Unseen Messages(147)

JUNE

I hadn’t been drunk since my eighteenth birthday.

Mostly because I’d been in jail with no access to alcohol. More recently because we’d been stranded on our island.

We’d stumbled across a few papayas last month that’d been sweet and plump. The taste of sugar after so long had been goddamn delicious. We didn’t get a lot of fruit on our island, probably because there weren’t many birds or bats flying over depositing seeds in their droppings.

The Papaya was a luxury and I’d thought about fermenting a few to see if Estelle and I could get tipsy (if such a thing as papaya alcohol existed) but there hadn’t been many and we’d eaten them all before we realised the limited numbers.

However, none of that mattered because I was inebriated.

I was drunk.

Completely.

On my daughter.

Only a few months old, she fascinated me with how quickly she grew. Her chubby arms constantly waved and fists opened and closed. She loved lying in the sand and cried if we took her from the waves before she was ready.

It seemed being born beneath the sea made her a child of the deep and she should’ve grown a tail rather than kicking little legs.

Her skin tanned rather than burned. The fuzzy hair on her head was as white as Estelle’s. And her eyes were a mixture of vibrant blue and glowing green.

She was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, and if Pippa wasn’t carting her around being the best babysitter we could ask for, then she was in the crook of my arm babbling nonsense.

For her crazy emotions during her pregnancy, Estelle was the most relaxed mother in the world. The saying ‘you need a village to raise a baby’ was entirely true.

And lucky for us, we had one.

Pippa and Conner took turns playing. No one grew bored because Coco was passed around at will.

I wished I knew the developmental stages and what to expect.

When would she walk? Talk? Crawl, even.

I had no idea.

I couldn’t tell if she was smart for her age or slow.

But that wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

To me, she was perfect.

Just like her mother.





Chapter Fifty-Three


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E S T E L L E

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JULY

“I WANT TO make her something. Galloway’s showing us up.”

I looked up from changing Coco’s rag-diaper and squinted in the sun. Pippa and Conner stood in halos, dripping wet from the sea, with an armful of red and yellow flowers.

“What do you mean?” I stood up, placing Coco on my hip. She squirmed toward Pippa, who dropped her flowers and took her from me.

The two girls had become inseparable.

“I mean G’s made her a crib, a damn high-chair thingy, even a driftwood horse on skates so he can drag her through the tide like a pouncy princess.” Conner dragged hands through his hair, doing his best to seem frustrated but failing.

He loved G.

In fact, they’d only become closer in the past few months since Conner well and truly left boyhood for an adult.

“Well...” I spread my hands. “What are you going to do about it? Is it a competition now?”

His brown eyes lit up. “Hell yeah, it’s a competition.”

I laughed. “And the flowers are commiseration for the loser?”

“Nope.” Stalking toward an empty piece of fuselage that we used to soak flax, wash laundry, and gather leaves, he dumped his wilting flowers and sat down. “I’m going to paint her something.”

“Paint?” Curiosity exploded. “How?”

“With these.” He pointed at the flowers. “I’m gonna crush them and paint her crib pretty colours. Poor baby must hate boring brown.”

My heart swelled for such an amazing teenager. “You want to paint Coco a mural.”

“Yep.”

“And you’re going to make your own paints and brushes and everything.”

“Yep.”

I couldn’t help it. I dashed toward him and kissed his face in a flurry of affection. “I love you, Co.”

He cleared his throat. “Whatever.”

Fighting my smile, I left him to it.

Whatever nostalgia I’d suffered faded with every memento we made here. I no longer hankered for a tumultuous urban town. I no longer took for granted what we had.

Life had swept us away and given us so much more.

With bubbling joy and effervescent contentedness in my soul, I went for a swim with my two daughters and left my son to somehow create a masterpiece.

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It didn’t work out.

The flower petals, once crushed, turned an unhappy ochre and bruised sienna. Despite Conner trying everything to add rainwater and smear the mess into some sort of design, he didn’t get the vivid colours he was hoping for.

It did make a slight difference with decorational shadows on the crib, but his disappointment broke my heart.

Galloway teased him mercilessly, but once he’d finished ribbing him, they vanished to the other side of the island for so long I began to worry.

They returned late that night with Conner proudly holding a flax woven doll complete with stringy hair. It wasn’t cuddly, it wasn’t exactly pretty (unless he was going for a voodoo kind of look), but it was absolutely priceless.