The math was going to change. As soon as this storm passed, I was getting on a boat and I was going to check every island, every cove, every strip of sand in the Grenadines until I found them. And when I found them, because it was when and not if, the Rios family was going to learn what happened when you came for a Banks and didn’t finish the job.
I looked at Prime. He was on the phone with Diego, speaking in a low voice, arranging things that didn’t need to be spoken about loudly. I looked at Bryce. He was staring out the window at the storm with his jaw tight and his hands balled into fists, watching the hurricane eat the sky and knowing his sister was somewhere underneath it.
“We’re going to find them,” I said. To Bryce. To Prime. To myself. To the ocean below us that was trying its hardest to keep my brother hidden.
The plane touched down outside Caracas thirty-eight minutes later. Diego was already at the airstrip with a truck. We were going to hunker down, wait out Beatriz, and the second she cleared, we were getting on that water.
The storm had maybe two days in her. My brother had survived worse.
18
Quest
The contractions stopped around three in the morning. I know because I counted every single one.
Four total. The first one was the worst, the one that made Mehar dig her nails into my arm hard enough to draw blood. The second came about forty minutes later, shorter, less intense. The third was barely anything, just a tightening across her belly that made her wince and grab my hand. By the fourth, she was half asleep against my chest and the tightening came and went without waking her fully.
I stayed awake the entire night. The storm raged outside the cave for hours, wind screaming, rain hammering the rock above us, water running down the walls and pooling at our feet. I held her and counted the minutes between each contraction and tried to remember anything I’d ever heard about pregnancy and labor. Braxton Hicks. That’s what it was called when the body practiced for the real thing. False contractions triggered by stress or dehydration or physical exertion. Mehar had experienced all three yesterday. I told myself it was Braxton Hicks because the alternative was something I couldn’t process in a cave with nolight and no help and no way to keep my child alive if she came three months early.
By dawn the storm had passed. The wind died down to nothing, the rain tapered off. The only sound left was water dripping from the cave ceiling and birds starting up again in the distance, cautious and scattered like they were checking to see if it was safe to exist again. Mehar stirred against my chest and lifted her head and looked at me with swollen eyes.
“Is it over?” she asked.
“Yeah. It’s over.”
“The baby’s okay. I think it was just Braxton Hicks.” She said it like she was reassuring me and I realized she’d been awake for more of the night than I thought. She’d felt me counting. Felt my body tense with every contraction. She knew I was scared and she was trying to make it easier for me, which was so backwards and so Mehar that I almost laughed.
“Let’s go see what’s left,” I said.
We walked back toward camp slowly. Mehar held my arm and we picked our way through the brush, stepping over branches and debris the storm had scattered across the hillside. The forest looked like it had been shaken by something enormous and careless. Trees were stripped, leaning at angles that didn’t make sense. Leaves and broken limbs covered the ground so thick we were walking on top of them instead of dirt.
When we reached the beach I stopped walking and just stood there.
The camp was gone. The shelter I’d built from palm fronds and driftwood was scattered across the sand in pieces. The fire pit was buried under debris. The flat rock where Mehar sat every morning was still there but everything around it had been rearranged by the wind and the water. The tide line had pushed thirty feet further inland than normal. The beach itself looked wider in some places and narrower in others, reshaped by astorm that didn’t care how many weeks we’d spent making this place livable.
And the raft was gone.
I scanned the shoreline twice to be sure. It had been pulled up on the sand near the tree line, tucked between two rocks where I thought the wind couldn’t reach it. But the storm wasn’t regular wind. The raft was gone, probably ripped loose in the first hour of the storm and carried out to open water where it would float until the ocean swallowed it or the current pushed it to some other shore a hundred miles away. Our one visible signal, the one thing a search plane or a passing boat could’ve spotted from the air, bright yellow and orange against blue water, was gone.
I didn’t say anything about it. Mehar hadn’t noticed yet and telling her would do nothing except add weight to a situation that was already heavy enough to drown in.
But the fruit was everywhere.
The storm had ripped through the trees and shaken loose everything that was clinging to a branch. Mangoes, coconuts, the bitter green fruit I still hadn’t identified, all of it scattered across the ground like the island had emptied its pockets. Some of it was bruised and split open. Some of it was perfect, ripe and ready, sitting in the sand like gifts nobody asked for.
Mehar saw it and her whole body softened. She let go of my arm and walked to the nearest cluster of mangoes and picked one up and bit into it without wiping it off, juice running down her chin. She sat down right there in the wet sand with her belly between her knees and ate like someone who’d forgotten what abundance looked like.
I picked up a coconut and cracked it against a rock and brought her the water inside and she drank it without stopping. Then she reached for another mango and looked up at me and for the first time in days there was something on her face thatwasn’t exhaustion or fear. It wasn’t hope exactly. It was closer to relief. The temporary kind that comes when the worst thing you imagined doesn’t happen and your body unclenches long enough to feel something other than dread.
“We survived a hurricane,” she said, almost like she was testing whether the words were real.
“We did.”
“Our baby survived a hurricane.”
“She did.”
Mehar rubbed her belly and shook her head and bit into the mango again. “She’s going to be so dramatic when she grows up. I can already tell. First baby to survive a plane crash AND a hurricane before she’s even born. She’s going to hold that over everyone’s head for the rest of her life.”
