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Coconut Trees
by Anton M.
Chapter 5: Discoveries
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Mary and Fatemeh could see nothing as freezing wind blew snow into the airplane.
"Anybody out there!" Fatemeh yelled, and a single knock against steel was followed by a face turned toward them, and Orri rushed to help as they, together, lifted the person into the plane.
"Are there others?"
The person did not so much shake their head as their entire body, but it was enough for Mary to shut the door. Hope for rescue dwindled given the state of the person who'd arrived, and excitement and dread wore off quickly.
The person was entirely covered by snow. So much so, in fact, that it was probably the perfect camouflage in this weather, and when Fatemeh rushed to take off their coat, Darcy squeezed Elizabeth and set her beside him. He stood up, slowly, holding his head.
"Careful," he said. "Slow, slow. Slow down. They might have frostbite."
Darcy gave instructions as Mary, Roger and Fatemeh worked together to get off what had once, probably, been a long fluffy coat, but the zipper was frozen shut and they didn't so much unzip it as they tore it open. It clanked against the floor as it fell, partly frozen. An elderly woman appeared, so cold that she did not shiver, and Darcy assessed her health.
"Mary and Roger, take your blankets and lie next to her. No more than ten minutes before Fatemeh and George replace you. Then Orri and Anna."
Even George dared not argue with Darcy.
The woman was given sips of water. The exhaustion and distance in her gaze did not inspire anyone to make her talk. Everyone but the children, Charlotte, Li and Darcy contributed to heating up the woman – although the lightest of them struggled to get warm again. After Elizabeth had her shifts, Darcy always opened his blankets for her and squeezed her against him. He pressed his hands on her back and breathed against her neck as he warmed her back up.
"I shouldn't have allowed you to be among the people warming up the woman," Darcy whispered.
"I'm uninjured. You had no reason to exclude me."
"Your core temperature drops too much."
Elizabeth ignored her own shivering and pulled back a little to see Darcy's eyes. "Are you getting too cold? I can–"
"No." He cleared his throat as his chest continued to rumble with his words. "It will help lower my fever."
He was being so sweet, she wanted to cup his cheek and kiss his lips and hide her face in his neck, but she did not feel brave enough.
"Thank you for warming me," Elizabeth said, feeling cared for but surreal in Darcy's arms. In less than 24 hours, Darcy had gone from the one that got away with a car-crash of a break-up to the man who held her (mostly) without words and made her feel all the love she'd hoped she'd forgotten. It felt precious and dreamlike, this new reality.
Darcy squeezed Elizabeth against him and rested his cheek on top of her head. Instead of replying, he pulled Anna's son's woollen sweater over Elizabeth's head, on top of all her clothes, and wrapped their blankets around them.
It took half a day's worth of shifts to get the woman's lips to turn pinkish, and meanwhile, Darcy tended to the wounds and (suspected) broken bones of the survivors. He suffered from a headache, but he was more alert than on the previous day. Elizabeth helped him wherever she could, but Darcy needed Elizabeth and Kitty to sort through and write down the names of the medicines they had, and so Elizabeth and Kitty set the pile between them and started going through them.
Lydia, George, Li and Charlotte played cards when George was not on his (resented) body heat duty. Anna took her son's ancient-looking MP3-player and played some Russian music nobody understood, but it was melodic and cheered the hungry people somewhat.
"I think she fell asleep," Roger said, sitting up next to the woman. "Should we let her sleep?"
Darcy was about to reply when Anna started rubbing the woman's toes. He almost leapt out of his seat.
"No!" he shouted, rushing to Anna who stared at Darcy with an open mouth and started explaining something in Russian.
"No," Darcy repeated, shaking his head, taking Anna's hands. "She may have frostbite. We cannot know yet. Don't touch her extremities."
He shook his head for good measure, miming a grimace at the touch of her toes, and Anna sighed but complied. Darcy checked the woman's temperature and looked for signs of injury, but she did not appear to have many. She'd fallen asleep. Darcy gave orders to continue warming her up in shifts. They'd have to wait for answers from the woman (if she survived to give them), and it was an anti-climatic end to an otherwise adrenaline-filled day.
When Darcy appeared in front of Elizabeth, he had a bead of sweat on his face and his chest rumbled with his breaths.
"Are you okay?" Elizabeth asked, standing up. Darcy shut his eyes when she touched his cheek, and he complied when Elizabeth motioned for him to sit on the chair she'd sat. Elizabeth, not saying a word, sat sideways on his lap and covered them both with their blankets. Darcy wrapped his arms around her and rested his head against the back of the chair.
Everyone received half a sandwich, as planned, three times a day. It had been easy to distract themselves when everyone was settling into this new reality, but with the surprising boredom of being trapped in a box in a blizzard, food was a frequent topic of conversation, and so was its (artificial) scarcity. They had counted 142 sandwiches, which, if they all received half a sandwich, three times a day, would last them 6 days. They were sad little sandwiches, barely enough for one meal, but all things considered, it was a generous amount. It was a compromise between the people who wished to ration it further and those who thought that any rationing was unnecessary and that a rescue team would arrive at any moment.
However, half an airplane sandwich did not create a satisfying meal, and occasionally, crumble of plastic was hoped to be a candy wrapper or feared to be food hidden from others.
Roger, Anna and Mary joined with the group of people playing cards. The attempt to save phone batteries for later, while paved with good intentions, did not succeed. Even when they were kept against the warmth of skin, three quarters of their phones had died in the night or the morning, and even though Lei was playing on his phone with his brother, nobody said a word. The cold was too brutal for the lithium ion batteries to last, and the blizzard too cutting to hope that the phones could last two nights in the cold. It no longer mattered.
After eating supper and humming along some Russian songs where the melody stuck with people but nobody understood the words, the air felt almost warm, not in temperature but in mood, and their smiles felt brighter and laughter less hollow. The card-playing group increased while Li was balancing a book on her stomach, and Fatemeh was praying.
Elizabeth observed her with no little envy. She would've felt better had she believed the plane crash to be a part of higher purpose or a test to challenge her. But as it was, her faith offered Elizabeth a kind of silent comfort.
"How long have you guys been married?" Kitty asked, observing Elizabeth in Darcy's lap as they continued to make a list of drugs available to them.
"Only a few years."
Kitty paused, blushing. "You look very cute together."
Elizabeth gave her a soft smile, unaware of Darcy's eyes on her.
Kitty lifted another box of medicine.
"Nicomalom, or–" She turned it around to read the non-brand name. "Acenocoumarol," Kitty read, almost without pausing, writing it down before Elizabeth put it in a row of drugs. "We might be quicker if you do it at the same time."
"But how will you practice for your spelling bee?"
"I don't need practice," Kitty said, with the confidence of a kid with supportive parents and healthy relationships. "Come, you take one."
Kitty put a box of drugs in Elizabeth's hands, and Elizabeth shifted in her seat, the familiar terror of being put on the spot rushing in her ears. It was infinitely embarrassing, having an audience for her failures, and she briefly considered feigning a sudden headache, but Kitty was so easy-going and kind that Elizabeth gave up on her thoughts of fleeing and made her best effort.
"Byrvid."
Kitty started writing it down before taking the bottle and giggling. "That's not right," she said. "It's Viibryd–" She turned the box around, having made a game of it, practicing for her spelling be. "Vilazodone." It was the casual correction of a kid, with no ill intentions, and Kitty paused, suddenly aware of Elizabeth staring at her lap in shame, avoiding her eyes.
"Oh, do you have dyslexia?" Kitty asked. "No big deal. My best friend has it too. She has all these visual and auditory learning help for all the writing and reading and stuff. Her dad says that she'll be a CEO one day because it is supposed to make you really good at delegating tasks and persuading people and stuff..."
Darcy squeezed Elizabeth, staring at the side of her face as if he'd never seen her before, hearing Kitty go on and on about her best friend's dyslexia.
Darcy hadn't had a clue. This little twelve- or thirteen-year-old with a best friend for a dyslexic had figured Elizabeth out in less than 24 hours, and he'd spent four months in Elizabeth's company, two of them dating her, and he'd never thought of it.
Elizabeth had never said a word.
Suddenly, it all made sense. It was scary how much sense everything suddenly made – Elizabeth did not read books, she listened to them, and Darcy's snobbery about it had made her feel as if her reading was less valuable because of the way she processed information. The few times he'd asked her to read a book or a newspaper excerpt to him, she'd found a way out of it, and he'd never given it a second thought.
In one of his lowest moments, he'd accused Elizabeth of failing her exams on purpose because she was brilliant when she argued with him, but she had looked him dead in the eye and said, "I don't have to."
She was one of the few people in their twenties that he knew of who, instead of texting, called people outright. It terrified some people, made others uncomfortable, but it had further developed her people skills far beyond most people he knew.
Even the list of people who'd survived, Elizabeth could've done it herself but she did not. She'd made Kitty do it.
"Did you also have that stuff at school?" Kitty asked.
"No." Elizabeth was acutely aware of Darcy's sharp gaze on her. "My parents refused to get me tested."
"But why?"
Elizabeth rubbed her glove-covered fingers. "They were ashamed of me, I think. My sisters are all extremely smart and I think my parents didn't think of it as a real thing. They thought I struggled at school because I was lazy and stupid and faking it for attention."
"That's stupid."
"It is." Elizabeth let out a small, humourless laugh, but her eyes remained on her hands. "Nevertheless, it's how they felt, and I guess they were right. I'm nowhere near as bright as most people."
"I don't think so," Kitty said. "My best friend also has it, and she is so smart. She has the best memory."
Elizabeth gave her a sad smile, one that assured Darcy that Elizabeth felt Kitty's kindness but didn't believe her, and he watched, in silence, as Kitty finished listing the drugs while Elizabeth sorted and put them away. Elizabeth listened to Kitty's stories about her friend Hannah until they were done, but when Charlotte asked them to join for their card game, Elizabeth declined. She still felt the after-effects of trying to warm up a woman with hypothermia, and she didn't dare leave Darcy's warmth with the measly clothes she had.
Kitty happily joined the others, and Elizabeth was amazed by how well-adjusted the girl was. Kitty seemed to believe that being found was only a matter of a few days of discomfort, and Elizabeth hoped she was right.
Darcy was heating up again, and Elizabeth made him take his medicine and lie sideways on the chairs. He curled his legs so that they wouldn't dangle off the seats. Elizabeth sat in front of his stomach, thinking of joining the others for a game of cards now that he was resting, but he took her hand in his.
"Join me," he said.
"There's no room."
He shifted and opened his blanket, shutting his eyes. "On top of me."
They were not words she'd thought she'd ever hear again, but she did not have the heart to deny him. He sat up and took off his coat before lying down again. Gently and slowly, she lay on top of him, covering their bodies with blankets and his coat before Darcy pulled another blanket around them, and then, she was on top of him, cocooned in his arms, her cheek resting on his shoulder and his palms pressing against her back. His movements were gentle, his body warm, and Elizabeth felt like she could drown in the scent of him. She could never tell what specifically made him smell so attractive to her, but it elicited all the emotions she'd willed herself to forget and yet found herself unable to.
"Are you warm?" he asked, breath ghosting against her ear.
"Yes," she said. "You?"
He hummed in agreement before he attempted to clear his throat, and they smiled when their stomachs growled in unison.
It was getting too dark to keep playing cards, so the group beside them divided into many as smaller, quiet conversations started taking place. Elizabeth could hear Mary and Kitty hitting it off together and was endlessly thankful for it.
The plane was not entirely dark, just dim, and a few phones lit up corners as people talked. Lack of electricity and light ensured that there was nothing to do but to talk. It felt homey, somehow, to hear so many voices, whispers and even laughter.
"You can sleep," Elizabeth whispered.
Darcy cleared his throat and squeezed her back.
"Elizabeth…"
"You don't have to say anything."
Darcy slid his hand higher, turning his head so that his lips grazed her forehead and his breath blew over her face. "I don't know how you ever even agreed to go out with me given how I behaved."
"It helped that you were so pretty," she replied, and he smiled against her skin.
"You are right to hate me."
"I don't hate you."
"You should," he replied. "Why did you go out with me?"
When they first met, Elizabeth had been visiting her sister Jane at Jane's boyfriend's house – Bingley's house was enormous – and she had left some of her notebooks and papers on the dinner table when she took a break and sat in an armchair by the windows. She'd spent days and nights studying twice as much as her roommates but failing just as much, and she fell asleep. When she woke up, a tall, broad-shouldered man was standing by the mantlepiece and holding a picture frame. He looked up when Bingley joined him.
"Is this her?"
"No, that's her sister, Elizabeth. This one's Jane."
Darcy frowned. "I thought you said Jane got the beauty in the family."
Bingley laughed and patted his friend in the back. "Whatever you say, man."
"Nothing against your girlfriend, obviously," he corrected himself, "but her sister–"
"I get it, I get it." Amused, Bingley put the picture back as Darcy walked closer to the table and picked up an essay belonging to and written by Elizabeth, The Portrait Engravings of Paulus Pontius, with almost more red than black on the paper and a big, fat E on top.
"Wow." Darcy stared at it for a few seconds. "Can't even spell properly. Who'd she sleep with to get into –"
Elizabeth snapped the paper from his hand and gathered her things. Her eyes burned. She was overworked, exhausted and had nothing to show for it, and she was certainly not in the mood to hear how stupid everyone thought she was.
"You didn't tell me your best friend is a dick, Bingley," she said, clutching her books and not looking at them as she disappeared in the hallway.
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