Eight Weeks
Myka had added keeping track of what day it was to her tasks. Steve had had a watch that showed the date, but when he had fallen from a coconut palm trying to cut some coconuts down, the watch face had been smashed. Steve had been somewhat smashed, too, and Myka was ashamed to admit, even to herself, that her first two thoughts had been selfish ones. If Steve was dead or badly injured, they would lose their most adept fisherman. He was quicker to see fish than Pete and more sure in his aim. If Steve was only badly injured, he was someone they would have to care for, someone they would have to feed, and he would be able to contribute nothing in return. They had all been in the camp when he decided that this would be the morning he would climb the palm. It wasn't as tall as the others, and it even bent down at the top. Looking at the banana he had just peeled, he threw it into the fire, and he slogged through the sand toward the tree. He had kicked off his deck shoes and clapped his hands, talking to himself encouragingly. With a last loud clap, he started climbing the tree. Claudia had been at the base of it, encouraging him until something, a misplaced foot, a sweaty hand, an insect that he might have unthinkingly batted at, caused him to swing away from the trunk and fall. She began to scream and she kept screaming as they ran toward Steve, Artie no less urgently but behind the rest of them. Helena roughly shoved Myka toward Claudia saying, "Keep her quiet, you're good at that sort of thing."
Myka had tried to hold the shaking Claudia back, smoothing her hair and telling her that Helena and Pete would take care of Steve. After a few minutes, Helena and Pete had raised Steve to a sitting position, and he dazedly looked around him as Helena examined his head and Pete asked him to move his arms and legs. Thankfully he hadn't broken any bones, but there was a large lump on his head, and Helena worried that he might have a concussion. They watched him carefully over the next couple of days, but other than having a bad headache, which they couldn't do much for other than to give him a couple of aspirin from a travel bottle that Helena had taken from her purse (that now served as a carryall when Claudia and Myka gathered fruit) he seemed to be fine.
Steve's fall from the palm tree had happened on a Thursday, five weeks after they had landed on the land. The next day Myka scratched into the trunk of a tree she had designated for the purpose, the number 36. Once Steve had recovered, their normal patterns resumed, gathering fruit, collecting water, spearing fish, setting snares for weaselings. And a few new chores had been added as well. There were small bays and beaches up and down the island, and Pete had discovered that turtles would nest in the sand to lay their eggs, so they sometimes gathered eggs as well, although Claudia refused to eat them, saying she wasn't going to contribute to the worldwide predation of turtles. Helena had discovered a new mammal to hunt, a raccoon, or what looked like one, although it was much bigger than a raccoon. The raccoons had raided their snares several times, leaving only scraps of weaselings behind. They were slow-moving, which meant that it was possible to run them down and kill them with spears or clubs. But you had to be swift and aggressive in the killing of them because a wounded island raccoon was a dangerous thing to move in on; it had pronounced jaws with very sharp teeth. Helena, not surprisingly, was good at killing them.
But in another sense their lives hadn't returned to normal. Myka kept remembering how white Steve's face had looked after he had fallen, how still he had been, and she found it sad that they knew so little about each other when there were so many dangers on the island. One of them could be carried off at any time by a snake bite, a strong wave, a sudden illness. She knew that Steve liked to meditate, and she suspected that he was gay, from the jokes that he and Claudia would sometimes share, but other than that, she knew nothing. She didn't even know how he and Claudia knew each other. One afternoon as she came down from flashing distress signals, her arms aching, she saw him cut across the base of the hill toward the jungle, and she hurried to intercept him.
"Steve, wait up," she called. He paused, a faded sport shirt hanging unbuttoned, swim trunks triple-tied around his hips. They were his own, only he and Pete and Claudia had actually carried spare clothing when they had had to desert Artie's boat for the life raft, but they were too big for him now.
He smiled as she came up to him, the blue eyes and white-blond of his hair, bleached by the sun, startling against the darkness of his skin. "You've got another chore for me?"
She shook her head as they both automatically turned toward the spring. "Just want to know how you're doing." As he was about to deflect her inquiry with a shrug of his shoulders, she put a hand on his arm. With him, she was instinctively comfortable being direct. "I'm realizing that we've been here almost two months, and I know next to nothing about most of you. What did you used to do? How did you meet Claudia? It may seem silly to be asking about this kind of stuff now, but we may be here for awhile."
"I was. . . am a software developer, and I had a start-up in Silicon Valley, where else?" He said with a self-deprecating grin. The grin faded, and he turned away from her to tug at a piece of grass. He put it between his teeth. "Some stuff happened. . . my sister passed away, my boyfriend and I split up, and I just needed a break. So I sold the company, bought some camping gear, and decided I'd hike the globe, see if I couldn't find a little inner peace."
"I'm sorry about your sister," Myka said and, feeling that her swinging of her bucket was inappropriate - it lent a jauntiness to their conversation that felt out-of-kilter now - she held it still. "The two of you were close?"
He nodded. "Yeah. When she was diagnosed with cancer, it about destroyed me. That's how I met Claudia, she and I were in a support group. Her brother had died of leukemia. I told her that I was going to take some time off, see the world, and she wanted to tag along. That day we got on Artie's boat, we had been gone for six months, and we had decided it was time to go home. We were going to head for the airport as soon as the tour was over, that's why we were carting around our backpacks." He lifted his eyebrows at Myka. "Ironic, isn't it? The day we were going to call it quits and put away the backpacks for good. . . ." His voice trailed off.
"All the spare clothing came in handy, otherwise Helena and I would be running around naked."
Steve laughed. "Not sure she would have minded that." At Myka's frown, he said, "She's not so bad once you get past that prickly exterior of hers." They knelt down at the lip of the spring, and Myka submerged her bucket. Once it was full, he took it from her, ignoring her protests. "She and I, we sort of share a point of view."
"Because you're gay and she . . . ." Myka lifted and dropped her shoulders. "She doesn't take gender into account?"
He laughed again. "God, no. Believe me, sexuality, sex period, is the last thing on our minds. Well, on my mind, I can only speak for myself." He followed Myka into the fringes of the rainforest, looking up at the tree canopy as she bent to check a weaseling snare. There had been a weaseling, but one of the island raccoons had gotten to it first. "We share a science background. We were both at MIT."
Myka's surprise was evident even in the dimness of the forest. "It's true, but she dropped out a credit or two shy of graduation. Hollywood came calling or something like that."
"Seems like she opened up to you." Myka had meant it only as an observation, but it had come out as a resentful grumble. She didn't like the woman, she reminded herself, so why was she annoyed that Helena had chosen Steve to confide in. It wasn't as though her saying "Goodnight" of an evening was going to work wonders on Helena.
"Not really." Steve brushed aside some vines, and Myka carefully skirted the plant with the tiny white flowers. "She asked me to teach her some meditation techniques, thought it might help keep her from going crazy. But she's pretty intense. . . ." He hesitated. "What about you? What brought Myka Bering to Artie's boat on that fateful day?"
"Like you, I had a relationship that ended, and I wanted to get away." Ended wasn't quite the word. Shattered, maybe exploded. She and Sam had been engaged for four months, living together for two, and she had come home early on an afternoon when he had said he would be out on client calls all day. It had happened just like it did in the movies. She had heard noises from their bedroom and had opened the door, and Sam and Karla, one of the junior attorneys from the personal injury division of the firm, had drawn up the sheet to their chins. She wasn't sure who had been the more stunned. Karla had flown from the bed, bundling her dress and shoes into her arms, and run out of their townhome, while Sam had repeated in the same patient, slightly condescending tone he would use with clients, because he always knew more, knew better, of course, "Let me explain, Myka. Just hear me out." She had had to hear him out because she hadn't been able to move, not really. She had collapsed on the foot of their bed and listened, because she couldn't bring herself to do anything else.
It had been a flirtation that had gotten out of hand. It wasn't anything serious, he still loved her, he said, he still wanted to marry her. As she continued to say nothing, he had conceded, yes, it was a mistake, but they could work through it. He had known better than to try and touch her, sit near her, but he circled her as he dressed, the patient, condescending voice eventually growing more impatient, but no less condescending. He loved her, but he found her lack of ambition, her indecisiveness about what she wanted to do with her life frustrating. She was working as a paralegal when she could do so much more. He had worked his ass off to get through law school and paid his dues putting in 15-hour days billing clients that the senior partners had fobbed off on him. Well, he was a partner now, and he had a client list of his own, and he wanted a wife who was as accomplished and confident.
He had put his shirt and socks on and was trying to step into his pants. As he jerked a pant leg up, the panel of his briefs gaped open, and she could see his proudest accomplishment, pink and limply curled, and she wondered briefly, coolly what Karla had thought of it, if she had enjoyed it more. He had seen where her eyes had dropped, and he had reddened, roughly zippering up his pants. He hadn't ever cheated on her before, he said vehemently, and he wouldn't ever again. Not until he found her wanting again, Myka thought cynically. He checked his watch; he said he wanted to talk it all out, but he had a client call that he absolutely could not reschedule. Once it was over, however, he'd make a beeline home, and if she wanted to shout and scream at him, that was all right because he deserved it. He shrugged on his suit coat and then he was gone. When Myka heard the garage door open, she asked herself how stupid she had been not to realize when she pulled her car in next to his that he hadn't finished his calls early and was waiting for her. He would never have done that, he would have simply gone back to the office. She had been so stupid for so long about him. Taking a suitcase from their closet, she had packed some of her clothes. She would stay at a motel until she could find a place to stay. She already had tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt, undergraduate, graduate (she had dropped out of the program midway through her dissertation), law school (she had completed one year). What was a motel bill on top of that?
And what was a trip to a tropical resort on top of that? She had continued to work at the firm even after she and Sam had formally ended their engagement. She was the senior paralegal in the estate planning division; Sam was in mergers and acquisitions. They rarely had to cross paths, and when she did see him, she managed to keep her composure while it was Sam who reddened and sought to escape back to his office. The awkward solicitousness of the assistants and the other paralegals, even of the attorney she was assigned to, became harder to tolerate. She was all right, she didn't need their concern. She didn't have to be told that she was better off without him. But she had to concede, Sam had been right about one thing. She was drifting. She didn't want to be a paralegal. She put in her two-week notice, and she let her sister Tracy talk her into the trip. Tracy had suggested that she go to Hawaii, that's where she and Sam had planned to go on their honeymoon, and it would serve him right, Tracy had said, if Myka went by herself and found some gorgeous hunk of man to spend her days and nights with. Tracy even began to sound a little envious imagining it; she was five months pregnant with her second child, and while Kevin was a dear, dear man and the best husband she could ever have, he was also an accountant and that told you all you needed to know. Myka thought the honeymoon destination for just about any blushing bride between 18 and 80 wasn't for her, but the tropics did sound appealing. She just wanted something off the beaten path.
Well, she had gotten it. When she and Steve returned to the camp, they still had the bucket of water but no weaselings. Pete was sharpening another spear by the fire - he had splintered two in the past few days - and said sarcastically to Helena, who was patiently picking apart an especially fibrous vine, "I think that's your call, Xena, to go take down some raccoons."
"Perhaps if Myka would check the snares earlier in the day, we wouldn't be having this problem." Helena wasn't looking at her, focused on extracting the inner fibers from the vine.
"Perhaps if you'd actually help out a little more around here, I wouldn't be checking the snares in the middle of the afternoon." Myka looked at her steadily.
"I do help around here," Helena said. "I bait the traps for the weaselings, I kill the raccoons, I port water and help dig latrines. I found the mint that we all chew and, currently, I'm hoping that we can use this fiber." She tore off a length and wound it around her index fingers. "As dental floss. I, for one, am tired of sharing a ratty toothbrush. What I don't do," she said underscoring her words, "is traipse up and down that hill signaling to nonexistent planes. That is a waste of time."
"To you, maybe. Not to me," Myka said quietly. She turned her back on Helena before she said something she would regret, although she wasn't quite sure what that would be. Nothing she said, pleasant or unpleasant, ever seemed to evoke more than that black, flat-eyed stare.
She stepped into their shelter and pulled out the remnants of Claudia's backpack. Their dwindling supplies were kept in it. She didn't remember much about the storm or what followed it. It sometimes seemed to her that she had stepped onto Artie's boat, Pete holding out his hand to her to help her down onto the deck, only to step into the sand of this beach. There had been the towering clouds, the wind, the boat rocketing up the waves and then down, Artie yelling at all of them to tie themselves to the railing and then, later, yelling at them to untie themselves as Pete inflated the life raft and steadied it against the sinking boat. He had strapped to himself every knife he could find, and Myka had been terrified that one of them would inadvertently puncture the raft, but miraculously that hadn't happened. He had thrown a hastily tied bedroll at her, consisting of blankets and extra clothes, toothpaste and a toothbrush, and a few buckets, and then he had been helping Helena down and Claudia and Steve, winning the argument with Artie that they should keep the backpacks, even though they would add to the weight in the raft. Then he had carried Artie down, which had nearly overturned the raft, because Artie was yelling and beating at Pete with his fists, crying that he should go down with his ship because it was his fault. There were oars fastened to the sides of the raft, and Pete had given one to Steve, and they had started paddling, and Artie had ducked his head down not looking at anyone, while Myka had watched the boat slowly upend - like the Titanic had in the movie - into a sea so calm that it almost seemed that the boat had chosen, now that they were all off of it, to dive into the water, as if it wanted to investigate what could have caused the waves to wrench it apart.
Myka opened the backpack and itemized the remaining contents for the others. Two men's t-shirts, one woman's tank top, two sports bras, two pairs of shorts, one safety razor, the travel bottle of aspirin with eight aspirin left, one pair of scissors, a waterproof container holding matches, and one corroded iPad. She didn't know why they kept the iPad except for the fact that Claudia wouldn't let them throw it away. Looking down at her faded pink tank top with the holes along its seams, she announced that she was taking the remaining tank top for herself. Claudia and Helena shrugged. Myka knew that Claudia had squirreled away two t-shirts for herself, but she wasn't going to call her on it. It wasn't as grave a sin as sneaking food. As for Helena, she seemed content with the turquoise sports bra, and, strangely, it did seem to be holding up well, although her capris were another matter. They were in shreds, and the waistband hung so loosely around Helena's hips that sometimes the pants rode down far enough that Myka could make out, as her eyes traveled the flat plane of Helena's abdomen, the shadow of her pubic hair. Even recalling it made Myka blush. Why did she care what Helena inadvertently displayed if Helena didn't? Certainly none of the men cared, not even Pete.
She put the backpack in the shelter. Her talk with Steve had given her an idea. "After dinner tonight, let's play a game of charades or something."
They all turned to stare at her. "Look," she explained, "we're all each of us has, and if we're going to be stuck here for a while longer." She couldn't, wouldn't allow herself to say 'forever.' "Then we need to develop a little. . . camaraderie."
"Aren't we together enough as it is?" Artie growled.
"But it's all about getting through the day, making sure we have enough to eat and drink. We need something more than that." Having anticipated their resistance, she added slyly, "We can break up into teams and whichever team wins gets to choose what chore they don't want to do the next day."
No one seemed enthusiastic about the idea, but no one was objecting either, and when they finished their dinner of fish and fruit, they quickly paired off, that is, Claudia and Steve and Artie and Pete did, leaving Myka and Helena to form the remaining team. It wasn't so much a game of charades that developed as a game in which they guessed movie titles and characters, sometimes interspersing the names of a few actors. Each time Helena and Myka guessed an actor's name correctly, Pete would innocently pose the question whether Helena knew him (or her), and after the first "Yes" or two, when Helena began to realize what Pete was really asking, her lips would thin into an angry line and she would refuse to answer.
Seeing how frequently she grimaced, Pete laughed all the harder. "That face is telling me everything I want to know and more. So, you and Johnny Depp? That comes as no surprise. C'mon, fess up, we're all friends here. Was he all Edward Scissorhands with you?"
"Knock it off, Pete," Myka said. "Move on to the next one."
He sighed. "All right, all right." He got up and whispered the answer into Helena's ear, although she was straining away from him as much as she could. She walked around to the opposite side of the fire from Myka.
"Glenn Close," she said, hands on hips.
"You're going to have to give me more than that," Myka said.
"Glenn Close and rabbits," Helena said. "Surely that gives it away, Myka."
Glenn Close and rabbits, Glenn Close and rabbits. Everyone was looking at her expectantly, and she had no idea what the answer was. She felt it stirring somewhere deep in her brain, but it wasn't surfacing. It had been a big movie, and Glenn Close had had permed hair that approached the wild state of Myka's own hair after almost two months of maltreatment and neglect. Why the hell couldn't she come up with the name of the movie?
"Another clue?" She pleaded weakly.
"Michael Douglas," Helena said, exasperated.
"Basic Instinct?" She hazarded, although she knew it was wrong.
"Brrrrnnnnt," Pete shouted in imitation of a buzzer. Adopting the false hearty voice of a game show host, he said, "Claudia and Steve, the game is yours with a two month stay on a deserted island if you can give us the right answer."
"It's Fatal Attraction, dude," Claudia said pityingly to Myka. "How could you miss that?"
Myka shrugged and said more nonchalantly than she felt, "Hey, I was in preschool when that movie came out. I never said I was a movie buff."
Claudia and Steve chose not to tote water from the spring, so Helena and Myka made extra trips the following morning. Helena was angrily banging the bucket against her leg, just as she had been grinding her teeth especially loudly when they had gone to sleep the night before.
"Just spit it out," Myka said wearily.
Flinging her arms out, bucket nearly flying off her fingers, Helena exclaimed, "Really, how could you have missed that one? People who have never seen it know about the rabbit scene. I'm not even an American, and I know about the film."
"We'll challenge Claudia and Steve to a rematch," Myka suggested. "It's just a couple of extra trips to the spring, it's not a big deal."
"You can challenge them. I'm not teaming up with you again," Helena said rudely.
Myka stopped, and Helena walked on for a few paces before she realized that Myka hadn't moved. "No one else will be your partner, you know that," Myka said evenly.
"I don't care. I'll play solo, which is probably what you wanted anyway," Helena sniffed.
"Are you accusing me of throwing the game simply because I didn't want to play with you?" Myka asked incredulously. As Helena glared at her in resentful confirmation, Myka slowly wagged her head from left to right and back again. "You are a piece of work, you know that? You are selfish and thoughtless and just plain nasty. Why that director wanted to sleep with you, let alone his wife, is beyond me."
"Ah, now we come to it," Helena said triumphantly. "Your little Midwestern soul just shrivels in revulsion at the fact that you have to share a shelter with a so-called sexual deviant, doesn't it? I've always sensed a. . . distaste from you that my behavior never seemed to justify."
"First of all, I'm from Colorado," Myka said hotly. "Secondly, I don't care what gender you prefer, if you prefer one. What I don't like about you is that you slept with a married man and his wife. As someone who's been cheated on, I can say there's nothing that justifies betraying another person's trust."
She half-expected Helena to laugh. Her outcry sounded old-fashioned, ludicrously old-fashioned, even to her. But Helena wasn't laughing and she wasn't sneering and she wasn't turning away from her in scorn. Instead, she was looking at Myka sympathetically. She dropped her bucket and plopped down in the grass. "Your boyfriend? Husband?"
"Sam was my fiancé," Myka mumbled, folding her legs under her and joining her in the grass.
"I don't make a habit of sleeping with married people, and despite what Pete wanted everyone to think, I don't sleep with that many people, period." Helena inclined her head toward the sun, laughing to herself. "If you had seen me when I was 17, 18, 19 years old, you wouldn't think I would stir anyone to the heights of passion, and maybe I don't even now." Her laugh became ironic. "I was bright but a frump, until I met one of my brother's friends, who fancied himself something of a talent scout. I was too short to be a model, he said, at least a sought-after one, but there was something 'arresting' about my face. I had a bit of a crush on him, although I had a much more serious infatuation later on with his sister, but that's another story for another time." Helena gave her a roguish look that Myka didn't want to find charming but did in spite of herself. "I wanted to impress him, so I took his advice." She paused, an expression simultaneously shy and sad crossing her face. "I'm still that awkward girl in many respects, and she can let her head get turned. I met Nate when he was directing a film of one of my books, and he stormed the gates, so to speak. And then I met his wife, and I got a little starry-eyed. There were rumors that they did this, the two of them, sleep with one another's paramours. No harm, no foul, right? But something went wrong, and the next thing I knew I was in the middle of their very public splitting up."
"Do you love him? Her? Both of them? Myka tried to keep a smile from her face but couldn't. . . quite.
Helena smiled sheepishly. "It does sound overmuch, doesn't it?" She hesitated. "Nate's very powerful, very important, within the confines of the industry, anyway, and it was hard not to respond to that. As for Andrea, she's very dramatic, very, um, expressive." Helena arched her eyebrows. "Fascinated with both of them, yes. In love, I don't think so." She pushed herself up and picked up her bucket. "We ought to get on to the spring, don't you think?"
Myka walked beside her. "What made you get on Artie's boat?"
Helena started laughing again, ruefully. "My personal assistant booked me a stay at what she promised was one of the most secluded resorts in the world. The plan was that I would stay there until the furor died down, and the plan was working, but then someone spotted me and told someone who told someone who spread it all over the internet, and even the maids were taking surreptitious photos of me and selling them. Who the hell was going to follow me onto Artie's rusty old scow?" She began swinging her bucket again, but more gently. "I imagine Nate and Andrea have reconciled. I sometimes suspected this was all just a way to reenergize their marriage."
"I'm not in favor of relationships where you hurt each other to jolt things back to life," Myka said. "If you care for the other person, I mean really care, you shouldn't have to jump start your relationship. That says to me there wasn't really anything there to begin with."
Helena lifted her shoulder dismissively. "I can't say what works or doesn't work for other people. I'm not even sure what works for me. I'm 35 years old, and the longest relationship I've had was a two-year marriage several years ago."
"How did that end?" Myka was surprised at how grim she sounded, as though it mattered to her, in some way, what Helena's response was.
"Not how you think," Helena said chidingly. "I was an actress, or trying to be an actress at the time, and he was an actor, and we simply never saw each other. Out of 24 months, we were probably together for a total of four of them. There was no cheating, just a lack of interest after a while. It's one of the reasons I got out of the business, I wanted to have the time to devote to a relationship. That, and I didn't have the fire it takes to make a success out of acting. But I guess the right relationship hasn't materialized yet."
"Good luck finding one here," Myka laughed.
"The pool's small, admittedly, but I wouldn't say the situation's completely hopeless," Helena said serenely.
"I think if you can assure Pete that Little Pete wouldn't end up even. . . littler." Myka frowned at the word, but her eyes were shining mischievously. "You might have something there."
Helena only smiled.
