Chapter One: Tears at Midnight

The trouble started on the evening they buried Libby. As Hugo dug her grave, Michael tried to enlist him to get his kidnapped son Walt back, but no way. Hugo was in no mood for stupid, pointless adventures.

With each shovelful of sandy earth, Hugo heard Libby's last word, over and over, whispered in two hoarse, blood-spattered syllables. "Michael."

Not Hurley, not Hugo. Michael.

What did that mean? Libby had died with a twisted face, desperately gasping for air which never came. Her wide-open eyes were fixed with such intensity over Hugo's shoulder that he turned around, expecting to see something there. This what what his Grandma Titi called "a bad death," one that you had to pray many rosaries to avoid.

Hugo had clung to her hand for a long time, until Kate gently unhooked Libby's poor dead fingers from his warm, living ones. In a voice so tender it started him crying all over again, Kate said, "Hurley, we have to wrap her up before she gets stiff."

Sad and reluctant, he let go, although at first he wouldn't allow anyone but Kate or himself to wrap her in the coarse wool Army blanket. When it came time to move her body onto a stretcher, Hugo grudgingly allowed Sawyer to help.

Not Jack, though. Wasn't there something Jack could have done? He was supposed to be this great surgeon, but maybe he sucked at surgery as much as he sucked at bedside manner. All he did was give Libby heroin.

Useless, everyone. Useless as Jack. Useless as Hugo himself.

Michael was just fine, though, despite his gunshot wound. He had stood there like a statue, watching everyone in the Swan Hatch with round haunted eyes.

Now Hugo stood tongue-tied at Libby's grave, sick to his stomach with anxiety. Shame, too, because thirty-some pairs of eyes stared at him, waiting for eloquence, for closure. They expected more than Hugo's few stammered sentences, proof to everyone that he had known virtually nothing about her.

Nothing except that he had almost thrown himself off a cliff, and then, because of her, he hadn't.

"She helped me," Hugo finally said. Incomplete, inadequate, but that was all he had. Then it was too late. It would always be too late, no matter what he said or remembered or did, because one clod hit the olive-colored shroud, then another, until her body was covered with pale brown dirt.

The funeral over, people headed back to their own fires, their own lives. Claire stood hand-in-hand with Charlie (Here we go again, how long's it gonna last this time?), while Sawyer and Kate softly talked out of earshot. Every so often Kate looked over at Hugo with an expression of pity.

Michael once again pestered him to go across the Island. The guy was obsessed, and Hugo knew obsession.

Hugo was ready to blow off Michael one more time, when a sudden, mad thirst for revenge swept over him. If he had a gun in his hand, and if their escaped prisoner Henry Gale stood there before him, Hugo would have killed him in an instant. He had never thought of himself as someone who could take down a man in cold blood, but on this night he wasn't so sure.

Maybe killing for vengeance was as sweet as some people said. People did it often enough, didn't they?

Still shaking with desire as cold as ice and painful as brain-freeze, Hugo turned to Michael at the grave-side and said in a tight emotionless voice, "I'm going with you." Never had he wanted anything so much as to stand face to face with Libby's killer.


But before the upcoming trek, Hugo had to get through the night.

Libby's tent stood at the tree-line, and as the sun went down, that was where Hugo headed. The rickety structure was already starting to lean from the wind. If you didn't tie those shelters up every day, they'd fall into a heap before you knew it. Even though Libby was never going to use this lean-to again, Hugo secured it snugly anyway.

Eyes watched Hugo as he worked under the tall, thin trees. Eight or so of the group which Sawyer called the "Girl Scout Camp" sat around their fires. They lived in the farthest recess of the beach camp, right up against the jungle's edge, and nobody paid much attention to them.

Any other evening, they'd have greeted Hugo and welcomed him into their circle, but tonight was different. Never before had they fallen silent when he came over to their neighborhood. They reserved that treatment for Charlie, or Locke, or Mr. Eko.

It must have been something in his face which kept them still and speechless, their only motion the ceaseless work of their hands. Some wove; some carved; some chopped with those long black obsidian knives which the men made.

Then Sirrah and her friend Chen left the Girl Scout camp fire and offered Hugo some fish stew, sweet Sirrah with her long cascade of black hair, Chen from Taiwan flush with his new mastery of English. Hugo waved them away, because the thought of food made him even sicker than he already felt. Sirrah gave a graceful little nod as she and Chen retreated.

When darkness fell, Hugo crawled inside Libby's shelter and lowered the tarp to hide himself from the Girl Scouts' sympathetic looks. Even before the tarp hit the sandy ground, his cheeks once again were wet with tears. Libby hadn't slept on a pallet or anything, just one blanket laid directly on the ground, and another to cover her.

He clutched the top blanket, pulling it tight to his body as if it had been Libby herself, and cried softly, not worrying about the Girl Scouts hearing him.

Everybody on the beach lived by the same rule. If the tent flap was closed, if the tarp was down, no matter what kinds of interesting noises came from within, you didn't hear it. What happened inside the tent stayed in the tent.

Libby's blanket smelled a little of her fresh scent, piney and a little salty. Then it hit him. Why had she gone all the way to the Swan Hatch to get blankets? Why walk an hour round-trip when there were two perfectly good ones here?

The first thing he'd thought of last night when she didn't return from the Hatch was that she had ditched him. It wouldn't have been the first time for a girl to do that. For what it was worth, she at least had gone to get blankets. Shredded by bullet holes, they had lain at her side in a pool of blood. Even so, going to the Hatch didn't make sense. Not that he'd ever get an explanation now.

Tears leaking unchecked, Hugo stared at the grey tarp ceiling, the thin fabric tethering him to earth, keeping him from spinning away on a trajectory of grief. There was so much he'd never know now, starting with why she even liked him in the first place, gross, fat, stupid as he was. Where he knew her from, and not just the Sydney terminal or the plane.

Had she been real at all? Had he hallucinated her, just like Dave, who had flung himself off the cliff into the surf, but had never left a body or any sign of its presence?

Hugo touched his mouth where Libby had kissed him not twice, as he'd asked, but just once.

Something inside Hugo broke like a dam. He had enough deaths on his conscience. Enough people had died because of him. No more, never again. Gunning down her murderer wouldn't bring her back. The desire to kill someone seeped out of him with his tears.

On the other side of the tarp wall, through most of that night, the Girl Scouts listened to his sobs like the final rasps of a dying person, and said nothing.


At the first light of dawn, Hugo crept out of Libby's tent for the last time. Clad in a thick cocoon of grief, he headed back to his own shelter to pack for what might be his final journey across the Island. He didn't care, though. Might as well get eaten by bears or torn by boars, as well as stay here.

As he walked past the food tent, Frogurt tried to say he was sorry. When Hugo gave him a look as blank and hard as a concrete wall, the smaller man scurried away, shaken. Kate handed Hugo a water bottle and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder, but he brushed her off and moved on, not seeing the pain which crossed her face.

Jack was standing by the water tarp, fitting a pistol into the back of his pants. What a stupid way to carry a gun, Hugo thought. One of these days somebody's gonna blow their ass off. All he said to Jack was, "If we're gonna do this thing, let's do it."

(continued)