On the Island Read online

  “What’s a GED?”

  “A general education diploma. Sometimes when kids drop out of school, they choose that option instead of going back. But don’t worry, I’ll help you.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t give two shits about my high school diploma right then, but it seemed important to her.

  The next day, when we were working on the house, Anna said, “Are you ever going to shave?” She felt my beard with the back of her hand. “Isn’t that hot?”

  I hoped there was enough hair to hide my red face. “I’ve never shaved before. What little I had fell out when I started chemo. When we left Chicago everything was just starting to grow back.”

  “Well it’s all there now.”

  “I know. But we don’t have a mirror, and I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “Why didn’t you say something? You know I would help you.”

  “Uh, because it’s embarrassing?”

  “Let’s go,” she said. She grabbed my hand and pulled me back to the lean-to. She opened her suitcase and took out a razor and the shaving cream she used on her legs, and we went down to the water.

  We sat cross-legged facing each other. She squirted shaving cream into her hand and dabbed it on my face, then spread it around. She put her hand behind my head, pulling me toward her until I was at the right angle, and then shaved the left side of my face with slow, careful strokes.

  “Just so you know,” she said. “I’ve never shaved a man before. I’ll try not to cut you, but I can’t promise.”

  “You’ll do a better job than I would.”

  Only a few inches separated our faces, and I looked into her eyes. Sometimes they were gray, and sometimes blue. Today was a blue day. I never realized how long her eyelashes were. “Do people notice your eyes?” I blurted.

  She leaned over and swished the razor around in the water. “Sometimes.”

  “They’re amazing. They look even bluer because you’re so tan.”

  She smiled. “Thanks.”

  She scooped up water in her hand and ran it over my cheeks, rinsing the shaving cream away.

  “What’s that look for?” she asked.

  “What look?”

  “You’ve got something on your mind.” She pointed at my head. “I can practically see the wheels turning up there.”

  “When you said you’d never shaved a man before. Do you think of me as a man?”

  She paused before she answered. “I don’t think of you as a boy.”

  Good, because I’m not.

  She squirted more shaving cream into her palm and shaved the rest of my face. When she finished, she held my chin and turned my face side to side, running the back of her hand along my skin.

  “Okay,” she said. “You’re all done.”

  “Thanks. I feel cooler already.”

  “You’re welcome. Let me know when you want me to do it again.”

  ***

  Anna and I lay in bed one night, talking in the dark.

  “I miss my family,” she said. “I have this daydream I play out in my mind all the time. I imagine that a plane has landed in the lagoon and you and I are right on the beach when it does. We swim out to it and the pilot can’t believe it’s us. We fly away and as soon as we find a phone, we call our families. Can you imagine what that would be like for them? Being told someone has died and having their funeral, and then they call you on the phone?”

  “No, I can’t imagine what that’s like.” I turned onto my stomach and adjusted the seat cushion under my head. “I bet you wish you never took this job.”

  “I took the job because it was a great opportunity to go someplace I’d never been. No one could have predicted this would happen.”

  I scratched a mosquito bite on my leg. “Did you live with that guy? You said you slept next to him.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t think he’d want you to be away for so long.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “But you did?”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute. “I feel weird talking about it with you.”

  “Why, because you think I’m too young to possibly understand?”

  “No, because you’re a guy. I don’t know if you can relate.”

  “Oh, sorry.” I shouldn’t have said that. Anna was really good about not treating me like a kid.

  “His name is John. I wanted to get married, but he wasn’t ready, and I was tired of waiting. I thought it would be good for me to get away for awhile. Make some decisions.”

  “How long have you been together?”

  “Eight years.” She sounded embarrassed.

  “So he doesn’t ever want to get married?”

  “Well. I think he just doesn’t want to marry me.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him anymore. What about you? Do you have someone back in Chicago?”

  “Not anymore. I used to go out with this girl named Emma. I met her at the hospital.”

  “Did she have Hodgkin’s too?”

  “No, leukemia. She was sitting in the chair next to mine when I had my first chemo treatment. We spent a lot of time together after that.”

  “Was she your age?”

  “A little younger. She was fourteen.”

  “What was she like?”

  “She was kinda quiet. I thought she was really pretty. She’d already lost her hair though, and she hated that. She always wore a hat. When mine fell out she finally stopped being embarrassed. Then we just sat around like two baldies, and we didn’t care.”

  “Losing your hair has to be hard.”

  “Well, it’s probably worse for girls. Emma showed me some old pictures, and she had long blond hair.”

  “Did you ever get to spend time together when you weren’t having chemo?”

  “Yeah. She knew her way around the hospital. The nurses always looked the other way when they caught us making out somewhere. We went up to the rooftop garden at the hospital, and sat in the sun. I wanted to take her out, but her immune system couldn’t handle being in a crowd. One night the nurses let us watch a video in an empty room. We got in the bed together and they brought us popcorn.”

  “How sick was she?”

  “She was doing okay when we first met, but after about six months, she got a lot sicker. One night on the phone, she told me she’d made a list of things she wanted to do, and she told me she thought she might be running out of time.”

  “Oh, T.J.”

  “She’d turned fifteen by then, but she wanted to make it to sixteen so she could get her driver’s license. She wanted to go to prom, but she said any school dance would do.” I hesitated, but lying in the dark next to Anna made it easier to talk about things. “She told me she wanted to have sex, so she could know what it felt like. Her doctor had put her back in the hospital by then and she had a private room. I think the nurses knew, maybe she told them, but they left us alone and we managed to check one thing off that list. She died three weeks later.”

  “That’s so sad, T.J.” Anna sounded like she was trying not to cry. “Were you in love with her?”

  “I don’t know. I cared about her a lot, but it was such a weird time. My chemo stopped working, and I had to start radiation. It scared me when she died. Wouldn’t I know if I loved her, Anna?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  I hadn’t thought about Emma in a while. I’d never forget her though; it had been my first time, too.

  “What did you decide about that guy, Anna?”

  She didn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t want to tell me, or maybe she’d already fallen asleep. I listened to the waves crashing into the reef, the sound relaxing me, and I closed my eyes and didn’t open them until the sun woke me up the next morning.

  Chapter 19 – Anna

  “Do you want to play poker?” T.J. asked.

  “Sure, but I left the cards down by the water.”

  “I’ll go get them,” he said.

  “That’s o
kay. I have to go to the bathroom. I’ll grab them on my way back.” I hated going anywhere near the woods after dark, and I had about two minutes before the sun went down.

  I had just grabbed the cards when it happened. I never saw it coming, and it must have swooped out of the sky with some speed behind it, because when the bat collided with my head, it almost knocked me off my feet. It took me a second to figure out what hit me, and then I started screaming. I panicked, my hands raking through my hair to get the bat out.

  T.J. ran to me. “What’s wrong?” Before I could answer him, the bat sank its teeth into my hand. I screamed louder. “There’s a bat in my hair,” I said, as stinging pain radiated across my palm. “It’s biting me!”

  T.J. sprinted off. I shook my head back and forth, trying to dislodge the bat. When he returned, he pushed me down onto the sand until I was flat on the ground.

  “Don’t move,” he said, cupping his hand around my head. Then he drove the blade of the knife through the bat’s body. It stopped wiggling. “Just hold on. I’m going to get it out of your hair.”

  “Is it dead?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I lay still. My heart raced, and I wanted to freak out, but I forced myself to remain calm while T.J. untangled the bat from my hair.

  “It’s out.”

  We couldn’t see it very well in the sliver of moonlight, so T.J. went back to the fire and grabbed a burning log. He bent down and held it over the bat’s body.

  It was disgusting, light brown with big black wings, pointy ears, and jagged teeth. Its body was covered with open sores. The fur around its mouth looked wet and slimy.

  “Come on,” T.J. said. “Let’s get the first-aid kit.”

  We walked back to the lean-to and sat down by the fire.

  “Give me your hand.”

  He cleaned the bite with the alcohol wipes, dabbed on antibiotic cream, and covered it with a band-aid. My hand throbbed.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  I could handle the pain, but the thought of what might be incubating in my bloodstream terrified me.

  T.J. must have been thinking about it too, because before we went to bed he stuck the blade of the knife in the fire and left it there all night.

  Chapter 20 – T.J.

  Anna was awake and sitting by the fire when I got back from fishing the next morning.

  “How’s your hand?”

  She held out her palm, and I peeled back the band-aid.

  “It doesn’t look too bad,” I said. The jagged wound seeped blood, and her hand had swollen a little overnight. “I’ll clean it again, and put another band-aid on it, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I swiped another alcohol pad across the bite. “You look tired,” I said, noticing the dark circles under her eyes.

  “I didn’t sleep very well.”

  “Do you want to go back to bed?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll nap later.”

  I put a fresh band-aid on her hand. “There. You’re good as new.”

  She must not have heard me though, because she stared off into space and didn’t say anything.

  Later that morning, I finished framing the house and began putting up the walls. The breadfruit trees gave off a milky sap, and I patched the cracks with it.

  Anna worked silently beside me, holding boards or handing me nails.

  “You’re quiet,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  I pounded a nail into the board, securing it into the frame and said, “You’re worrying about the bite?”

  She nodded. “That bat looked sick, T.J.”

  I put down the hammer and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. “It didn’t look good,” I admitted.

  “Do you think it had rabies?”

  I positioned the next board and picked up the hammer. “No, I’m sure it didn’t.” I knew bats sometimes carried the disease, though.

  Anna took a deep breath. “I’ll have to wait it out, I guess. If I don’t get sick within a month, I’m probably okay.”

  “What are the symptoms?”

  “I don’t know. Fever, maybe? Convulsions? The disease attacks the central nervous system.”

  That scared the shit out of me. “What do I do if you get sick?” I tried to remember what was in the first-aid kit.

  Anna shook her head. “You don’t do anything, T.J.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because without rabies shots the disease is fatal.”

  I couldn’t breathe for a second, like the wind had been knocked out of me. “I didn’t know that.”

  She nodded, tears filling her eyes. I dropped my hammer and put my hands on her shoulders. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re going to be okay.”

  I had no idea if she would, but I needed both of us to believe it.

  I counted forward five weeks and circled the date in Anna’s datebook. She wanted to wait longer than a month, just to be sure.

  “So if nothing happens by then,” I said, “and you don’t have any symptoms, you’re okay, right?”

  “I think so.”

  I closed the datebook and put it back in Anna’s suitcase.

  “Let’s just get back to our regular routine,” she said. “I don’t want to dwell on it.”

  “Sure, whatever helps.”

  She should have been an actress instead of a teacher. By day, she put on quite a show, smiling like nothing bothered her. She kept busy, spending hours playing with the dolphins or helping me with the house. But she wasn’t eating, and she was so restless in bed I knew she was having trouble sleeping.

  I woke up when she crawled out of the life raft one night two weeks later. She always got up at least once to throw wood on the fire, but she usually came right back. She didn’t this time, so I went to check on her. I found her in the lean-to, staring at the flames.

  “Hey,” I said, sitting down next to her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t sleep.” Anna poked at the fire with a stick.

  “Do you feel okay?” I tried not to sound anxious. “You’re not running a fever, are you?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m fine, really. Go back to bed.”

  “I can’t fall back to sleep unless you’re beside me.”

  She looked surprised. “You can’t?”

  “No. I don’t like it when you’re out here alone. It makes me nervous. You don’t have to put wood on the fire every night. I told you it’s no big deal for me to make one in the morning.”

  “It’s just a habit.” She stood up. “Come on. At least one of us should be able to sleep.”

  I followed Anna into the life raft and after we lay down, she covered us with the blanket. She wore shorts and my T-shirt, and as she settled into a comfortable position, her bare leg brushed mine. She didn’t pull it away when she stopped moving, and neither did I.

  We lay in the dark, legs touching, and neither of us slept for a long time.

  She agreed to stop getting up in the middle of the night and one morning a couple weeks later, after I built the fire, I said, “Anna, I wish you could time me. I bet I made this in less than five minutes.”

  “Well, now you’re just showing off.”

  She laughed when she said it though, and as we got closer to the date I circled in the datebook, she seemed to relax a little.

  When five weeks had passed, I held her open palm in my hand, and traced the scar left behind with my thumb. “I think you’re going to be just fine,” I said. And this time, I really meant it.

  She smiled at me. “I think so, too.”

  She polished off three fish for lunch that day.

  “Are you still hungry? I can catch more.”

  “No thanks. I was starving, but I’m full now.”

  We swam for a long time and we worked on the house until dinnertime. Again, she ate more than she’d eaten in weeks. At bedtime, she could hardly hold her eyes open, and she fell asleep seconds after I lay down next to her. I fell asleep too,
but I woke up when Anna curled up next to me and rested her head on my shoulder.

  I put my arm around her and pulled her closer.

  If she had gotten sick, the only thing I could have done was watch her suffer. Bury her next to Mick when she died. I didn’t know if I could make it without her. The sound of her voice, her smile, her– those were the things that made living on the island bearable. I held her a little tighter and thought if she woke up I might tell her that. She didn’t though. She sighed in her sleep, and eventually I drifted off.

  She had moved back to her side of the bed by the time I woke up the next morning. I was building a fire when she climbed out of the life raft.

  She smiled at me, stretching her arms over her head. “I had a great night’s sleep. The best I’ve had in a long time.”

  “I slept pretty good too, Anna.”

  A few nights later, we were lying in bed debating our favorite top ten classic rock albums of all time.

  “The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers is my number one. I’m knocking Led Zeppelin IV back to the fifth spot,” she said.

  “Are you high?” As I started listing the reasons why I disagreed – everyone knew Pink Floyd’s The Wall should be number one – I farted. The breadfruit had that effect on me sometimes.

  She shrieked and immediately tried to escape through the door of the life raft, but I grabbed her around her waist, yanked her backward, and pulled the blanket tight over her head.

  It was a little game I liked to play with her.

  “Oh no, Anna, oh my God, you better get out from under there,” I teased, laughing. “It must smell horrible.” She struggled to free herself, and I held the blanket down even tighter.

  When I finally let her out, she made gagging noises and said, “I’m gonna kick your ass, Callahan.”

  “Really? You and what army?” She probably weighed about a hundred pounds. We both knew she wasn’t kicking anyone’s ass.

  “Don’t get too cocky. One of these days, I’ll figure out a way to take you down.”

  I laughed and said, “Oooh, I’m scared, Anna.”

  What I didn’t admit, though, was that she could have brought me to my knees with one touch of her hand, if she put it in the right place.