THE GROUND OUTSIDE THE SHIP WAS BARE AND WHITE. Charlotte’s footprints marked the soft snow with dim pockets. The night was quiet all around the ship, from the silent stars to the nervous kids who had started to fill up the empty and blown-out compartments once again, like old times, for the few months that everything seemed perfect. From a distance, the ship looked frozen in mid-sink. A large hole opened along the starboard hull. The hole made the labyrinth of halls and doorways vulnerable to the elements. The lobby was stark and coated with smoke stains. The halls tilted. The ship wasn’t the lively home they had once shared, no matter how much Charlotte pretended.
Charlotte came into the room to find James lying next to the fire, his bare shoulders open to the flame that puffed. Someone kept the fire going while she was gone. She needed to remember to thank whoever it was later. She needed to feed James the medicine Tic-Tac had given her. James hadn’t eaten anything in days. He was too tired, too sick, to even open his mouth. Charlotte came close to shoving soup down his throat the other day; the frustration overwhelmed her. How could she want to help someone who was too sick to help himself, too sick to know what they needed? James couldn’t give up and neither would she.
Charlotte lifted him up and let his open back hit the frigid air, away from the fire. She had the medicine in her hand and tried to force the pills in his mouth. She hoped they would work. After time aboard the ship and away from doctors, she didn’t know what sickness he had—whether he held a bad cold, a slight flu, or something worse. Whatever it was, she hoped it could be cured with simple medicine; that was all the island had. She pushed the pills to James’s lips. His eyes stayed shut. The flicker of the fireplace shone on his face. His cheeks glistened with sweat, absent of acknowledgement. Did he notice her at all anymore?
His weight was almost too much to bear as she tried her hardest to keep him steady and feed him the pill at the same time. He swayed and wobbled, falling back and forth. She kept him steady long enough to push the pills to his lips. She watched them stick to his tongue and not go any further. He needed to swallow them. Why wouldn’t he swallow?
“Take the pills James,” she said. Her voice was softer than the fire. “Take the pills and we can get rid of this. You can come back to us . . . to me. You need to come back.”
She saw the pill stuck to his tongue just beyond his slightly parted lips. It hadn’t budged and it wouldn’t disintegrate. He would swallow water. The cup by the fire was filled with melted snow. She tried to reach for the cup without dropping James. It was a balancing act in a circus of which she never wanted to be a part. His body stood against her knee. Her hand reached for the cup, grazed her fingers just out of reach. She had to extend her fingers a little more, but the more her body leaned, the more James dipped back to the ground. She had gone on the run and didn’t have the energy to lift him back up once he fell; her body ached from her fingers to her toes. She attempted one last quick swoop of the cup. She leaned toward the fire but pushed too far. She fell away from James. James fell to the floor. The cup was in her hand but James was on his back, eyes closed, lips parted, unaware of the difficulty of simple things.
Charlotte saw Franklin by the fire and grabbed him. She needed the comfort of home, which faded more and more from her mind. The memories became dreams, and dreams had the ability to drift away once she woke up. Franklin’s fur was soft, his mustache fuzzy. A walrus could easily survive in a frozen climate. Once taken away from its home, a branch will crack and wither. Charlotte felt that way now more than ever, having fallen from the tree long ago, thinking she was strong enough. The longer she hid from the settlement, the more James looked like he would slip deeper into sickness and the more she felt like she had shrunken from a branch to a twig, unable to fight the waves and the ocean, ready for the world to snap her. In those moments, her body chilled, filled with pain and overworked. She couldn’t even sit by the fire with her head in her hands and cry. She held onto Franklin instead, filled with the unspoken fear that if she could cry the tears would freeze to her cheeks.
“Do you need some help?” Sarah asked. She stood by the hollowed-out door with her purple mittens dangling around her neck.
“Why aren’t you wearing those?” Charlotte asked.
“Sometimes it’s just better to let my fingers breathe.” Sarah walked into the room close to James’s feet but with her back close to the fire.
“He needs medicine but I can’t get him to swallow. I can’t hold him up.” She loosened her grip on Franklin and slowly put him down.
“I’ll hold him,” Sarah said. “You give him the water.”
Sarah lifted James’s upper half from the floor and Charlotte spilled drops of water into his mouth to wash down the pills, making sure none of the water dripped down his chin and his chest, onto the blankets below. He swallowed the pills; Charlotte could see his neck twitch with every shallow gulp of water. Sarah laid James on his back and Charlotte covered him back up with the blanket.
“I saw some new faces tonight,” Sarah said.
“This place is a hot commodity,” Charlotte said.
“Won’t be long, I suppose.”
“Until Tic-Tac joins the exodus?”
“No,” Sarah said. “Until Abe decides to come looking for us.” Sarah stared into the fire with a face absent of concern. Her face looked absent altogether, no emotion one way or the other.
“What makes you think he’ll come at all?”
“You know him better than I do and I know he won’t let this go on for much longer. We’re all shocked he turned his head and let so many of us leave. What was he like before?”
“You knew him before,” Charlotte said.
“No,” Sarah said. “No one really did, but everyone wanted to.”
“I didn’t really either,” Charlotte said.
“Do you think Tic-Tac will be okay?” Sarah looked at Charlotte; her eyes gave way to the fear Charlotte hadn’t seen earlier. Sarah may have left Tic-Tac behind but not because she wanted to; it was written on her face. She did what she thought she had to do—as we all keep telling ourselves.
“He’s worried about you too,” Charlotte said.
“Why didn’t you take me with you tonight?”
“I didn’t take anyone with me tonight. It was too dangerous.”
“Too soon after the last run?”
“Among other things. He wants to join us soon. I don’t know if that would be a good idea or not, but he’s looking bad.”
“He’s hanging on,” Sarah said.
“Sounds like a lot of people we know,” Charlotte said. She looked back at James. How often had the world picked them up and lifted their spirits only to drop them again? When would they tell the world they weren’t going anywhere? If they hadn’t left by now . . .
Sarah stood up and brushed off whatever stray remnants of snow or ash or sadness may have clung to her. “It’ll be over soon.”
“I’m worried about what that means,” Charlotte said.
“A lot of us are.” Sarah walked out of the room. The shuffle of her small feet gave way to the sporadic crackle of the fire. Charlotte pressed her ear to James’s lips to make sure he breathed. They all had lost enough in their lifetime; she wasn’t willing to give up anything else—not to the cold, not to the world, not to Abe. She would hold on.