“Good. I know it sucks but it’s temporary. I’ll call you when Xander lands. Stay strong.”
I hung up and stood there with one hand on the phone, the other on my belly, and breathed. In and out. The baby kicked again, harder this time, like she was co-signing everything Justice just said.We show up. That’s what this family does.
I walked back toward my cell. Passed the metal table where the three women were still sitting. One of them, an older woman with braids and tired eyes, looked at my belly and then at my face and said, “How far along?”
“Eight months.”
She shook her head slowly. “They ain’t got no shame putting a pregnant woman in here.”
“No,” I said. “They don’t.”
I kept walking. Got to my cell, sat down on the yoga mat they called a mattress, leaned against the wall, and put both hands on my belly.
We’re getting out of here, I told the baby silently.Your grandmother put us in this cage but your uncle is sending reinforcements and a Banks doesn’t stay locked up for long. I promise you that. Your mama has killed two men and survived worse than a holding cell in Hartford, Connecticut. This place is not where our story ends.
Then I heard it. A TV mounted on the wall in the common area, volume low but not low enough. A news anchor’s voice, polished and detached, reading a headline the way they read all headlines, like the words didn’t belong to a real person with a real life.
“…Serenity Banks, daughter of former DC mayor Vivica Banks, was arrested early this morning on a murder warrant issued by the state of Connecticut. Banks, who is reportedlyeight months pregnant, is being held in a Hartford facility pending arraignment. The victim, David Jamison, was a teacher at the prestigious Ashford Academy who disappeared over a decade ago…”
My face. On the screen. The mugshot they took when I got processed, pajamas and all, blown up on a television for the whole world to see. Daughter of Vivica Banks. Murder. Teacher. Pregnant.
Everybody was going to know. My brothers. My grandmother. The press. The adoptive family in Silver Spring. My daughter.
Everybody.
6
Quest
I was up before the sun, which wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was waking up on sand instead of Egyptian cotton, with a pocket knife instead of a phone on the nightstand that didn’t exist, next to a woman I normally woke up beside in a California king, not on the ground under a tree on an island that God forgot to put on a map.
Day two. No rescue. No boats on the horizon. No planes overhead. Just the ocean doing what it did, blue and wide and indifferent to the fact that two people and an unborn baby were stranded on a piece of land that was probably smaller than the property in Virginia I couldn’t get back to.
Mehar was still asleep. Curled on her side with her hands tucked under her belly and her face soft in a way it only got when she was unconscious. Awake, Mehar was steel and sass and a jaw that could cut glass. Asleep, she looked like she used to look when I first met her, before Janelle, before the warehouse, before any of this. Peaceful. Young. Like a woman who hadn’t been through the things she’d been through.
I let her sleep. She needed it more than I did and the baby needed it more than both of us. I checked the fire. Still going.I’d been feeding it through the night, getting up every hour or so to add driftwood and dry branches. That thing was staying lit until somebody came for us or until this island ran out of trees, whichever came first.
No sign of the boar. Whatever we’d heard in the brush last night hadn’t come any closer. The fire was doing its job. But I wasn’t stupid enough to think it wouldn’t be back. Wild boars were territorial and persistent. We were on its turf, not the other way around. Sooner or later, we were gonna have a conversation and it wasn’t going to be diplomatic.
I stood up and stretched. My body reminded me of every single thing it had been through in the last thirty-six hours. My hands were the worst. The blisters from paddling had dried out overnight. The skin was tight and cracked, and every time I flexed my fingers the cuts reopened. My shoulders were stiff. My back ached. Everything from the neck down felt like it had been put through a rinse cycle on heavy. But I was vertical, I was breathing, and I had a pregnant woman to feed. The body was just gonna have to get in line.
First things first. Protein.
The mangoes and coconuts were keeping us alive but they weren’t enough. Mehar needed real food. The baby needed real food. Fruit and coconut water would hold you for a day or two but after that your body starts eating itself. I wasn’t about to watch my fiancée waste away on a beach while I sat around picking fruit off trees like this was some kind of resort experience. Nah. We needed fish.
I walked the tree line until I found a branch that was long enough and straight enough to work with. Broke it off, sat down with my knife, and started carving. Stripped the bark, shaved the tip down to a point, tested it against my palm. It wasn’t pretty but it was sharp. My grandfather used to take me and Justice fishing on the Chesapeake when we were kids. I wasn’t spearingfish back then, I was using a rod and reel and sitting on a bucket eating Doritos, but the principle was the same. You find where the fish are, you stay still, and you don’t flinch when it’s time to strike.
I waded into the shallows about fifty yards down the beach from where Mehar was sleeping. The water was clear enough to see the bottom and after about ten minutes of standing still with my spear raised I saw movement. Small silver fish darting between the rocks. I waited. Tracked one. And jabbed.
Missed.
The fish scattered. I stood there with my spear in the water and nothing on the end of it and thought,this is humbling. Questor Rufus Banks, CEO of Banks Reserve, with a net worth in the high nine figures, standing in the Caribbean in yesterday’s clothes trying to stab a fish with a stick. If Mekhi could see me right now he would never let me live it down. Prime would take a picture. Justice would calculate the cost-per-fish and tell me it wasn’t efficient.
I reset. Waited. Tracked another one. Jabbed again.
Got it.
The fish wiggled on the end of the spear. I pulled it out of the water, held it up, and felt something that I can only describe as primal. Not pride exactly. Something older and deeper, from a part of my brain that remembered what it was like to provide when there was nothing between you and starvation except your own hands. I caught a fish. I was gonna feed my woman. That meant something out here in a way it never meant anything when I was ordering room service or dropping two hundred dollars on dinner at Marcel’s.
