One Man's Island
Will she ever come for him?
ONE MAN’S ISLAND
By Ruth Sullins
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The waves curled and fell. The water reached over his feet, pulling the sand away. Ian turned the gold band on his finger. Its surface was tarnished by seawater, but it reflected the two gulls high in the cerulean sky above him.
The step behind him was soft, and he turned to see who it was. It was a woman, neither middle-aged nor young. Her shirt was white and her hair was pulled back at her neck and released again in a strange sort of ancient-feeling way.
“No one has been here for a while,” he said.
She sat down a few feet away. Ian was silent, turning the wedding band with his finger as he looked out.
“What do you see?” she asked.
He looked up to see whether she meant the question. She was looking out at the sea.
“Waves,” he said. “Gentle by the shore, breaking hard on the rocks on the other side of the island.”
The wind blew a breeze against his face that smelled of salt and seaweed.
“What if I were to tell you that your wife is dead, Ian?” she asked.
Why must they always try to convince him of the same thing? What did it matter to them?
“I know that she isn’t,” he said quietly. “There are things I know, and that is one of them. When I was in the water, I saw this island. We all saw it. She isn’t here, so she will be coming. Any day now.”
“But how do you know?” the woman asked softly.
The foam rolled away from their feet, taking the sand with it.
“Do you know that the water will return?” he asked, pointing.
She looked down.
“No,” she said. “But I believe it will. No one can know anything until it happens.”
“Then to you, I must say that I believe Anna will find this island and return to me.” He choked at the sound of her name. It’d been so long. His heart ached for her, and the sea and the sand and the sun blinded him.
By and by, he remembered that the woman was there. It was a nice thing to have company.
“Who are you?” he asked. The words felt curt on his tongue.
“My name is Doctor Emma Bailey,” she said.
He suddenly did not care about the curtness of his words. “Are you a psychiatrist? Is that why they sent you to talk to me?”
“Yes,” she said. “We’re worried about you.”
He stood up suddenly, sand falling from his clothes. He walked up the beach and threw another log of wood on the fire. He lifted the pointed stick from where it marked the buried fish, dug them free and hung them over the flames. He roasted them slowly, turning them until the cooked meat was soft and moist and perfect.
When he looked back at the beach, she was gone.
He was terribly, terribly lonely that night.
He woke when the world was dim and young. Already the air sulked in the heat. His feet were dry and cracked from the salt and the sand, and he sat where the water could not reach them.
He looked back eagerly once when he thought he heard a step, but it was only a frond of the trees falling to the sand. When she came, he was so lost in thought that he did not notice until she sat beside him.
“Hello, Emma,” he said.
“Hello, Ian.” She gazed out at the sea.
He searched the horizon, imagining that he saw the triple decks of a cruise ship, the etched forms of navy ships, the sail of a smaller vessel.
“The sun on the sea is beautiful,” he said. He turned to look at her. She smiled, and her eyes smiled, and he saw they were the color of the sea where it had not yet reached the shore.
“Yes,” she agreed, “but the sun on the snow on the mountains is my favorite. I love to ski in the winter, when the snow is orange and pink and yellow.”
Anna. She would ski every winter, every winter beg him to come. His words were so natural, so normal, that they scared him, but the tears in his throat scared him more. There was nothing to cry about, only he’d been alone for so long.
“I can’t ski to save my life,” he said. “I fall every time. You must miss it, though.”
“It’s not winter yet,” she said. “There’s always a break for summer.”
“I hate this island.” The words held him a captive and spoke with a brain of their own, like a spirit controlled his tongue. “I hate the sand and the heat. I hate the taste of fish in my mouth and the sound of the waves. I hate the sun on my back—’’
“I know,” she said. “I know, Ian. One day this island will be gone. Forever gone.”
He let her words touch him, felt a sort of strength in them, a forbearance build suddenly inside him against loneliness and the island and the merciless sea.
“I’ve thought of going to see your camp,” he said, “but I might miss her boat, or she might miss the island because she did not see us.”
“If you could have anything, anything but Anna, Ian, anything from the past, what would you have?”
The question was friendly, and he was not annoyed.
“Honey,” he said. “Honey, and a real spoon to eat it with. What would you have, Emma?”
She was silent.
“I would have my boy be able to hear again,” she said.
Ian glanced at her. “Your boy is deaf?”
“Yes,” she said.
“How old is he?” he asked.
“Thirteen,” she said. “He fell ill when he was four and lost his hearing.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “When the ship comes, Anna and I could come visit.”
She was quiet, and he glanced away from the sea at her eyes, and there were tears in them.
“How long will she be?” he wondered aloud. “She’d have to get them to come, of course, convince them that we were alive. And they would have to find the right island.”
“The right island,” Emma said. “Yes, she would have to find the right island.”
But he could feel the emptiness in her words.
When she came the next day, she put something in his hands. It was a tiny golden jar.
“I didn’t know there was honey on the ship,” he said, and suddenly he smiled. “If I had, we wouldn’t have any now.”
Emma laughed and handed him a spoon. It was a lovely laugh, silvery as the spoon, and it dimmed the churning of the waves.
They sat together for a long time, until the sun went down again, rimming the peaks of the waves with red.
She came again the next day, and the next.
“I have something for you, Ian,” she said. She walked down the beach, her bare feet whispering on the sand. She sat beside him. There was a bottle in her hand. It was brown and the wrapper was faded red.
“It’s a different sort of thing, Ian. It’s—it’s from Anna.”
His heart leaped and he took it from her. “Where did you find it? How—’’
“We found it in the water,” Emma said.
“But the ship went down there.” He pointed into the ocean. “It should have come to my beach. You opened it?”
“Yes,” Emma said. “Don’t be angry, Ian, we didn’t know whom it was from.”
“Why would she write something in—’’
The step was quick and urgent on the sand behind them. Ian turned to look up the beach. It was a man, a very young man, small and nervous and urgent. He stopped and looked at Emma.
“Doctor Bailey?”
Emma looked at him sharply. “What is it, Steven?”
“It’s urgent, Doc.”
She stood up quickly. She looked back at Ian, and he saw in her face fear, and pain, and a soft—a soft sort of tenderness that seemed to wrap around him like a blanket against his own frustration.
She followed the boy up the beach. He felt strange and alone, and for a long time he looked at the sea without searching for a ship.
Then he remembered the bottle in his hands. The cap was loose, and when he turned the bottle upside down the paper fell out easily.
It was small and splotched, patterned with flowers. He knew the stationary well.
Ian, I went back to our room to look for you. Something jammed the door shut. The window is under the surface now, and the water is almost up to my waist. I can’t get out, but maybe you have, so I hope they find this bottle. I know you loved me for real, and I know it will be hard for you to let me go. I love you, Ian, but I’m not the only one who can. I miss you already. Anna
The paper trembled in his hand, the sea swirled in his head. The sound of shattered glass came to his ears and there was a sudden, stabbing pain in his hand.
He was on his feet, he did not know how. The sand burned like coals. He was running up the beach, saw his fire—and someone screamed, a cry of rage and anguish in his ears. He picked up a burning log and hurled it into the trees. The fronds on the ground flickered and glowed, and he threw another brand, and the flames crawled up the trunks of the trees. Behind him, he heard the sea laughing, mocking him.
He ran from the sea, and the sand. He ran through the burning trees, and the heat of them singed his bare toes. “How long were you going to wait?” the sea cackled, and he could not escape its voice. He stumbled and fell, the dry palm fronds scraping his face.
He lay still, watching the blood ooze from the gash in his hand.
Anna was dead.
By and by he rose to his hands and knees. Somewhere, a fire burned, and the smoke filled the palms with the scent of ash and death. He stood up, walking blindly. The smoke dwindled as he walked, and he was aware that he was hungry, hungry and thirsty.
The sand was rough and grating on his feet. Why had he turned around? When had he turned? He lifted his face. The water was blue and hateful, and he heard its voice but heard no words. The sun burned through his eyes into his mind, read his pain and doubled it, drilled into his head with a stabbing ache.
He let himself fall, felt the pain as the saltwater lapped at his bleeding hand.
Anna was dead.
When he woke up, he did not feel pain. He saw the cut in his hand, filled with sand. He knew he was lying upon it, but the sand was empty, neither hot nor rough, under the brightness of a sun that no longer pierced him. He was nothing, floating, waiting in a dream. With the eye above the sand he watched the tumbling of the waves.
When it was night, he fell asleep.
In the morning he was hungry and thirsty and his limbs ached from not being used. He sat up stiffly. The sun had burned his skin, but he did not feel it. There was nothing but the hunger and the aching. He saw sand, but did not feel it; saw the waves, but did not hear them. All was bright and empty and silent.
And Emma had not come.
The next morning, he knew she was there, and he knew that she was different.
She sat beside him in her usual spot, and the silence was broken by the soft sound of her sobs.
He sat up. He did not feel the sand, or the air, but he heard his own voice.
“Emma?”
She looked at him.
“Emma, was it—your boy?”
“Yes.” Her voice was husky and choking.
It was natural that he lift his arm and put it around her. He wished that he could send her strength—send her the power that her voice had built inside him so many times before. But he felt weak, weak and broken.
Her hands trembled as she opened them. “I…they…found something in the water again, Ian. I thought maybe—you would see—what it meant. But if the bottle did nothing—’’ She sat up straighter, forcing his arm from her shoulders. “I’ve tried. I want to help you, but it’s…if you won’t see, Ian, there’s nothing more I can try.” She broke off in a sob.
He looked at the thing in her hands. Small and beautiful. A band of gold, inset with a diamond.
He took the ring gently. He lifted his arm around her again.
“Emma,” he said, “I know. Anna is dead.”
She looked up at him. There was surprise, and then confusion in her eyes.
“Then what?” She whispered at him. “What are you waiting for, Ian?”
He thought a moment. He tested the question against the emptiness of the island.
“For a ship,” he said.
She looked toward the horizon.
“What do you see?” she asked.
He remembered the words. He looked out at the ocean. The ships bobbed on the waves; a bell rang, and far away he could hear the sailors call to each other. The sails of the little boats filled gently with the breeze.
“Ships,” he said, “but none of them will take me home.”
“I will be your ship, Ian,” she whispered, and she took his hand.
Something was happening. Something was changing. There was ground underneath his feet—no, not sand, something smooth and hard and cool. His hands jumped back, found something to hold—plastic, the plastic arms of a chair. The sun—where was the sun? The sun was gone, and then the sea was gone, gone with the glare and the breeze.
“Emma!” he cried in terror. He stared at the wall of a room, painted a gentle green. A window, and outside, a bush of white flowers.
She squeezed his hand. “It’s all right, Ian. Ian? Do you see me?”
He turned almost violently. She was there, her face gentle and smooth. He looked about wildly.
“The island—where is the island?” he asked frantically.
“There is no island, Ian,” she said softly.
His eyes fell still and he looked at her.
“You saw the island from the water,” Emma said. “When they rescued you—all of you—they couldn’t get close to the sinking boat. You stood there, at the rail, and watched it go down. Anna was trapped in there. I think—I think you went into shock, imagined that you had reached the island, that she had been rescued—and would return to get you.” She looked into his eyes.
“I couldn’t find her,” he whispered. “I left our room, it was empty. I looked everywhere. All the boats were gone, and they couldn’t get the last ones free. They told us to jump if we didn’t want to go under with the ship—but she wasn’t there—’’ his voice came in a gasp— “and I couldn’t leave, couldn’t leave, and this fellow picked me up and forced me over the edge—’’
He stopped, letting the memories sink in. He looked down at his hand. It trembled, but there was no wound.
“Your boy,” he said.
She looked down.
“I’m sorry.”
Her thumb moved gently over his hand.
“You haven’t eaten for three days,” she said.
There was a door on the green wall, plain and translucent. He could just read the label on the other side.
Ian Rand, Mental Patient—Do Not Enter.
He stood up, carefully, not letting go of her hand. The wheelchair creaked.
“Perhaps we could go together,” he said.
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The End
The simple setting and style made this story easy to write. I like this one because the idea is pretty cool, but it didn’t need a lot of setup or explanation. Thanks for reading!
- Ruth