at summer camp one year in the north woods of Wisconsin had been the recipient of an earnest and well-intentioned lecture on basic first aid—very little of which Barry remembered, engrossed as he was at the time with a clandestine Playboy one of the other campers had snuck into the meeting. Airway, breathing, and circulation couldn’t hold a candle to the magazine’s glossy, trifold delights. Among those fond adolescent memories, however, he did have one recollection from the actual lesson: the necessity of warmth. Something about the body going into shock and requiring extra heat. Not that it was especially cool outside—it couldn’t have been less than seventy degrees on the island. But something had to be done.
Leaving the raft where it was, Barry scooped the unresponsive Sonya(?) into his arms and did an awkward, stumbling job of carrying her back to his makeshift encampment. She was by that point shivering convulsively, and her delicate limbs seemed to be seizing up. He deposited her inside his little shelter, then set one of his frond stacks ablaze. Three rushed forays into the bush yielded a thick harvest of additional leaves, which he piled onto the growing fire. Coughing through the smoke, he lifted Sonya once again and set her down beside it.
Whew. He exhaled sharply, exhausted from the exertion, and sat in the sand. Curled beneath his shirt, his new co-castaway formed a shivering ball. He made a few attempts at conversation, none of which yielded even a hint of a response. It occurred to him that perhaps she did not speak much English, so he tried some very poor overtures in mostly forgotten middle school French, at one point even resorting to a horribly garbled rendition of “Frère Jacques.” That didn’t work either. Not sure what else to do, he stroked her hair—sometimes the simplest gestures are the ones that mean the most—and gradually, over the course of a breezy, surf-swept afternoon and a flamboyant, sorbet-shaded sunset, she stopped shaking.
Barry stayed up the whole night, tending to the smoldering fire, keeping his eyes out for any sign of rescue—of which there was none. No jet contrails glazed in the moonlight, not a single megaphone blast from a distant pontoon. The French girl, meanwhile, stared blankly into the embers for hours, unmoving and unresponsive. Eventually—Barry wasn’t sure exactly when, but he noticed it not long after the moon set and the winds died down—she fell asleep, announcing her slumber with a faint, almost mouselike snore. Barry took a strange, paternal pleasure in this; it seemed to him a good sign, an indication that the horror was perhaps fading and that natural human rhythms were again taking hold. He stirred at the embers and looked at the stars. Blazing, searing stars, the likes of which he had never seen before in his life. He recalled the night skies above his grandparents’ farm in Illinois; the way the Milky Way made a shimmering ribbon above the frozen prairie had been more than enough to stir a boy’s wonder and put an ache in his soul. But the star-fire that burned down upon him on the island, an ocean away from the incandescent smear of civilization, was something else entirely. Back in one of his college art history classes, he had once read an account from Renaissance Europe, when the nights were wondrously dark, of starlight bright enough to cast shadows, even read by. He wondered if this glimpse of the universe, afforded to him in the direst of human circumstances, was as close to those pristine, preelectric nights as he would ever get. Probably, he thought to himself, and for a moment he felt the heady sensation of traveling through time, despite being firmly planted in a rather inconvenient place.