My fingers move deftly, looping and twisting and tugging tight enough to stop the bleeding. Once the tourniquet is in place, I exhale a faint sigh of relief as I watch the bleeding subside from a steady flow to a trickle. Underwood’s eyes move from the staunched wound to my blood-stained hands to my pale face. There’s grudging respect etched on his expression.
“Help is coming,” I whisper, more to myself than him. “They have to come.”
He nods.
“We just have to hold on till then.” I dunk my hands into the shallow water at the bottom of the raft and watch dark blood flow off my skin in rivulets. When they’re clean, I reach out and gently brush a strand of blond hair from the flight attendant’s face. Even unconscious, I can read the pain on his features. When he wakes, he’ll be in absolute agony.
“You have to hold on,” I tell him, throat thick with unshed tears. “Just a little while longer. Help is coming.”
Help is coming.
Help is coming.
Help is coming.
Stroking a stranger’s forehead, I whisper it over and over under my breath, like a witch weaving a spell that might summon a fleet of search and rescue helicopters from the skies above. I repeat it for hours, until my voice goes hoarse and the lightning ceases, until the rain gentles from a torrent to a patter, until the sky is streaked with the first pale pink traces of the coming dawn.
Help.
Is.
Coming.
It must.
Because the alternative…
That’s simply unfathomable.
Chapter Six
A D R I F T
At some point or another, the thought crosses all of our minds.
If I disappeared one day, would anyone bother to notice?
The truth is, no matter how confident or self-assured you appear on the surface, deep down we all wonder what would happen if we inexplicably vanished off the face of the earth. Without a note, without a trace, without any explanation as to how or why you’ve blinked out of existence. Just a slew of memories and a thousand questions.
Are they looking for me?
Mourning me?
Missing me?
Is there a tombstone engraved with my name on it, sitting atop an empty grave?
I think it’s natural to wonder. We’re all human — predisposed to experience the same existential crises every now and again. But few people ever have a chance to put those abstract musings into practice. Few actually do disappear.
I definitely never thought I’d be one of them.
That first day on the raft, we keep a vigilant watch — still full to the brim with blazing conviction that, any moment now, our rescuers will arrive. With the rising sun come rising temperatures. On a positive note, my sundress dries completely for the first time since the crash; on the negative, while it’s nice not to be damp, I quickly find my pale skin begins to crisp like a piece of bread beneath a broiler.
Underwood struggles to unfurl the overhead tent — a bright orange canopy affixed with plastic rods, that covers half the raft. As he fiddles with the straps, I pull a tube of SPF50 sunscreen from the bottom of my backpack and slather my arms, face, and bare legs. I send up silent thanks to my mother for her persistence in protecting me from melanoma. I can practically hear her.
I told you you’d need it, honey!
“Here,” I say, extending the bottle out to him. It’s the first word either of us has spoken in hours.
He glances at the tube, grunts unintelligibly, and begins applying.
No thank you. Not even an acknowledgement that I’ve spoken.
I bite my tongue to stop the torrent of words poised on its tip. I’d like nothing more than to unleash all my frustrations on him — all the pent up anger and hopelessness and fear that we’re never getting off this raft. That rescue isn’t coming. That my last few moments will be spent watching a man die in agony in the middle of the ocean, with only a total jerk for company.
I refuse to give him the satisfaction of watching my meltdown.
He looks as guarded as ever as I glare at him. Nothing I say or do seems to provoke a response from this man. I can’t read a single emotion in his eyes, in his expression. Never in my life have I encountered someone so self-controlled. Either he’s a sociopath, or he’s the best actor I’ve ever met.
Or… maybe he’s known so much pain in his life, the only way he can manage it is to shut out every other feeling along with the heartache. A total emotional blockade.
I bury that thought in a fortified box at the back of my mind and dump a half-ton of concrete on top, in case I’m ever tempted to revisit it. Mom always says having damage isn’t an excuse for being a dick. Rationalizing a man’s rudeness is a slippery slope to romanticizing all his less-than-reputable characteristics. Just ask Jane Eyre. Or Catherine Earnshaw. Or any other woman who’s ever swooned over a Byronic hero.
The silence lingers between us as our gazes lock. This close, I can see our eyes are almost the same shade, except for those tiny rings of hazel around the edges of his irises. I’m breathing too hard, barely able to keep my rapidly fraying emotions in check… and he’s a brick wall, a solid edifice of composure. My total counterbalance.
A chatterbox and a curmudgeon, I think. Fate definitely has a sense of humor.
One of us needs to break this growing silence. The longer it stretches out, the more charged the air becomes. The charge between us — two polar opposites, trapped together like repelling magnets — is so potent, I can practically taste it on the tip of my tongue.
Say something.
Say anything.
Just stop looking at him like that.
Thankfully, the tension snaps when the flight attendant moans. We trade another glance and somehow, without speaking a word, come to an agreement. In silent tandem, we drag the injured man beneath the canopy, moving slowly so we don’t jostle his broken leg overmuch. I wish we had something to splint it with, but there’s nothing. My eyes linger on the mottled purple flesh below the tourniquet, then move up to his face.
It’s a starling contrast — the ugly wound, the handsome features. At the moment, they’re contorted in acute agony, but there’s no denying he’s an attractive man. In his early twenties, he has a full head of sandy blond hair, the slim build of a soccer player, and — if I recall correctly from his preflight demonstration — a pair of dimples that offset a megawatt smile.
I wish I could do something, anything, to help him. In truth, he’s in worse shape than I thought when we first pulled him from the water. In addition to his shattered leg, there’s a pretty serious laceration by his temple. I force myself to unbutton his uniform shirt — once so crisp and white, now streaked with blood and grime — and find a slew of angry purple skin streaking over his ribs. A surefire sign he’s bleeding internally.
Hold on.
Just a little while longer.