Stranded
Chapter Five: Joyce Walters
Joyce gathered together a bag of medical supplies to take with her on the hike. The thought that there could be other survivors, possibly severely wounded, made butterflies do loop-de-loops in her stomach. The injured on the beach were all going to make it; they were more scared than anything else, although Joyce had splinted several broken bones, and there was one teenage girl with a mild concussion.
Joyce asked Blayr to take water around to her patients every so often, and then she stood and went around to check them all over once more. No new problems had arisen; everything was starting to be as it should be. Steve and Danietta walked over along with another volunteer, a man named Louis White. His daughter, Katrina, was the girl with the concussion. When she woke up the first day, the only words that she formed were used to ask if her cats had made it.
As they walked into the jungle, Louis told them of his daughter's passion for animals. He was a Staff-Sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps, and he had orders to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. With three cats and a dog, the military would not allow that many animals aboard a plane, so Louis had arranged a commercial flight from Tokyo for them. Now all four of his little girl's pets were missing, and he made it clear that the animals were the main reason that he came along on the hike. At the crash site there had been no sign of the pets, cages and all. Katrina was devastated.
"Where are we?" Danietta asked.
"I don't know, but I think we passed this tree an hour ago," Joyce said, resting her arm on the trunk of a large tree.
"We did," Steve said, pointing down at their footprints in the soft dirt.
"Which way is the beach?"
"I don't know," Joyce said, shifting her weight as she maneuvered herself up onto a branch of the tree. "But I'm going to find out."
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"It's a good thing he proposed to you, or you and that thing would be living at home for the rest of your life."
As her father left the room, Joyce sank down onto the edge of her bed, tears filling her eyes. Her wedding gown hung next to a tall mirror, waiting for her to don it and walk down those stairs to her new life. For as long as Joyce could remember, her father had been blunt with her, but he had never said anything so cruel before.
Joyce's mother passed away shortly after she was born, leaving Jaimas Booker to raise his daughter alone. He blamed Joyce for the loss of his wife, and let her know it by verbally abusing her from day one. Over the years she had been dragged down until she believed that all she could do was marry into a well-off family.
That was until she met Eric Walters. Eric spoke kindly and respectfully to Joyce. He made her believe that she could do anything, even fulfill her dream of becoming a doctor. But as Eric helped Joyce, he began to fall in love with her. On Joyce's eighteenth birthday, nearly a year after they'd met, Eric proposed to the woman of his dreams. They planned the wedding for a month later.
Now Joyce sat doubting herself again.
"You and that thing would be living at home for the rest of your life."
Joyce's father had a way with words. Joyce pushed aside painful memories of the rape that had left her carrying "That Thing," who was actually her three-year-old daughter, Mollie. She stood as the toddler stirred in the large crib beside her bed. As she stroked Mollie's cheek with her fingers, a knock sounded on the door.
"Who is it?" Joyce asked, while wiping her eyes with a tissue, and trying to keep her voice steady.
"It's me," Eric said. Joyce threw on a happy grin and stepped out into the hallway.
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Joyce reached the top of the tree easily. She carefully found sound footing before looking away from the tree. She could see the smoke from the beach, where their signal fire blazed. She called down to the three on the ground, and pointed that out for them. Then she turned and looked behind her. Smoke rose from a spot in the jungle. She quickly climbed down and led the others in that direction.
It took nearly three hours before they could smell the smoke. Joyce climbed several more trees, to check their direction. Finally they broke through the branches. The nose of the plane had landed in a clearing, and was now a charred blackened hunk of metal. Five people huddled around a small fire: a tall man with dark hair, a woman in a stewardess uniform, a woman with auburn curls, and two three-year-old children.
"Well hi there, traveling buddy," Danietta said to the man. She had apparently found the man who was sitting beside her on the plane. The people looked up and their faces broke out with smiles. Steve, Danietta, Louis, and Joyce handed out the water bottles that they had been carrying. The three adults that were here agreed to come back to the beach camp, and Joyce helped them pack up anything useful. Louis was delighted to find all of his daughter's pets, still in their cages, well fed. The auburn woman had been caring for them.
Meanwhile Steve and Danietta ventured inside the piece of the airplane. There were several bodies, the pilot's among them. Danietta kept her eyes focused ahead of her as she went straight to the cockpit for the flight manifest. Steve followed her, and picked up the transceiver. It was melted in several spots and charred black as the plane shell. If it had been beyond repair before, it was so more than ever now. Steve put it in his bag nonetheless, knowing from experience that crowds liked real evidence, or they became angry mobs.
Outside the others were ready to leave for the beach. Louis put all three of the cats into one carrier, and then strapped it to his back with their leashes, like a backpack. He put the dog, a German-Shepherd puppy called Callie, on a lead, and he led the way. The stewardess, Tess, her nametag read, carried one of the children, while Joyce took the hand of the other, and they followed everyone else into the jungle to begin another four hour hike.
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"What is the matter?" Eric asked immediately; he was not fooled by Joyce's fake grin.
"It's just something he said," Joyce told him, leaving it at that. "I'm okay, really."
"That's good, because this came for you in the mail." Eric held out an official looking envelope. Joyce carefully opened it, a feeling of dread making knots in her stomach. What if they rejected her? Joyce's hands shook as she read the letter, telling her that she had been accepted into medical school.
Joyce threw her arms around her fiancé, crying tears of joy.
"I can't wait to show thisto myfather," she said. "My success just might give him a heart attack."
The rest of the day went smoothly. Joyce was not nervous at the wedding. Her father sat in the audience, and she walked down the aisle alone. Mollie was a flower girl, although she was chaperoned by Eric's niece, Ella, to keep the toddler from eating the rose petals.
The next day, at the local courthouse, Eric signed Mollie's adoption papers, making him her legal father. Joyce had never been so happy in her life.
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They still had nearly half an hour left when dusk began to fall. They lit torches with a lighter that Stuart begrudgingly gave up, and kept on moving.
The two young children had both fallen asleep, and now Steve carried one, and the lady with auburn hair, Terri, carried the other. They looked so alike that Joyce knew that they were twins; brother and sister, named Jamie and Audrey. While awake, they chattered happily, not fully grasping the situation.
"Oh to be three again," Steve had said with a smile, when Audrey had finally drifted off and he took her from the doctor. Soon they walked onto the beach.
Several people looked up at the newcomers to the camp. A woman, whom the people on the beach had come to know as Marilyn, ran forward to the two small children, gathering her babies close to her.
Steve smiled at Ellen, who was cradling Hope. He put an arm around her shoulders as Joyce and Danietta stood nearby.
"Did you get it?" she asked in a whisper.
"Yes," Joyce answered. "We got it."
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Joyce chewed over the past years since her wedding. Mollie was doing well in school, and was a brilliant soccer player. Joyce made sure that she was always nearby with a complement and a hug. Every night Joyce climbed the stairs to her daughter's room for their bedtime ritual. They climbed up on Mollie's big bed and drank hot chocolate while reading a book. Eric would even join them every now and then. Mollie loved the series Protector of the Small, by Tamora Pierce. They were halfway through the first book when Joyce had left two weeks ago for a medical conference in Tokyo. Joyce's week-old job at Community General Hospital already had her traveling the world.
Mulling over her memories gave the doctor something to do on the long flight back to L.A. She dug around in her carry-on bag and pulled out the second book in Mollie's series. She had picked it up as a gift for her daughter. As she ran her finger over the cover, Joyce felt the plane hit turbulence. An air mask fell before her, and Joyce put the book away quickly. Her ears popped as the plane plummeted swiftly downward. Just after she secured the mask over her face, Joyce blacked out.
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"Vanilla ice cream and bacon," Blayr offered. Joyce set down the water bottles she was carrying and looked at the pregnant woman.
"What was that?"
"That's what I crave: vanilla ice cream and bacon. I've been trying to figure it out for days," she said with a grin. "That sounds disgusting, doesn't it?"
"When I was pregnant, it was strawberries covered with butterscotch. I got those little Hershey chips and melted them down," Joyce said, smiling at the memory.
"I didn't know you have children," Blayr said, shifting in the sand to get in a more comfortable position.
"Just my little girl," Joyce said simply. Joyce went back to her infirmary to check on her patients. She dismissed Katrina White, letting her go to play with her pets. The girl had been overjoyed when her father had walked back into the camp with all four animals the night before.
Katrina picked up a stick and threw it as far as she could. Callie, her dog, went flying down the beach after it. She circled the stick so fast that no one saw the exact moment that she picked it up from the ground, before tearing back to Katrina. She dropped the stick at her feet, and then jumped up, knocking the girl to the ground.
As the dog licked her master's face, Joyce smiled, remembering days spent like this with her own daughter.
Tears filled Joyce's eyes as she turned away, looking out towards sea. Suddenly she felt at peace, knowing that Eric was caring for Mollie.
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After the plane took off, Joyce pulled her cell phone out one last time, to check her messages. She had received a text message from Mollie the night before, but she was in a hurry to catch the airplane in time.
"iHEARTuMama." She read just before the screen went blank, due tothe dead battery.
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"I love you too, Mollie," Joyce thought, as she turned back around, to finish her rounds in the makeshift hospital.