She dozed and woke up screaming. She cried and passed out from tiredness.
Poor thing had it worse than Conner did because at least he passed out from pain and let his body heal without being conscious.
It didn’t matter if he was awake or sleeping, I never left his side.
Galloway and I shared numerous looks, gradually fading from horror at possibly losing him to accepting relief as Conner slowly got better.
My calculations were right.
Conner was stung at one p.m. on Saturday (thanks to my phone and its steadfast ability at telling time, even if it couldn’t catch a signal). By one a.m. on Sunday, Conner was over the worst, and he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
.............................
Three days passed and my entire attention remained on Conner.
I didn’t have time to wonder if Galloway and I would be okay. I didn’t contemplate the fact we hadn’t come or how thick the unspoken discussion hovered around us.
All I could focus on was Conner.
Galloway and I were okay. We were friends. We would work through a bad experience and move on. Sex wasn’t everything. And besides, I loved him so much more than that.
But for now...he didn’t need me.
Conner did.
Luckily, he healed quickly. The skin around the sting didn’t peel, but it did stay bright red (from the poison and the burning water) but that didn’t stop him from growing quarrelsome and wanting to head back out to fish.
Galloway and I flatly forbid him, and Galloway took over, bringing home another octopus and a large eel that strangely tasted like chicken (just like everyone said). My vegetarian preferences had been put on hold in favour of my belly earning a full meal.
Pippa stopped crying whenever Conner went to sleep, and Conner spent most of the day teasing her for causing so much fuss when he was ill. She was wary, not trusting his return to health, as if expecting him to die at any moment and pull a terribly cruel joke on her.
Because of her nervous terror, she never left his side, plastering herself to him wherever he limped to the bathroom and pestering him when she insisted on eating almost in his lap.
Conner rolled his eyes and poked and joked, but he never once snapped at her to leave him alone. He understood how terrifying it had been for her.
After all, he’d lost his parents, too.
Pippa was all he had left.
Despite the passing days and Conner steadily growing stronger, Pippa regressed into sucking her thumb again.
We’d all been through an awful ordeal. But at least our family was still intact.
Late at night, sleeping in my bed and feeling grateful for what we’d achieved, it sucker punched me with realisation of just how insignificant we were.
Against all odds, we’d made a home here. We’d learned how to forage and hunt. We’d educated on how to build and create. And yet...we were so vulnerable to Mother Nature and her creatures.
That reminder stole the rest of my naïvety that we would one day be rescued and go home. Ever since the crash, I’d believed that as long as we kept going, kept trusting that we would be found, that everything would be okay.
But that was a lie I could no longer believe.
The chances of rescue became more and more irrelevant every week. We were living on borrowed time.
Hard-earned time.
Time that wasn’t kind nor had any intention of giving us a break.
We’d all healed from our crashed arrival, but it didn’t mean we wouldn’t suffer other injuries, illnesses, mistakes, and consequences.
We wouldn't come out of this unscathed. No matter how much we might wish.
We were on the brink of extinction.
And we couldn’t let our guard down.
Ever.
.............................
Bad luck visited us a second time.
This time...it brought hazardous weather.
On the fourth day after Conner’s accident, the clouds galloped over the sun in the late afternoon, blanketing our island with false darkness. The wind sprung from nowhere with the clamouring hooves of thunder and lightning forked as if Zeus himself waged war on his brother, Poseidon.
Our task of cooking dinner was put on hold as rain droplets the size of school buses fell in a heavy sheet a second later. We all dashed into the home Galloway and Conner had built and gnawed on coconuts and salted fish as rabid winds snapped and masticated our roof, tearing away our window coverings, boring a hole for an impromptu skylight, and threatening to destroy the walls.
Once again, the storm reminded us (just like the stonefish had) that we were insignificant; entirely unsubstantial and dependent on the mercy of whatever the world wanted to give.
Memories of the helicopter crash kept us somber. The tally of how many days had passed since we’d been protected by glass and metal, rather than bamboo and flax, repeated with sorrow.
We huddled together beneath a spare blanket, each consumed with thoughts of loved ones back home and the fact that they would never know we were alive...or dead, if we didn’t survive.
It was a long night.
Luckily, as Fiji slowly lightened, the squalls gradually quietened. The walls held and the sky grew bored trying to kill us.
By the time we climbed from the relative safety of our bungalow, dripping wet, with the mammoth task of patching up our home and food stores, we left optimism behind as we surveyed our island.
Everywhere, the sand was littered with flotsam. A jumbled hodgepodge of broken rubbish, regurgitated by the ocean. Seaweed slithered on the white sand like entrails of a giant squid while plastic shopping bags from purchases long ago fluttered in the trees.