Doug Bryant lay on the sandy beach gasping for air. Mary
was dry heaving beside him, the contents of her stomach having
been left far out in the water. Alyson was crying on the other
side of her. Mary and Alyson had briefly gone under with the
boat, but had somehow escaped. They broke surface on either side
of another life vest. Mary and he had insisted Alyson wear it.
He’d had to half-drag Mary to the beach against the pressure of
the wind. It hadn’t been easy swimming in his canvas deck shoes,
despite his almost legendary endurance, but he knew he’d need
them on the island since neither Alyson nor Mary had any.

Lightning struck another tree on a hill, reminding him of
how exposed they were.

“Come on! We have to get off the beach. Don’t stand up or
you’ll attract lightning.”

They were all too tired to do more than crawl anyway. It
took both of them to stop Alyson’s crying long enough to get her
moving. “We need to get back into the dense trees as a minimum.
Maybe we can reduce the chance of being fried. Maybe we can find
some kind of shelter. A cave or something. Come on!”

“Shelter” was just a large fallen tree lying at a forty-five
degree angle against a small rise in the ground. It looked
stable enough, so Doug put Mary and Alyson under it while he
scrounged branches, fronds, small bushes–anything he could use
to build a lean-to wall on the windward side. Mary had insisted
on helping, but he overruled her. “Aly’s hanging by a thread.
If we leave her alone she could snap. Just get back under there
and comfort her. Tell her it will be okay when the storm passes.
Please, Mare.”

Doug’s wall didn’t block all of the wind, but it did keep
out over ninety percent of it and effectively blocked the rain.
He had enough material to create a partial windbreak on the
leeward side, then crawled in with the others. The temperature
would have been comfortable were it not for the chilling effect
of the wind and rain. Mary was sitting behind the still-sobbing
Alyson, her nude body wrapped around her daughter’s to share
warmth.

Doug’s exertions had left him overheated. He had the other
two cuddle around him to share his warmth and to keep himself
from cooling too quickly.

“Daddy….” After six attempts and never getting past that
initial word before breaking down in sobs Alyson gave up.

His left arm tightened, squeezing her to his side. He spoke
in a quiet, gentle voice barely above a whisper. “It’s okay now,
Pixie. The worst is over. We’ll be safe here tonight, and
tomorrow we can look for something better. Search and Rescue
will be looking for us when the storm clears.” He hadn’t had the
opportunity to ask Mary if that last was true. But it could wait
until he could ask her out of Alyson’s hearing. Knowing the
answer now wouldn’t make any difference at the moment.

“Your mom’s already asleep. You need to sleep, too, because
tomorrow you’ll need your strength. We’ll have work to do.
Okay?”

“But….”

“Shhhh! No buts, okay? Worrying tonight won’t solve
anything. We’ll have time to worry tomorrow, but let’s not do
that until we know what the situation really is. Tomorrow things
will probably turn out to be better than they seem to be tonight,
and we’d be worrying about non-problems. Pixies have better
things to do than worry about non-problems. Okay?”

Her tear-streaked cheek snuggled against his left shoulder.
“Okay. I’ll try.”

He couldn’t free his right arm from around Mary, so he
brushed her bangs aside with his nose and placed a gentle kiss on
her forehead as he raised his left hand. He ran the side of his
left forefinger down the line of her jaw and whispered, “G’night,
Pixie.”

Her arms tightened about him for a moment, and then she
lifted her tear-streaked face and he heard the two soft little
grunts. He gently pressed his lips to hers for the
“MmmmmmmmMAH!”

She returned her face to his shoulder and sniffed once. “I
love you. G’night.”

“I love you too, Pixie.” He lowered his arm and wrapped it
around her, holding her to him while realizing he should have put
her in the middle where it was warmest. But her breathing had
suddenly become deep and regular. He suspected she hadn’t gone
to sleep as much as she had passed out from exhaustion, the same
as Mare. And the same as he was going to do.

His last thought was the sudden realization that in addition
to the soft handful of Mare’s right breast cupped in his right
hand, he had a firm little cone under the fingers of his left.
He jerked his arm down. “Goddamnit, Mare,” he mumbled as
exhaustion took him.

*****

While Doug headed for the beach to examine the leaden sky
and take stock of their surroundings, Mary tried to explain the
basics of field sanitation to their discontented daughter.
“Look,” she finally said, her shoulders sagging in frustration.
“You don’t have any other choice. There’s no C-store handy to
buy toilet paper, not that we have any cash on hand anyway. You
can always wash in the surf, you know. Now, scoot! I have to
talk to your father.”

“What if I use poison ivy?”

“Your father left a stack of leaves on the log for you. Use
those.”

“What if a bear attacks me?”

“Lie to it. Tell it you always root for the Bears to beat
the Chargers. Go on!”

As Alyson rolled her eyes and minced her way to the slit
trench that Doug had dredged with a broken tree limb, Mary
followed the trail back to the beach, looking as she went for
suitable ways to improve their makeshift shelter. She found Doug
standing just beyond the treeline, the two orange life vests
dangling at the end of one arm, staring to the right. The south,
more or less, she assumed.

“Doug?”

“Look at that.”

She followed his pointing finger. A small wooden dock,
weathered gray with age, stuck into the water a couple of hundred
yards to the south. “I thought this island was uninhabited,” she
said, her eyes now searching the treeline near the dock.

“That’s what the chart said. That does look rather old….”

“There!” She pointed. “Right down from that tallest tree
with the broken top.”

She waggled her forefinger while he squinted. His lasik
surgery had not been a hundred percent successful because he’d
insisted on going to that jerk McLaughlin instead of to Brilovic
as she’d done. But this wasn’t the time to point that out. She
waggled it again and he suddenly grunted as he saw the
debris-strewn clay tile roof and the weathered gray walls
half-consumed by the surrounding vegetation.

“It looks worse than the dock.” He looked toward their
makeshift camp. “Where’s Alyson?”

“Taking care of Number Two. She’s not happy that there’s no
Charmin to squeeze.”

Doug glanced toward the water. “Well, she can….”

“I told her.”

Doug already knew that, just as she knew he already knew.
They could practically read each other’s minds after all these
years. But he didn’t need to be a mind reader to know that her
next question would be about Search and Rescue. She explained
that she’d just given the coordinates but didn’t get a
confirmation before the boat was hit. She saw the look on his
face and stopped talking. “What?”

“That was an eight, not a zero. That’s about a hundred
fifty miles difference, Mare.”

She blinked at him. “But if they don’t find us there….”

“If there’s another of these little islands there, they’ll
assume that’s where we went down, and that’s where they’ll start
looking for us. If not, then they will assume our bearings were
off slightly and start searching with the closest island, moving
downwind. They may give up before they ever get to this one.”

She thought he was blaming her. “Well, I warned you about
your handwriting!” she snapped.

He placed his free hand gently on her shoulder. “What’s
done is done. We don’t need to be arguing about this, especially
in front of Alyson. What we need to do is prepare for a slightly
extended stay here. That cabin is a good sign, even if nobody
appears to be home. We can try to salvage stuff from the boat.
The water’s only about thirty feet deep out there, depending on
exactly where it went down.” He pointed along the shore. “A few
things have already washed up here.”

“_Where are you?_” Alyson’s voice was shrill and shaky.

“_Here_!”

Two more shouts and Alyson stumbled out of the trees before
them. “I couldn’t find you,” she said, brushing a tear from her
cheek. “I’m going to get lost here.”

“You never get lost in the mall,” Doug said. “And who’s the
one who always knows where the car is in the parking lot?”

She gave him the standard Frustrated Daughter Dealing with
Obtuse Parents look. “_Daddy!_”

“I’m serious. You keep track of the landmarks there. You
just have to do the same here, except they aren’t letters on
signs attached to light poles. Just because you grew up in the
city doesn’t mean you have to forget everything you learned while
you’re out here. You just need to adjust some of your thinking
for the changed circumstances.”

“Why didn’t you just follow the trail?” Mary asked.

“What trail?”

Mary blinked. “Just what did they teach you at that camp
three years ago?”

Alyson’s thin eyebrows pulled down from her bangs in a
frown. “Pottery and archery and swimming….”

Mary interrupted her. “Speaking of swimming, do you want to
go wash up before we check out the area?”

“Yeah.” She glanced at the shoreline and back at them.
“Shouldn’t you be building a signal fire or something, like they
do in the movies?”

“Sure,” her father replied. “How do you want to light it?”

“How should I know? Bang two rocks together or something.
Rub two sticks together. You’re the adults. You grew up in this
sort of place. I’m just a city girl.” She trudged toward the
water, the onerous burden of being stranded hundreds of miles
away from the nearest Godiva Chocolatier, Pizza Hut, or movie
cineplex, without even her portable MP3 player for diversion,
evident in her posture.

After a dozen paces Alyson turned around. “What about
jellyfish or sharks or something?”

“I meant to warn you,” Doug said. “They might be endangered
species. Don’t hurt them.”

Mary saw the standard Frustrated Daughter Dealing with
Smart-Assed Parents look, but she also saw the first hint of a
smile that day. She went back to discussing plans with Doug
while Alyson splashed and scrubbed in the shallows, no doubt
upset by the absence of her favorite coconut oil-based bath soap.
They had decided to delay diving to the boat until the next day
to let the storm-churned turbid water return to its natural
clarity when they were interrupted by Alyson’s scream.

She was pointing southward along the shore. “_There’s a
dock down there!_”

*****

“It’s in good shape, considering,” Doug said as he examined
the boards and pilings of the dock from knee-deep water.

Alyson frowned at him, her narrow eyes squinting as if
looking for signs of another smart-assed parent comment.
“Considering what?”

“Considering its age. Probably hasn’t been used in ten
years, right Mare?”

She put her knuckles on her tanned hips and swept her eyes
along it one more time. “That’d be my guess. Which means the
cabin’s probably been abandoned that long, too. Let’s go see.”

Alyson groaned. “Does that mean there won’t be anything to
eat?”

Mary pointed inland and shook her head. “Aly, there’s
enough edible food in there to feed our entire neighborhood for
over a year, and it’s not all ‘rabbit food,’ either. You have a
lagoon full of seafood, too.”

Doug turned to wade to shore and pointed. “There’s a
coconut. Probably blew off one of those trees over there during
the storm.”

She looked around. “Where?”

He pointed again.

“_Daddy!_”

“He’s not kidding, Aly. That’s what they look like. What
you see in the supermarket is just the seed. See? Look up that
tree there.”

Alyson looked, then glanced around in frustration. She
froze with her eyes fixed on the dock. “There’s something
sparkly,” she said and started down the gray wooden planks.

“Careful!” her father warned. “The boards look stout
enough, but they might be weak.”

“It’s right here,” she said taking another two steps forward
to stop in front of him and then bending at the waist to pick up
a small, shiny object from between her feet.

Not three feet away and at his eye level, between the flare
of her hips and below the buttocks that were assuming the size
and shape for the woman she was becoming, the sparsely-curled
pillows of her outer labia pushed toward him, as if pursing to
kiss him, and then parted slightly to show him the damp, darker
vestibule of her vagina. The absence of her maidenhead struck
him momentarily, though he was aware of her masturbatory habits
and, in truth, he examined more girls her age without than with
the thin shield of tissue near the back of the opening.

He was sorting the emotions conflicting within him, and also
thinking unkind thoughts at Mary for having stirred those
emotions and unwanted memories, when she straightened and the
unnerving sight was gone. When she held the rough object between
thumb and forefinger for him to see, he peered at it. “I think
it’s a gold nugget,” she said.

“That’s a gold crown,” he said.

Through the look of disbelief she said, “Doesn’t look like
any coin I ever saw.”

“Not a coin crown,” he said with a grin. “A crown off a
tooth.”

“It came out of somebody’s _mouth? EEEEeeeewwww!_” She
jerked her hand away from the offensive golden object. Doug bent
forward and caught it before returning to shore.

“Whoever owns it might want it back. It cost a lot of
money,” he explained. “C’mon. Let’s check out the cabin.” He
grabbed the straps of the two life vests in the same hand as the
crown and led the way.

The two-room cabin had been vacant for years. The windows
had no glass–had never had any from what they could tell–but
had wooden shutters on rusty hinges. The door hung by the bottom
hinge, and that snapped when Doug tried to open the door wider.
Sand, dirt, and bird and small animal droppings littered the
interior.

The front had been arranged into a living room on the left
and a kitchen with an office behind it to the right. A ratty
green couch sat along the front of the left wall. A small stone
fireplace was in the wall just beyond the couch. At the back a
wood rocking chair with rattan back and seat sat in a corner past
a bookshelf. A stuffed chair in a gold brocade sat mildewed and
full of holes before the fireplace. A small, hairy face blinked
red eyes from one of the holes near the floor and jerked back
with a squeak.

Another bookshelf sat beside a filing cabinet, a metal desk,
and a wooden office chair on casters in the right rear office. A
few picture frames, one with the glass broken, sat on the desk
and on a wall shelf.

A painting of a battleship hung over the mantel of the
fireplace. Something about the style told Doug the artist was an
oriental. In the bottom right corner he could just make out a
name in apparent Vietnamese. The ship in the painting was the
_New Jersey_. Small battleships, aircraft carriers, and
propeller planes in a variety of scales sat on the mantel. Most
were cast metal, but some were stamped metal, wood, or plastic.

Two aluminum frame chairs with dark green nylon webbing
sat at a wooden kitchen table three feet square. Two others were
folded and leaning against the wall next to the door. Wooden
cabinets formed a small kitchen around the table on two sides.
An enameled metal sink was set into one countertop with two
covered water buckets beside it, the handle of a dipper
protruding from behind them. The cabinets held china, plastic,
and metal plates, bowls, cups, tumblers, pots, pans, and other
cooking and dining impedimenta in a variety of shapes, styles,
and colors. It seemed no two pieces matched. The same could be
said of the knives, forks, and spoons, with the exception of a
set of stainless steel kitchen knives with fine teak handles
inlaid with an elaborate oriental pattern in gold. Matching
steel and ceramic sharpeners finished the set, which was clearly
worth more than everything else in the cabin.

The stove was a small, wood-fired, cast-iron model. It had
been years since Mary had cooked on one of those. There would be
complaints to the chef for a while. Lighting it would be no
problem. Both adults knew how to use flint and steel, and Doug
had been good with a fire bow when he was a teenager.

A search of the drawers revealed one with a few hand tools,
a can with an assortment of screws, and another with galvanized
nails of varied sizes. Another had over a dozen long, tapered,
white objects. “A woman must have lived here,” Doug said as he
reached into the drawer to put down the gold crown and pick up
one of the things.

Mary frowned the question as she asked, “Why?”

He held up a candle. “Wax dildos.”

Alyson blushed from the tops of her small breasts to the
edge of her bangs, as if she’d been caught using one for that
purpose, while Mary just shook her head and murmured, “You
asshole.”

A half-burned candle was stuck in a bottle on an end table
by the stuffed chair. “They must have used those when the
electricity was off,” Alyson mused.

“Yeah, sure,” Doug said, and then followed her line of sight
to the peak of the roof. Two electric bulbs surrounded by hard
plastic shades dangled from wires that ran down to the far side
wall and passed through it. He crossed to the window and looked
out.

“There’s a generator shed out there,” he announced. “It’s
empty.”

The murmurs of disappointment were cut short when Mary
announced, “There’s some canned goods in here. Don’t know if I’d
trust them after all this time, but maybe some are still edible.”

“Good!” Alyson said. “I’m hungry.”

“Then you can help clean up the kitchen. You can wash the
dishes.”

The square face screwed into a frown. “With what?”

Mary arced a hand upward and pointed over her shoulder.
“There’s a whole ocean out there, and sand you can use to scrub
with. But there must be some fresh water here somewhere.”

“There’s a stream just beyond the generator shed,” Doug
said. It’s probably the water source.”

“Good!” Alyson jumped up and down, clapping her hands. She
hadn’t been thrilled about drinking from puddles of rainwater.
Doug watched the tanned tennis-ball-sized cones with their darker
tips as she bounced. They moved with her body, as if she were
all one hard plastic shell, but he knew of their soft firmness
and how they yielded to pressure….

_What the hell am I thinking? Get a goddamned grip on your
thoughts before it’s too late, you asshole! You know where this
would go: “Sorry, Mr. Smith, I thought you know that a pelvic
exam was a routine part of a physical after Tiffany reached
puberty, and I swear that I did use a rubber glove. Tiffany must
not have seen me put it on or remove it. Well, I can certainly
understand if you want to find another pediatrician, even though
it was just a misunderstanding. Best of luck to you.” And you’d
be losing patients left and right, and perhaps face an inquiry
from the Licensing Board._ He checked the smaller bedroom. A
wardrobe, nightstand, bureau, double bed, wooden chair, and a
folded cot were all that was in the room. The mattress and
linens were ruined. The clothes in the wardrobe and bureau were
mildewed and generally useless except for the pure synthetics,
which amounted to some nylon wet-weather gear and some nylon
socks. Photographs were displayed in frames with glass so grimy
that he could tell only that they were of men, children, an
apparent family group portrait, and in a tarnished silver frame,
one woman. He did not brush the dirt away for fear of scratching
the glass.

He emerged from the bedroom to see Mary clearing away the
countertop and Alyson idly scratching a spot on her left hip
while reading a large book atop the desk.

Alyson looked up as he approached. “His name was Peter
Butler Welch. This is sort of like a diary.”

He moved to her left side and brought his right arm up to
give her shoulders a gentle squeeze as he looked at the first
page. It showed Welch’s name and a starting date as well as the
coordinates for the island. The handwriting was masculine but
neat and precise, the antithesis of his own. “It’s a journal,
sort of like a ship’s log. He was a sailor. I found some of his
uniform things in there.” He had her turn to the last entry. It
had been made a week short of eight years earlier. Welch was
leaving that morning to take the generator in for repairs and
expected to return within a week.

“He lived here for four years. I wonder what happened to
him,” she said in a faint voice.

Doug squeezed her shoulders again. “We’ll try to find out
when we get back home. Meanwhile, I’ll go check around outside.”

“Daddy?” She turned her face up to his and her lower lip
trembled for a moment. “When’s Search and Rescue coming?”