Marianne Wiggins

When he’d gone they’d kept each other’s ring. Charlotte wore his on a thread between her breasts, she was stunned to find he hadn’t died with her ring somewhere on him. Now she had them both when even one was one too many. Sometimes she put them in her mouth. She put them on her tongue, one inside the other. She bit down on them. Sometimes she smoothed the paper of the letters that he’d written like shrouds over her face as she lay still. Sometimes she tried to hear his voice. She missed his face. She longed to know what it was doing. She held his shaving brush, she tried to touch her stomach with it but she couldn’t feel a thing beyond the cold. She tried to keep the locker closed so it would hold his smell but then she longed to hide herself away inside it. She couldn’t see his face.

The first thing we’ll build is a fire, Amanda decided. Her face hurt. She’d scratched her cheek on the coral and bitten her tongue. Her skin burned. And shelter, she said. ‘We have to stay out of the sun.’ Her mind was beginning to function. A day, or two days, at the most, she was thinking, then they’ll come back for us. Parents come back. Parents don’t go and forget where they’ve left their children.

She imagines John tells her there is nothing to be afraid of here, on this beach, this part of the island. He’d been here several nights and nothing had endangered him—only the sea, by swallowing him. No monsters would emerge from behind them in the jungly forest, she imagined he assures her, no demons would swoop down on them from the sky. Because she couldn’t really hear him over the din, their conversation sounded in her mind the way her conversations with her father do and so it didn’t seem that strange when she heard her father scolding her. He was very disappointed, he was saying—What was she doing here, in this place, Re-mote, godknows-how-many-thousand-miles away from Ammi? All he ever asked her to do was to take care of her mother, watch over the most beautiful of women. Now she had made that most beautiful woman most bereft—how could she have done it? of what had she been thinking?—why was she so wayward, so perverse, so bad?—why was she unworthy of anybody’s trust, of everybody’s love—?