The Island(48)
The fin went down. It was going for Olivia.
Heather couldn’t even warn her.
She leaned all the way over and pulled back her leg.
If she timed this right…
She looked into the blue shark’s right eye and kicked it in the gills just as it was opening its jaws to take an exploratory bite.
Olivia saw and gasped and put her hand over her mouth.
The immature blue splashed away, annoyed.
The little girl, Niamh, turned and looked straight at the rocks but didn’t see anything. Or perhaps pretended not to see anything.
The boy and Ivan and Niamh continued to talk until they reached a thick clump of mangrove at the end of the little bay.
They disappeared into the trees and were gone.
“Let’s get to shore,” Heather said.
“Shouldn’t we wait a little bit longer?” Petra said.
“There’s a blue shark circling us. Let’s get ashore. Come on.”
They swam to the shore and dragged Owen into the shade of one of the mangrove trees.
“Do you think they will double back when they don’t find us?” Petra asked.
Heather shrugged. “I don’t know. I can only hope they’ll keep going until it begins to get dark. It doesn’t matter if they double back or not. We won’t be moving Owen again.”
21
Heather and Petra carried Owen to the shade of a mangrove tree and left him to recover. The seawater had cooled him down, but heatstroke wasn’t the issue now. It was dehydration. She fanned Owen with mangrove leaves, keeping him cool as best she could.
One hour.
Two.
Three.
The O’Neills didn’t return to the beach.
Olivia wrote SOS with stones and seaweed that they all knew the tide would take away.
The sun began to set.
Owen, amazingly, was still alive.
Water. If she didn’t get water tonight, the boy was going to die.
Petra knew it. Olivia knew it.
Heather went up onto the mesa and climbed an immature eucalyptus tree.
The heathland was empty. There were lights on at the farm-house two miles from here. Birds were roosting. Night was coming.
“Anything?” Petra asked.
“I think they’ve all gone.”
Heather began climbing down. She missed her footing on the branch beneath her and grabbed for a handhold on the branch next to her. The dry eucalyptus limb could not take her weight; it snapped and she fell eight feet into the hard dirt. Her back took most of the impact.
“Are you OK?” Petra asked, running to her, alarmed.
“Uh, I think so,” she said and lay for a while with one leg stuck on a lower branch.
Petra disentangled her.
“I didn’t sign up for this,” Heather said.
“What did you sign up for?”
Heather thought about it. “I don’t know. I don’t just mean this. I mean the kids, all of it.”
Petra smiled sadly. “We never had children. Hans didn’t want any, and I didn’t protest too much. How…how did you end up with your husband? He was older, yes?”
“Some of my friends said I was crazy to marry a man in his forties. But I was poor. Lonely. Tom is…was fun. We hit it off immediately. It was an instant family with a yard and a picket fence—just microwave for one minute and you can have everything you want.”
“Hans and I had very little in common at first,” Petra said. “He hated my music. I was a punker, if you can believe it.”
“I can believe it. I’ve always sort of been out of step with my contemporaries. I didn’t realize how much until I left home and came to Seattle.”
Petra nodded and they sat in silence.
When the sun had finally gone down in all its gaudy beauty, Heather stood. “I’m going to look for water. If I’m not back by morning, I guess it means they got me.”
“I understand,” Petra said.
Heather hesitated. “You’ll take care of the kids as best as you can?”
“Of course.”
The two women hugged.
“Good luck,” Petra said.
Heather nodded and waved and headed east.
East under the upside-down moon.
Under the sky full of southern stars.
Under the Southern Cross and the Milky Way.
She walked through the spinifex and thistles and blowfly grass. She knew the Northern Hemisphere’s sky like the back of her hand; there was no light pollution that far west on the Sound. The Big Dipper. Orion. The Dog Star. Night-fishing with her dad, she could see from one side of the heavens to the other, the stars rotating around Polaris. She smiled at the memory. None of that would help her here in the Southern Hemisphere, where even the moon was wrong.
She had a headache. She didn’t know the biology of it, but she guessed that her brain cells, like everything else, were affected by dehydration. Her muscles ached and she was cramping, and she suspected that this was because of dehydration too.
Not much she could do about that.
A bat crossed the moon.
She heard nightjars.
Someone was driving an ATV a mile to the south.
The island was an approximate rectangle, three miles by two, with the farm in the middle. She approached the farm from the north, where the spinifex was tallest, but she quickly realized the farm’s well was a no-go. They had turned the spotlights on around the farmstead, and on the roof of the barn she could see the silhouette of a man with a rifle.