"I'm glad that I was with you last night, then," I said.
She looked at me with a blend of emotion in her eyes and I immediately felt a pang of guilt. She turned away from me, dropping my hand and walking a few steps in the opposite direction. Her head was down as if she felt bad about the way that she had weathered the storm the night before rather than spending it afraid and sad as she imagined was her usual response.
"Eleanor," I said, starting toward her.
"Is there something that you wanted to talk to me about?" she asked, turning to face me.
I didn’t know what to say. Something had shifted in her tone and I felt like she had put everything away in a neat little file cabinet, closed the drawer, and walked away, not ready to see or think about it.
“I just wanted to make you feel better,” I said, feeling like the sentiment fell flat. “I want you to know that I’m here to help you and protect you if we face any danger here.”
"I feel like I was already in some pretty serious danger literally running for my life through a cruise ship."
"I know and I'm sorry that I didn't find you faster, but the point is that I did find you. I found you and I got you off of the ship safely."
"You threw me off of the side of the ship."
"I didn't throw you. I helped you jump."
I absolutely threw her.
"And now we are on quite literally a deserted island with absolutely no way of getting off."
"I know. There’s not really anything that I can do about that. I wish that there was. That wasn’t really what I thought was going to happen when I got us off the ship.”
“Really?” Eleanor asked. “What exactly was going through your head when you scooped me up and tossed me into the ocean? How did that situation play out in your mind?”
“I didn’t honestly have any plan beyond that. It was a bit of a split-second decision. I hadn’t really thought anything through.”
“Good to know that I’m in such analytical and quick-thinking hands.”
I smiled at her, relieved to hear some of the levity in her voice. Eleanor let out a sigh and looked around. It was almost like she was seeing the damage from the storm for the first time, as if her mind had erased her reaction and was allowing her to re-evaluate. This time it seemed that she was seeing the carnage from a more practical and logical place rather than one fueled by emotion, and that was a place where I was comfortable camping out for a while.
“So, what do we do now?” she asked.
I looked around with her, trying to let my eyes follow the same path that hers did so that I could see what she had and hopefully get some of the same perspective.
“I don’t know,” I finally said. “There’s so much to do, I don’t even know where to start.”
Eleanor let out a long sigh.
“I thought Noah said that you were some kind of organizational wonder,” she muttered, more under her breath than to me.
“What?” I said.
She looked at me as if surprised either that I had heard her, or that I was actually going to call her out for it.
“Hmmm?” she said with mock innocence.
“Did you say something about Noah?” I asked.
She stumbled and stuttered for a few moments and then nodded.
“Yes,” she said shortly. “It’s just that he has told me that you work for him at the advertising agency and that you are really good at your job.”
I narrowed my eyes at her.
“He told you that?” I asked, the comment striking me as strange. “I didn’t realize that you kept in touch that closely. How often do you talk to him?”
Eleanor’s eyes widened slightly.
“Pretty often,” she said with another slow nod. “I guess that you never get over being someone’s guidance counselor.”
“Third grade teacher,” I corrected, tilting my head at her.
“What?” she asked.
“Third grade teacher,” I repeated. “I thought that you said that you were Noah’s third grade teacher.”
“Yes,” she said again, the voice almost exploding out of her. “Third grade teacher. Guidance counselor. Mid-term soccer coach and spring jubilee coordinator and costume designer. That was a tight year for the school budget. We all kind of chipped in and did our best.”
"We need to find Gavin," I said, trying to give myself time to process what she had said. That was a lot. "He's been gone for too long. He could have gotten hurt in the storm."
Chapter Fourteen
Gavin
I nearly sobbed in relief when I felt the bottom of the tiny raft hit something nearly solid beneath me and realized that it was sand. The last few hours had been nothing short of terrifying and I was done with being in the water. In fact, I was at the point when I was drafting the insurance claim for my boat in my head and was planning a move to somewhere fully landlocked so that I never had to see a body of water bigger than a mudpuddle ever again.
Not even a fucking swimming pool. I might even tear all of the bathtubs out of my house.
I was done with water. Fully and completely done. The fact that I had just washed up on the beach of what looked like an even smaller and more desolate island than the one that I had left, though, didn’t bode well for my decision to impose a life-long ban on any large quantities of water. Heading out in the raft hadn’t been something that I had thought through very extensively. With Hunter unconscious and Eleanor reaching what seemed like a mental breaking point, I had been the one that was left to try to keep gathering supplies and ensuring that we were going to actually get through this Gilligan’s Island shit as unscathed as possible. I was prowling around in what was left of the boat looking for anything else that I could salvage from its pathetic skeleton when I found the emergency raft still stuffed in its lockbox on the side. I felt like an absolute, unequivocal idiot when I pulled it out, examining it to confirm that there were no tears or other issues in the material that would compromise its seaworthiness, as it were. How could I have possibly forgotten that this thing was in the boat? With all of the flailing and Eleanor’s MacGyver-ing of a vessel to get her across the tidal pool, I never once thought about the equipment that was actually put on the boat to get me through situations like this.