I WOKE UP ON A BEACH AND STUMBLED TO MY FEET. I scanned the area for anyone. Anything. It only took me a second to find Dory, curled up on the beach, with her arms and legs still wrapped around a tree.
I ran over to her as fast as I could in the thick sand.
“Dory!” I said, shaking her.
Nothing.
Oh gods, please don’t let her be dead. That was not how this story was supposed to end. I was not going to write that.
“Dory!” I said again, and I shook her harder.
This time she stirred a little and said something I couldn’t understand.
“What?” I said. “I can’t hear you.”
She mumbled again.
“Dory? Are you okay? Speak to me!”
She finally rolled over enough that her mouth wasn’t pressed into the sand.
“I said to stop shaking me,” she said. “I’m aching all over.”
I laughed and then grabbed her in a hug before I even gave it a second of thought.
“I am so glad you aren’t dead,” I said, and that’s when the memories came rushing back.
Polites, dead at the hand of Eurylochus. Odysseus, confronting the murderer. The curse from the gods. The guys being pulled downward. The gaping mouth of Charybdis. The splintered ship.
“Did you see?” I asked.
Dory nodded but didn’t say a word.
“I don’t like this story anymore,” I said.
“I don’t either, Homer, but sometimes people have to write things that make them cry.”
“I’m not crying,” I said, forcing away the tears that were ready to burst.
“I know,” Dory said.
I felt in my pocket for the scroll because I wanted to get away from the sad stuff. I could reread parts of the story that made me laugh. Parts about the guys trying to fish. Or some of the jokes they told. Or the incessant farting. But my pocket was empty.
“It’s gone,” I said, not wanting to voice the words.
But a small smile crept onto Dory’s face.
“I found it, Homer. In the water. When the ship went down.” And she reached into her own pocket and pulled out my scroll.
I’ve never been so happy to see anything in my entire life. I almost grabbed the scroll and hugged it, too.
“Oh my gods,” I said. “You are the best friend in the entire universe!”
“I know,” Dory said and handed it over. And amazingly every single word I’d written was still on there, perfectly scripted. Well, I guess as perfect as my messy handwriting allowed it to be. The lines showing how many days we’d been on our journey were still inked in the margins.
“You’ve saved my life,” I said. “You know that, right?” Without the scroll, there was no point in going on. My entire future depended on this scroll.
“Maybe not,” Dory said. “Have you looked around?”
I clutched the scroll in my hands, because I was never going to let it go again, and finally studied the world around me. The sand was white like sparkling crystals and went on forever in both directions. In front of us was the water, completely still, almost mocking us for the horrific whirlpool we’d just survived. And behind us were dunes. Whatever was behind the dunes, we couldn’t see.
“Any clue where we are?” I asked.
“Well, I’m pretty sure it’s not Ionia,” Dory said.
I’d been to the beaches near Ionia enough times to know she was right. They had way darker sand, and the beaches were always crowded with families and kids. Back when Dad had been alive, we’d been one of those families, visiting the shore for fun on the weekends. But there was nothing fun about our current situation.
“Maybe Ithaca?” I said.
Dory pulled her eyebrows together. “You saw Ithaca. It had way more rocks than beaches.”
I knew she was right.
“Perfect. So it’s not Ionia, and it’s not Ithaca. Where does that leave us?”
“Completely out of luck?” Dory said.
“Great pep talk. You should start writing inspirational books.”
Dory punched me on the shoulder which really hurt because I already felt like I’d been punched in every muscle of my entire body.
“We should go exploring,” I said. “See if anyone else survived.” I hated to say those words because I knew the truth.
But Dory didn’t have the same hesitation. “No one else survived,” she said.
The truth sat there in the air between us and taunted us. Everyone else was dead.
Except then something miraculous happened. Someone came walking from up over the dunes.
“King Odysseus!” Dory said, even now remembering to use his royal title, and she ran toward him.
He waved when he saw us, but sadness covered his face. Sadness that echoed the death of all his guys. Sadness in knowing that he felt responsible. That he’d lost everything. And with that sadness, my hopes for the future slipped away.
“Where are we?” Dory asked once we reached him.
He lifted his mournful eyes and gazed out at the calm water. “They’re dead. They’re all dead. Even Polites, my dearest friend. We’ve been together forever. Fought side by side. The man lost an eye for me. Gave up his life and his family to come on this journey. To help me in my time of greatest need. And for what? To be killed at the hands of a traitor.”
“He died protecting me,” Dory said. “He was a really, really great guy, and I’m going to miss him.”
Odysseus put his head in his hand. “I’ve failed him. I’ve failed them all. I should have died with them. Should have gone down with my ship to pay for my mistakes.”
Dory shook her head. “No. The gods kept you alive. They kept us alive.”
“We may as well be dead.”
“But we’re not,” Dory said.
“Maybe not,” Odysseus said, “But this is the end, my beautiful friends. We can’t go on. I can’t go on.”
“Sure you can,” I said. I didn’t know about Odysseus, but I still had every intention of getting home. Mom needed me. And I was still going to be a soldier. Or was I? With all that had happened, that future felt like a childish dream.
“No, young Bard,” Odysseus said. “This is the end of the journey.” And he sank to the sand and buried his face in his hands.
Dory looked like she wanted to choke him.
“What is he doing?” she whispered. “He’s just giving up?”
If Odysseus heard her, he made no visible sign.
“He’s really sad,” I said.
“We’re all really sad,” Dory said. “Sad things happen. That doesn’t mean we just kick over and die.”
“He feels like a failure,” I said.
“That’s because he is a failure,” Dory said. “But, so what? People fail all the time, at everything. That doesn’t mean he should just quit.”
I knew she was right, but I also got the failure thing. If I didn’t get back to Ionia—if I failed—I wasn’t sure what I would do.
“Just give him a few minutes,” I said. “Polites was his best friend.”
Just like Dory was my best friend. I didn’t want to think about her being gone.
Dory scampered to the top of a nearby dune and looked inward, away from the endless water.
“Is that a building over there?” she asked, loud enough that Odysseus had to hear.
“The gods, mocking us once more,” Odysseus said, barely looking up from his hands.
“No, really,” Dory said. “There’s definitely something over there.”
And I guess this was enough to pique his interest because he got up, and we trundled in the direction Dory pointed.
I’m not going to go deep into the story here. I’ll summarize it as this.
Odysseus of course went into the building which was built into the side of a hill like a cave, and he met some woman named Calypso. I guess she was some kind of sea nymph who happened to be the daughter of Atlas. For those who don’t know, he was one of the Titans. So, she was immortal. And I guess she wanted Odysseus to become immortal, too.
Dory and I set up camp inside a small cave conveniently located a bit away from the main dwelling place of Calypso.
But Odysseus was a complete depressed mess. He moped around day after day after day. Months went by. Maybe even a year. I stopped making marks in the margin of the scroll because it seemed stupid at this point. I flipped the hourglass only once, so it couldn’t have been that long.
Thankfully Dory agreed to keep on cooking. Otherwise, I would have resorted to seaweed and coconuts, probably not the most well-rounded of diets. And while Dory cooked, I got caught up on the story, writing every detail, revising the parts I’d already written, filling in more info on the characters. I spent a good amount of time on Polites because the guy deserved it. He’d given up his life protecting me and Dory, and even though being stuck on this island was kind of boring, we were at least still alive.
“YOU SHOULD GO TALK TO ODYSSEUS,” DORY SAID. “Tell him we need to leave. I may not want to go back to Ionia, but we can’t stay here any longer.”
She’d been nagging me incessantly to go do this, but I wanted to get caught up on the story first. I still had plenty of time. But finally, I couldn’t put it off anymore.
So, I tried. A bunch of times. But every time I asked Odysseus about it, he said something vague like, “We can think about that tomorrow, Bard,” or, “There’s plenty of time to worry about that later, Bard.” He also said some things that weren’t quite so positive like, “What’s the point in ever leaving?” or, “I’ve ruined everything. I don’t deserve to go on.” The sun didn’t seem to shine quite so bright on these days.
And the whole time Calypso sang songs that seemed to hypnotize Odysseus and wove carpets and blankets on a giant golden loom. Odysseus was beyond hope.
“You’re right,” I finally said to Dory after a particularly futile day of trying to convince Odysseus to leave. “We’re never getting off of this island.”
I sank down into a bench and rolled the scroll up tight, shoving it back into my pocket. I’d written all the words there were to write. There wasn’t anything more to add.
“Maybe …,” Dory said.
“Maybe what?” I put my head between my hands and moped properly.
“Maybe we can do something … oh, I don’t know … proactive.”
“Proactive?” I mumbled into my hands.
“Yeah, proactive,” Dory said. “That’s what heroes in stories do. They take charge of the situation and make things happen. They don’t wait for things to happen to them.”
I lifted my head and met her eyes. “But we’re not the hero of this story. Odysseus is.”
She looked at me like a coconut had fallen on my head one too many times. “Yeah, maybe, but you’re writing the story, right? What if we could be the heroes of the story, just for a little bit?”
Her words floated around in my mind. “But Odysseus …”
“… isn’t doing jack squat,” Dory said. “We need to take action for him. Get ourselves out of this situation. We need to get this story back on track.”
I had no clue how Dory was always right about this stuff, but there was nothing I could find wrong about what she was saying. I was the storyteller. I could do whatever I wanted with the story. And if the story demanded a temporary hero, then I was going to give it one.
“Okay, so what do we do?”
We sat around and brainstormed for the next couple days, writing down every idea we came up with. Sure, there were some pretty basic ideas, like running into Calypso’s house and grabbing Odysseus and dragging him out of there or building giant wings and flying away or tricking Calypso into magically sending us home, but most of these weren’t feasible. Still, just the brainstorming process made us come up with a lot of things we might not have thought about otherwise. Finally, at the end of the week of brainstorming, we had a plan.
