Sinking
Jack Shepherd awoke to sunlight, an empty tent, and the sound of distant laughter. He spent a long minute trying to piece the three apparently unrelated facts into a pattern that made sense to his unresponsive brain, before finally giving up and struggling to his feet to see for himself what was going on.
He stumbled out of the tent and immediately regretted it when the level of sunlight leapfrogged from 'pleasantly bright' to 'blinding'. When his eyes eventually adjusted, he turned his attention back to the view before him. Not to the endless span of sandy beach and lush greenery that stretched out to either side or the Hollywood-perfect scene of azure ocean melting into a cloudless sky in the distance. Instead, his eyes fell without hesitation on Kate, standing down at the water's edge twenty feet away with a little girl in denim shorts and a red shirt.
Kate had left her hair down this morning and the long dark curls danced in the breeze coming in off the ocean. She wore no makeup and was still dressed in the same clothes she'd worn the day before, but her face was lit with laughter and her skin glowed with a healthy tan that had become permanent despite careful use of sunscreen. The little girl, whose own dark ringlets were tied back in a neat ponytail, held fast to Kate's hand as she played tag with the incoming waves, giggling each time they caught her bare feet. Jack smiled at the happiness radiating from the pair.
He was just about to go down and meet them when Kate bent to whisper something to the girl which caused her to suddenly still. They both stared down at their feet in fascination as Kate continued to speak, and Jack suddenly realized what they were doing. Kate had told him once, long ago, about something she had done with her mother when she was young. Sinking. And now, it seemed, she was passing the family tradition down to her own daughter.
He couldn't bring himself to break the perfect moment, not even to be a part of it, so he stayed where he was. Sitting back down at the entrance of the tent, he just basked in the warmth of the sun on his bare skin and watched his wife and daughter giggle and gossip down at the sea shore.
This was paradise.
It was ironic. When that plane had crashed nearly ten years ago, paradise had never seemed further from reach. In fact, the beauty of their surroundings had seemed a cruel joke given their continued struggle for survival. Those first years had, indeed, been brutal. But they had also saved Jack's life. Without them, without that plane crash, he would have continued following in his father's less-than-fulfilling footsteps. He would have eventually become an alcoholic, emotionally-dead egomaniac. And he never would have met Kate.
That hadn't necessarily seemed like a bad thing in those first few years, either. She had proven to be just as challenging, mysterious, and frustrating as the island. But Jack was now a firm believer that nothing worth having came easily. It had taken three years of living on the island for Jack to overcome his issues with his father and Kate to get over the mistakes that she had made in her past. Three years for them to finally trust themselves, each other, and their feelings enough to act on what had been obvious to everyone else from the beginning. When a private yacht had wandered near enough to the island to discover their band of survivors seven years ago, Jack and Kate had left the people they used to be buried in the jungle and started a new life together.
Jack believed that those early years of constant struggle and conflict had only made them closer and their relationship stronger than most of the married couples he knew. Unlike most couples, they had seen the worst of each other first and fallen in love anyway. He figured after surviving multiple tragedies, his hallucinations, and Kate's criminal record, anything else was cake.
It pretty much had been. Jack had convinced Kate to come home with him, where he found that the remains of the life he had despised were gone. His mother had died during the time they were missing and while Jack had to bear the guilt of abandoning her, it was a relief to be able to start over fresh. It had been weird, being back in Chicago after so many years on the island, so he and Kate had moved to the closest approximation they could find in the civilized world: Kauai. It was all the pleasures of their own private island with electricity and cable TV.
Jack had gone back to work, but Kauai didn't have the facilities for a spinal surgeon and he found that he missed interacting with people and being a part of their lives. So he switched to general practice. Kate had nothing to go back to, so she took a few distance courses through the University of Hawaii. It turned out that she hadn't been kidding when she told him that she took better pictures than the mug shot he had first found. Both in front of and behind the camera. She had a gift and a passion for photography and was soon making money freelancing. She even did a coffee table book.
They were happy.
Not that they were perfect. Jack and Kate were still haunted by their respective pasts, by the pain that they had inflicted and that had been inflicted upon them in all those years before they had been reborn in a violent baptism by fire. Kate had never been cleared for the crimes she had committed and, while most of the world believed that she had died in the plane crash, there was always a distant possibility that they would be found out. But, somehow, they had managed to create something between the two of them that was untouched by their fears and scars and mistakes, something that was perfect.
Lily.
She was the best of them both, wrapped up in one beautiful, pure package. Kate's hair and love of adventure. His eyes and sense of fairness. And something greater than any odd bits and pieces of them: innocence. She would never have to know the battles her parents had fought against fear and doubt and paralyzing insecurity. Or shadowy monsters in the jungle.
Lily had already heard the story of how her parents met—heavily edited, of course, for the consumption of a four year-old—and she was obsessed with reliving her parents' island adventures. Jack had been happy to make that wish come true with the simple purchase of a camping tent and an overnight stay down at the beach just behind their house. And that was how Jack had come to wake up, alone, in a tent on a beach for the first time in half a decade.
Of course, this tent was several times larger than even the med tent he'd had back on the island. Kate had thought it was ridiculously extravagant and laughed at him when he brought it home and set it up for the first time. But she had been forced to take it back when he showed her the second 'room' in the back for Lily and gave her a simple reminder of how their evenings around the campfire usually ended. Most of his colleagues had to take their wives on expensive trips to get the romance back in their marriages. Jack found it pretty convenient that all he had to do was walk fifty feet and pitch a tent. Maybe not even that on a clear night.
The sun was starting to feel a little too warm and Jack was getting restless. A glance at his watch showed that ten minutes had passed as he sat reflecting. Plenty of time for Kate to enjoy her bonding time with Lily. If they sank much longer, he'd be digging them out of the beach. Standing, he brushed the sand off his cargo shorts and started down to the water. Maybe it was time he got in on this family tradition thing.