I caught two more over the next twenty minutes. Carried them back to camp by the tails and laid them out on a flat rock near the fire. By the time I got back, Mehar was awake. Sitting up against the tree with her hands on her belly, her eyes onthe ocean, that look on her face that I’d been seeing since we got here. Hopeful and terrified at the same time. Scanning the horizon for a boat or a plane or anything that meant someone knew we were alive.
Nothing out there but water.
“Morning,” I said, setting the fish down.
She looked at the fish. Then at me. Then at the spear. “You just went and caught fish.”
“I did.”
“With a stick.”
“With a spear that I made from a stick. There’s a difference.”
“My baby out here on some Castaway shit.” The corner of her mouth twitched. Almost a smile. Not quite. But close enough to tell me she was still in there, still fighting, still capable of cracking jokes when the world was falling apart. That was my girl. “You talk to the volleyball yet?”
“I don’t need a volleyball. I got you.”
That one landed. Her eyes softened and she looked away because Mehar couldn’t take a compliment without breaking eye contact. She’d been like that since the beginning. Tough about everything except tenderness. Tenderness made her uncomfortable because she’d spent most of her life around men who used softness as a setup for violence. I was trying to retrain that instinct but it was slow work and we had time. Apparently, we had nothing but time.
I cleaned the fish with my knife. Gutted them, scaled them, laid them on a flat rock near the fire to cook. Yesterday I’d spelled out S.O.S. on the beach with the biggest branches I could find and lit both emergency flares, hoping somebody would see the smoke or the letters from the air. Nobody did. The flares were gone now, used up, and the S.O.S. was still sitting on the sand looking like a cry for help that nobody was gonna hear. But I left it there in the hopes that a plane would fly by and see it.
“Come on,” I said, holding my hand out to her. “Let’s go to the waterfall before we eat. Clean up.”
• • •
We bathed in the pool beneath the waterfall. I’m using the wordbathedloosely because what we really did was stand in cold water, scrub ourselves with our hands, and try to get the salt, the sand, and the sweat off our skin without soap or washcloths or any of the things you take for granted when you have a bathroom and a Target within driving distance. We used the burnt char of wood to clean our teeth and our bodies. It’s similar to the charcoal toothpaste and soap that’s trending in stores. That’s where it came from, indigenous folks’ remedies.
Mehar found a plant near the waterfall with thick leaves that had a slippery texture when you broke them open. She rubbed it between her hands and it lathered up enough to work as a substitute. I didn’t ask how she knew to do that. Mehar was an aesthetician. She knew skin and plants and textures the way I knew liquor margins and distribution routes. Different expertise, same precision.
We used the leaves to scrub our skin and our teeth. It tasted terrible but it worked. Mehar made a face that almost made me laugh, scrunching up her nose and spitting into the water.
“This is disgusting,” she said.
“It’s better than burnt sticks.”
“Barely.”
On the walk back to camp she stopped at a bush with small red berries that neither of us recognized. I reached for one and she grabbed my wrist.
“Don’t eat that.”
“How do you know it’s bad?”
“I don’t. That’s the point.” She picked one berry off the bush and rubbed it against the inside of her forearm. “You rub a little on your skin first and wait. If your skin reacts, it’s toxic. Redness, swelling, itching, anything. If nothing happens after twenty minutes or so, it’s probably safe to eat. If it passes the skin test, you put a tiny bit on your lip. Same thing. Wait. Then a tiny bit on your tongue. If you make it through all three without a reaction, it’s edible.”
I stared at her. “Where did you learn that?”
“Esthetics program. Botany module. They made us study poisonous plants because she said if we couldn’t identify what would kill somebody’s skin, we had no business touching their face.” She shrugged. “Never thought I’d use it on an island to figure out if a berry was gonna kill us, but here we are.”
“That lesson might have just saved our lives.”
We headed back to camp and I cooked the fish over the fire. Mehar pulled green bananas from a nearby tree, wrapped them in large banana leaves, and set them near the hot coals to roast.
“Green bananas aren’t sweet,” she said when she caught me looking. “They’re starchy. You can roast them and mash them up like a potato. It’ll actually fill us up instead of just holding us over.”
We ate. Fish and roasted green bananas and mango and coconut water. The bananas were dense and bland, and Mehar chewed hers slowly and said, “All I need is a little butter and some salt and this would actually be good.” She shrugged. “But it’ll stick to our ribs. That’s what matters.”
She was right. It was the most food we’d had since the crash and it sat heavy in my stomach in a way the fruit hadn’t. Hunger makes you grateful for things you would’ve never looked twice at in your real life. I’d been to restaurants that charged three hundred dollars a plate and none of those meals hit the way this one did.
