Sarah barely sensed the red ants’ fiery stings. She clung to the branch, staring at the ground below her.
Heights had always scared her. Whenever she stood on the edge of something taller than she was, nausea would flutter in her stomach.
Now she was fifty feet above the ground, on a tree with no branches in reach below her and a trunk too big to slide down.
“Help!” she screamed. “Help!”
Her cries were smothered by the jungle’s absolute silence.
She lowered her forehead to her arm, squeezing her eyes shut. When I open them, I’ll wake up and be in my bunk.
An ant bit her on the eyelid. That one she felt. “Ow!” She slapped it dead and all others in reach. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a stout vine dangling behind her all the way to the ground.
Holding on to the trunk for balance, she gingerly rose to her feet. The vine drooped just out of reach. She would have to jump. She glanced at the ground far below and moaned. Something moved on the trunk near her hand. A lizard as big as her forearm, staring at her with cold eyes. She jerked her hand away. This threw her off balance. Her arms flailed. She was going to fall. In desperation, she sprang for the vine, which smacked her in the face where her mom had slapped her, the skin still tender from the blow. Her arms and legs automatically wrapped around the vine’s rough bark. When her stunned senses cleared and she realized she wasn’t falling, she inched her way down.
A minute later she stood with trembling legs on a tilted bed of newly exposed rock. The air reeked of stirred-up muck. Water lay in a hollow of a large boulder torn out of the hill, deep enough for her to rinse her filthy face.
Salty as seawater.
God, you idiot, it is seawater. That was a tsunami. When you were studying about them in earth sciences with dandruffy old Mr. Andaars, you never thought you’d be in one, did you? You were too busy passing notes—
Tsunami.
Peter. Dad. Mom.
“Peter!” she shouted. “Dad! Mom!”
Before, the jungle floor had been shrouded in shadow. Now sunlight poured through huge gaps in the canopy. Fallen trees sprawled at random. Boulders big as cars had mowed through their branches and scythed down smaller bushes, leaving ragged trails.
How could her parents and brother have survived?
Yet at the same time, her heart insisted they were alive.
She scrambled over tree trunks toppled across her path, sometimes walking down their lengths with arms outstretched for balance. She continued calling. “Peter! Peter! Mom! Dad!” There was no reply, not even a bird’s call or an insect’s chirrup. At the torn roots of one tree, a boar with enormous yellow tusks lay dead on its side. She made her way around it and climbed the fallen trunk. Through a breach torn in the jungle’s shoreline, she could see the bay. Swirling blacks and browns stained the bay, the water littered with a jungle’s flotsam, including entire uprooted trees. She did not spot the sailboat. The sun was a white kernel in an achingly clean sky. Had so much time already passed?
She squeezed around a tangle of vines and jumped onto the beach. Most of the sand had been stripped away, exposing sharp limestone ridges.
One high dune remained. There, resting against a rotting fishing net, sat her mother, her back toward Sarah, her tangled hair fluttering on the breeze.
Sarah dashed over. “Mom! Mom!”
Her mother regarded Sarah with a flat look of anger, as though ready to scold her for not keeping Peter safe.
Sarah stepped closer. “Mom?”
Her mother’s eyes didn’t track her. Her nightie was torn across the waist. Both her feet were caught in the fishing net. Her mouth was agape, and from her left nostril peeked a bubble of froth. Dried blood trailed down her forehead, having dripped from a crusted wound in the scalp. A cloud of flies buzzed around her head. Dozens had landed, probing not only the scalp wound but also her lips and eyes.
Sarah’s head spun. She turned away and retched violently. When the spasms stopped, she rinsed her mouth in a limestone tidal pool and faced her mother again. More flies had gathered.
She took off her T-shirt and swatted the flies away. Where had they come from? “Bastards!” she shouted. “Leave her alone!”
The flies circled and darted back in, patient and persistent. She swung away at them, keening in her rage. Her fury was soon spent, and she knelt in exhaustion in the sand. She studied her mother’s face. The cold look was the same one that had been there when she had slapped Sarah, telling her to take Peter and run. Sarah could still feel the blow on her cheek. She waited for grief to come. It didn’t. It felt as though something inside her had short-circuited.
She had to bury her mom. Protect her as best she could. She disentangled her mother’s feet from the net. Her limbs were stiffening up and hard to move. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she muttered, for there was no elegant way to do this. With a shove she toppled her mother’s body onto the sand and then rolled it down to the shallow limestone crack at the foot of the dune. She scooped sand over her mother with her bare hands. The effort left her panting.
Not much of a burial. But only temporary, after all. Later there’d be a proper church funeral. She’d clutch a handkerchief and cry as a daughter should. Right now, she wiped sandy sweat from her forehead. Where was all this sweat coming from when her mouth was so dry?
She froze. Something was in the bushes. Just the littlest swish of leaves. Something was stealthily creeping behind the line of flattened and matted plants.
Tiger.
Sarah thought that all her fright had been used up. Not true. New fright sizzled in her veins. Her throat clogged. She stumbled backward, away from the jungle.
Surf Cat jumped from the foliage onto the sand dune. He bared his tiny fangs in a falsetto roar. Sarah burst into laughter that bordered on hysteria. She forced herself to stop.
Surf Cat meowed, pacing the sand dune, heading for the jungle and then circling around. His twitching tail seemed to be a signal to follow.
“Oh, all right,” Sarah said.
The orange cat led her twenty feet into the strip of ruined jungle. She heard coughing. A blob of brown hair moved in the shadows of a tree’s overturned roots. “Peter!” she cried, and broke into a run.
Peter sat in a pool of mud, his shorts filthy beyond washing. A deadfall log as big around as a garbage can lay across his lower right leg. “I can’t get it off,” he said with a plaintive wheeze. “I’m stuck.”
Sarah hugged him. Tears came to her eyes. “Oh, God, Peter…”
“Could you please get it off me?”
Sarah bent to the log, digging her hands into the mud to get underneath the smaller end, which still seemed impossibly heavy. As she grunted and jerked upward, strength surged through her. She lifted the end high enough for Peter to pull back his leg, and then let the log drop with a splat.
The soft ground had prevented Peter’s bone from breaking. He limped over to Surf Cat and picked him up. Rubbing the kitten’s head, he asked, “Where’s Mom and Dad?”
“Mom’s dead. She was caught in a fishing net.”
“Dead?”
“It was a tsunami, you know. Tidal wave.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I just buried her, Peter.”
“Where?”
“On the beach where I found her.”
“Show me.”
“I’m not teasing you, okay? This is not something I would ever tease you about.”
“Show me.”
She showed Peter the net on the dune and the burial mound of scooped sand.
“I want to see her,” Peter said.
Wordlessly, Sarah brushed sand away.
Peter studied their mother’s exposed face for a moment and poked a cheek. His lower lip began to tremble, and his eyes blinked rapidly. He caught his lip between his teeth and bit hard, blanching the skin. Then he put Surf Cat down so he could kneel and kiss their mother on the cheek.
Sarah watched. Why didn’t I kiss her good-bye? The oversight confused her. Too late now. Peter was pushing sand back into place.
“Is Dad dead too?” he asked.
“Of course not. We’d better go look for him.”
Their father was a tough and capable man. He’d sailed around the world when he was younger. He’d once been marooned for a week on a South Pacific island. Another time he had sailed through a hurricane with a cracked skull. A big news write-up. Even with the printed X-ray of his cracked skull, some people refused to believe it.
A broken leg was nothing.
Sarah and Peter made their way along the beach, scrambling around boulders and over downed trees. Surf Cat trotted alongside them, pausing to sniff at dead fish. They called for their father and listened for his reply. Nothing. Only the mocking sound of small waves lapping on the ruined beach.
“Dad! Dad! Dad!” Peter shouted, his voice rising until he was shrieking.
His infectious panic incited Sarah’s own. To calm herself as well as Peter, she gathered him up and shushed him.
He pushed her away, coughing hard, his freckled face mottling with the effort. He spat out a mouthful of gunk flecked with dark spots. “I’m thirsty,” he said in a wheezy voice. “Can we find something to drink?”
The sun hovered closer to the horizon and shone with relentless cheerfulness. Sarah climbed onto a boulder to look again for the sailboat. Probably smashed to bits, but still, there’d be canned food and bottled water. She swept her gaze across the bay and along the shoreline. No boat. No wreckage.
An oblong patch of orangey red rested in a clump of fallen bamboo. An unnatural-looking color—the only red that shade had been the ice chest kept on the stern of the boat. Sarah ran over and yanked the chest out.
Within was a single can of Sprite.
She popped the can and gulped the wonderful liquid.
“Hey,” Peter said, grabbing her arm. “Don’t drink it all.”
“I’m not,” she said, giving him her big sister glower.
“You hate Sprite.”
She did, too. Or had. Reluctantly she handed Peter the can. He guzzled the rest. God, he sounded so piggish.
Sarah sat down at the edge of a large wading pool to wash her mud-caked sandals.
“Hey, Sarah,” Peter said, pointing over her shoulder to the bay’s last finger of water.
Sarah looked. A sailboat hung in an enormous, shaggy tree. She glanced away and then back again. The Dreamcatcher was still there, cradled in a nest of branches, the bottom of its big keel ten feet off the ground. The boat looked undamaged, ready to sail into the air. The shorts and T-shirts from yesterday’s wash were still strung on the back line.
For a giddy moment Sarah expected her father to appear on deck, wiping his greasy hands on a rag.